Gravity Well

by Melanie Joosten

  Ever since the diagnosis, she had thought about calling Eve. But no matter how often the thought reoccurred over the following weeks, she dismissed it. They each had their own lives now; they had chosen different paths. Or rather, Eve had chosen a path too close to Lotte’s own; Lotte had come to a standstill and watched Eve walk ahead, not once looking back.

  Only a few months after arriving in Chile, Lotte had phoned the genetic-testing counselling office in Sydney. She bulldozed into the conversation and convinced the counsellor to give her the results over the phone, feeling like she was lying as she explained she was out of the country and couldn’t attend the clinic, no matter their policy. Positive. For months she had trained herself to hear that word, playing out the moment in her mind again and again, in the hope that when she finally did hear it she would be immune to its meaning. Its promise of preventative surgery, of reconstruction, of removing parts of her that she tried to convince herself she would not miss.

  But at the same time a smaller Lotte, one who lived deep inside, striding about empty rooms, heels striking floorboards with purpose: that small Lotte told her that the test would not come back positive. That if she imagined receiving the bad news often enough, it would not happen. She shied away from the logic that disputed this thinking, from the laws of probability that dictated her fate, and when the counsellor finally relented and gave her the results, she first felt a burst of satisfaction that she had gotten her way, and then shock at what had been said. Positive. She possessed the same defective gene that killed her mother. Brushing off the condolences, Lotte had thanked the counsellor and hung up, not wanting to hear about the following steps, the decisions to be made.

  She’d done it — she’d heeded Vin and Eve’s nagging and found out the results. But she was determined that nothing should change. The facts remained the same; only her knowledge of them had altered. Even so, Lotte discovered how it was that a heart could be heavy. At the centre of every galaxy is a hot, supermassive black hole of incredible heft, its existence so fraught that it effortlessly twists space-time, skewing everything within its vicinity. And so it was. The possibility of the future shut down when she heard the counsellor say those words; Lotte instinctively understood that she would share her mother’s fate, her life shorter than it should be. The preventative surgery was experimental at best; she knew that, she’d done her research. She knew how often the cancer found its way through anyway, popping up in the slightest bit of tissue that had been left, determined as only a mindless organism can be. She couldn’t stop it, but she could stop anybody else from having to witness it. And so for the next few years she had put the knowledge to the back of her mind.

  Calling Eve now would be a mistake. She might refuse to answer. Or worse, she would pick up the conversation exactly where it had been left off, as if time had wrinkled, collapsing the intervening five years to an unnoticed moment. Besides, that was how it all began — a phone call to Eve — and look how things turned out. One small action, and the world shifted on its axis.

  Lotte had phoned Eve just after she crawled out from under the dining table five years ago, leaving her mother’s crayoned solar system in its infinite stasis. She’d lain on the couch, her hangover fading into the day, the phone pressed against her head, talking until her ear was warm. Eve understood: Lotte’s want to accept this job; her initial hesitance to tell Vin, and the implications of what it might mean. The haste of her father and Alison’s relationship, the absence of her mother right when she was needed most.

  In the desert, Lotte can feel the bite of sharp rocks against her back and shoulders. Shifting her weight she releases her muscles, realises she has been holding them tight to stop from shivering. She closes her eyes briefly, then opens them as though the scene might change of its own accord. The stars above are about all she can see from here; they flood the sky, barely a dark patch left untouched. She makes out the Coal Sack in the Milky Way, the Magellanic Cloud wispy and unconvincing. She shifts her head to try and catch a glimpse of the Southern Cross — the closest thing she knows to a pole star — but when she tries to sit up her leg seizes in protest and she howls, the fox lifting its head before returning to snuffling at the ground, pursuing the scorpions wherever they scurried. That’s all it was after. The stars are dimming now. Lotte still cannot seem to pull enough air into her lungs; all she can see is those airport doors sliding open, a sea of people behind the barrier, and not one of them waiting for her.

