Gravity Changes

by Zach Powers

  Our other friends, those who had watched us dive and disappear into the water, didn’t come to Ricky’s house again. When we saw them in the neighborhood, they would greet us like usual, sometimes join us in games, but something was strange. They never referred to the event, even when prompted, to the point that I am unsure if they remembered it at all. But they knew something. There was a reason why they wouldn’t return to the pool, why their mothers shied away from us or took their children’s hands if we approached. Sometimes when they talked I could hardly understand them. Ricky knew it, too. He distanced himself from everyone but me and Lindsay. I didn’t mind, because I could lay more exclusive claim to the boy I considered my best friend. I could finally feel like the title went both ways, at least for a while. The power of our secret brought us together. I loved being in possession of the secret more than I cared for the secret itself. I loved our triangle more than the cabin.

  On the day after our first visit to the cabin, we had returned to Ricky’s backyard. We crept to the edge of the pool and looked down for the glowing spot on the bottom. It was there, in the same place, distorted by the rippling water, which was agitated by a gentle but ceaseless wind. This time I did not feel the compulsion to dive. That first time, I had felt beckoned, like I was being asked an important question that could only be answered through action, and so I had entered the pool not out of decision, but out of instinct. Now I felt, at most, curious, though in the posture of my friends, the way they leaned just a little bit forward, I saw that they were drawn to the bottom as strongly as before, and I knew that I would follow them. Eventually it became habitual—the more we visited the cabin the more we felt we had to visit, until it came to seem essential, at least for the other two.

  Ricky dove into the water first, as he would each time we returned. As he neared the bottom, white light, flowing like milk in the water, surrounded him, faded, and he was no longer there. I let Lindsay go next. I watched as she, too, disappeared, and I stood there for a while in the steady breeze over the empty pool. My body trembled. It was not that I felt afraid, exactly. But I was already beginning to feel out of place, my point of the triangle obtuse to the acuteness of my friends. I felt necessary for the shape, as Ricky’s mother had described it, but standing there alone, a point, without length or width, I doubted the necessity of the shape. They were already there, Ricky and Lindsay, and I was not, and sadly, it seemed not to matter. But my doubt was overpowered by the pending adventure and the desire to be with my friends, so I dove to the bottom of the pool, into the light, through the gelatinous something between the pool and the cabin, and I fell softly onto the bed in the corner.

  The dimensions were roughly the same, but this cabin was constructed and furnished differently from the first. The walls were papered in a tacky flower pattern, the pinks too bright and the green of the leaves flat, lifeless. Against the far wall was a kitchenette with a small stove and refrigerator, microwave and toaster, a row of cabinets a few feet above the counter. A sofa, upholstered in fabric that looked to be selected specifically to clash with the wallpaper, occupied the center of the room, and it faced toward an old television set like the one on which Ricky’s father watched sports, where the roar of the crowd came out robotically from built-in speakers. A rabbit-eared antenna sat on the TV, prongs angled in such a way that if they were connected across the top they would form a familiar triangle. Ricky and Lindsay were sitting on the couch watching a black and white movie. The actress on screen spoke with over-careful diction.

  I went to the front door, thick and old and wooden, and tried to turn the knob, but it didn’t even wiggle. Through the windows I saw tree trunks, almost atop the cabin, and looking up I could just catch a glimpse of the green forest canopy as it faded to shadow very nearby, the thick woods blocking the sun and making the afternoon feel like dusk. I went through the cabinets and found all sorts of food, some canned, some fresh. All of it looked newly bought. The same was true of the refrigerator. I took three apples and joined my friends on the couch and watched the incomprehensible middle of the movie with the strange-talking starlet. We finished our apples. Ricky stood.

  “We should probably leave,” he said, “before the dizziness starts up again.”

  Lindsay nodded. “I already feel like I’m about to tip over.”

