The Physics of Imaginary Objects

by Tina May Hall

  If in a dark room, you close your eyes and press the eyelid with your fingernail, a circle of light will be seen opposite to the point pressed, while a sharp blow upon the eye produces the impression of a flash of light.

  The shock of little waves.

  Imagine them placed at a distance from each other and perfectly free to move.

  You may feel (when the hoarfrost is removed), you may feel the dark waves, the air, the blind forces of nature, a delicate shimmer of blue light, a sound like thunder, the abstract idea of a boy.

  What, then, is this thing which at one moment is transparent and invisible and at the next moment visible?

  To return blow for blow. Almost transparent to others. A delicate balance. Not so perfect as the first.

  Every occurrence in Nature is preceded by other occurrences that are its causes and succeeded by others that are its effects.

  Pour cold water into a dry drinking glass on a summer's day.

  You may observe a luminous body, the existence of which you were probably not aware.

  It is necessary that you should have a perfectly clear view of this process.

  Take a slab of lake ice and place it in the path of a concentrated sunbeam.

  Through that clear space the thing must pass.

  Thus by tracing backward our river from its end to its real beginnings we come at length to the sun, the abstract idea of a boy.

  Prove this, if you like.

  Fold two sheets of paper into two cones and suspend them with their closed points upward.

  Could my wishes be followed out, I would at this point of our researches carry you off with me.

  When the red sun of the evening shines upon these cloudstreamers, they resemble vast torches with their flames blown through the air.

  But it is quite plain that we have not yet reached the real beginning of rivers.

  Fill a bladder about two-thirds full of air at the sea level and take it to the summit of Mont Blanc.

  Hence it is the dark waves, the heat of these waves, the truth of the statement, sending a smoke of spray into the air. Hence the wisdom of darkening.

  Is this language correct?

  You have already noticed. No effect whatever is produced.

  It is necessary to employ the obscure heat of a body raised to the highest possible state of incandescence.

  This has been observed in Russian ballrooms.

  Supposing, then, mutually attracting points. Waves competent to burn the hand like a hot solid.

  An ascending current rises from the heated body.

  Feel the heat of these waves with your hand. Get upon the ice and walk upward. The truth of the statement made in paragraph 34 is thus demonstrated.

  And you have the Fire-Balloon. A body, almost transparent to others, may exist in a perfectly dark place.

  Allow a sunbeam to fall upon a white wall in a dark room. Bring a heated poker, a candle or a gas flame underneath the beam.

  Oddly enough, though I was here dealing with what might be called the abstract, I desired. I had descended the glacier, leaping with indescribable fury from ledge to ledge.

  If the experiment be made for yourself alone, let the air come to rest and then simply place your hand at the open mouth.

  A delicate shimmer of light, a sound like thunder, a dense opaque cloud, a perfectly dark place, which, through some orifice that it has found or formed, comes to the light of day.

  A body, a break, a sharp blow. Can you see me? Can you feel my breath? My tortured heat?

  But we cannot end here. We have sought to reveal more.

  The point of disturbance, the end of a delicate balance, a luminous body. The shock of little waves.

  We must exist.

  This is the point to which I wished to lead you and without due preparation could not be understood.

  We cannot end here.

  I had descended the glacier, a break in the chain of occurrences, a body raised to the highest possible state, consciously warm and real.

  My object thus far is attained. I have given you proofs (a slab of lake ice, a dry drinking glass, the Fire-Balloon). Resolution must not be wanting.

  We can have refreshment in a little mountain hut.

  I should have told you. I am describing your own condition. Imperfect, a dark room, incandescence, and then, the hoarfrost that cannot be removed.

  I should have told you rain does not come from a clear sky. I should have told you a sharp blow is necessary for a flash of light. I should have told you this thing which at one moment is transparent and invisible and at the next moment visible is not so perfect as the first.

  I desired to keep you fresh as well as instructed, untouched, without any break. It is thus I should like to teach you all things. But it is quite plain you may feel, you may feel the darkening, a source of agitation, the shock of little waves.

  It is not, therefore, without reason I warned you against entering. The hoarfrost cannot be removed.

  And you and I have shivered thick bomb-shells into fragments.

  A break in the chain of occurrences. I wish, I wish.& But you have already noticed the wreathing and waving of the current, the deep soft sand, the whirling eddies, a southwest wind.

  You have already noticed the reproach to the body, the unstoppable plunge toward a perfectly dark place. You cannot halt it for me any more than you can for yourself.

  Should we not meet again, the memory of these days will still unite us. Or rather, was not the paying of the price a portion of the delight?

  Give me your hand, note the consequence, the obscure heat of a body. You alone must pass through that clear space.

  The Woman Who Fell in Love with a Meteorologist and Stopped the Rain

  She watches him every night at 10:12. When he says dewpoint, she breaks into a sweat, and it is as if her body has stolen the moisture of his mouth as he pronounces those two syllables. He is not particularly handsome, but as he moves before a map of the United States, pointing out cold fronts and low-pressure systems, she thinks he looks like an angel in a button-down shirt wielding a battered steel pointer instead of a sword.

