But I kept the necklace. I liked it still. Apparently enough to bring it with me, here, to this atoll. I’d forgotten I had packed it at the last minute, so when I unpacked on my first day, I was pleasantly surprised to find it in my suitcase. And now I can use it for experiments.
In Traumphysik, I sat at the edge of my mat, held the pendant in between my thumb and forefinger, drew it up to 0 degrees, and let it go. A remarkable thing happened. It swung to 270 degrees—the nadir of a normal arc—but then swung right back up to 0 degrees. Its arc was confined to the fourth quadrant. I tested it again. This time I drew the pendant to 90 degrees, straight up. I let go. It swung to the left, then stopped at 180 degrees. And swung back up to 90 degrees. Its arc was confined to the second quadrant, in defiance of any expected behavior. Absolutely fascinating.
I have to conclude that, again, there are forces of gravity in Traumphysik that differ from those in the waking world. Multiple centers, multiple pulls. It is not the earth. It is not the moon. Gravity is fungible.
I repeated each experiment twice, with the same initial conditions, and obtained the same results, to finish the night’s work. Then I let myself sleep.
* * *
I took another walk around the atoll today. I spotted a new species of lizard sunning by a tide pool, and also a beached jellyfish with a dark blue heart. More significantly, though, I got the distinct sense that circumambulating the atoll takes a shorter time than it used to. I have no good way to test this, given that a full walk already takes such a short amount of time, and my watch is broken, and I can’t rely on my own heartbeat, obviously, since its rate is inconstant during exercise.
So instead of measuring time, I will measure space. I placed a conch shell on a spot on the sand at the lip of high tide, in a straight line with my shelter. I will re-measure in one week.
* * *
I checked on the conch shell. It was gone, already, overnight. There was no trace of it.
My goodness. How does your razor cut, Occam? I submit four possibilities, and address them in turn:
1. I was careless and misplaced the conch.
Re: My capacity for mistakes is very low. At MIT, I had a reputation for rigorous, consistent, excellent work (though my fellow students called it “perfectionism”). This is not a boast. This is an empirical observation.
2. I miscalculated high tide.
Re: Unlikely, given that I’ve been keeping assiduous records thereof.
3. The conch was displaced by another animal or group of animals.
Re: The largest fauna on this atoll is the native pig, mild-mannered and no bigger than my hand. To test its strength, I found another conch and harnessed it by twine to a little pig I caught. It could barely move. This does not preclude the possibility that a group of pigs moved the conch, but according to the behavior I’ve observed so far, they do not seem capable of purposeful assembly or group tasks.
4. The atoll is shrinking.
Re: Vastly unlikely. Base has not informed me about any rises in sea level. And I know of nothing that would cause a change in sea level on such a short timescale—only a tsunami, which would temporarily lower the sea level, not raise it. And the atoll sits atop a coral reef. I’ve not known coral reefs to sink, unless the calcite beneath is unstable. The calcite could be unstable because the ocean’s pH is dropping. But again: None of this could occur on the timescale I’m witnessing, not by any natural phenomenon of which I’m aware.
Further data are needed. I’m running another test. This time, I found a long, slim length of driftwood—half as tall as I am—and hammered it deep into the sand, three-quarters of its length in. I’ll check on it every day.
* * *
Now the driftwood post is also gone.
What could this mean? I’m certainly alone on the island, and the pigs definitely could not have moved such an object.
I’m strangely unalarmed. But then again, this is a logical reaction, as I’m in no immediate danger. If I ever do feel endangered, I can get on the radio. I’d explain my discoveries to the Navy scientists, though no doubt they’d come up with their own theory based on their assumptions about people who own uteri.
Besides, my curiosity grows. I want to stay and continue my work. I’ve formulated a new goal: to devise a unified theory of my Traumphysik. The scope of my theory is limited to what I can achieve in my lucid dreaming, of course. But I’m getting better every night. Last night I did not conduct an experiment, per se, but achieved a feat of observation: I succeeded in leaving my shelter entirely and standing on the beach. The stars were bright violet sparks, and the sky was deep chocolate brown. The ocean was markedly different, too—pearly and viscous. In waking life, this landscape might appear choked and polluted; as it was, I felt as if this palette were the natural and normal one.
Also, in the dream, I found the same conch shell on the beach. It was eerie. I’d selected the conch shell as a marker in waking life. And here it was, with a characteristic chip in the outer lip. Its appearance in my dream suggests Traumphysik at work. Perhaps there are wormholes in my personal universe.
There is so much more to learn.
* * *
Last night, in my dream, again I practiced walking out onto the beach. I found I could sit down on the sand, which was sparkly and transparent, as if made from ground and tumbled glass. The sand was so clear I could even look down and perceive a few inches of depth, deeper than which light was too refracted to penetrate.
