The Physics of Imaginary Objects

by Tina May Hall

  One Thursday in April, a man in his thirties enters the diocese office a few minutes before closing. He crosses to Rosa's desk and stands in front of her, apparently studying her nameplate. His silence makes her nervous, and she tucks her left hand under her thigh before asking how she can help him. He doesn't speak, and she wonders whether she should try to get past him to the outside door or dash into the copy room behind her where her most lethal weapon would be a five-gallon bottle of toner. Just as she starts to pray to the Lord for divine intervention or at least a little timely guidance, the man pulls a small silver box from his pocket, parts the edges of his collar, and holds the box to the bit of clear tube that protrudes from his throat. “Rosa?”

  She thinks it is the most beautiful and terrifying sound she has ever heard. It is a cross between a whisper and a deep bass with overtones of metal, but it is not mechanical. It is a sound she imagines stones make when mating or dying. He repeats, “Rosa?” Again the sound amazes and humbles her, provokes a feeling she has only experienced after praying for hours, late at night, when the other nuns were sleeping and she was alone in the cold arch of the chapel. There is an almost sexual tightening of her abdomen, a powerful contraction deep in her stomach.

  “Yes,” she whispers.

  “I didn't mean to frighten you, it's just that this is the only way &”

  He says he has a spiritual problem. His voice still startles her, but she is becoming used to it and its effect on her; however, this question throws her into a panic because all of the priests are out of town for a convention on venial sin except for Father O'Rourke who doesn't approve of conventions and went to Las Vegas instead for the weekend. The man looks distressed by this.

  “Well, then maybe you can help me. I guess it is sort of an administrative matter.”

  “I'm not really an expert,” Rosa says. “Don't you think you'd better wait for the fathers to get back?”

  The man plucks at his collar in agitation. “If I don't resolve this now, I'm afraid I'll lose my nerve.”

  She wants to say something reassuring, but her stomach growls and the man smiles and says, “I'm keeping you from your dinner.” He holds out his left hand because he is still clasping the silver box to his throat with the right, and she hesitates but finally gives him her left hand to shake and is surprised when he doesn't say anything about her missing finger. That's when she finds herself asking him if he'd like to eat with her at the deli next door so they can talk more about his problem.

  Over corned beef and coleslaw he asks about her missing finger, and because he asks so casually, she tells him the truth. He is the first person she has told the story. Everyone else who knows the truth heard it from the nuns who found her in the kitchen, on her knees, her severed finger beside her on the stone floor, her hands clasped, forehead pressed against the avocado metal of the refrigerator. They said she was in rapture; the doctors called it shock. She tells him how it didn't bleed at all and how this disappointed her, how even at that time, even when she was having the most meaningful religious experience of her life, she felt somehow cheated by the absence of blood. She tells him without prompting, almost shyly, about the voice she heard before it happened, except it wasn't a voice. It was more a feeling, a shifting of weights and forms around her. That's how she explains it after he asks if she wants cheesecake—it was as if her perception of everything slipped for a moment and she knew what she was supposed to do. He asks only one question.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It's proof, of course.”

  It isn't until she has accepted his offer of a ride back to her apartment that she realizes they haven't talked at all about his problem. He is quiet when she reminds him of it. The artificial voice box is a moth, still in his cupped palm. Then he says he was wondering if it was possible to bury objects, not a person, just an inanimate thing, in consecrated ground. She thinks for a long time before she has to say she doesn't know, but she doesn't think so. He sighs when she tells him this. The noise comes from his mouth, not the box; it is a painful sound that makes her knuckles ache. When they reach her apartment, he asks if he can come in for a moment, says that there's something he'd like to show her. And because she feels this bond with him, this recognition, she doesn't even question him, just nods and leads him down the sidewalk to her door.

  “Do you have a tape player?”

