Gravity Changes

by Zach Powers

  The sun was bright and the wind strong on the day he loaded the boat onto its trailer and took it to the lake. There had never been a boat more boat-like. As he backed down the boat ramp the other boaters stopped to stare. With wonderment they beheld the white sailboat with the red stripe and the sail that looked like glowing silk. From the top of the strong mast to the lowest protrusion of the rudder, nothing had ever represented the idea of a boat more perfectly.

  The old man felt the weight of the boat float away, and he pulled his truck forward, dragging the trailer out of the water. He parked and returned to his boat at the end of the boat ramp. He stopped. The boat was not floating in the water as he had thought, but hovered in the air two feet above the lake.

  The old man’s old fishing buddy walked over.

  “That’s truly a fine boat,” said the old friend.

  The old man shook his head. “But how can something so perfectly formed fail to do the thing it is perfectly formed to do?”

  “You’ll catch plenty of fish in that old girl.”

  But as the old friend said this the boat floated higher. It drifted in front of the sun and never emerged from the glare.

  No. 6

  The little girl peered from around the door, which was open just enough to see out into the yard. In the yard the little girl’s best friend was playing with an imaginary friend. The best friend’s imaginary friend was an imaginary version of the little girl. The best friend saw the little girl in the doorway and waved. Suddenly ignored, the imaginary friend disappeared. The little girl closed the door slowly, peeking out the whole time. The door was fully shut. The best friend climbed the climbing tree in the yard, all the way to the top, and stayed there forever.

  JOAN PLAYS POWER BALLADS WITH SLIGHTLY REVISED LYRICS

  Joan shrinks the universe.

  She types on her laptop, poking at the keys. An open copy of Swann’s Way rests beside the computer, spine broken, the glue of the binding crumbling. She transcribes the text verbatim. Verbatim until page 372, where she changes one word. She types the rest of the book out as is. She saves the file, closes it, opens a new one. The white of the virtual paper fills the screen. She flips back to the first page of the Proust. She types again, from the beginning, everything in the book. This time she changes a different word. She has done well over five hundred one-word revisions of the novel.

  I once tried to read Swann’s Way, but didn’t make it past the first chapter. Joan’s persistence impresses me. It’s why I love her, even if I don’t understand. Love is a difficult concept. Given to subtleties and vagueness. Impenetrable and impervious to even the most determined probes. Poking at love like her fingers on the keyboard. A poke for each letter, space and punctuation in the book, multiplied by five hundred. And she hasn’t even started the other volumes. Still, love survives.

  I ask her for the five hundredth time why she makes so many revisions of Swann’s Way. She pauses in her typing. Even though she is impossibly persistent, I know her fingers grow tired. When we walk in the evening, my hand does all the holding. Hers rests limp in mine, trembling slightly. The tremble is almost imperceptible, like the subtleties of love. Only knowable as an uneasiness in the stomach.

  She looks up from the pages of the book. Her eyes struggle to focus.

  “I’m shrinking the universe,” she says.

  “How does that work, again?”

  “The most detailed way to describe something is in terms of everything that it’s not. An object is defined by the sum of its absences. The universe, the collection of all objects, is the inverse of the sum of all the objects that do not exist. It’s what’s left when you remove the near-infinite unrealized variations of everything that does exist, the permutations and misprints and could-have-beens that never were. It’s a sculpture chiseled from an impossibly large stone, and all the leftover chips and chunks, flakes and flecks, define the shape of what remains. The more pieces left out of the universe, the more terms there are to define it from the perspective of what it isn’t. The definition of the universe is bigger when there are more nonexistent objects by which we can, through an inverse procedure, describe it.”

  I nod. “So by creating variations of Proust, you’re decreasing the number of nonexistent objects and thereby decreasing the size of the universe as described by the nonexistent.”

  “Shrinking the universe. Halting its expansion. Keeping our neighbors close.”

  “Close enough for what?”

  “For camaraderie. For friendship.”

