Gravity Changes

by Zach Powers

  Our office consisted of twin rows of desks down the narrow length of the main room. Executives and middle managers lived through the doors on either side. The restrooms were at the end of the room, directly in front of the desks, like that’s where we were headed on a slow-moving train. Even if DROPPED A STINKER didn’t emblazon the hung head of Jim as he exited the men’s room, we would have known who’d done it. Jim, to his credit, never grew bangs. Owning up to your faults, the TV shrinks called it, even as you could see the thick makeup that covered their real foreheads and the obvious fakeness of the text that had been painted over top. Jim’s head never said anything particularly shameful, but still, I’d never met someone so willing to look you in the eye. As we left the meeting last Friday, at which Jim had presented the budget report, I heard one exec say to another, “That boy has upper management written all over him.” The only thing I’d read on his face, though, was MADE UP THE NUMBERS.

  The desk next to mine had been empty for a couple weeks. Stray computer cables blossomed from a slot in the desktop. Dust-free squares patterned the surface where Post-its had been removed. The chair, black and mesh-backed, was rolled into the corner, angled away, the seat raised as high as it could go. When Jen quit, it hadn’t been much of a surprise. She came back from lunch one day with JUST INTERVIEWED WITH THE COMPETITION poorly hidden behind a drape of fine blond hair. A week later she gave her notice, and two weeks after that she was gone.

  I’d been with the company long enough to have seen that desk empty any number of times. Before Jen it had been Veronica, Jack, Beth, Casey, and Stephen. There was one other lady, too, but she hadn’t even lasted a week. Data entry isn’t for everyone.

  About midday the new woman came down the center aisle and dropped a cardboard box on the desk, kicking up a small storm of dust. The woman coughed and waved at the air in front of her face. She looked at me, grinning.

  “They didn’t tell me I’d need a wet rag for my first day.”

  She had dark skin, hair cropped short and left natural. Her lips were tinged with violet, just barely.

  I opened my top drawer and pulled out a few tissues. She took them and wiped down her desk’s surface. Each tissue she used turned from white to gray. She looked around for a trashcan, but somebody had taken the one from her cubicle. I slid my trashcan out. She balled up the tissues and tossed them in from across the aisle.

  From the cardboard box she pulled out the regular office supplies: stapler, staple remover, tape dispenser, mug full of pens, a rack for file folders, and a mouse pad that featured an image of a kitten. She set each item on the desk as if rearranging a room she’d lived in for years. The last thing she removed from the box was a snow globe containing a tiny Eiffel Tower. The fake snow inside flurried as she moved the globe around the desk, trying out several spots before settling on the far back corner. She saw me looking at the snow globe, and said, “I’ve never been to Paris.”

  She tossed the empty box underneath her desk. Days later I’d notice the box in the same spot. She took a seat in the mesh-back chair. It sank a couple inches under her weight.

  The woman stared ahead at the space where eventually there would be a computer monitor, tapping one finger on the desktop. Something about her unsettled me, but I didn’t know what. She’d done nothing but simple, expected tasks. She’d been pleasant in our brief interaction. She hadn’t introduced herself, but I couldn’t fault her that because neither had I. Maybe I just missed the emptiness of the desk beside me. Maybe it had to do with how comfortable she already seemed, like she fit in better after five minutes than I did after five years.

  She turned to me. “I’m Lakiesha. Most people call me Lake.”

  “I’m Gar,” I said.

  “Short for Garfield?”

  I nodded. “Don’t know whether my parents had a thing for dead presidents or comic strip cats.”

  It was a line I used all the time. I held my hand across the aisle. Lake looked down at it as if in evaluation, then gripped it and shook, overfast. Her smile was wide, like her mouth had extra teeth. I found myself smiling back. I only noticed my own expression because it felt unfamiliar, like when a new message spreads across your forehead, before you can check a mirror to know what it says.

