Gravity Changes

by Zach Powers

  Lifting his face to the ceiling, the homeless man sings along. His voice spreads like thick paint, a high warbly tenor. The harmonies are unexpected, surprising, tense. They release into minor thirds and open fifths. They are tense again. The homeless man claps along, palm to palm.

  The room has grown quiet. Every breath is held. Mouths hang half-open, unfinished words readable on the shapes of tongues. The only sound is the singing.

  The two voices tangle together in a soaring double helix. A man in a flannel shirt stands and sways to the song, waving his arms above his head like at a revival. Asses slide to the edges of seats. I take the blond woman’s hand in mine and squeeze it. She squeezes back. This is what they call a moment.

  The banjoist and the homeless man hold the last note until their lungs give out, and still the banjo rings after them. Everyone exhales the breath they’ve held, but still no one claps. The man in flannel stands motionless, arms still above him, like he’s diving upwards. Only the homeless man is still clapping to the beat of the already ended song. The banjoist looks down at the homeless man as if noticing him for the first time. He adjusts the strap on his banjo and crinkles his nose. He makes a shooing motion, fingers down, brushing away at the homeless man with the backs of his hands. The homeless man keeps clapping a slow beat, palm to palm. His hand jerks up and pushes the corners of the bandanna out of his eyes.

  “This next song,” says the banjoist, “is about love. It’s rather sad.”

  He looks into the darting eyes of the homeless man and strums the banjo. The chords are disjunct and don’t make any sense together.

  He sings:

  Go away, crazy man

  Take your fidgets

  Take your jitters

  Take the subtle

  But somehow overpow’ring

  Scent of

  Vinegar

  The hell away from

  Me

  Go away, crazy man

  Take your soupy eyes

  Take your droopy cheeks

  Take this subtle

  But somehow overwhelming

  Feeling

  Of pity

  The hell away from

  Me

  The homeless man fishes through his pockets and pulls out a metallic bubble gum wrapper. He smooths out the wrinkles, sliding the wrapper between his thumb and middle finger. It looks like a magic trick. I expect the wrapper to keep coming and coming, an endless silver ribbon. The homeless man drops the wrapper into the empty tip jar in front of the stage. For a moment his motions are deft, effortless.

  His hand jerks up and pushes the corners of the bandanna out of his eyes.

  Again the banjoist makes the shooing motion, at the same time thanking the homeless man for the tip.

  Removing his banjo, gripping it by the neck, the banjoist smashes it across the top of the amp. There is a brief whine of feedback then silence. The audience claps, fingers to palm.

  The old homeless man shuffles away from the stage. He pauses by Richard, who is still bent over what must by now be a cool cup of fancified coffee. The homeless man taps the table with two fingers. Richard looks up and sees the homeless man’s extended hand. The skin is dry and callused, the texture of old asphalt. Richard reaches and takes hold. He rises, and hand in jittery hand the new couple walks out. I grin at Richard’s broad back. Good for him.

  The blond woman still holds my hand, the sweat of our palms intermingling. I reach up and stroke her cheek with the back of my finger. Again she smiles, stretching her lips free of wrinkles. I am reminded of sad songs about love, but I can’t remember the lyrics.

  The man on the stage holds a broken banjo.

  ONE HAS HUGS THE OTHER PUNCHES

  My grandmother told me that when it rains and the sun is shining at the same time the Devil is beating his wife. What kind of woman marries the Devil, I asked her, but she wouldn’t answer, smiling, eyes unfocused, into the distance of memory. She said:

  The sound of rain on the stone roof and the creeping slice of light cast down on the floor. Tears, or was it blood bright against my cheek? The only sound a gasp that slipped from his lips as it happened. Like it surprised him. The ache in his knuckles. He never knew how to throw a punch, left his grip loose, and the pain just made him angrier. And he was an angry man to begin with. Red skin? Hardly. He was just always so mad. His blood welled up to the surface, all over. He’d kick at the stone walls and torture whatever happened to be around him.