  His voice seems weaker, more metallic than before, and she wonders if he isn't used to talking so much. So, as if her not speaking could conserve his strength, she simply nods again and points to the corner of the living room. He stands in front of the machine for a while, both hands pressed against it. When he does move, it is to reach into his pocket, but this time he brings out a cassette tape, not the silver box. He places it in the deck and presses play, and for a few minutes the room is quiet except for the murmur of the tape cycling into the machine. Rosa is still standing in the entranceway, the door open behind her, and she can see the dark form of his car in the mirror on the opposite wall, and strangely, she can see another reflection within that image. She recognizes the blur of the moon on his windshield as a voice comes out of the speakers and she knows without him telling her, for he is not talking or even looking at her, that this is his voice, was his voice. It is a child singing a song about a spider and a rainstorm, and as the rain starts falling, there is a click where the recording stops.

  “May I leave this with you?”

  This surprises her but she knows she will say yes, knows she won't be able to help herself, and the sound of the tape player continuing past the voice, scanning silence, brings back that feeling of praying in the empty chapel and another memory, the rasp of metal against stone tile, the smell of onions, the whine a bone makes when it is lost. Rosa wants to give him something in exchange, to show him the thing she holds secret. She says, “I've been keeping something too,” and places her left hand on the coffee table, spreads her fingers until they are shaking with the effort, and uses the forefinger of her right hand to trace the cold transparent space where her pinkie used to be.

  Last Night of the County Fair

  You win a plastic frog at a half-price ring toss, and the hawker urges another game on us, his fingertips stained indigo and trembling. “Something big,” he yelps as each ring sails into the air. Across the way, the Ferris wheel endlessly cuts out its steep slice of sky. We've missed the monster trucks and rhinestoned crooners. The crocodile wresting pit is just an oval of damp sawdust. Only the dwarf remains, standing on the gold-painted box, yelling sonnets at the fat lady. A cloud of mosquitoes and pollen and cotton candy fibers balloons above us, some weird blessing. For a moment, I think you are going to propose to me in front of the fry-bread cart, but you are just tying your shoe. Fathers are dragging their children like wounded soldiers over the grass. The Gravitron is still, its doorway a dead mouth exuding the smell of steel and vomit. We are strangers here with the lightbulbs of the concourse burning out one by one overhead. In the corner are the animal sheds and the moldy pies. Someone has cross-stitched the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel onto a pillowcase. In the last stall, there are day-old pigs worming against the big flank of their mother, an FFA project gone unexpectedly exponential. For a moment, I can't remember any dream I've ever had. And look at them; their eyes have yet to open.

  A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Long-Gone Love

  In this strange labyrinth how shall I turn?

  Ways are on all sides while the way, I miss:

  If to the right hand, there, in love I burn;

  Let me go forward, therein danger is

  MARY WROTH

  1

  The tree outside my window was in bloom. Each morning we would watch its petals, thinking we could see them open. His breath on my left shoulder asking, when? Some days we'd lie in bed ‘til two with their pinky-white, their paper hearts, their cold stamens—speaking, soon. The April silence of that room. My own pink heart was rolling over in my chest, my fingertips were tracing, when. Across h
is chest, across the thin scar where his fifth-grade friend hit him with a leaf-encumbered rake, or maybe it was someone in grad school who carved a letter of her name into him on a whim, an almost “D” that looked more like a spoon.

  The flowers on the tree that year were large and frail. I worried when I saw them—their transparent throats it seemed would never turn to plum. The way they shivered under every rain made me think of lightning splitting wood, wrenching dark from pale. He preached the sun; I closed my eyes and saw them dropping one by one. The monsoon season that year was too long—we stayed in bed storm after storm—I learned his skin so well that winter came.

  2

  Winter came and hovered. And with it, a roll call for my lovers: the sculptor dead, his boot beside the highway, body where? The boy who wrote me songs, whose guitar-calloused palms went dark to fair. And back again depending on the season—at night, dreaming of chords and basketball, those hands would shudder. Next, there was a poet turned to science, and a second poet, and another. And him, the thick turned thin, a starling in my attic (heaven), a single coffee mug, a pair. Him, the one that I misplaced somewhere. Except for him, each one I've lost, I've found again—as with omens, names, healed-over skin, to forget is to discover.