  I let my eyes drift up from her mouth to her eyes and then higher still. It was almost impossible not to read a new acquaintance’s message, especially with someone like Lake, whose whole forehead was exposed. I searched the deep brown skin there for letters, for the geometric discolorations, the arches and spans, but what I found was nothing. Not even the hint of a word. I leaned forward without thinking. The creases on her forehead were like the lines on a blank sheet of paper.

  Lake chuckled to herself and turned away.

  “Thanks for the tissue,” she said.

  By the end of the week, Lake had a computer and was entering numbers into spreadsheets like the rest of us. We said hello each morning and goodbye when we went home at night. I showed her how to use the copier. Beyond that, though, we’d barely spoken, so I was surprised when she asked me if I wanted to grab a drink after work. I said yes before I even stopped to think if I had other plans. I never had other plans.

  She drove us from the office to a downtown bar. Her car was a yellow Corvette, convertible, but she kept the top up. It smelled inside of fresh plastic, the air from the AC vents crisp and clean. The padding of the passenger seat barely depressed under my weight, as if mine was the first ass to rest there. I started to ask her how long she’d had the car, but she gunned the engine and the rumble drowned me out.

  She parked at a meter right in front of Quills, one of those shiny bars set in the corner of glass high-rises, the kind of place frequented by business execs and lawyers. There was, in fact, a group of lawyers at a table by the door, drinking imported beer and telling lawyer stories. “We trained him and trained him and trained him,” said one lady, “but right when he stands up to enter the plea, his forehead changes to say, I DID IT.” There was a round of laughter from the table, accompanied by commiserating head shakes.

  We bypassed the host stand and took seats at the bar. Lake ordered us both drinks without asking what I liked. That’s how I ended up with my first vodka martini, wet with a twist, though I only half knew what that meant at the time. I sipped and was pleased to discover the drink was better than I’d anticipated. Lake drank from hers with a practiced motion, the stem of the glass pinched familiarly between her fingers. She seemed to savor the feel of the martini, first in her mouth and then as she swallowed. Her shoulders loosened and a soft smile played on her lips.

  After a few seconds with her eyes closed, she opened them and turned to me. She looked at my forehead and smirked.

  “What?” I said. “What does it say?”

  “AWKWARD AT STARTING CONVERSATIONS.”

  I looked down at the bar.

  “It’s alright,” she said. “Just drink.”

  The alcohol was surging straight to my head. Lightness spread through my limbs, the first hints of euphoria. I watched the activity behind me in the mirror over the bar.

  “So where are you from?” I asked, looking at her look at me in the mirror.

  “See? That’s not a bad beginning.” She stood up and swiped her drink off the bar. “Be right back.”

  She strode over to the table of lawyers, interrupting one of them in the middle of another anecdote of the legal profession.

  “Taylor, right? From Swift and Taylor?”

  The lawyer smiled, then glanced up at her bare forehead and stared.

  “I’m a paralegal over at Levy and Strauss,” said Lake, “and I swear I know you from somewhere.”

  “Um,” he said. “My bus ads, maybe? I have ads on a lot of the local buses. John Bonn.”

  “Oh my gosh, that’s it! I take the bus to work every day. It’s nice to meet you anyway! So sorry to have interrupted.”

  She turned before John Bonn could reply and walked back to the bar. The lawyers all looked a
t each other, shrugging one by one, until their conversation resumed.

  “Did you know him?” I asked Lake, softly so the lawyers wouldn’t overhear.

  “If you’re asking if I take the bus, no.” She said it a little louder than necessary.

  When the bartender came by, she ordered another round.

  “Oh,” she said to the bartender, “John Bonn said to put our drinks on his tab.”

  We’d been at the bar for a couple hours when I felt my face change. There hadn’t been much talking. Even when I’d managed to ask one of the regular get-to-know-you questions, Lake’s answers were elusive.

  Me: Where are you from?

  Her: Too many places.

  Me: Is this your first job in data entry?

  Her: No two jobs are alike.

  Me: Read any good books lately?

  Her: Has anyone written any good books lately?

