Gravity Well

by Melanie Joosten

  What are you going to do?

  Drink coffee. Lounge about. It’s just for a few days, Lotte. You’ll be fine.

  Easy for you to say.

  When she pulled back onto the road, a cherry-red SUV overtook her, reindeer antlers fixed to its side windows, a stick-figure family dancing across the rear.

  Maybe she needn’t go all the way to Ballarat to see her father; maybe a phone call would suffice. He’d be just as uncomfortable with her visit as she was, so perhaps she should save them both the awkwardness. Spend a couple of days in a cabin in Jindabyne instead, looking out over the lake.

  Recently, there had been an experiment in Russia in which six men were put into a mock-up space station for five hundred and twenty days, to simulate a trip from Earth to Mars and back again. The idea of this had horrified Vin: not just the isolation for such a long period, but the falseness of it. To know that outside the walls of the pretend space station were crews of researchers and technicians doing their best to make the situation as realistic as possible for those on the inside, but who were themselves able to go home every night, to drive out to their summerhouses with their families on the weekends, to swim in the ocean. Lotte, though, had been envious of those six men. The responsibilities of the outside world had been removed for them. They were free to concentrate only on the task at hand: putting their lives on hold for something bigger than themselves.

  Every aspect of the mission was created as it might occur in space — the twenty-five minute communication lag when radioing through to control, the rationing of resources, the impact of such a confined space on the mind and body. A woman who had been involved in one of the fifteen-day trial simulations was banned from participating in the main event, the sexual tension of her presence having been deemed to jeopardise the success of the mission. Lotte had eagerly followed blog updates of the men’s day-to-day activities: their insomnia; their irritation with other crewmates; the lamenting of missing night and day. Disappointingly, the project was unable to simulate weightlessness — the cosmonauts had to trudge around performing their tasks on two feet, including their simulated walks on the surface of the red planet. Her curiosity waned only when she learned about the experiments in cosmic radiation. The researchers, unwilling to expose the crew to the levels of radiation they would encounter on a trip to Mars, instead brought a group of pink-faced Rhesus macaques in contact with caesium-137, and charted the results. She often wondered whether the human crew knew about these monkeys; if there was one named for each of them, and whether they ever met.

  4

  EVE

  AUGUST 2015

  From where she sits with her feet in the water, Eve can see that, after crossing a log bridge, the trail follows the river uphill, trees leaning their branches over the path. She remembers grabbing on to a branch when she’d stumbled that summer she was pregnant with Mina; the way it had gracefully followed her fall before pulling tight just as she was about to hit the ground. She’d given herself a fright, and had been glad she was walking behind, that Tom hadn’t seen. She didn’t ask whether he was as solicitous to his first wife, or if he’d been this concerned with the coming of his first baby. She didn’t ask anything about that; it was a different time. When she stumbled, she cursed Tom in her mind, pre-empting his concern and wanting him to know that twelve months before she would have torn down a path like that on her mountain bike, disbelieving that she could come to any serious harm. But since she’d become pregnant she hadn’t even considered mountain biking. It wasn’t so much to avert the danger of such an irresponsible injury, but simply that, for the first time in as long as she could remember, she’d felt no urge to be so reckless, to test her limits. Having a child makes you afraid. It should make you afraid.

  In the water her feet are aching, sending shudders up through her shins. She could do it now, surely. The strength and tense balance would return quickly enough — and the sheer bloody mindedness to throw herself down a hill? She has that back in spades.

  Eve leaves her pained feet in the water and leans back. The green buzz of the leaves hangs above, sunlight fighting through, throwing itself at the ground. She closes her eyes; maroon paisley patterns and lazy firecrackers swirl. Water gathers momentum, producing a heavy static as it rushes over stones. Breaking down the sounds’ layers, she hears the ripple of wind-whipped plastic bags, the mumble of the sea that rests above the thundering volumes of the river. A bird squawks, another tweets. High chirrups and smooth, fluting calls. She has no idea which bird makes which noise, but she is hearing every one.