  Have I ever told you about his hair? Jet black. He was already an old man when I met him, but not a speck of gray. He spent a full hour every morning in front of the mirror, slicking his hair back so the widow’s peak cut a perfect V down his scalp. If anything, his scalp was even redder than the rest of him. Heat rises, after all. I tried and I tried to get him to shave off that stupid little mustache, but he loved it. Waxed it every morning, sometimes traced the edges with eyeliner. The vanity! He never wore clothes. I can’t blame him for that. That’s the reason I got with him in the first place. It’s like the body fat had all melted away in the heat of his anger. His muscles were ropy in action, round and smooth at rest. And, I know you don’t want to hear this from your grandmother, but his member was magnificent. Of course it was large. The largest I’ve ever seen. But it was also the shape. When erect it shot straight out from his body and the artery on top would pulse with his heartbeat. And to touch it! It was steaming. When he removed it from . . . well, you know, the moisture would evaporate. You could watch it. A puff of steam. A little cloud made from our fluids. I called them our babies. Cloud babies. I’d watch them rise away and dissipate before long, but I always hoped that they kept rising, invisible, all the way up to . . . I wanted my babies to live somewhere more pleasant than Hell. Though let me tell you, for sure, that man shot blanks. With my second husband I had seven kids, your father included, and three miscarriages beyond that, and I never got down to it with your Grandpa, rest his soul, nearly as often as with that old Devil.

  Obviously, the Devil loved pain, and what is sex if not the mutual pursuit of a pained release? After a day of dismembering sinners and boiling human flesh, he wanted nothing more than to feel a bit of that pain himself. And I gave it to him. Almost every night. Some he worked late. Those he’d come home and climb into bed straightaway without even dinner. But most nights we made love. I can’t really use the word love with him. He was incapable of it. To him, it was weakness. Weakness was the one thing that scared him. It was always after the act, when he lay quivering, skin inflamed and sweaty, like red vinyl, that’s when the shape of his face would shift. He’d scowl, and I knew what was coming. I mean, he always scowled, but this was a look reserved for me. I think he couldn’t stand the thought of anyone seeing him in that moment. He wanted to subjugate me, if that’s the right word. Or diminish me. I’d caused him pain. I’d seen him weakened. He wanted to return the favor. I’m not saying he thought it out like that, but I’ve had years of experience since, and your Grandpa was no saint either. The Devil would pick something about me that irritated him. My shoes left in the middle the floor. A steak that I’d undercooked—he liked them practically charred. Sometimes it would be something from days before. He’d focus on the littlest thing and project onto it this irrational rage. It built up in him so fast. It detonated. I’d try to calm him down, but it never worked. He’d swing, always at my face. That’s where he looked when he bedded me. Never once at my body. Never more than he had to, anyway, to find where to put whatnot. So he knew me as my face. I had a great body as a young woman, but leave it to the Devil to focus on the eyes, like they are the gateway to the soul or something. Of course he knew better than to believe tripe like that, but what he knew and what he did rarely had anything to do with one another. He’d hit my face, hurt his hand every time, then plead with me to stay as I stormed out. I always took a couple laps around the fire pits, trying to find forgiveness inside myself, and I always did, and I went home and there he was at the kitchen table, and he wouldn’t
speak an apology, but he looked like the one who’d been beaten. Could I blame him for what he was, for being an evil outcast, shunned by his all-loving creator? He’d hug me and wouldn’t say a word. I was so young, I thought the silence meant something. But no, it happened again and again, until one day when I walked away I just kept walking. Then I climbed. All the way up to the surface. My fingers were bloodied and my knees scraped. It had been years since I was last above ground and it was too bright for me to see and I only knew I was outside by the feel of rain on my skin.

  Come on, Grandma, I said, there’s no such thing as Hell.

  I know I know, she said, but whenever I see rain like this, as if it fell from the sun itself, I can’t help but think about the poor woman who’s with him now. I can’t help but hope that when she walks away she keeps walking. Rain like this is just unnatural.

  THE LONELINESS OF LARGE BATHROOMS

  With nothing else to do, in almost any situation, I count things.