  “For love.”

  She removes her tired fingers from the keyboard and strokes the hair on the back of my head. I think of the individual follicles, all different, millions of them, but still just a tiny fraction of what could be. I lean forward and kiss her lightly on the mouth. I try to kiss her differently each time. Sometimes long and deep, sometimes just a brush of the lips. Otherwise I’m scared she’ll get bored. Or the distance between us will grow as the universe expands us apart. Can I kiss her often enough, with enough variety, to maintain our closeness?

  Every morning I wake up with my arms extended, reaching, having dreamt of her falling away, of our portions of the universe hurtling apart. In the dream I knit sweaters and fire pottery and fold swans of different papers, but no act of creation is enough. I lack her patience and her courage. I wish Joan would win the fight, halt the universe, so that I could sleep and feel love unaccompanied by worry.

  Worry is a complicated thing, full of variations and subtlety. Forever shifting and unsure. That’s why it’s worrisome. Unknowable, like an all-inclusive universe, with nothing on the outside to define it. If everything existed we would all be still, with no room to move. Not even to wiggle. Maybe a subtle vibration of the firmament, agitated by our worry.

  We are mailing a postcard to Joan’s mother. The front of the card depicts the Eiffel Tower. The scene is in the evening, when the framework of the tower shows as a black fractal against the tangerine sky. Wispy clouds hover in the background, indigo. The blinking red light on the top of the tower is frozen on, lit forever in the photograph. The back of the card depicts whiteness and a place for the address and a copyright in French.

  We drop the postcard into a mailbox on a street in Kalamazoo, Michigan. We have mailed 720 identical postcards to Joan’s mother from mailboxes across the country. Each postcard perfectly identical except for the postmark, changing to represent whatever municipality in which we find ourselves. Across the whiteness of each card Joan writes Wish You Were Here! Love, Joan. Each time she writes the phrase exactly the same, stroke for stroke, down to the smudge where she drags her pinky through the still-wet ink. The skin of her knuckle soaks up the blackness and no amount of scrubbing gets it clean.

  Joan says instead of the unread revisions of books, postcards at least reach an audience of one. She says it’s a matter of meaning. Can a book that no one reads really be called a book? Even a short message, once read, has more meaning than a thousand unread pages of manuscript. So she’s moved on from writing books, limiting herself to this single line. I don’t know if anyone reads the postcards, but I affix the stamps just the same.

  Joan’s mother died in 1982.

  Wish you were here.

  We are pretending to shop for a new car. We are perfectly happy with our current car, but pretending to be car shopping allows us to wander the dealership without suspicion. A salesman approaches us. I step forward to meet him, shielding Joan from his view. I talk with him about gas mileage and horsepower and side impact safety ratings. He tells me of resale values and J.D. Power initial quality awards. We talk about the American car industry. He’s from Detroit, he says. That’s where they make cars, he says, but in his eyes I see reflected the charcoal husks of dead factories, and lines of foreign-made cars fleeing the withered city.

  Behind me, Joan walks down the row of shiny new cars. Their windshields are painted with prices and discounts and APRs. Balloons are tied to radio antennas. Little plastic flags sn
ap in the wind.

  Joan carries a key jutting out from between the first two knuckles of her left hand. Her pinky knuckle is still black with ink.

  She circles a car, inspecting it closely. Despite our ruse, the inspection is sincere. She is looking for something. And when she finds the perfect spot, she jabs the key into the clearcoat finish, digs down to raw metal. She gives each car a small ding, each in a different location, to mark as unique the otherwise sameness of midsize sedans. She distinguishes, beyond color and optional features, each boxy SUV from the next.

  We reach the end of the row, far away from the showroom. The salesman is still with me, discussing payment plans and financing options.

  Joan stops and says, “We’ll take this one.”

  She gestures to a bright red sports car. The salesman trots back to the showroom to get the paperwork ready. He just needs us to sign on the line, he says. It’ll take him five minutes, he says.

