by R. A. Nelson
I’m barely noticing. Schuyler pokes me with a chopstick, missing my right boob by the width of a bra strap.
“Hey!” he says. “Snap out of it. What are you thinking about? You’ve been on Planet 9 all day.”
“What?”
“Earth to birthday girl. They’re about to sing.”
“Oh no, you didn’t.”
“Don’t look at me.”
I endure it. I have to.
I know I’ve been neglecting Schuyler, and he knows it too. But what can I do? What can I tell him? This thing I have going on, this love, is so huge, so real—Schuyler would never understand. It would freak him out completely. I don’t know if I could ever get him back. As much as I would hope he of all people would get it—he wouldn’t. I don’t know if anybody on the outside can.
Worst-case scenario:
He might even turn Mr. Mann in.
Shit.
Middle English, Schuyler would say, and dock me a quarter. But this is the first time I’ve thought of that possibility. Now I’m eighteen, sure. But for the moment, Mr. Mann is still my teacher.
And the longer the deception goes on, the worse it gets. I hate lying. Like the way I’ve been lying to Schuyler about the water-color lessons I’m supposedly taking on the nights when I don’t work. Luckily, he hates art, so there haven’t been many questions. Which of course would just lead to more lying.
The chef has made a volcano out of an onion. He’s slipped it next to my plate.
Time to go.
“I’ve got to run some errands before the places close,” I tell Mom and Dad when we’re done.
“I’ll help,” Schuyler says.
“Nope. It’s not anything big. Just some things I need for my art lessons.”
“Oh.” No way he’s coming now. Great.
I thank everybody and pull out from the curb before he gets a chance to climb in.
I hate lying to Schuyler—I hate lying in general. But I have to get rid of him somehow. If he finds out what I’m up to, what’s going to happen tonight—he would call me insane. He just might try to stop me.
But.
I have the inertia of worlds on my side. He might as well try to stop a spinning planet. Try to stop the seasons from the tilt of the earth’s polar axis. Try to stop the tides from the pull of the moon.
I’m going.
the house of tomorrow
Now.
My last chance.
This is it. I have arrived at every parent’s nightmare:
His apartment.
I’m not as terrified as I should be. Everything is golden. The sun is falling into the lake—you can see it from here. Mr. Mann goes up first, unlocks the door, slips inside. I wait a few beats down in Wilkie Collins, realizing I could wait much longer, even forever. This is not something he is making me do. I’m choosing this, to be here, now, with him. He’s giving me the best way out.
I don’t take it.
I climb the wooden stairs, hands not even touching the railings. There’s a moment on the landing when I’m looking at the lake, still have the choice before me. I rap the knocker, feeling elated and electrified.
The door to number 220 opens.
Mr. Mann appears, pulling his fingers through his hair, a well-fancy-meeting-you-here look on his face. The door clicks shut behind us; the moment is over. Mr. Mann throws his keys on the table, eyes apologetic.
“Welcome to Casa Mañana,” he says.
“The House of Tomorrow?”
“It’s small, but I like the location. Close to school.”
I hear myself in the single word: school.
Quiet.
I look around. His apartment is a pepperoni pizza: Papa John’s, thin crust. Wal-Mart bookshelves. Particleboard furniture. White plastic chairs. Not enough light. A cretaceous-era Macintosh squats in the corner. The sink is a ziggurat of dishes.
“I meant to get to those,” he says, as if I would care.
There’s a gift sitting in the center of the small table, silver foil tied with a green ribbon curled at the ends with scissors.
“Happy birthday,” he says.
My eyes fill. “Really? I can’t believe you got me something too.”
I tear at the foil; it’s a heavy glass jar with something golden inside. I hold it up to the light. The label says TRAPPIST, below that, SEVILLE MARMALADE.
“The monks! You didn’t.”
He doesn’t answer, instead unscrews the cap, dips his index finger in. The scent of oranges floods the room.
“Taste.”
