The Physics of Imaginary Objects (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize)

by Hall, Tina May

  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.

  A few years ago, a paleontologist from St. Louis came looking for bones and fell in. He caught hold of a root (gnarled as an old woman's knee, he said later) and held himself there, about twenty feet down, until some men from the filling station pulled him out with a rope. He is the only person I can remember who went into the hole and came back out. Before he left to go north and look at something frozen, he told us that in the hole he saw armchairs and tennis racquets sticking out of the walls and heaps of shoes and staplers piled onto ledges. I think it changed him, being in there, because he didn't talk about rock strata and geologic eras anymore. He couldn't stop describing items he spotted and sounds he heard and how dark the center of the hole was, how it was like night, except in pieces he felt moving against him. We listened to him carefully because a lot of the things he mentioned were familiar, things we had lost a long time ago.

  When anyone dies in the town, we say that person went into the hole. Even the older townspeople say it, though they knew a time when there wasn't a hole and still there was death. Last Fourth of July, the oldest woman in town gave a speech about when we didn't have the hole and how life was worse then. She said having a hole was a way of remembering. But a lot of people didn't believe her and called her senile. When I was young, my parents told me our cat, Galileo, went into the hole, but I saw them putting her in the metal drum where we burned trash out in the yard. That was when I realized there were several ways into the hole. I found another in the back of Brian McConner's Volkswagen bus, where I had sex for the first time. There was a little refrigerator that Brian had painted with neon green daisies, and as we slid and slipped all over the foam mattress that smelled of patchouli and sweat, those daisies went translucent and dark, disappearing before my very eyes. Years later, the paleontologist described neon flowers glowing deep in the hole, almost covered by junk mail and half-empty nail polish bottles, flourishing like some strange plant that only existed thirty-five feet underground.

  It is said that if you throw something from a dream into the hole, the dream will leave you forever and a new one will come in its place. For instance, if Bill, the diner owner, throws his apron into the hole he'll spend his nights combing the tail of a piebald horse instead of washing endless mounds of gravy-crusted dishes. And if the horse's spots look curiously porcelain and the comb is spongy, that is not the hole's fault. Young girls throw their brothers' knives and their fathers' keys and their grandmothers' glasses into the hole and go home to dream of sailcloth and hiking boots and bicycle tires. I've tried it myself. I've dreamed the death of Mrs. Pritchard's son and a tree falling on the barbershop and a best friend sinking in the mud of another country, all in exchange for a hair that was left in my bed. The dreams you get are not always happy ones, merely someone else's and by virtue of that, never nightmares.

  Last week, a news crew from Los Angeles came to do a story on our hole. They interviewed the mayor and the town beauty who was second runner-up for Miss America two decades ago. They also interviewed my mother because she is the organizer of the anti-hole faction in town, and she argued the necessity for a fence or dynamite, something to stop its growth. And they interviewed me because I am the town historian, a position that pays surprisingly well in a town with a hole. The reporter was brittle and had only eight beautiful teeth, the four front teeth on the top and the bottom. The rest shone pewter in the cave of his mouth, but when he held the call-sign-emblazoned microphone before his lips, the women of the town swooned. Between takes, girls offered him coffee and kisses, and matrons presented him with pies and floury eyelash flutters. While they flocked around him, I examined the cameraman who slouched in the background. He had floppy hair that covered one eye and a baggy sweater that hung past his fingertips. He also had bulky black headphones, loops of blue and red cord festooning him, and the mouth of a Caravaggio angel. While I was being interviewed I couldn't keep from staring at him, and when the segment aired, it looked as if I was startled by the attention and lights, when really I was plotting a course for those lips that started at my jaw and ended at the turn of my ankle.

  It is hard to describe the hole. Digging into a backyard is not enough. A tear in a shirt is closer to the truth, something that shifts, something you can see skin through. When people who don't live here come to see the hole, they always want it to be explained. The town council tried to raise money for a kiosk with a tape player and a recording, but they weren't very successful. We all knew it was only a matter of time before the kiosk fell into the hole, and some people didn't like to imagine the tape player down there. They thought it would be a waste of a voice.

  For the news crew, I talked about the time my mother was a teenager drinking a lime phosphate in the drugstore and half of the building disappeared into the earth. I tried to tell it like she did, using my hands to outline the shape of soda glasses and wincing at the sharp taste of lime, but I added things like rows of licorice, black as beetles behind the counter, and the way she sat there to finish her drink, even the thick syrup at the bottom.