  Hotel lobby. Twelve people. Four couples. Remove eight from the equation. One man, three women. Two of the women, forty-plus. Remove three. One woman remains.

  I smile at her from across the room. I stand and move to the bar. She follows, a few seconds behind. When she arrives I have already ordered two drinks. Vodka cranberry. It’s a drink I’ve found most everyone likes well enough, especially women who follow strange men to bars. She sits on the bar-stool, shimmies into a comfortable position. The position does not actually look more comfortable, but it allows her to lean forward and rest her elbows on the bar. It is a position that thrusts out her chest. Perhaps this is a request for further thrusting?

  There is a glossy black baby grand piano in a corner of the bar. A white-haired, white-mustachioed man plays familiar songs in unfamiliar arrangements. I have never heard “Take Five” orchestrated so lushly. Its carefree bounce is replaced by a forced, false emotion. We are told how to feel, and for the sake of convenience we allow ourselves to feel that way. Like a shot of alcohol, it is a shot to the system. Immediate effect is favored over the delicacy of the flavor.

  “Are you in town for the conference?” asks the woman.

  “No, but I like meeting new people. That’s all a conference is, anyway. A chance to meet.”

  “The shaking of hands and the reading of name tags.”

  “After so many meetings, you still drink at the bar alone?”

  “Are you going to leave me here?”

  “I’ll be leaving here at some point,” I say. “Whether you are left is up to you.”

  She smiles and sips her drink. I have already finished mine, which makes it not much better than a shot. The bartender offers me another. I order bourbon instead. Whiskey in a glass, I call it. No mixer, no ice. The smell stings. The sting is like a toothpick slid between the teeth, a mixture of pain and pleasure and the promise of release. I take a toothpick from a bin on the bar. It is plastic and shaped like a sword. It is not designed to pick teeth but to garnish martinis. To slay tiny pirates. I slide the tooth-sword into my drink. I count twenty different types of whiskey behind the bar.

  “My name is Natalie,” says the woman.

  I do not respond with my own name. Like an ancient fairytale, tonight my name is the source of my power, and to reveal it after only one drink would be irresponsible. That’s the kind of information that is blurted out only at the end of the night, drunkenly, to the shock and embarrassment of all. I am a little disappointed to know Natalie’s name. It came too easily. She tilts toward me. Drooping neckline. A small slice of shadow.

  “I like this hotel,” I say.

  “I like to watch people pass by in the lobby,” she says. “They all have a look of disorientation.”

  “This place, the hotel, is their temporary home, but they recognize nothing of home in it.”

  “Sometimes you see a frequent traveler, one who moves through the lobby with confidence.”

  “He has seen this lobby and a thousand like it.”

  Natalie touches my hand. “You have that same look. One of unflappable familiarity. Have you been here before?”

  “I never visit the same hotel twice.”

  “Do you want to go up to your room?”

  “I don’t have a room here. Your room?”

  “I don’t have a room, either.”

  “The lobby, at least, is ours.”

  She wraps her fingers around my hand and pulls me from the bar. I follow a step behind, like a child being led through a department store by his mother. We pass the elevator. It dings. Four men step off. They wear blazers with elbow patches and khaki pants and shirts unbuttoned too low. The white hair on their chests pokes out. One of them winks at me. He remembers his own youthful trips to hotels. The women he left hotel bars with. Somewhere an old wrinkled wife waits for him. I think fondly of her wrinkles, their depth a sign of permanence. I do not think of them for long. The smooth flesh pressed to my hand is of more immediate importance.

  Natalie leads me into the men’s room. Bottles of cologne and lotion are lined up on the counter, arranged by color. Sixteen bottles, from red to blue. They all contain substances scented like flowers so the bathroom smells of a distant garden. An old blind man sits by the sink. He is dressed sharply in a tuxedo and wears obsidian black sunglasses that reflect back nearby images as if from the void of space. His face is round with protruding jowls. His breaths come out raspy, as does his voice.

  “Go ahead,” he says, “all the stalls are free.”