  Once his back is turned, before he’s even halfway to the showroom, we leave the lot. The salesman will search and search for us, his commission, but all he’ll find is a series of random dings in the smooth finish of the merchandise.

  But I’m confused by the car dealership. I’m unsure of our mission there. It seems different from Joan’s past efforts. I ask her how come we damaged the cars. It seems less like an act of creation and more like an act of differentiation. We didn’t add anything to the universe, merely altering what was already there. And since cars are all subtly different from each other, imperfections in the plastic and the metal and the glass, then all she did was add another, purely cosmetic, difference to the already differentiated.

  Joan rests her head in my lap on the sofa. She smiles and strokes my arm. Her fingers feel strong. For the first time in a long time her touch is not lethargic. She commands her muscles and they obey and her fingertips tickle the thin skin on the back of my hand. This is part of her answer to my questions. She needs a vacation, her fingers say. All those creations, the thousands of retyped novels, the looping script on a thousand postcards, every repainting of the Mona Lisa with every imaginable variation of eyebrows—all these acts of creation are a drain on her hands.

  Joan speaks, this time with her mouth.

  “It’s the same mission, scratching the cars, but a different method. Creation is probably best, but it’s not the only way to shrink the definition of the universe. If you can make an object easier to describe, then it can be identified in fewer words, or in the case of the universe, transcendent of language, simpler to conceptualize. Before they were damaged, the appearance of each sedan was insufficient to identify it, so that a description had to begin with inconsistencies introduced in the manufacturing process. It’s difficult, for example, to tell you how to pick out the car with the metallurgic defect in the engine block. It’s difficult to describe a metallurgic defect at all. On the other hand, it’s considerably simpler to tell you to find the car with the two-millimeter ding a centimeter below the left taillight. It’s a conceptually simple differentiation, and therefore simplifies the definition. If I asked you to describe a person to me, probably the first detail you would tell me is the sex of the individual in question, thereby eliminating about half of all possible people. A difference in sex is obvious and easily observable. If instead you described to me someone by their heart rate, I’d have to understand the complex inner workings of their circulatory system for your description to be useful. At least I’d have to check their pulse. The process of understanding an individual as such would be made more difficult.

  “So I’ve made each of those cars easier to identify, which is the same thing as making them easier to define. Fewer words, a smaller concept, to describe what is basically the same item.

  “And my hands feel better today than they have in years.”

  To illustrate this last point, she unbuttons my shirt, top to bottom, fingers nimble, sliding down effortlessly as if operating a zipper.

  She finishes undressing me, making quick work of my undershirt, my pants, my boxers. Using only her fingers she brings me to climax. As my panting fades she strokes my chest and my stomach, her face close to my ear, breathing lightly. She strokes lower, and, feeling that I’m ready to go again, stands up to remove her own clothes.

  Usually I undress her myself, but I want to let her fingers do everything. They brush across the cotton of her shirt, the silk of her bra, the leather of her belt. Her fingers, so active, caressing, searching. I gaze at them, twigs with knots for knuckles, aged decades more than the rest of her from constant use, but just then looking young and beautiful again, like how they would look if she’d never become aware of the universe fleeing her, threatening to escape her eager grasp.

  She grasps me, almost too hard, pulls me close. We kiss. I kiss her firmly at first, then lap at her lip with my tongue. She giggles, and I imagine her as a younger version of the woman she is now.

  She pushes me away and climbs onto the sofa, positioning herself upside down, back on the seat, legs extended up the backrest. She shifts until her crotch is at the same height as the back of the sofa and motions me over. I climb up, struggling to position myself above her. My knees rest on the sofa table, hurting already, and I lean forward, hands on the edge of the coffee table. I squirm back and forth until my appropriate parts are aligned with her appropriate parts.

  It isn’t our most creative coupling, but this one is different, which, as always, is the only important criterion. I guess there are two other criteria, each marked by a groan and a quiver, a spasm and a sigh, and I’m glad to say, more often than not, all three criteria are met.