When I looked up again, a great silver pig was standing on the shore in front of me. It must have just emerged from the surf—iridescent rivulets were oozing down its flanks. It was much bigger than the island’s native pigs. It was the size of a lion. It waddled towards me, veered to my left, turned around, and sat back on its haunches. I turned to it and smiled, to signal welcome and no harm intended. It did not respond. Then I heard a deep gurgling sound from within its gullet, and the pig splayed its legs and belched, and there was the driftwood post lying on the sand in a pool of luminescent slime. Then it got to its feet and waddled back into the surf, its curly tail wagging left and right with the alternating pistons of its haunches.
I picked up the driftwood post, feeling a slight burn on my palms (Traum-bile?), and washed it in the surf. Then I did the most logical thing and planted the post in the same spot I’d planted it in waking life. We’ll see whether the island is also shrinking in Traumphysik.
* * *
The re-hammered post was nowhere to be found in waking life. But in my dream last night, I checked on it and found it—well above the furthermost reach of the surf. This suggests that, while the real atoll is decreasing in size, the dream atoll is increasing in size. Knowing how fluid gravity is in Traumphysik, I can’t make definitive conclusions. But it’s a thrilling result. Lucifer is rising.
On the radio today, just to refine my working hypotheses, I swallowed my pride and asked base whether there were any unusual events in my locality. They asked what I meant by unusual events. I asked whether there had been any sudden drops in oceanic pH. I was told that there was a war going on and they didn’t have time to measure acid in the ocean and as long as ships could still float and shoot at Japs, the Navy was happy.
So unfortunately I don’t have those data. I was again told, however, that the war was going well. I asked for details. I was told that that was classified information.
Then I was given instructions for another flyover. Tonight, at midnight, an essential supply convoy would approach my atoll and look for my signal light as a landmark to turn north. The signal light must be on. I must watch for their Morse code, giving their call sign. I must signal back in Morse code, giving my own. The supplies the convoy carries are crucial to a certain planned strike, which itself is crucial to our long-term strategy in the Pacific, and did I understand? Yes, I understood. I had never failed them before. I was to report in as soon as the exchange had been achieved.
At sunset I sat on the beach and watched the surf. I thoug
ht about how Galileo had hypothesized that tides were caused by the oceans “sloshing” in their basins as the earth turned, and how he dismissed Kepler’s proposal that the tides were instead caused by the gravitational pull of the moon. Kepler turned out to be right, of course. There are ten thousand million heavenly bodies, all with their own inexorable pulls.
* * *
On my last morning, there was a spectacular sunrise.
I sat on the beach, having stayed awake all night. The colors of Eos were lilac and mandarin. They called to mind the beach of my Traumphysik—the violet stars, especially. I hope to visit there again, and linger longer.
The pigs congregated near me, rolling on their backs and taking their little sand-baths. And the radio lay in pieces beside me. I’d always wanted to take that radio apart, and see what kind it was. I dismantled it well before midnight. I’d also dismantled the generator that powers the signal light. Then I’d sat on the beach with my toes in the sand and watched the convoy fly over. They had done well, navigating this far, but without my signal they would fly straight into Japanese waters. I’d watched them fly overhead and thought I could imagine their confusion, their consternation. Undone, and with so little effort on my part.
I breakfasted on coconut and waited. At last, I heard a distant buzz, and then a seaplane appeared as a speck in the sky. I got to my feet and watched it land, shading my eyes with my hand. The seaplane landed in the shallows, sending up a spray. A boat was unlashed from the underbelly of the plane and dropped to the water. Two figures climbed out of the plane and let themselves down.
The boat came nearer and I began to make out their faces. It was a man and a woman. They were both smiling. Lucy! Gut gemacht—wirklich ausgezeichnet! the man called out.
It was my dear friends, the Gaertners.
Meine lieben Freunde! Willkommen und Guten Morgen! I called back.
About the Author
Monica Byrne is a writer, playwright, and traveler based in Durham, NC. Her first novel, The Girl in the Road, won the Tiptree Award in 2015. You can sign up for author updates here.
Copyright © 2016 by Monica Byrne
Art copyright © 2016 by Keith Negley
FREDDIE WEYL IN TORONTO, 1902
Freddie’s head rested on the music rack as he murmured into the piano’s keys possible and probable rhymes, slant or assonant, for moon. He accompanied each syllable with a dull minor chord from his left hand. June. Raccoon. Spoon. Croon. Womb. Harpoon. High noon. Tomb. Gloom. Wound.
The last word stuck and a terrible, irresistible lyric formed. He droned it through his nose: The June moon it is a wound. High noon gloom of my little room, and so the tomb.
How much they loved these loony, crooning vowels. Words that turned all singers into doves, with billing and cooing that sounded to his ear—he, who had lived so much of his life under the eaves of pigeon-infested houses—like an asthmatic climax. Hoon. Hoon. Hooooon.