  For Eve, each second that passes is a distance; each distance both an escape and a torturous reminder. She had a family in her parents, and then she did not. She had a family in Tom and Mina, and then she did not. She has no one to blame but herself.

  Would it all have been easier if it had been with Nate? A man who corrupted time … no, he disallowed time altogether, it was a measure he refused to be aware of. He would not celebrate anniversaries, he would not respond to reminiscence. He was, deliberately, a man of the present. Of presence, as though time had to step around him, grumbling at the inconvenience. It was no small comfort to Eve that his children would have made his dismissal of time difficult to reconcile. Children grow. They change. They would ask him questions, and one day they would stop asking him questions and start telling him things. Eleven, that’s how old his son Jack would be now. And Grace, just a few years younger. How long before his children become aware of time, start to see it spooling out ahead of them and become desperate to embrace it? See it trailing behind them and try to record it so they can play it back?

  •

  It was Nate who’d encouraged her to give up studying law. She enrolled in a sound-engineering course instead, buying new editing software and better headphones, working shifts at the campus library to pay for it. She realised that all those years of quiet observance of her parents’ moods — listening out for how much anger or surrender might be contained in her father’s tread down the hallway as he returned from the pub — had tuned her ear to the nuance of sound. She didn’t mind that the other students in the course were predominantly boys, or that they just wanted to produce tracks of one another’s garage bands. She was drawn to the acoustics of space, how to reduce or direct noise, but she struggled with the physics, a field entirely new to her, and wondered if she had made the right choice.

  Nate was little help, dismissing her concerns with a shrug.

  You’ll get by, Eve, you always do.

  She was drawn to him without relent: her hand reaching out to grasp at his wild spinning-top antics, always surprised when he stopped and looked in her direction. She often wondered if he was attractive. He probably wasn’t; he tousled his wispy hair to disguise his balding, and his body lacked all definition, straight up and down. It hardly mattered: his inclusivity drew people to him, the way he always assumed the best. Eve experienced her first tugs of jealousy watching him entertain a bunch of his students at an orientation barbecue, noticing the way he invited their gaze as he laughed at one of his own jokes, demanding their acknowledgment and mirth. He was a generous storyteller and a demanding one, wanting conspirators for his tales who would follow him to the end and wait for him to launch into a new beginning. But he always came back to Eve.

  Some nights, she would feel her way through the kitchen in the dark, open his bedroom door and slip into bed beside him. Other times the bed would be empty, and she would hurry back to the bungalow before one of the housemates saw her. Their relationship wasn’t a secret so much as not spoken about. Eve liked to think of it as something unquestionable rather than taken for granted.

  When she moved into a two-bedroom flat, she hoped that he might follow. But Nate maintained that his hours were long and uneven, that he wouldn’t be around to share the housework or keep her company. That there was nothing wrong with the way things were now. And he was right, there wasn’t. She advertised
for a housemate instead, and Nate became a night visitor, arriving in a flurry of noise, bursting to tell her about his day and all the annoyances that had attempted — and failed — to upend him: the smart-arse interns, the finicky senior staff at the NGO where he worked, the ever-changing rota of housemates, and the paediatric nurse who had taken over Eve’s room in the bungalow.

  Thank God for you, Eve, the eye in the storm, he said once, pulling off his T-shirt and collapsing onto her bed. In the years to follow, the urgency in his voice as he spoke about his most recent thoughts or fascinations would bely a truth he would never speak: he needed her. For sound to carry, its wave needs a medium to travel through. A constant medium to ensure the sound is not refracted or dispersed. Eve was able to provide this, and in return she got Nate. Enthusiastic, irrepressible, confident Nate.

  Lotte couldn’t see his appeal and wasn’t afraid to say so.

  He’s just so full of shit, she said one morning, as Nate slammed the door loudly behind him and rushed down the stairs. He just tried to explain string theory to me as though I’ve never heard of it before.

