Gravity Changes

by Zach Powers

  “Figured what out?” I asked.

  “Where the words come from. They’re not faults, and they’re certainly not sins. They’re not even regrets. Nobody’s head ever said, WISH I’D ASKED KATIE TO PROM.”

  “I don’t even know a Katie.”

  “Sloane, Vanessa, Shauna, whatever. The point is, none of those things cause the physiological change. The words come from guilt. And not what we’re actually guilty of, but only what we feel guilty about.”

  “That doesn’t sound so different from faults to me.”

  “We’ve all got a million little inadequacies, Gar.”

  “I don’t think I’m particularly little or inadequate.”

  She laughed once loudly, and I saw a flicker of text on her forehead, but it was quickly swallowed back up in the dark skin, like watching a blemish heal in time-lapse.

  “I’m just saying that if the words came from faults, we’d need huger heads to list them all. Or they’d cycle one every second, too quick to read. The only words that ever appear, though, are about the things we feel real guilt over. It doesn’t have to be big guilt. Just whatever we know we could have done differently, but didn’t.”

  “So you don’t ever feel guilty?”

  “Not often, and when I do, I suppress it until I can rationalize the guilt away.”

  “That can’t be healthy.”

  “Neither is getting thrown against the wall by your mother.”

  She smacked her martini glass down on the bar, hard enough that I was afraid it would shatter. The little bit of remaining liquid splashed up the sides, then dripped back down, leaving finger-trails on the glass’s surface. She signaled the bartender for a refill, and told him the name of the bridesmaid for the tab.

  “The first time I came home from school with a blank face,” she said, “my mother was euphoric. She’d purged all the sin out of me. It was like that for weeks, her full of self-righteous joy. I never got beaten again, but that wasn’t enough for me. I couldn’t stand for her to think it was her victory. Back then, text would still appear when I let down my guard. It wasn’t natural yet, keeping it blank, but only one thing ever appeared: I HATE MY MOTHER.

  “I hated that message even more than I hated the woman because it meant I felt guilty about hating her. This was a woman who’d done everything she could to crush my spirit, and for some reason I felt guilty that I didn’t love her, that I didn’t call her mommy, that what I wanted more than anything was to crush her like she’d crushed me. So I did. I crushed her.

  “After you learn how to clear your forehead, to sublimate your guilt, it’s not a long way to manipulating it. You just have to convince your brain that you feel guilty in such a way that it creates the messages you want. And if you start thinking about yourself in the third person, you can switch “You” for “I” and direct messages at someone else.

  “At dinner, my mom would always beam at me, at least at my empty forehead, from across the table. She was so proud it made me sick to my stomach. I forked up a couple grains of rice at a time, a couple beans to make it seem like I was eating. Mom never even noticed all the food left on my plate. One night, her stare was particularly insistent and pious, and I couldn’t take it anymore, so I did it. I looked her right in the eye, and flashed YOU ARE A SINNER across my head. Just long enough for her to read, for the shock to spread across her face, for her fork to clatter against the plate.

  “After that, any time I caught her looking at me, I flashed a similar message. GOD IS DISPLEASED, HELL AWAITS YOU, THE KINGDOM IS CLOSED TO SINNERS. I would fill up the margin of my notes at school with phrases I could use against her. I got pretty creative, but the one that broke her, and I knew it would, was simple: GOD HATES YOU.

  “I had just turned sixteen and three years of tormenting my mother had thinned her to a stick of her former self. The only thing her head said anymore was I AM A SINNER or UNWORTHY, stuff like that. She always wore a headscarf. Whenever I saw her without it, the white of her hair surprised me. It had been jet black before.

  “One day, we stopped at the Christian bookstore on the way home from school. She’d started going there at least once a week, filling our shelves at home with new-bought Bibles. She hung a cross over every door. It was time for a new cross, I guess, because she held one up to show me and asked what I thought, her eyes expectant. It’s the only memory of her I have when she appears naïve, innocent. And that’s when I put up GOD HATES YOU, and instead of flashing it like I always had, I let it stay, and I glared at her, because whether or not there is a God, the only one who hated her was me.