  She hadn’t returned to Australia for Tom and Eve’s wedding, which had been held in Ballarat just after Christmas, a year to the day after it all started. She hoped the distance and the cost of the flights would be enough of an excuse, and she’d followed that up with hints dropped about securing leave at such a busy time of year. But her father’s emails were unusually insistent. We’d really love you to be there, Tom wrote. It would mean so much to have you with us. In a fit of sentimentality, she’d booked the leave; her father was in love, he had found someone to spend his life with. She should be pleased. But why did it have to be Eve?

  The emails kept coming. Chirpy updates on the wedding plans, changes he was thinking of making to the house. Please let us know when you’ll be here, he wrote. They wanted something from her that she wasn’t able to give. When her mother had been dying, only occasionally conscious, her eyelids fluttering, a priest had come to perform the last rites. An ordinary-looking man: beige trousers over leather slip-on shoes, a blue shirt unbuttoned at the neck. His hands were warm and clean, like a doctor’s, and he greeted Lotte and her father by name as though they’d met before, shaking with one hand, clasping with the other. From a bag, he’d taken a prayer book and an embroidered scarf, which he’d draped across his shoulders, the ends trailing down his chest. It had been a relief to have him there: he had authority; he’d been in this kind of situation before and was equipped with a whole book of things to say. He was the person to bestow a blessing, not Lotte.

  On the day of the wedding, Lotte visited the floating islands of Lake Titicaca. She had sent an email of apology, but hadn’t waited for a reply. Instead, she decided to travel up through Bolivia by bus, day fading into night, the roads falling away in mudslides, the salt pans endless, lifting to the sky. Every time she checked the time, she converted it to the hour back home, and then shook the thought away. Australia was no longer her home. Upon arriving at Copacabana, she took a tour boat to the floating islands berthed nearby — islands that were formed by masses of lake reed tied together.

  The damp smell of rot was pervasive: as the islands sank into the water, the families cut more reed, laying the swathes down on the surface, and braiding them together. A pre-Incan people, the Uros built the islands as large boats that could be moved if under threat. Speeding toward the township, two-stroke engine bleating blue smoke into the atmosphere, Lotte wondered what could be more threatening to a way of life than an endless stream of curious onlookers like herself. They clambered off the boat and onto the soggy ground. In silence, men demonstrated the process of creating the islands to the huddled tourists: Argentinians sipping mate from a thermos, Italians cupping their hands to light cigarettes. A choir of woman wearing bright pink-and-yellow pompoms on strings around their necks sang a folk song of their own, and then a lacklustre version of ‘Row, row, row, your boat’ in hesitant English, their faces blank. Lotte was humiliated on their behalf and on her own. How many of them preferred the days the tourists were directed to one of the other islands and they were left in peace to carry on their regular life instead of playing roles in this living museum? They sang for tips only because the tour-ticket profits were pocketed by the boatmen, who lived in the comfort of town. The women laid out their wares on bales of reeds: tablecloths, cushion covers, wall hangings, all embroidered with machinery-like perfection and of much better quality than any of the tourist tat found in markets in town. Afterwards, they waved forlornly from the doors of their reed huts. Went inside to await the next boatload.r />
  She returned to the IAO early, and was relieved to be back at the telescope, spending her nights gazing deep into space. There was a barrage of emails from Eve, from her father. It frightened her, how needy people were. Her father for her blessing; Vin wanting her at home — wanting a family, a future. Eve wanting forgiveness for marrying Tom; for falling in love with Lotte’s father.

  It was her own fault. Lotte had called Eve from the couch that day, and Eve had patiently listened. When Lotte had no more to say, Eve offered to visit. She was staying in her camper van on the Sapphire Coast; she had holidays until mid-January. She would drive down the Hume and keep Lotte company, while her father and Alison enjoyed their week at the beach. But Eve arrived, and Lotte left, and Tom came home early, and nothing was the same again.