  And what about the ones I cannot number? The murky lake beside my house, the fallen tree I used to play on with my brother, with a dark-skinned boy named Tate (he planned to marry me, I said I'd wait) who lived next door. Every single mirror I've passed, the first glossy wasp I killed, the last. That perfect leaf, the saint who weeps in Mexico, the asphalt that softens every summer. All these things that I've called lover I've taken in, refused to cede; instead, I've catalogued my greed, been careful to record. But now I find I must ignore the loves I used to grasp, as if my skin can fit no more; I've gorged myself, and now I fast.

  3

  Too fast he's gone, and then my tooth begins to ache. He's left behind his books, his tapes, the shirt he swears is orange though I insist it's red. I wear it every night to bed. He calls to tell me where he is; I keep a map I mark with foil stars each time he asks me just to wait. One month, four months, a year or more—he has me moving state to state. To go to sleep, I count them up; I try to store all fifty in my head. My mouth's too sore; I stay awake and tear the map from end to end. And then I walk the dark rooms of my house and break everything there is that's left to break.

  And so the map is gone. For weeks, I've swept up shards of plate or found them in the tough skin of my feet. His shirt has turned to orange again; I do not bother to deny it. Instead I throw it out and buy a few red T-shirts of my own—I wash them twenty times before they start appearing worn. My tooth begins to hurt too much to eat. It's the only thing I keep; it reminds me to stay quiet.

  4

  Quietly, I count the months, the phantom dates. For him, I'd like a funeral or a wake, some official way to mourn. I do what every other abandoned lover does—I eat too much or not enough, I cut my hair, I turn and turn. While I begin to think that winter will not end, the black-beaked geese pretend to mate. They grapple desperately because they know the wind that segments flock from flock as they push north; I wish I had a heart to break. I wish I had anything besides this mouth to keep me warm. The birds are ugly in their love—wings beat great plumes of dust, every neck is bent or torn. I trust they find some pleasure in it, or some use, though I imagine it's too early still, too soon in their migration lake to lake.

  One morning, early, it's still dark, the flock begins to move. I watch them leave, black-studded strands veering into sky; their patterns are incomprehensible, a line of syllables that fade. The sky brightens; they disappear, leaving the ground beneath them desolate. Except for one gray body, wings flung wide, I guess a casualty of love. This bird I envy for its shapely passion, its care-less, feather-rending pride, the dull eye it turns upon the water, its beak to earth, sharp as a spade.

  5

  I shovel dirt upon the bird, and every muscle suffers. I ask the dentist how one is expected to recover from a loss like this, a tooth that one has grown for years. He recommends amalgams, metals, shiny bridges; he says to him it would appear my tooth has died inside my mouth and is now infecting others. He orders X-rays, weighs me down with lead and admonitions to stay covered. I move at first so that the bones are blurs. The next set is perfect; everything is clear, detailed as the stories of mass murders and military coups that I collect for weeks then throw away (or lose) in batches—I trace the small stress fractures. They web my oldest teeth, their patterns surreptitious; the dentist mutters.

  He says, It must come out. And I agree. But I hesitate to give it over, to sit by patiently while he removes this thing I've carried for so long. He says, abscess, fever, implant, but still I doubt. I meditate on healing as I pay his fee. I schedule an extraction but can't stop touching that disloyal, guilty tooth, can't stop feeling shocked at its defection or imagine it a space, a specially molded crown—my tongue cannot forget despite the dentist's rationale of Novocain and porcelain that something will be gone.