  “Panic, real and true, like she’d just come face to face with the bear that was going to kill her, consumed her features. She screamed, wept, fell to the floor, thrashing and kicking, knocking crosses and ceramic Jesuses from the shelf. The scarf slipped from her head, revealing one word repeated dozens of times in a tiny font: DAMNED.

  “When she settled into silent weeping, the staff at the store helped me gather the limp, quivering heap that was my mother into the car and I drove her home. I led her inside, put her to bed, then got back in the car and left. Never looked back.”

  The bridesmaid came up to close her tab. The rest of the party was funneling out the door, pulling the young man and now one of his friends along with them. The bridesmaid signed the check without reading it, hugged Lake, muttered something slurred and friendly, and then scampered away to catch up with the party.

  “So you can make your forehead say anything?” I asked.

  “Just about.”

  “Why keep it blank then? Wouldn’t it be easier to have a simple, fake fault?”

  “You think I’m the only one who can do this? I’m just the only one honest enough to keep my face empty rather than printing it with lies.”

  That was a disturbing thought, that there were other people who could control their faces. I snuck a peek at the bartender’s forehead. OVERPOURS FOR CUTE WOMEN seemed legitimate enough, but what would it say if it wasn’t?

  “Don’t let it erode your faith in humanity,” Lake said. “Most everyone is on the up-and-up.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It takes a liar . . .”

  That night before bed I stood in front of the mirror, willing my face to change, to say something other than NOT GOOD ENOUGH, which I’d felt form there while listening to Lake. I searched inside for the source of this guilt. I let my gaze drift to my other features. My nose had a little outward turn just before the tip. My left eye was slightly rounder than the right. My lips parted a bit in the middle, as if I was about to purse them for a whistle. Not a bad-looking face, overall. I could say this like someone observing a stranger, except I realized that even with strangers I always focused on the content of their message, identifying them by the types and severity of their faults. It wasn’t them but their guilt that I found beautiful or ugly. I’d reduced something complex to a single, over-simple feature. But there was no simple answer to a person, just a tangle of guts and feelings cinched up in a bag of skin. I’d only been seeing the part that hinted at the tangle, which was the same as seeing nothing at all.

  In the mirror, for a moment, the black lines of NOT GOOD ENOUGH lightened to gray, revealing my face underneath. My real face, not just the stuff on its surface.

  I rolled into work at 8:05, the first time I’d ever been late except for when Lake picked me up. My forehead said, STAYED UP ALL NIGHT, and the rest of me said it too. The skin under my eyes felt heavy. My shirt had received only a cursory tuck, poofing out above the belt. It was a clean shirt, but it seemed to have already gathered a day’s worth of wrinkles.

  I sipped a cup of shitty office coffee and listened to Tom share another one of his stories by the water cooler, this one about a hiking trip that somehow included another encounter with a bear. His forehead said, RUNNING LATE SO USED THE ELECTRIC RAZOR THIS MORNING. His skin looked as smooth as normal to me. But had I ever really looked at him besides his message? I noticed then the way
his front teeth bucked out, lifting his lips into a half-kiss when he closed his mouth. Electric razor or not, the skin of his face bore the pocks and discoloration from an adolescence of severe acne. His eyes, which I’d always taken for blue, were actually gray, almost completely colorless.

  Tom caught me inspecting him, and his voice faltered, story broken off midstream. The dimple on his chin looked like the knot on an old rotten tree. His ears flapped out wide from his head. His blond hair was obviously dyed that way.

  He cleared his throat to cover the pause in his story, and then resumed, trying to avoid glancing in my direction. But he kept looking over and I was always looking back, searching some new part of his face. On my own face, I let the message change, and for once I knew what it said, because I’d pushed it in that direction: BETTER THINGS TO DO.