I take his finger in my mouth.
We move together in the center of the room. Circling each other, almost a dance. He’s constantly touching. My cheek, my back, my neck. His fingers are as long as mine. Through a narrow door I see his bed waiting in sallow dimness. He catches me looking.
“What are you thinking?” he says.
“You once told me teaching is your second-greatest passion. I was wondering about your first.”
“Ah. Here we go.”
But instead of leading me to the bedroom, he’s rummaging on a shelf. He pulls out a square brown case. What’s he doing? I make a grab at it. He holds it away.
“But what is it?”
“Nope. I’m master of this box.”
“Let me see, please.”
He fends me off, laughing. “Nope. You’re in here.”
“I am?” I can’t describe how good this makes me feel. “How can I be in there? Is it a journal?”
Instead of answering, he swings to face the shelf and unsnaps the box, extracts a CD. He drops it into a Bose Wave Radio, the one nice thing he owns. I pick up the CD cover, puzzled: Split Enz, Soft Cell, Gary Numan, Wall of Voodoo. Who are these people?
“New Wave,” Mr. Mann says. “Circa 1982. I was just hitting puberty. Huge vinyl albums were still the rage. Music videos were brand-new. MTV wasn’t even a year old.”
I don’t hear any of the rest. I’m frantically doing the math:
Just hitting puberty = 1982.
He’s in his thirties. Maybe as old as thirty-five.
God.
Nearly twice my age. This is a body blow. I realize my mouth is gaping; I snap it shut and do my best to recover. Does this make a difference? Is he changed because he’s older?
Am I?
“You—you said I’m in there.”
“You are. All that longing. All those crushing feelings. New Wave helped me get through it. We didn’t know it at the time, but New Wave was just an extension of disco. The anti-disco disco. A lot of it was atonal as shit but still danceable as hell.”
He turns up the sound. A driving guitar begins thumping the walls.
“Billy Idol, ‘Dancing with Myself,’” Mr. Mann says.
He lets go of my fingers and does a goofy Molly Ringwald Breakfast Club kick step. First one foot, then the other, dipping his head to the beat. He looks ridiculous and surreal. I adore him.
He’s saying something.
“What?”
He stops dancing and turns down the volume. “I knew you would like Billy.”
“I do,” I lie. “But if you’re talking old, my taste runs more to the Cranberries.”
He laughs bitterly. “Ancient!”
“Or Johnny Cash.”
“Good God, prehistoric.” He means it this time.
“Watch his video, Hurt,” I say quickly. I’m not used to defending my love for a man born around the time Pluto was discovered. “A million years old and he’s covering a Nine Inch Nails song.”
Mr. Mann grins. “Tell me something else you like. Something I don’t know.”
It’s hard.
Wildflowers. Goofy old musicals like Meet Me in St. Louis or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Thanks, Mom. Carpentry. Thanks, Dad. Colonial archaeology. Historical trees. These I blame on myself.
“Historical trees?” he says.
“They collect the seeds from famous trees around the country and sell them. You can bu
y acorns from George Washington’s Mount Vernon tulip poplar.”
His eyes are sadly joyful. To be looked at this way feels . . . spiritual.
“How did I find you in Alabama?” he says.
“And on a Shoe Day, too.”
“What?”
“Y’all godless Yankees think we’re all barefoot racist rednecks.”
“And your point is?”
I shove him. He responds by taking me in his arms and kissing me hard.
His tongue moves inside my mouth, lightly brushing my tongue and finding the edges of my teeth. My legs go boneless. It overwhelms me that I overwhelm him.
“You’re so damn . . . tall,” he says. “I’ve never kissed anyone tall before.”
I want to tell him the things I’ve never done before.
The couch is fake leather and cold.
My hand moves under his shirt. His chest is unfashionably hairy. I like it. What is he thinking? Touching me. What am I thinking? I’m blown away by competing sensory inputs. The words I need are too big.