  Lotte had answered Eve’s ad for a housemate, and when she turned up at the door, forthright and uncommonly beautiful, Eve’s instinct had been to tell her the room was already taken. She was hoping for a quiet mouse of a housemate who would offer occasional chitchat and then leave her be. Not someone like Lotte, who came marching in, poked her head in every room, and announced it looked just fine, if a little expensive. As long as Eve wasn’t planning on throwing parties every weekend, because she had a lot of uni work to do. Lotte was studying astronomy, and, despite her misgivings, Eve needed not only a housemate but also a tutor in physics. It turned out to be, without question, the best decision she ever made, though looking back all those years later, Eve can see clearly that she barely had a hand in it at all.

  Eve and Lotte became firm friends. Long hours of studying side-by-side at the kitchen table; watching Seinfeld and SeaChange cross-legged on the couch, with dinner propped on their knees; walking round Lake Burley Griffin on freezing winter afternoons. Lotte getting in arguments with Nate, and then allowing him to buy her forgiveness with a six-pack of beers shared on the balcony as Eve cooked dinner. Lotte treated Nate with a wary indifference, asking him so many questions about his politics and theories that he took it as complimentary, never realising that she was making fun of him. Eve would listen to their banter, rarely joining in, and wonder how it was that some people had so much to say. When Lotte turned her insistent questioning on Eve, Eve found herself opening up. It was something in the way Lotte listened so closely, never forgetting what had been said, never letting Eve get away with a glib response. It was as though she was seeking out the truth in every exchange, and, in time, Eve relaxed into the intimacy, relishing the immediate yet slow acquiring of a close friend.

  Would she return to that time if she could? Back to when decisions — or a lack of decision — didn’t seem to have any consequences? Instead, they grew up. Eve finished uni and took a job as an acoustic engineer, her days spent talking to blank-faced building developers about sound barriers and insulation. She volunteered in the National Film and Sound Archive, updating databases with digital recordings, trying to minimise the crackle of dust on vinyl playbacks. Lotte’s mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and Lotte’s research, always central, took on a new urgency. When Lotte wasn’t visiting her parents or working, she was at Vin’s, welcoming his nurturing calm, and eventually they moved out together, apologising for leaving Eve alone, but nonetheless resolute. Nate was there and not there, and when Eve decided to move to Sydney, where there were more job opportunities, Nate thought it a fabulous idea and declared that he would follow. Eve still remembers his loud dreaming of the life they might have together — Sydney cast as an emerald city and the future full of possibilities. But he didn’t leave Canberra. He lives there still.

  What if she had not left? Would she be so adrift now, nothing to live for and no one to care? What if she’d put her foot down and confronted him about what he wanted; about whether he wanted her at all? They had known one another seven years. What had he been waiting for? But one cannot play that game of ‘what if?’ and win. Because if she had held on to Nate, then there would have been no Tom, no Mina. No family to be lost.

  Tom. To meet someone and know that you have been seen, heard, recognised. To find a person who will go on standing by you, even to his detriment.

  •

  At the thought of Tom, Eve sits up. Takes her feet from the water and pulls her socks on, their cotton catching on the dampness. She walks back the way she came until she arrives at the campsite and crawls inside her tent, zipping it closed. The walls of the tent offer no horizon or distance. The material has been strengthened with a cross-hatch thread, designed to make sure that a hole does not tear away into a run and cleave the tent in two. Is that what she had neglected to do? Secret reinforcements, pre-emptive efforts to allay future problems? Instead, she has caused this rent, this split, this separation — she cannot point to fate, or anything else that might shoulder some of the blame.

  •

  Eve had only the vaguest memories of the Eureka rebellion: stories learnt in primary school about hardworking miners and corrupt policemen during the gold rush; an outlaw who would lose his arm to the cause and go on to become a politician. She recognised the flag as that of the builder’s union, fluttering over construction sites throughout the city. When she saw there was a position available as the audio curator for a sound-and-light show being developed to tell the story of the rebellion, she knew it was what she’d been waiting for: a reason to leave Sydney and spend time in Ballarat; a chance to see if there was something to pursue with the man she’d met there only a few months before. Tom.