  When Tom read it, there was another pause, just long enough for me to turn and walk away.

  I couldn’t hold the new message for long, and it shifted back to something of my brain’s own choosing as I made my way down the aisle. Whenever it changed, it tingled, like a warm cloth pressed against the skin. Like a blush starting from the outside. For something that had been happening my whole life, I’d never paid much attention to the way it felt before. It had always been accompanied by the dread of what the message might reveal, the worry stronger than the sensation.

  Lake was tapping away on her keyboard. She had a program open on the monitor that I didn’t recognize. An endless stream of digits scrolled down the right side of the screen. The rest was filled with other data, a jumble of numbers, green on a black background, like she was using a computer from twenty years ago.

  I sat down at my desk but didn’t turn on the monitor. A couple more sips from the shitty coffee. I admired the perfect clarity of Lake’s forehead as she worked across the aisle. Her face made little motions as she concentrated, a lift of the lower lip, a focused squint. She held her hands above the keyboard, then pecked down her index finger on the enter key with dramatic finality. She leaned back and watched the screen.

  “Morning,” I said.

  She smiled at me. “Sorry, I was concentrating. Didn’t notice you come in.” She looked at my forehead and spoke a single “hah.”

  “I’m laughable this morning?”

  “Just not a very Gar-like message. SELF-SATISFIED? What’s got you so full of yourself?”

  I found a little corner of guilt inside myself and focused on it and channeled it to the surface. A tingle spread across my forehead. The new word emerged: SHOW-OFF.

  Lake’s eyes widened momentarily, and she sat up straighter in her chair. She laughed, this time for real.

  “You’re a quick study,” she said.

  I felt the heat of a blush on my cheeks and the tingle again on my forehead. SELF-SATISFIED was already back.

  Usually I took lunch right at noon, but since I’d come in late and then dallied for a while after that, I was still at my desk at one. The rest of the room was empty, even the bosses’ offices abandoned, everyone filed out to restaurants or the lounge downstairs that we shared with the rest of the building.

  In the quiet, my keyboard sounded like machine-gun fire. My stomach grumbled, loud enough that I thought it would shake the conference room windows from their frames. My heart thudded deep inside my ears. Some of my coworkers would wear headphones to drown out the noise of the office. I wanted my own pair now to drown out the silence.

  Despite the quiet, Lake snuck up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. I jumped in my seat and slammed my knees on the underside of the desk. She laughed, a cackle really, and I couldn’t help but join her even as I winced away the pain. As her laughing subsided, she rubbed her hand across my back, and then my shoulder, and then down my arm to my hand. She was pulling me up and out of the seat and I was following her, neither of us laughing anymore. She cracked open the door to the supply closet and pulled me inside. The door closed and it was black. I fished around in midair for the cord from the overhead light. By the time I tugged it on, Lake’s skirt and panties were already around her ankles.

  She undid my belt and button and zipper, hooked her thumbs through the belt loops on each hip, and slid my pants down. Then my boxers. She stroked her fingers down the top of my penis, the mostly unfeeling part, and then squeezed it as if testing a fruit for ripeness. She shoved me back against the rack of office supplies, rattling paper clips and thumbtacks, a struggling wind chime of a sound. The wire shelves dug into my back.

  She traced the shape of the letters on my forehead with her fingertip. I felt the message change, and she traced this new one, too. She licked her finger, like she was tasting what she’d touched. She rose up on her toes and licked my message directly. Her tongue felt like when a message changes except on the outside.

  Lake adjusted my hips then straddled my legs, the warmth of her inner thighs inching up until she was just so. She lowered herself around me. The position offered her no leverage, even when she gripped the shelves and lifted with her arms. After a few abortive thrusts, I slid myself out of her. I turned her around by the shoulders and bent her over and entered her from behind. We stumbled across the closet, some four-legged, heaving animal, and she braced herself against the shelves on the other side.