  I rubbed my forehead. I couldn’t feel the letters on the outside, but I could sense them from within. Something short, a single word, large font. I leaned to the side to see myself in the bar mirror. There were two of my faces overlapping. I blinked and focused and merged them into one. The text was gibberish. Then I realized it was backwards in the mirror. I tried to read it from back to front. I tried two more times before I got it. DRUNK.

  Lake watched me trying to read myself, and chuckled when I finally figured it out.

  “Looks like I need to get you home.”

  “I can take a taxi.”

  “Your car is still at the office. What time do you want me to pick you up in the morning?”

  “I usually get in at seven thirty.”

  “Great, I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  Even though she’d told me eight, even though my brain felt like wool from the hangover, I was dressed and ready at seven fifteen as usual. I poured the remains of my morning pot of coffee into a red Solo cup and went outside to wait. The concrete of the stoop was still damp with morning dew. Sleepy schoolkids trudged past to the bus stop.

  I was still sitting there more than an hour later, which made Lake tardy even by her own standards. A car pulled up out front. It wasn’t Lake’s Corvette, so I ignored it. The car honked three times. A silver Mercedes, a few model years old from the looks of it, though I’m not one to be able to tell much from the looks of a car. It honked again. I glanced around for whoever it might be honking at. Another set of honks. The noise was too loud for my hangover. The tinted side window rolled down.

  “You coming, Gar?” asked a voice from inside.

  I leaned down to see the driver. Even looking at her face, it took me a moment to recognize that it was Lake. Where had she gotten this second car?

  I willed myself standing and eased down the steps to the car door, which Lake had thrown open from the driver’s side. She patted the gray leather seat.

  “The seats are air conditioned,” she said.

  I plopped down. Cool air chilled the fabric of my pants, which had wicked up some of the wet from the stoop. Lake accelerated away from the curb before I had a chance to buckle up.

  “How’re you feeling?” she asked.

  “A little groggy.”

  “I think the word is hungover.”

  “Yeah.”

  “At least that’s what your forehead says. HUNGOVER ON A WEEKDAY.”

  I hadn’t even noticed, hadn’t thought to read myself in the mirror that morning.

  The water cooler was situated behind the row of desks, at the opposite end of the office from the restrooms. The coffee maker sat on a rickety rolling cart next to that. On the wall above them hung the announcement board, bare cork that only ever had one thing tacked to it, that OSHA poster about not getting maimed or decapitated on the job but if you do, remember you have rights. Even when freshly brewed, the coffee always tasted stale.

  I dribbled water from the cooler into a conical paper cup while Tom talked about his plans for a weekend of canoeing on some river I’d never heard of. Mary listened and nodded at the things he said and seemed actually interested. She’d been wearing that same bandanna almost every day for over a week. Jim poured himself the last of the coffee but didn’t start a new pot.

  “Last time I went,” said Tom, “I paddled right past a bear fishing in the shallows.”

  When he smiled, Tom’s jaw muscles flexed and his chin thrust out. His forehead said, HAD A SECOND GLASS OF WINE WITH DINNER. I sucked down the rest of my first cone of water and refilled. I left just as Tom’s story reached the rapids.

  Lake’s computer monitor quivered with motion as I approached. Usually, I never look at a coworker’s computer. Whatever work someone is or isn’t doing at a given moment isn’t any business of mine. But her screen was practically convulsing, so it was impossible not to glance.

  A porn video stretched across the whole screen, currently on a close-up of conjoined genitals. I froze in place, unable to look away, like I was passing an accident on the freeway. I slid with sideways steps into my pseudo-cubicle (the walls not high enough to hide whatever you were doing—watching porn, for example—from curious eyes), and slowly lowered myself into the seat.

  I opened a spreadsheet, entered a couple numbers, but I was distracted again by motion coming from Lake’s direction. I couldn’t see her monitor anymore; it was Lake herself moving in the same rhythmic fashion, hand slid underneath the waistband of her skirt, knuckles pressing up the fabric, tracing small circles. Her eyes gripped shut, mouth set in a tight line. Little noises like stifled screams escaped with the exhalations from her flared nostrils, noises so soft I wouldn’t have heard them at all if I wasn’t watching.