  6

  Something will be gone, I think as I watch them prep the tray, the silver tools, the suture thread (milky fine like spider webs), the flowery deflated gloves. When pulling teeth, expect a lot of blood, the dentist says before he starts. And then he slips the needle in, and then the dark. I wake, I feel my face; my mouth is numb. The dentist tells me this is good. He asks what I remember, this part, this part? I think I heard a saw, a drill, no, the buzzing of my heart. The dentist keeps on talking, but I am tired—all his words begin to sound like love.

  I wake again and search for absence with my tongue. It's there behind the packing, that black space. I eat ice—the cold's supposed to heal. I feel the chill spread from my throat into my lungs. I think I can no longer smell or taste the place where my tooth used to be; an excavation was completed while I slept, while I dreamt of nothing, well, not nothing—I dreamt of sounds, my heart, my heart, a gray streak on a page—I dreamt of nothing real.

  7

  I dream of nothing real. Winter continues to drag out; I move from north to south to hasten its undoing. Even in the desert, things have closed upon themselves, acacias dead, agaves topped by withered plumes. Monsoon rains have warped my door; the swollen wood protects a house in which nothing costs enough to steal. Inside, the dust has formed a shroud, and sunburst widow's webs festoon the windowsills. A black-bulbed spider decorates each room. I leave them there, a charm, a prayer; their poisonous precision soothes. At night, I swear I hear them spinning, each fat egg-sack an axis, the swollen moon the wheel.

  The lizards crawling up my walls have changed from clear to rust. I find their bodies in my cupboards ironed flat by dehydration and line them up outside the door in regiments of waiting. Their parched skins rustle, speaking soon. I wake one morning to whispers of crenulated claws, the red scent of petals crushed. From my bed, I translate sentences of dust the lizards left behind, a souvenir of their departing. The sun has risen earlier today, and as its tissue-papered light inflames the room, I see the tree out-side my window is in bloom.

  By the Gleam of Her Teeth, She Will Light the Path Before Her

  After dinner, Father folds a swan out of his paper napkin. Mother says, “My, how early it grows dark.” First Daughter laughs at a flickering outside the window. She thinks it is an out-of-season firefly or a spark from the chimney, but really it is someone creeping through the trees with a flashlight.

  Father folds triangle over triangle, smaller and smaller, until a head and wings appear. Second Daughter watches the ghost of her grandmother walk around the table and touch everyone's plate. Second Daughter wonders if the dead get hungry and she eats the last corner of her tuna sandwich in one bite so grandmother's ghost will not stand too long by her. Birds fly up from the apple orchard in a cloud blacker than the sky. Only Son screams for his bottle. Mother says, “He has such strong lungs. Perhaps he will be a soldier.”

  First Daughter goes to the fireplace and pretends to d
o homework. She writes numbers in long columns and eats the eraser of her pencil in secretive nibbles. Second Daughter follows grandmother's ghost into the kitchen and catches her trying to chew through the rims of cans. Second Daughter wonders if the dead feel pain. She whispers, “Stop,” and grandmother's ghost throws a can of pureed tomatoes at her. Father places the swan in the bowl of grapes where it rocks over the uneven fruit and watches everyone out of its mustard-spot eye.

  Mother clears the plates from the table. She says, “Goodness, these dishes are so clean, I don't believe they need washing.” Father tears Mother's napkin into small pieces. In the garden, rows and rows of green beans tangle closer for warmth. The eggs in the henhouse mutter in their sleep. The light outside the window draws closer. Second Daughter sees it and knows what it is. Someone is moving through the forest toward them.

  Only Son screams because grandmother's ghost is biting his upper arm. Mother says, “Perhaps he will be a stockbroker.” First Daughter throws her wool mitten into the fireplace to see the yellow smoke. She loves things for the colors they burn. Mother says, “What is that smell?” Grandmother's ghost flies shrieking up the chimney. Second Daughter wonders if the dead can get stuck in small places, and Only Son screams because he is growing older. Father touches the swan's wing with the brown tip of his finger and imagines holding a grape in his cheek, not biting it, just feeling its roundness.