  What I didn't say is how the hole looks when it opens suddenly, or what happened to the pewter-mouthed reporter. Other news crews came to town to discover what had happened to the first. Of course, I knew what happened to them; it is my business to know. And as with so many stories, there are two versions. In one, the reporter asks me to take some night shots by the hole, to act as filler for the interviews, he says. At night, the hole seems to breathe. And as I stand by the hole with the reporter, translating its burps and sighs for him, he, perhaps because I am the one woman in town not offering him anything, clutches my breasts and presses his eight good teeth against my mouth. I can't step back because the hole is behind me, and for a moment I am placid in his grasp, until I open my eyes and see the cameraman, still filming, those perfect lips curving. It is then that I feel the hole stirring, as if it is offended on my behalf. I unlatch myself from those unnatural teeth and hands and step to the side, and there is time while I'm inching away from the edge to say something. But I don't say anything at all, don't call out a warning, despite the reporter's microphone jutting toward me, the microphone which, by virtue of its cord, drags the cameraman down with the reporter as the hole suddenly widens. And I don't say anything about it to the police or the news crews that come looking for them because I expect they will pop up somewhere else if they haven't already, a miracle of teeth and lips emerging from the soil in Thailand or Baghdad, bruised and dusty but with the camera rolling.

  There is another version of the story that I also don't tell. It is midmorning, during a lull between thunderstorms, and I am walking near the hole when a crow flies over it. The crow is so black and large I stop to watch it, and it seems for a moment that I can see the hole reflected in the shiny feathers of its chest. It is a beautiful bird. Just as it reaches the air directly over the hole, I feel the ground shake. But shake is not the right word—it is more a recoiling or a reaching, something involuntary. And when I look down at the hole, it moves. It is hard to explain; there is a hole moving somewhere, but it may not be the one in front of me. It may be a hole somewhere else, opening for the first time. It may be a lie or a thwarted
desire or a deadline expiring. This is one of the reasons I haven't told the story to anyone, because I don't have proof. I can only say, one day I was walking after a rainstorm and saw a piece of a hole flying over me.

  Another reason I don't tell the story is because tourists don't want to hear things like that. They enjoy tales of farmers pulling people out of the ground and bakeries being destroyed. I'd like to show them the birthmark spreading over my ribs when they ask for directions to the hole. I'd like to explain where a hole lives, how it can fit under a fingernail or inside a word. If I were making the recording for the kiosk, I would have it say a hole is something you give to someone you love, and a hole is a pear, and a hole is the bruise you got while playing kickball in the fifth grade until everyone understood. But the truth is that people can't believe as easily in a hole as they do in a lime phosphate. Even black holes, so strong they absorb light, seem like figments of our imaginations. And yet, some scientists spend their entire lives studying these faraway things they will never be able to touch or taste. The townspeople who side with my mother would like to fill the hole with tons of dirt and gravel. I've spent innumerable town meetings explaining that a hole is not something to be filled; there is no way to do it. The only thing to do with a hole is to take measurements and photograph it and tell it over and over. And to stand next to it, regularly, as close as possible.

  There Is a Factory in Sierra Vista Where Jesus Is Resurrected Every Hour in Hot Plastic and the Stench of Chicken

  Stand still. I am taking your picture.

  The mission behind you, the sky paralyzed turquoise, the stop sign and the gleaming tourist cars, the way your hair is too long at the neck.

  You said when you called, “It's worth a try.”

  You have a voice so seductive men have ridden twenty extra blocks on city transit to continue hearing it.

  I winced when you said “miracles.”

  The chipped metallic green of your Plymouth. The sound the tires made on the smooth skin of the highway.

  The four sentences in a row you started with maybe while I calculated mileposts.

  The way you wash everything twice.

  I have counted the moles on your breasts: 7. I have counted the moles on my breasts: 3.

  As we hike up the hill to the mission, you are breathing too hard.

  My grandfather used to bring me here at Christmas, at Easter, to pray to the saints even though we were Methodist.

  The night we hid in your mother's pantry and ate jalapeno-flavored sea kelp crackers and told stories about the perversions we had tried so far.

  I called you whore because you let men buy you things.

  The thirty-two freckles that ring my neck. One for each year.

  Blue line in the employee bathroom, ochre metal stall door, rotten sweet smell of discarded maxi-pads present like a charm.

  On our drive here, I asked what you would wish for and you said, “anything.”

  A plaque on the hillside that lists the names of dead nuns.

  The first gift you ever gave me: a baby tooth I keep in my wallet.

  When I told you about it, I said, “I nearly fainted.” I said, “But I was so careful,” and we laughed at how trite we had become.