  He is an old-fashioned man, the kind of man who would tighten the fan belt of her car when it needed it and take out the trash and reach for the high things in the pantry. Not only the pointer gives him away, but also the way he fumbles with the remote that changes the views of cloud cover and frontal boundaries and the way he fixes his gaze just a bit to the left of the camera, clearly puzzled by the miniature of himself in the monitor superimposed upon invisible geography.

  In severe weather, he is disconcertingly spontaneous, appearing unexpectedly in the middle of a soap opera shootout or a talk show featuring exotic animals. These are intimate moments; his hair is mussed, his shirt untucked. Red patches blush the satellite images as he urges her to take cover and watch for downed trees. She knows exactly what he smells like: Xerox toner and lemons. And she imagines how she will rub her body with crushed grass and cobwebs, blueberries and road salt so that he can map the seasons in the dark.

  This is not a love story. If it were, there would be a certain pathos in a woman conjuring a lover out of storm watches and tornado warnings. It is instead a fairy tale, where two people can live in imaginary worlds, bounded only by the limits of the blue screen, clutching remote controls in harmony, and achieve perfect happiness in the four minutes and thirty seconds that they coincide each evening. That is, they could if it weren't for the complication of a garden.

  On Thursday, wearing a halo of dots marked Boise, Chicago, and Albany, he predicts rain for the weekend. She has seven rows of split-cup daffodils that have been waterlogged by three weeks of storms. They are the last in a succession of many years of failures. Each fall, she plants the bulbs with a sense of banked hope that lasts on the promise of creamy-lipped petals and crimson hearts through the subzero temperatures and deep snows of winter until soggy spring and early summer when she excavates the barren plots to find bulb after bulb,
rotten and swollen with milky pus. Obviously, her garden needs better drainage. In lieu of this, she wills it not to rain.

  Friday, he nervously predicts rain again and reminds her to take an umbrella to the weekend's Little League game. She imagines her bulbs floating like heads in the ruin of her garden and steels herself against him. It is their first quarrel, and it takes the pleasure out of the sight of his solid figure against the cartoon graphics of the five-day forecast.

  That weekend there is no rain, and she finds small, tentative green hairs in the dirt of her backyard. Sunday night, he is jocular and somewhat abashed but with bird-wing gestures and subtropical magic, calls up a storm for the beginning of the week. She ignores the disapproving swirls of cloud on the Doppler scan and fantasizes forty-two spikes of color.

  It is so dry and warm the next few days that the mud hardens and cracks and a full two inches of split-cup daffodil emerge. By 10:12 p.m. on Tuesday, he is pale and thinner but doggedly insists on storm patterns and imported Canadian air. She visualizes her flowers basking in the heat and sends the jet stream spinning northward, away from her garden.

  As the week progresses, he grows more stubborn in his pronouncements. She feels a twinge over tricking him like this, like the wife who tosses her husband's favorite ratty sweatshirt and insists he has misplaced it. But the lines of green tongues tasting the air of her garden remind her of imbalance of their relationship, the way he has never had to wait for her, how he doesn't know the tense pleasure of anticipation.

  Wednesday it does not rain. Thursday it does not rain. On Friday, he is hoarse and shadowy as he traces storm systems and bungles computer overlays. As she watches him invoking humidity and cloud crystals, she finds regret deep like a stone in her throat and gives up willing the sun.

  All weekend she waits for rain. She sits outside trying to detect clouds against the pure blue until her eyes burn and the weight in her chest blossoms into full-blown remorse. Her daffodils grow under the painfully clear sky in seven arches of reproach.

  Sunday, he says thunderstorms and heavy showers, and she tries God and St. Swithun, the patron saint of rain, praying they will send another deluge and not disgrace the man who lives four and a half minutes each night to plot His terrible path in precipitation and hard freezes. Monday, she stands barefoot in the garden, her toes curled into the earth to hold her in place as she waters forty-two bright needles of shame.

  Three more nights he asserts rain. He is gray and wrinkled from the effort, and his hands shake beneath the weight of his sincerity. She can see the egg-white streaks of the high-resolution radar tracking system showing through his dark-jacketed midsection, and when he gasps the words moist air, she feels the impact of his breath on her forehead and the coolness of her tears as they evaporate into the expanse between the sofa and the television set.

  By Thursday, he has disappeared. A young man with perky hair and blanched-almond teeth who used to do the Sunday sports highlights hovers in his place. She switches off the set at 10:13 and goes outside. Beneath the heavy curve of the moon, the daffodil stalks are sturdy slashes.

  There might be a moral here. But it is nothing so simple as the impossibility of holding onto two imaginary things at once, a lover and a garden. It is a more difficult thing she is feeling as she stands outside in the dark, difficult in the way a daffodil bulb is difficult, gnarled and secret. The truth is, she never really could picture him here. He existed in rectangular spaces, and her garden is humpbacked and sprawling, irregular, unkempt, maybe the shape of her heart.