  A couple of years ago, Voyager 1 had reached the heliopause — the edge of the sun’s reach, where its solar wind can no longer push back the competing wind of the surrounding stars. When the probe traversed this field of giant magnetic bubbles, it became the first spacecraft to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space. Upon reading the news report, Lotte had reached for her phone to call her mother; it was only when she found herself pointlessly scrolling through her contacts that she sharply remembered that her mother had been dead for almost six years. While she knew Eve had not taken her mother’s place, Lotte could not forgive her friend for doing so.

  Seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty …

  Lotte counts the stars, her eyes alighting on the next before the number of the last is out of her mouth. How many of them were suns with their own planets? How many planets had been counted?

  And what can these planets tell her, lying here in a desert, her knee dangling to one side and screaming accusations when she tries to move it? She is shivering now, her shoulders aching with the effort of holding themselves still, her hands bunched in her pockets. She must get up and find help, but every time she shifts her weight, the pain seizes her body, forcing it still.

  Help, she calls, unsure. She feels ridiculous as she cries out, knowing there is no one close enough to hear. Help! She turns her call into a yell and listens into its empty wake. All she can hear is the slip of sand and small rocks beneath her own boots; the scuffing of her sleeves against her waist. She would pity herself if she thought it would help.

  Bending at the waist, she sits up, jaw clenched. If she can pull her leg straight, the kneecap will slip back into position, and the pain will disperse. She knows this from experience, but she has always had someone else to do it for her. Someone to grab her ankle and quickly twist her foot so it points at the sky. Reaching down to her shin she wraps both hands around her calf. And twists.

  The pain seizes her entire being; her hands are thrown up, and she’s screaming.

  Owwwww!

  She’s let go too early — her kneecap hasn’t shifted, and sweat breaks out over her entire body, chased by fear. She can’t do this by herself; it’s impossible. Yet there is no other choice.

  Lotte waits for the pain to subside to a throb and begins shuffling backwards, extending her arms behind her then levering her body up and back, propelled by her good foot. Tears run down her cheeks and into her collar; her leg is a dragging deadweight, her own groan animal-like in its despair. She reminds herself that it is not possible to die of pain alone; she heaves her weight back again as her water bottle, attached to her belt with a carabiner, clanks and scrapes on the ground. She remembers the litany of her colleague’s more gruesome facts, each one more outlandish than the last, as he’d entertained her in the long hours one morning with different ways to die in space. They’d begun with the most obvious — that if it were possible to get close enough, you could drop yourself into the sun and burn up in 5700 Kelvin heat. They had laughed about it at the time — that you wouldn’t even burn, that your body would simply evaporate. That even if it could withstand the heat, the gravity force of the sun would siphon the blood from your body through your feet.

  Lotte jerks back another pace, squawking as her boot catches on a small ridge. There were other ways — what else had they listed? You could find yourself caught in Saturn’s winds, which race five times faster than any hurricane on Earth; they would tear you to pieces, flinging you further than you could ever return from. Or you could dive from a two-kilometre-high cliff on Mercury, smashing into one of the planet’s many craters, each one named for an artist, of sorts: Tolstoy, Matisse, Twain — you could take your pick. If you wanted to go up before you came down, you could stand on an icy geyser on Neptune, which would spurt you eight kilometres into the blue hydrogen-and-helium atmosphere. Which sounded a hell of a lot more attractive than taking a walk in the sulphuric rain of Venus, or falling into a black hole, stretching like spaghetti as you went — your legs becoming longer before your body tore in two at its weakest point, probably somewhere around your waist, stretching and snapping until oblivion.

  She is drenched in sweat now, her palms pierced by rock and coated in sand. There is no way she can make it back to the residence like this, not once the sun’s up; she’d walked at least forty minutes to get here, so it must be a few kilometres back. Breathing heavily, she stops to catch her breath. Remembers her mother drawing lines on a piece of paper, where they ran off the edge and shot across the next page. Lotte was young, early primary school it must have been, and Helen was trying to explain what ‘parallel’ meant. She took Lotte out to the backyard and got her to walk along beside her, arm outstretched.