  Ricky climbed onto the bed. He bounced, then floated, then disappeared in light. The light spread through the whole room. I watched the ugly walls as they were bleached into nonexistence, and I was warmed inside by the thought of homecoming. We were again in the pool, again formed our triangle. I tried to note the specific angles, to be able later to sketch the triangle on paper, but the exact shape eluded me.

  On the deck, Ricky and Lindsay were overtaken by shivering as the wind, stronger now than before we left, licked across the wetness of their skin and carried away warmth with the evaporating water. I did not feel cold, however. I was aware of the wind, but to me it delivered fresh, familiar air. The whole time I had been in the cabin I had felt short of breath. Now, back home, I could again breathe normally. So the cold did not bother me and the faint prickling on my skin was like waking up.

  Ricky’s mother gazed out at us from the kitchen window. I thought she looked sad, but I couldn’t tell because her face was dark behind the glass, which reflected back, over her, a faint image of the slatted fence. She saw me looking and moved away from the window. Moments later she came onto the porch with cookies that steamed in the cold air. I bit into a cookie as Ricky and Lindsay toweled off. The taste was of warmth more than flavor. As I chewed my first mouthful, Ricky’s mother hugged me, quickly, as if she didn’t want the action to be seen, and then went back inside. It was the last batch of cookies she baked for us. Ricky and Lindsay never seemed to notice their absence. But the cookies were all I could think of. How I hungered for them, more and more, each time they didn’t appear.

  We developed a routine for the rest of that summer. The three of us would gather at Ricky’s house after lunch, already in our swimsuits. I didn’t see Ricky’s mother anymore as we passed through the house and out the back door to the pool. Sometimes I saw her in the kitchen window. Each time her figure looked darker, until it was nothing but a silhouette, and toward the end she disappeared completely.

  Ricky would lead us into the water. Then Lindsay. By the time I arrived, the two of them were already engaged in whatever activity that particular version of the cabin had to offer. Sometimes we just stared out the window, amazed by the many landscapes the world had to offer. Sometimes we watched TV. The programs were different each time, always old, films and sitcoms representing, in black and white, a reality I could not recognize. I wonder now what my childhood reality would have looked like to a viewer in the distant future. Once we found the cabin furnished only with a ping-pong table. We spent the whole day there, returning to the pool long after evening had set in. Once, on a round table in the middle of the room, we found three pairs of binoculars, placed carefully as the corners of a triangle, and out the windows, alighting in a sparse forest, flocks of birds of every imaginable species. Once we found the floor covered with the scattered pieces of a massive jigsaw puzzle. We spent the afternoon assembling the edges, but when we returned the next day, both the puzzle and our progress were gone.

  It was the last week of summer vacation. My afternoon visits to the pool were replaced by shopping trips with my mother to buy school supplies. She walked far ahead of me through the store, slinging items into her basket without asking me if I needed them. Pulling a staple remover from the shelf, she pressed it shut several times, the device like a biting mouth, before she placed it atop the pile in her basket. I followed her into another aisle, this one completely filled with pens, hung tightly-spaced on the pegboard, endless variations on color and ink and tip. I didn’t see my mother stop in front of me and bumped into her. She was smiling at Ricky’s father, Ricky beside him. Ricky hunched his shoulders and shifted his eyes away, and looked, just this once, small and meek
. I tried to smile at him, but I couldn’t. I didn’t recognize in the boy before me the elements that made up my friend. I might not have recognized him at all if not for the scent of his father’s cigars filling up the aisle.

  My mother greeted Ricky’s father warmly. She seemed not to notice Ricky. I realized for the first time that she didn’t know Ricky as well as Ricky’s mother knew me. Maybe all my mother knew of him was this timid boy before her now, his eyes downcast, hair unusually neat and parted. She asked Ricky’s father how his wife was doing.

  “She is as expected. I can feel her diminishing, as if she is falling away to a distant source of gravity that stretches her thinner and thinner.”