  I never call the act making love, since with Joan it’s as much a technical achievement as it is a physical extension of the emotional. Each time it’s something new. A new pose, a new contortion. But maybe it’s more like love than the endless repetition of the missionary position. Always the awkward unfamiliarity of new lovers.

  We rest on the couch, oriented rightwards. I wrap my arms around her, clasp my hands to her hands, interlocking. Her fingers fidget. Restless. Unused to this excess of energy.

  Joan expands her audience.

  A new drummer takes the stage behind her. He is the sixth different drummer of the concert. The other musicians in her band trade out every few hours, guitarists and bassists with fresh fingers. Like the band, the audience changes. The door is a constant bottleneck of newcomers and departers. Those on the way out sweaty and drunk, those coming in heading in that direction.

  I cough. Cigarette smoke clouds the air, barely overpowering the scent of stale, spilt beer and body odor. My cough can’t be heard over the sound of Joan’s band. I’m pretty sure I have permanent hearing damage. I’ve been listening to Joan’s first set for the last thirty-six hours. She strums unerringly away at the guitar and belts out the lyrics to power ballads. She is currently singing her twenty-seventh consecutive rendition of Slaughter’s “Fly to the Angels.” Each time she sings different lyrics. Just a word or two. Changing the meaning of a line or a verse. Making the song, not really her own, but entering it into the public domain of the universe.

  One of the roadies scampers out on stage and squirts water from a bottle into Joan’s mouth during an instrumental interlude. I don’t think it’s enough water to replace the sweat she’s dripping. Her top hangs low, the neckline sinking, soaked through. Her hair is completely matted, sticking in clumps to her face. She stares intently at the microphone in front of her.

  I decide that this is the masochistic version of “Fly to the Angels.” Joan tweaks the lyrics so that it’s an epic ballad to the love of pain. Oh, the pain, the pain. Her guitar pick is worn down to almost nothing. The fingers of her left hand bleed, worn raw against the strings. The dirty burgundy of dried blood cakes beneath her nails. Still she strums, unaware or uncaring.

  She sings the loudest part of the song. Her voice gurgles, vocal chords exhausted. The melody is lost in the gurgling. She gurgles louder to compensate. Louder. She stops sing
ing. Her eyes roll, head lolls back, knees buckle. She collapses onto the stage, fingertips smearing four lines of blood onto the worn hardwood.

  The crowd cheers as if this is all a part of the show. And maybe it is.

  I wrap Joan’s bloodied fingers in cocktail napkins and carry her outside. The taxi driver helps me get her into the backseat. He makes a joke about drinking too much. I make a joke about singing too much, doing everything too much, but he doesn’t understand. I wonder if I understand it myself. Don’t let her throw up in the cab, the driver says. Fortunately, he says nothing about dripping blood on the upholstery.

  On the ride home I direct the driver to cut down side streets, double back, take the expressway, take back roads, follow that car, stop for gas, turn left on red, roll through stop signs in neighborhoods that aren’t mine. Finally, I tell him to stop in front of our building. Even though she’s asleep, I think Joan appreciates the route. We’ve never come home this way before.

  The driver and I lift Joan out of the back seat. I lean her against the cab as I pay the fare plus fifty percent. With her limp body balanced on my shoulder I climb the stairs to our apartment. Inside, I peel off her matted clothes, wipe her down with a washcloth, and run a brush through her hair. I rub antibacterial cream onto the tips of her fingers. She tries to say something as I set her into bed, but it comes out as a gurgle. Her eyes slit open. She reaches up and touches my face, leaving a smear of the cream on my stubbled cheek.

  I have never before seen her so tired.

  She sleeps.

  When I wake up in the morning Joan is on the couch watching TV. I have never seen her watch TV before. The sound is turned down, or maybe my ears have yet to recover from the concert. She has strapped Band-Aids over her fingertips. It makes her look amphibian, like the bulbs on the toes of a tree frog.