There is a shocking pinpoint of decision, then his hand cups my breast. I respond with an involuntary, liquid sigh. It’s strange to be adored, understood, hungered for. Most of the time I’m still not used to it.
He frowns and pulls away. His voice is almost inaudible. “This is where I’m supposed to be strong.”
I twist a piece of his hair around my ring finger. “Why.”
“I’m sorry, Carolina. It shouldn’t be like this. Not your first— I’m not thinking straight.” He sits up and massages his forehead. “All of this, you, it’s making me do crazy—”
“I’m not crazy.”
“But—”
It’s my turn to stop him with a kiss. We linger, lips barely touching, breathing each other’s air. His resistance without resisting is— irresistible.
Move.
We go in.
The bedroom brightens and darkens. The only illumination is a couple of fat yellow candles on a nightstand in the corner. They smell nothing at all like vanilla. He had to take the plastic off them. For all I know, he bought them for just this occasion.
The walls are bare except for a large framed poster of Emily. She floats like a ghost above the bed, neck long, face pale, hair tight as Lycra pants. She’s not smiling but looks as if she could.
The reality of the first kiss was nearly beyond my comprehension.
What can prepare you for a time like this?
Nothing.
As we get on the bed, I’m numb, standing somewhere outside myself. Processing oceans of thought right to the very end. Assembling impressions, observations, moments, touches, exhalations. It’s impossible to keep up with this kind of flow. I’m a satellite passing through a powerful magnetic storm, all my sensors pinging at the limits of their range.
Mr. Mann presses his lips together determinedly, pulls my shirt slowly over my head. I cover myself instinctively with my arms. My skin prickles with goose bumps. He kisses them, moves his mouth up under my arm. The feeling as he kisses me there is indescribable. He helps me to straighten my arms.
My turn. I unbutton his shirt, throw it on the floor. I spend an uncertain amount of time nuzzling his newly exposed skin. Every part of my body is suddenly connected to my toes.
I feel myself changing, shifting. Now I’m tugging at his pants and then at mine. He’s kissing me everywhere, squeezing me, running his fingers over places no one else has touched.
It’s too much; it’s frying my wiring. I close my eyes. The same thin blue light starts up again, just like when he kissed me. It starts as a line behind my eyelids. The blue line grows, becomes an arc, then a circle. I’m suddenly aware of the miracle of my bare skin against his bare skin. Just as the blue circle behind my eyes is completing itself, he—
Now there is no thought. It’s not possible anymore. Everything is scattered. All control and focus are gone.
I break an unspoken promise to myself not to cry.
Not from the pain. It hurts, just as he said it would. But it hurts in more ways than he even knows. It hurts the way dying must hurt, if you truly see a new world rushing at you.
“Richard.”
It’s the first time I’ve ever said his name out loud. I try it again and again.
electromagnetic love
Sweet.
Indescribably sweet.
It’s Saturday morning.
My heart tells me first—the world is still here. I’m letting it settle around me. I would have spent all morning in bed if I could. Reliving it all. Everything, him. Us. The outlines on the wall. But maybe I would never get up ever again.
But I have to. I’m helping Mom make my cake. There wasn’t time yesterday since I was gone. Gone. Is that what I was? I have never been more Here. We’re using my favorite green ceramic bowl. I inhale the scent of vanilla extract, touching my fingers to my lips, my tongue, remembering.
The candlelight, his bed. Emily watching over us, a pearly, schoolmarmish god. The end of it all, when I opened my eyes just in time to see him open his. The paradoxical feeling of safety and release in his arms. I didn’t wash his scent off. He’s still there.
It happened.
“No,” Mom says. “Oh no.”
She has to run to the store for lemon juice. While she’s gone, I sit at the table stirring languidly, letting my eyes go in and out of focus, staring a thousand yards out the window at nothing.