  Eve’s favourite moment of every Skype conversation was at the beginning, in the seconds before her own image would have popped up on Tom’s computer screen. She knew that the look of concern that crossed his face, a premature disappointment that she might not appear, mirrored her own. But their conversation was always easy: a few times a week they talked long into the night, sometimes with a bottle of wine (he would message in the afternoon, asking what she felt like drinking that evening so that he could buy one of the same). The intimacy of the internet allowed them to consider one another without having to own up to what they were doing.

  She didn’t tell him about the job. The first interview was by phone; for the second they flew her down to Victoria, asking her to rent a hire car from the airport and drive up to Ballarat. Crossing the dry plains and dipping into the cutting where the landscape dropped into more fertile ground, she considered stopping or turning back. She tried to tell herself that this relationship was inconsequential — if things didn’t work out with Tom, she could just head home. But they both knew there was more at stake.

  The sound-and-light show was a larger project than she’d ever taken on; the majority of work at her current firm was acoustic management: making sure museum displays didn’t drown each other out, or that office workers who needed to actually work weren’t distracted by their colleagues lounging about in the now ubiquitous breakout spaces. It could be monotonous work even when complicated, its worth only recognised when it failed. But over time she had also established a profile as a sound artist, occasionally exhibiting in small galleries and collective shows. The openings reminded her of her student days in Canberra — she found herself timidly looking over her shoulder, waiting to be found out as a fraud — but she liked to go back to the galleries during the exhibition run and watch the audiences interact with the work. That was when it became art: not in its creation but its reception.

  One of her shows was entirely comprised of the sounds of bridges: the wind snap of taut suspension wires; the hoot of a northerly winding through metal trusses; the regular repeat of car tyres over a loose plank of wood. She had made the recordings on her camping trips to small towns, as well as on v
arious overseas holidays, stalking cities with her recorder in hand. In the galleries, she would watch as people fitted headphones to their ears, their expression moving from suspicion to interest. Her favourite recording was the uncomfortable winching sound created by a rope bridge in the Daintree settling underneath her feet, the fibres protesting as they rubbed against each other, and she saw how many people recognised the sound from their own childhood, a long-ago time of tree-houses and playgrounds. For the show she left some recordings whole, and spliced others together to create an opulent soundscape, the bridges providing the string, woodwind, and percussion of an orchestra, the melody writing itself, the multiple layers coalescing into a fey-voiced choir.

  From the initial interview, Eve recognised that the company creating the show knew exactly what they wanted: gun powder explosions, burning hotels, shouting rabble, and rifle fire. She just had to figure out how to make it on the available budget — a difficult ask when they couldn’t afford the copyright fees to access any of the available audio libraries, meaning the sounds would have to be created. The company wanted to tell the story of the rebellion — from the murmurings of dissent regarding the high price of mining licences to the death of two dozen young men on the hastily erected stockade — and they wanted it to be as compelling as any theatrical production, but without any pesky actors that would have to be paid each night. It was to be a fully automated show that could play outdoors every night of the week, no matter the weather, and the sound needed to travel to an audience seated in steep tiers at the side of an arena. Eve wasn’t sure it could be done, but as she drove into town — the main street familiar from her visit just two months before, when she had first met Tom — she knew how much she needed this change.

  She arrived in town early. The interview wasn’t until late morning, so she followed the main street further west until she got to the lake. She had twice walked its perimeter with Tom, both times in the evening, as the light faded and the town settled into evening. The first time they had both reached for easy banter; the back and forth of polite conversation, almost strangers filling too-long silences. The second time, the night before she had left to return to Sydney, their walk had been near mute, their clasped hands the only necessary discussion.