  This Is a Love Story, Too

  This morning, when the rooster would not stop crowing and the first egg I cracked had a bloody yolk, I knew. Now the sun is rising to the end of its tether. Soon, it will be on its way down, and the woods will darken first.

  No one cares about the old lady. I was like that myself, before I became the old lady. They leave their offerings on the doorstep and sometimes they come in and beg a story and then I am in the newspaper again, the tired gory details dredged up anew, wrinkled black and white, a photo I search for signs of my former self.

  She is moving toward me today—I can feel her, the flame of her, her trotting steps, the basket swinging on her arm.

  Even today, I have my chores, so I lace up my tennis shoes and peg the clothes on the line. The sheets bell like sails; the monogram on them is not mine. The weeds are choking the vegetable patch, and I drag them up by the roots. I can be ruthless. I wring chicken necks and drown unwanted kittens. I shot a raccoon last July because he wouldn't leave my trash cans alone. Once, I stepped on a nail that went all the way through the meat of my foot and I just pulled it out and walked on. I birthed three children in the cottage bed, and only one of them lived. In the black earth above the other two, I planted peonies whose heads I cut each spring for my kitchen table. My mother used to say that it was the little things that killed you. My mother told me to tread gently in the woods.

  She is closer now. I can feel her. She is a berry, the glossy poison kind. She is the one I care about, not him, all teeth and talk. She is the important one, flesh of my flesh. Who knew that blood could be so greedy? I want to see her, no matter what comes next. I want to see her plump cheeks, her shining eyes, and drink my fill. It is the one thing denied to me, I think, if I'm reading the story right.

  When it was my turn, I took the basket eagerly enough. The leaves chattered in the spring wind. The path was soft under my feet. The hood was warm and fleece-lined, and I was clean as a river stone underneath, fresh-shaven, flossed, exfoliated and moisturized. I was more toothsome than the cakes I carried and I knew it. When he appeared, I wasn't surprised, but I could not look away from his mouth. I loved the way he smoked his cigarette down to the very end. Why didn't his fingers burn? Why didn't the whole forest light?

  All my married life I wondered which I had ended up with—the wolf or the man with the ax.

  This is what I know: there is a cloak bright as a geranium muffled in my closet, the bloodstains dark at the hem; when he talks to her, she cannot help but listen; I will make a flourless torte, the chocolate one with the bourbon, as if this were my birthday; the end will not be painless for any of us.

  All those years ago and still I can hear his voice, the growl of it, Hey, baby. He called me chickadee as if I were small and harmless. He ate the cakes with both hands, and I carried an empty basket through the woods.

  Ah, the old lady, the old lady. There is no escaping her. She hangs out the wash and stokes the fire. She makes up the bed with the sun-scented sheets. She gasps a little when she catches her reflection in the silver teapot. The teapot shows her the truth; there is an infinite sequence of her, like a nesting doll or a line of dominoes set on end.

  I am too old to believe in fairy tales. I feel the glow of her on the dim path to my clearing and I know I'll never see her face. He is the one who will come to me. Again. But this time there will be no endearments. He, or the other one, the woodsman with his musty barn jacket, will proffer it all to her. They are the ones she will thank as she walks through the cottage, touching the gravy boat and the polished stones of the fireplace. She will have never seen such objects in her life. The painting of the ship at sea will stop her in her tracks as she tries to name the exact color of the waves. I have things I would tell her, messages I can leave only in the most homely of ways. Oh, baby, I would say. Chickadee. Hang up your cloak next to mine, next to the others. See the place on the floor where the blood has fallen? You must scrub it with sand to get the stain out. The sheets will bleach in the sun. I've given you everything, the clear days, the smell of smoke in his hair, all the plates and tins and implements. There are morning glories hidden behind the chicken coop. Whichever one you end up with, never tell him the truth about the other—there are some things that shouldn't be said aloud. The pump handle sticks, but when the water gushes out, it is cold as sin and twice as delicious. Strawberries grow in the shade at the edge of the forest—you have to hunt for them.


  Now. He lifts the latch, and the door swings open. My mother used to say there was no time like the present. I step forward like a bride. He knows all my soft parts. Still some way off in the woods, I see it, the ruby scrap, a cardinal flitting perhaps, the reflection of the setting sun. I keep my eyes on it, ignoring him as if he were a doctor prodding me, a paper sheet between us. I watch until the red fills my vision, seeping up from my very skin.

  How to Remember a Bird

  There is a hole growing in the center of town. People come from all over to see it. The first time anyone noticed, it was the size of a pumpkin, but since then, it has become so big we have stopped measuring. Just last month, the bakery slipped into it, and for days, the hole smelled like rye bread. It is hard to tell when the hole is going to open wider, so we don't get too close to its edges. Of course, children are fascinated by the hole and must be kept away with warnings and threats. My friends and I used to stand near the edge of the hole and dangle our heads over. It was a strange feeling, as if something were both pushing and pulling us, a feeling that we could endure only for a few moments, just long enough to start to see the outlines of things rumbling below us and to hear the echo of conversations, so faint they might have just been our own voices, reflected.