This seeing without seeing is comfortable, reassuring. I don’t want to lose it. Then it hits me: this is the single happiest moment of my life. It’s funny Mr. Mann is not here to share it. He’s the engine of its existence.
“You want to talk about it?” Dad suddenly says from behind me.
He approaches life the way he pores over an electrical schematic. Missing the wiring necessary to intuit, he has methodically, patiently learned to observe.
I know I’ve heard his voice, but I keep staring out the window. You can always talk to people. A moment like this might not come again.
“What?” I say finally.
He gives my shoulder a paternal Vulcan pinch.
“Nine.”
“Yeah?”
“What are you thinking about? College? Moving out?”
“Nothing.”
How could I even begin? I can’t. I turn on my toes and stretch to kiss him on the cheek. His big gray eyes are watery and golden at the center. He sighs.
“You remember, I’m sure, there are several different types of Nothing,” he says. “There’s the Nothing that is pure zero and the Nothing that is a negation. One is just before the birth of everything, the Nothing of not having been born. The other is the Nothing after the death of everything, the Nothing that is beyond all existence.”
“Charles S. Pierce, Logic of Events.”
“Good girl.”
“I never thought about it before, but he’s talking about the Big Bang, isn’t he? Before the creation of the universe and after its death.”
“In 1898?”
“Well.”
“So which Nothing are you thinking about?”
I rock my chair back with my sock feet. “Neither.”
“Then, by process of elimination, you must be thinking about a Something.”
I sure am. The biggest Something ever. The Something that has cracked open my life and set me free. “I don’t think I can’t put it into words.”
“Like to try?”
“No. I’m happy, that’s all.”
His shoulders relax. “I’m glad. I’m going to miss you something terrible. Where do the years go?” It’s his turn to stare out the window. “Do you remember when I carried you over the Haunted Bridge at Moore’s Mill? That tree fort we built that almost killed the sweet gum? Do you—?” He stops, eyes misting, unable to continue. “Come here.”
I put down the spoon and he hugs me into his Old Spice. It’s been a long time since we’ve done this. His gray hair needs a trim; the way it floats above his collar in
the back makes me need to cry.
Love must be an electromagnetic field that attracts like particles. Then I think of it—just as there is more than one kind of Nothing, there’s more than one kind of Love, too. I’ve always had the kind that was there before there was anything.
Now I have the kind that is there after everything else is gone.
throbbing star
NASA.
The Marshall Space Flight Center.
This is my birthday treat.
Well, second best.
I can’t stop thinking about the first. To be apart from Mr. Mann tonight is exquisitely painful. But there’s a deliciousness to my agony that wasn’t there before—I know he’s not going away. I know it’s real. It’s real inside my skin. It’s real throughout my bones.
Tonight I’m sitting with Dad in the Morris Auditorium. The same place where Werner von Braun used to speak to the troops. We’re waiting on a film.
“Hi, Dan, Pete.”
Dad knows just about everybody here, some of them going back to his Apollo days. I know a lot of them too. There are two hundred people in the audience, almost all engineers and aerospace types. Chrome domes, black eyeglasses, and mismatched clothing are inordinately well represented.
I desperately wish Mr. Mann could be here. I wish everyone else couldn’t. We’re watching a blank screen on a stage surrounded by walls built of local limestone. The head of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory comes out and speaks.
This is a movie of a pulsar in the Crab Nebula. A pulsar is a rotating neutron star that spews radiation out from its poles. The movie was made by stringing together photographs taken by the Chandra over a period of months.
The lights go down; the film begins.
Gasps.
The nebula is rippling, pulsing, enormous, alive. A gigantic red heart twenty trillion miles wide.
I miss him with that kind of ache.
woman exponential
Come closer.
I’ll let you in.
There’s a halo around the moon tonight. This happens when ice crystals refract the light in high cirrus clouds. Right now I could hug the world.
We’re standing in a field behind the Sunlake tennis courts. The johnson grass makes my legs itch. Somewhere a bird thinks it’s morning.