  “I understand,” said my mother. “I know she didn’t volunteer for such a thing, but it’s admirable the way she bears it. I wish her well, and if I don’t see her again, please let her know that I’ll think of her, for instance, when I look in a mirror or lift a somewhat heavy object.”

  Ricky’s father shook his head in an exaggerated motion. “It is not you who needs to express gratitude. Goodbye.”

  He moved out of the aisle. Ricky lingered for a moment, but he would not raise his eyes to mine. Eventually, he too walked away, and I caught my mother scowling after him with a look of disgust on her face, like a slap, that in later years would be directed at me. I followed her through the rest of the store as she bought school supplies as if for herself.

  On the last Friday of summer vacation, I found myself free. I met Ricky in his backyard. We dangled our feet in the pool, and I recalled for a moment the simple pleasure of swimming, which we had forgotten, distracted by our trips to the cabin, so I slid into the water and swam laps until Lindsay arrived. She stood by the edge of the pool and looked around, slowly, pausing sometimes on the landmarks of the backyard—the large stone by the fence, the yellow tool shed, the doghouse that had housed no dogs of which I knew. I swam to the platform and splashed her with water. She laughed, and kicked a retaliatory splash at my face. I shielded my eyes, so I did not see Ricky cannonball into the pool, soaking Lindsay completely and sending a wave over the top of my head.

  I was the last, as usual, to the cabin. In the room, other than the bed, there were three chairs, and nothing else, arranged in the shape of a familiar triangle. The walls were bare Sheetrock, painted white. No curtains hung over the windows, only cheap venetian blinds, retracted all the way to the top. The floor was tiled in one-foot-wide black squares with no gaps between, like in the halls of our school. I slid off the bed and looked out the window. Grassy hills spread away from the cabin, their edges crisp against the clear sky. Ricky and Lindsay already occupied two of the chairs. I took the third.

  We talked. For many hours, we talked of everything we knew. We expelled the whole limited knowledge of our young existences. A story from one of us led seamlessly into a story from another. I felt a pleasant tightness in my chest, a euphoric relaxation of my limbs, warmth all over, blanketed in the company of these, my friends. Toward the end of our conversation, we recounted the discovery of the light in the pool, and we took turns recalling our many visits to the cabin. It was Ricky’s turn.

  “We arrived,” he said, “and found three chairs in the center of a white room with a black floor. The chairs were arranged in a familiar triangle. We sat and talked for many hours, then we opened the door and left.”

  The door, set in a white frame, was a featureless black rectangle with a brass doorknob glinting suspiciously halfway up its surface. We rose from the chairs as one and moved to the door, maintaining the shape of our triangle as we went. Ricky gripped the knob, turned. The smell of grass rushed through the open door, chasing away the familiar chlorine stench. I blinked in the sudden sunlight. Ricky stepped outside as if into his own backyard, then Lindsay, but I remained motionless, unable to will my feet to follow. Reaching across the threshold, I grabbed Ricky by the shoulder, but he pulled away from me. My hand slid down his arm to his hand, which I gripped as if to shake. He looked back, not at me, but at our joined hands, and I could not recognize in the boy before me the one I called my friend. I released him. As Ricky walked from the cabin, the space between us, ever growing, felt more real, more solid, than the air it was made from, the distance farther than the paces counted from there to here. The room flashed white behind me. When I looked, only one of the chairs remained.

  I slid the chair over and sat in the open doorway and watched Ricky and Lindsay run off over the smooth green hills. They ran with limitless energy, surging up each slope, disappearing over each crest, only to emerge again on the face of a hill even more distant. Toward the horizon the hills grew gray, the farthest completely desaturated and indistinguishable from the sky. I thought to follow, to sprint after, calling out for my friends to wait, but instead I sat, silent. I don’t know why I didn’t follow. I missed them immediately, felt deflated, empty, but I missed them like they had died, a hopeless sort of emptiness that no action could relieve. The people they had been, the children who were my friends, were gone, irrevocably, and those two I watched running away from me were other people altogether, strangers. They crested the farthest hill, stick figures against a backdrop of clouds, and I heard, even from this distance, their laughing, joyous, primal, as they slid, finally, from view.