  See, if we stay on the paths we’re on, we will never touch, no matter how far we walk.

  Her father must have been watching from the kitchen because at dinner that night he put down his fork and coughed. You know, that’s not quite true, he said. About walking in parallel.

  Lotte watched her mother roll her eyes and laugh.

  I knew you wouldn’t be able to let it go, she said, teasing.

  The world is round, Tom continued. So even if you walk in parallel, if you keep going straight, not going around any fences or buildings, or taking a step to the left or the right, you will still get closer; eventually, you will come together. And he had nodded, satisfied.

  Light is appearing in the sky, the sun making itself known. Lotte heaves her leg back once more, and then again. She needs something to brace herself against, something immovable so that she can use her whole body to twist and not just her hands. There are two large boulders to her right, further up the incline. She shuffles towards them, three quick pulls, whimpers bursting from behind her clenched teeth. It must be only another fifteen metres, but as she tries to lift her body again she finds she cannot, her body convulsing as she bawls out her pain.

  That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. Where was it Carl Sagan placed the pale blue dot of the Earth, minuscule in the universe’s cosmic vastness? A mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The only home we’ve ever known. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. She has never felt more alone.

  She needs to get her foot hard up against the boulders, snug in the crevice between them. Lotte drags herself the final stretch, her boot catching on the uneven ground and extending her pain beyond what can be comprehended. Finally, she reaches the boulders and shuffles around until her foot is aimed toward them. She has to somehow get her foot in-between the boulders, where it won’t be able to move as she pulls her kneecap into place. She gently grasps her leg, but, as she lifts, her fingers touch her kneecap, loose and swimming at the side of her leg, and the nausea comes upon her without warning, the vomit bursting out into her lap, spattering across her clothes. The contents of her stomach burn at the back of her throat, and she sobs with self-pity. She is not supposed to be here. She is supposed to be tucked up in bed, her bags packed and her alarm set. Check in, she thinks, sobbing and bracing her knee with a hand on either side. Take-off. Landing. She laces her fingers under he
r knee toward the top of her calf and lifts, shrieking as her foot flops up then lands hard between the boulders, pain engulfing her knee to her hip. Her face a wet mess, she throws herself onto her back, as though to distance herself from the hurt, and she screams.

  Her chest is heaving, and the stars are indifferent, observing her plight and offering her nothing. It is a cruel role reversal, a pointed disregard. She needs to get home; she needs to be away from here. Passport control. She pictures it. Luggage carousel. Customs. She slows her breathing, sits up again and flicks at the traces of vomit on her jacket. When she gets home, she will call Eve; Eve will make everything alright. With her good sense, forward planning, and acceptance. She will come to the hospital, she will listen as the doctors talk through her various treatment options. The chemotherapy, the double mastectomy. For, just as the presence of the gene predicted five years ago, Lotte’s body has taken its cues from her mother. Three weeks ago, she found a lump in her breast, and the biopsy report from the hospital in Antofagasta said it was not benign. Not this time. She doesn’t yet know whether it’s found its way into her bloodstream, her lymph nodes, but she knows it is time to go home. That she cannot do it alone in Chile — the endless hours of treatment and slow recovery. She had seen it all before; as well as giving her the gene, her mother gave her the insight. Lotte knew what was ahead. She would go home, to her father and Eve, if they would have her.

  She readies herself with her hands by her hips, palms down against the ground. Counts aloud, trying to take command. One, two, and on three Lotte lifts her body and wrenches herself to the right, twisting her leg as she throws herself to the ground, falling onto her shoulder. The relief is instant. Her kneecap locks back where it should and all the other muscles release their terrified grasp. The acute pain appeases, slipping away into memory, replaced by something so much less insistent that it is a comfort.