  Natalie leaves me for a moment and takes the blind man’s hand in both of hers. She lifts it to her mouth. She plants a light kiss there, on the back, the skin drawn and papery. I can see through the skin to his tendons. His arteries and veins. The shapes of the tiny bones inside. There are twenty-seven of them. Natalie comes back to me and takes my hand. In it I see none of those same components.

  Natalie opens the first stall. It is less like a stall and more like a walk-in closet, walled from ceiling to floor and sealed with a slatted door. I count fifty-four slats. There is a toilet inside. Thick quilted toilet paper spins on a brass dispenser. Above the toilet hangs a print of a generic landscape. We move to the second stall, the third. Each one Natalie opens reveals a similar setup. It isn’t until after she opens the fifth door that I begin to wonder. She is searching for something. The row of stall doors stretches indefinitely into the distance. I can see at least forty stalls, and I don’t doubt that there are more beyond my perception. Each looks like the same door set in the same floral-papered wall. There is no mark, scratch, or smudge to distinguish one from the next.

  We inspect several dozen stalls, not stopping at any of them. Air-conditioned mist puffs from the vents. I shiver. Natalie wraps her arms around me and hugs me like she would a brother. Like a brother she has not seen in a very long time. I appreciate the warmth of her body, but I do not like feeling like family. My thoughts, until this moment, have focused on the shadow between her breasts. This new familiarity, this comfort, is uncomfortable. I pull away. She smiles and slides her hand down my chest in a way that is not sisterly.

  She opens the next stall. It is the forty-seventh. I have been counting.

  “Through here,” says Natalie.

  This stall is not like the others. It is not a stall at all, but a hallway. I cannot tell how long it is. It is long enough to be a hallway and not a stall. I step inside and Natalie follows. The walls are hung with photographs. Each is a picture of me. None of the frames match, different sizes and shapes, materials and moldings. In each picture I am sitting in a hotel lobby. The first is of me as a child. I sit in an overstuffed chair, which looks ready to swallow my tiny body. I am five years old. I remember that lobby. I remember the number of people there. Twenty-seven.

  The photographs are arranged chronologically. As I walk deeper into the hallway, I move forward through time, seeing in frozen black and white each and every lobby I have known. I don’t know how many photographs there are. Lobbies are maybe the one thing I have ne
ver counted. They exist one at a time. It is only now, counting the pictures, that I begin to realize the vastness of their number.

  In the photographs, the chairs on which I sit change. From squat and contemporary to ornate and wingbacked. Sometimes just a stool. How often does one consider the variety of chairs? The background in each picture is different: bare walls or picture windows or the blur of distant objects. The only consistency is my expression. I am observing. I am counting.

  We have passed many of the photographs before I notice the small brass plates beneath them. On each plate is a number. I recognize immediately that this is the number of people in each lobby. 7, 16, 32, 5. The numbers go on and on. I stop looking at the pictures, paying attention only to the brass plates and their numbers. I add them together in my head. I divide the sum by the number of photographs. By the number of lobbies. Natalie follows close behind. She looks at me and not the walls.

  Ahead, I can see the end of the hallway and in it a door. Light escapes from the crack underneath. I look at the last picture on the left wall. It is a picture of the hotel lobby that we just left. The plate beneath it reads 12. This photograph is taken from a wider angle than the others. I bear the same expression, but my gaze, the calculation of my eyes, is directed across the lobby at Natalie. In the picture she is dressed differently, in unassuming clothes with a modest neckline. A sweater slopes down her shoulders. Her skirt flows out and hangs past her knees. The promise of her figure remains, but it is concealed. It is wrapped like a gift. I look at her in person, in the hallway next to me, and she is dressed in the same clothes as in the picture.

  There is an empty frame on the right-hand wall. The frame is white and perfectly square. The brass plate below it is etched with a number: 2. It is the only instance of this number in the hallway. Every other lobby was occupied by several people at least. In my memory there is no lobby so empty. It is contrary to the nature of lobbies. They are a place to meet. A place to converge. And while they are most often passed through, enough people are passing with enough regularity to keep them full. Can anything less be called a lobby? Is two enough?