  Lake gasped and her eyes burst wide open and she curled over in her seat as if overtaken by some sudden, unlocalized pain. She pulled her hand from her skirt and held it up close to her face. The thumb tremored. With her other hand she moused something closed on the monitor, then she slumped back in her chair.

  I still stared at her when she looked my way. I thought to avert my eyes, but it was obvious I’d seen everything. Text started to appear on her forehead, not a complete message. Not even letters, really, just curves and lines without the other curves and lines necessary to complete them. She smiled at me and her forehead cleared.

  “Went home alone last night,” she said.

  As if that explained everything.

  “You should try it at work sometime.” She pointed at my pants, stretched into a khaki pyramid by a half-formed erection. My first thought was How’ d that get there? even though the answer was obvious.

  Tom’s canoeing story must have concluded, because he sauntered between Lake and me, followed a little bit behind by Mary. When they passed, Lake was already facing back to her computer, typing an endless stream of numbers on the keyboard.

  That night, Lake secured us another few rounds of free drinks courtesy of a bachelorette party. The bride-to-be wore a pink sash and a tiara and a necklace made of plastic penises. None of the bridal party seemed particularly pleased to be there. They all glowered at each other, like everyone else was to blame for the bride-to-be not having the best night of her life, like it never occurred to them that the problem might be the penis necklace, that a night out can be wild without being a spectacle.

  Lake went over to them, feigning drunkenness, though she was only a few sips into her first drink, and gushed over the beauty of marriage and the exciting times to come and the value of good friends who’d throw such a party. It only took her fifteen minutes to turn the table of scowling bridesmaids into a jubilant, story-sharing, dancing-to-the-shitty-jukebox-selection, tequila-shooting-salt-licking-lime-sucking celebration. When she stood to rejoin me at the bar, they begged her to stay. She pointed at me and used my sad posture as an excuse to be excused, but not before she’d entered a couple names and phone numbers into her cell phone, including the name of the bridesmaid with the open tab.

  She sat beside me and said, “Three JEALOUSES, one SAW HIM FIRST, and one I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S HER BEFORE ME
.”

  “What?” I asked.

  She pointed to her own brow. “Foreheads. By the time I was done, though, all of them had flipped to DRUNK or LOOKING FOR A RANDOM HOOKUP. The bride was stuck on COLD FEET, but it’s hard to turn someone who’s about to make a huge mistake and deep down knows it.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “What, get a whole bridal party drunk?”

  “Your face. How do you keep the words from forming?”

  “That’s just how I was born. A clean slate.”

  “No it’s not. I saw the words there, at least parts of letters. Earlier, when you were . . .”

  “Masturbating at my desk?”

  “Yeah, that.”

  She turned to me, searched my face, read my forehead, but didn’t seem particularly interested in whatever was written there. She rested her hand atop my hand on the bar. It wasn’t a romantic gesture. More like she was consoling me.

  She said, “You’re supposed to save the hard questions until the third date.”

  “Date?”

  She offered a smirk in answer to my question, then angled her face away from me.

  She said, “My mother beat me. Beat me bruised and bloody. She was a religious nut, and she saw the messages not as faults but as sins. And sins deserved punishment, no matter how minor they seemed. SPILLED THE JUICE got me smacked around just as much as CHEATED ON A TEST. Even then I was able to control it somewhat. You can’t cheat on a test if your face confesses it in front of the teacher, but I could hold it back, make it wait to show up until later. I always tried to keep everything hidden until I went to bed, but I was still learning. It wasn’t until I reached thirteen that I figured it out.”

  Behind us the volume of the bachelorette party had been steadily increasing. Now there was a round of high-pitched giggles. They’d snared a young man into their circle. He fidgeted in his seat, like he wanted to leave, but the bridesmaids on either side of him kept stroking his arm, the touch a kind of promise.