  As we fucked in the supply closet, the sound of our coworkers returning and resuming their jobs simmered on the other side of the door. I stayed as quiet as I could, but Lake let out a moan whenever she had one in her. Then the moans escaped more frequently, with more primal panic and less control. I ran my hand under her blouse and found her breast and kneaded it, probably too hard, but she just moaned louder. Then she was huffing in air and her whole body shot through with little convulsions. I gasped, because I came then too, though I hadn’t really known I was going to, even though it felt huge, like there couldn’t be anything left in me. I kept going for a good while after she was obviously already done because I didn’t want the feeling to end, and my dick seemed able to stay hard forever.

  When I stopped, she straightened herself and turned around and kissed me. It wasn’t a romantic kiss, not exactly. The kiss seemed to say thank you.

  “Jesus,” she said. “You should write a book on that.”

  She pulled in a deep, deliberate breath. I matched my breathing to hers, as if to maintain our rhythm.

  I said, “I’m usually worried about coming too soon.”

  “Goldilocks,” she said.

  “Is that your new nickname for me?”

  “Just right.”

  She looked around the closet and found a T-shirt with the company logo. She used that to wipe us both down—it was amazing the places little bits of wet had managed to smear—and then tossed the balled-up, cummy shirt in the corner behind stacks of paper that looked like they were left over from the age of ditto machines.

  While we dressed, Lake said, “Now comes the real test. Think you can keep your forehead innocent for the rest of the day?”

  “I don’t feel particularly guilty, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  She insisted that we both walk out at the same time. Nobody even looked up from their desk.

  I managed to pass the afternoon without incriminating myself. It turned out to be pretty easy to maintain a message if it was about something I actually did feel a little guilty about. I used ORDERED A WATER BUT FILLED UP WITH BARQ’S AT THE SODA FOUNTAIN until about 4:00, and then switched to CAME IN LATE BUT PLAN TO LEAVE ON TIME to close out the day. I couldn’t blank my face yet, but I could make the message as good as empty.

  I snuck a peek at Lake from time to time, but she focused on the screen in front of her, carefully entering figures on the number pad. At 5:00 she was still set on the screen, showing no signs of letting up. I hovered by her desk before I left, waiting for her to notice me.

  “Hey, goodnight,” I said.

  Still, she didn’t look up. I started to move away. She rolled her chair into the aisle to block me.

  “Meet me in the downstairs
lobby at 6:55 tonight. Don’t be late. The lobby locks at 7:00.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “Not that, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She lowered her face and raised her eyes and smiled coyly. “Well, maybe that.”

  Mary looked at us from her cubicle. The message on her face changed to BEING NOSY even as she turned away. It was the first time I’d seen her without the bandanna all week, but I didn’t have a chance to read the message that was there before it changed.

  I got back to the office at 6:45, but sat in my car in the lot. The building, windows unlit, loomed, unrecognizable. When the clock on my dash read 6:53, I shut down the car, cutting off a bad country cover of “Wagon Wheel” on the radio, and wended my way through the surprising number of cars still in the lot. Did people always stay this late? If so, why were all the windows dark? Those with windows in their offices were apparently not the same ones working after hours. Inside, the security guard let me pass without question even though I’d never seen her before. The elevator dinged. Lake was inside. She waved for me to join her.

  The door closed, and we accelerated upwards. Lake pulled something out of her purse, a brass nameplate, the kind that sits on the front of a desk. She held it up with both hands at chest level. It said, Barney Fister, President/CEO.

  “Greetings, Mister Fister,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Some name, right? I was wandering around and found it in an unlocked office.”

  “I’ve never visited another office in this building. Sometimes I forget they’re even here.”

  “What about all the other people? You think they’re just coworkers you’ve never spoken to before?”

  “I don’t speak to most of the ones I actually do know.”

  I followed her off the elevator and around the corner to the darkened confines of our office, tinged red by the exit sign, the light faint and smoky. The objects in the room, from water cooler to copy machine to the cardboard boxes in the corner, were just black blobs.