  I closed the door and twisted the lock. They would not be back, I was sure of that. I sealed the cabin, pulled the blinds, feeling the whole time very much like I was burying myself. In the dark, the glowing spot on the ceiling looked more solid, less wisp-like, and it called to me, stronger than it ever had. I realized my trips to the cabin weren’t for the cabin itself, or for the sense of adventure, but for the solidity of friendship, and now that my friends were gone I was called to a home where I might, eventually, make new friends to replace those I had lost.

  I jumped on the bed, mimicking Ricky’s movements as best I could, bouncing, higher and higher, impossibly high, lifted by an unknown force. As I spun, it felt like the cabin revolved around me, like I was suddenly the center of the universe. The spot on the ceiling spread, light descended and enveloped me, a warm feeling like a towel that has been resting in sunlight. Whiteness filled the room, and as it faded I felt the water of the pool wash around me, the scent of chlorine overpowering. I climbed out of the water, but found no towel waiting for me. I stood there for a long time, letting the sun dry me, in a wind that carried unfamiliar smells from distant places.

  It was quiet in Ricky’s house, absent the familiar sound of the television. I called out to Ricky’s mother. I needed to tell her Ricky was gone. I needed to tell her everything. I smelled cigars and turned to find, looming over me, the whole mass of Ricky’s father. He looked at me like he didn’t know me, like he had never before seen a child. He knelt so that his eyes were at the level of mine, but I cannot recall his face, and remember instead darkness, a black cloud of cigar smoke in the shape of a man. He gripped me, painfully, by the shoulders, as if to affirm the solidity of his form.

  “You’re back,” said Ricky’s father. “You had an infinite world before you, and yet you return.”

  I saw Ricky’s mother behind him. She was in a wheelchair, withered, skinny to the bone, gray-haired where once it had been black. Her hands, nimble in the preparation of meals and the baking of cookies, were now gnarled, fingers hooked toward palms, knuckles swollen. The skin of her face sagged, and the only recognizable thing about her, amidst the loose flesh, was her eyes, which looked at me, I now realized, with gratitude. I broke myself free from the grasp of Ricky’s father and embraced her. She hugged me back, but weakly—so weakly I started to cry for everything that had ever been lost.

  I said to Ricky’s mother, “They ran from the door, across the hills, until they disappeared in the distance. They didn’t even say goodbye.”

  “Nor should you,” said Ricky’s father. “It was not supposed to happen this way. Look at her,” he thrust a finger toward Ricky’s mother. “She is frail as an autumn leaf. You came back, and so this little bit
remains. Now she will stay withered and the rest of us will age and the promise of eternity grows more distant with each step you take in this world. Leave now, and never let me see you again.”

  I was too young to understand it, and even now it is unclear what was at stake. Ricky’s mother knew she had to let us go but loved us too much to do so. By coming back, I let her have both: the holding on and the release. I worry sometimes, though, that maybe it was neither.

  Ricky’s mother reached after me as I opened the front door and stepped outside. Before I ran from the door, down the street, parallel to the line of similar houses, I spoke to her for the last time.

  “I bounced on the bed and spun in the air and vanished in the light.”

  USE YOUR SPOON

  “I sense an awful strength within me.”

  —Daniil Kharms

  1

  When I was seven I did not perform my first miracle.

  On the tips of bare toes, arm stretched so far it hurt, I placed the final red brick. This was the top of my tower. I had more Legos, but I could only reach so high. I stepped back to see what I had created.

  It should have been a moment of triumph. But looking at the little red block at the top of my tower I wanted it taller. It wasn’t even a want. I felt no desire. I simply sensed that I had, within me, the ability to make it taller.