  The desert smells like creosote and gasoline.

  The mission large and white before us. You stop to have a cigarette. I look for a pattern to the dark lines rain has left in the stucco.

  The ghosts we saw that whole year we were fourteen.

  The legend goes: when the cat that is carved over the door of the chapel catches the mouse that is carved next to it, the world will end.

  You say, “Someday you can show her how I taught you to waltz.” You touch my wrist as you say it.

  You smoke Pall Malls because your first boyfriend did.

  On the dirt road from the highway, palo verde trees leaned to touch us.

  A fry-bread stand. A gift store. A mission tilting in the background.

  When you told me about your two dead lovers and your bleeding gums, I said, “So, get tested.” I said, “I'll go with you. I'll bring donuts.”

  You pose me next to the fountain shaped like a fish, a pale blurred arc over the sand.

  Virgin Mary coasters and powdered sugar.

  You called me “slut” because I let men buy me things.

  Last week, a man went out into the desert and shot holes into a saguaro until it fell over and crushed him.

  The way you slather honey and sugar on fry-bread.

  I know it is too soon to feel anything moving, but there is a flickering inside me.

  Country music coming from the transistor radio in the gift store. A magnet cut into Jesus on the cross, red rhinestone chips for blood.

  Hand-lettered signs that lined the dirt road. I say, “That shit will kill you.”

  The guy who works at the video store and wears shiny too-tight cowboy shirts, whose mouth tried to chew away the poppy seed trail of my freckles.

  Crooked acrid marker letters spelling, Happiness is submission to God.

  When we were kids playing fatal disease, you always had cancer; I always died for love.

  The photo that will show us standing next to a plaster fish, how scared we look even with our mouthfuls of fry-bread and movie-star sunglasses.

  Your long fingers sorting tiny arms and legs and houses. Milagros. Miracles. Hammered tin in the shape of wishes.

  The way you squint when you lie.

  I buy two thick translucent candles for $1.50 each. You buy one of the small metal hearts.

  The second gift you gave me: half of a blood orange that your mother bought by mistake.

  My bookcase arranged alphabetically. Your T-shirts ordered by color.

  The gift store woman hands you change. I ask what you will wish for and you say, “a pure heart.”

  The mission, white and lined and heavy-doored.

  Afternoon.

  My chest aches from the heat.

  You kiss my cheek and leave a honey imprint that itches as it dries.

  When you told me about it, I said, “Two dead lovers are no proof.” I said, “Why do you always have to outdo me?”

  Our hands touching as we pull the door wide, benediction of cool air.

  The year you painted the same picture fifteen times and I killed six ficus trees.

  You say, “How old is this guy anyway?”

  Holy water fingerprints stinging our foreheads, saints scaling adobe walls wearing red and white satin.

  The way you talked too loud as you drove us here. The way I could still hear the pavement groaning beneath us.

  On the left, a statue of St. Francis, lying on his back, so small and withered.

  The summer we were virgins and your brother caught us kissing in your backyard.

  Another flicker, somewhere lower.

  A bank of candles, lighting and unlighting themselves over and over.

  You said as we turned off the highway, “So, how does it feel, this thing growing inside you?”

  The places you touch St. Francis: his neck, his thighs, his stomach.

  The matching Celtic knots we were going to get tattooed on our hipbones until we decided to buy each other diamond earrings instead.

  Recorded tour whispering from small cheap speakers.

  The day you came to my house crying because asparagus was out of season and I sang Johnny Cash songs to you until my throat hurt.

  Your fingers sifting through the clusters of snapshots, milagros, notes, and hospital bracelets that shroud St. Francis.

  The black tuxedo pants that we both have, the Mondays we swim at the Y.

  Bells chime four o'clock. The candles fade and brighten.

  When we were driving here you asked what I would wish for and I said, “Enough rain to make mud, something we can sink into.” You said, “Be serious.”

  I light both of our candles with your lighter.

  The recording starts over.

  How we laugh at women who wear bikin
is, how we smirk when someone says love.

  The month you wouldn't talk to me. The winter you slept on my couch.

  I hold your candle upside down to catch the flame until three pale drops scald my wrist.

  The brown scarf you loaned me that I never gave back.

  How you pretended to cough all the way from Tucson until I said, “You can stop that. I know you aren't really dying.”

  The girlie magazines we used to steal from my father's dresser.

  The saints turn their faces into the walls, away from the sight of so many waxen hopes.

  Cracked Plymouth vinyl burning the backs of our thighs as we counted saguaros for thirty miles.

  The day you found your baby tooth in my wallet and called me hopeless.