It was hard to write about the green fields of somewhere-or-other when he heard only infernal pigeons, the clutter of wheels on pavement, the shout of boys, the rage of drivers. Despite the noise, Freddie still conjured moon-drenched country walks in terrible songs published as “F. Wilde” because he could not put his own name to them. Songs all written for a girl in Winnipeg with a quarter to spare and a pianola in the parlour. He’d seen modest cheques so far, which was why he was keen to keep the harvest moon in his heart, and so avoid his natural tendency toward moon-tombs and Cdim7.
If one was to write a song about the moon, he thought, one should think of its true nature: its distance from earth, out there among the meteors and comets; one should consider the luminiferous aether through which it sailed. The number of moons expanded yearly, he had noticed, as telescopes grew more powerful, and the people of Earth more sharp-eyed and watchful. There were multitudinous moons, not just their own, but Phobos and Deimos, accompanying Mars and its canal-scored deserts, Io and Tethys and oceanic Titan.
What they all needed was a song about an observatory, signaling Luna or any of her sister-satellites, how, one day, a light might wink back at them from the dark.
He thought of the canals of Mars and its moons, or the still-unnamed bodies that circled the sun in orbits invisible to the naked eye. He liked that feeling, of distance, an expanse so huge his mind ground to stillness when he tried to imagine it. His fingers found the keyboard, and it seemed that an enormous, empty space formed between the question and the silence of its non-answer—
Where does that water run? he asked, and thought of Schiaparelli’s canals, and the spidery Venusian webs Lowell had seen through his telescope. Where does it run?
Maybe out. Maybe into the black on the other side of the sky.
VOCAMATIC HAND-PLAYED RECORDING, 1904
Six Songs As Sweet As A Garden Stream, including “Where Does That Water Run?” and “Waiting For You, My Dear” by that beloved American tunesmith, F. Wilde.
For best results, choose a Dekalb pianola!
LILY GIBBS, 1898–1980
Vocals and Autoharp. Best known for her signature song, “Where Does that Water Run?,” an Appalachian ballad of uncertain origin, recorded ca. 1929. Advertised by OKeh Records as The weirdest melody that ever stole out of Tennessee.
LILY GIBBS PLAYS THE EXIT CLUB, 1975
The parking lot behind the Exit only fit three cars and it was full, so Pat squeezed her Volkswagen behind the dumpster and knocked on the door to Ken’s office. By the time Ken let her in she’d smoked her second cigarette down to the filter.
His eyes were tiny and red-rimmed. Pissholes, her father would have said, in the snow.
“Thanks, Patty,” Ken said. “You have no idea how grateful I am.” He leaned in close. “The vibes, man, the vibes. The woman is a menace.”
“I’m lending my car to a menace? What is she going to—”
“A reactionary kind of a menace, not the kind who’s gonna wreck your car. She needs to go to church, or buy a new hat or something. She hates me already—hates drunkards, that’s what she called me—and weed, and cocaine too, I assume. Though it hasn’t come up.” He barked, or maybe laughed. “If she wasn’t Lily goddamn Gibbs I’d’ve locked the door.”
That was when she heard Lily on stage. “Where Does That Water Run?” Lily goddamn Gibbs might be past seventy, her voice reedy, but she still possessed that quality Pat had first encountered when she was a kid with a crystal radio set, listening to the air in the middle of the night. Some January evening she had put the little beige earpiece in and slid the spring along the wire until she heard a melody in the static: Where does that water run? Lily had first asked her when she was eleven. She had not yet answered, though the inscrutable question remained in her mind.
On the wall beside the entrance someone had tacked up the poster: an ink-lined Lily Gibbs cradling her Autoharp, a face all tight-stretched skin over sharp bones and hollow shadows, her eyes huge and dark. The Exit Club. $2.50 weekdays. $3 weekends.
Pat wanted so very badly to say something, maybe about the crystal radio set and the beauty of a song emerging from the sheets of static. “It’s really pretty,” was all she could think to say while looking at the poster, her voice a shade too bright.
Lily Gibbs—really, truly Lily Gibbs, of the remarkable voice, of the peculiar Autoharp tunings and the irresistible question—just looked at her.
Ken carried on in the silence. “Yeah, it’s pretty good, I like it a lot. I like his work. She’ll just need the car for the afternoon, is all. I can’t thank you enough, Patty, I really can’t. You’re on the list. Forever. I’ll put you on the list forever,” followed by the humourless bark.
In the alley, Pat unlocked the Volkswagen and handed Lily Gibbs the keys and took in her incongruity, so much more obvious in daylight. She wore a lavender double-knit suit with slightly dingy white buttons and piping. Her hair had been teased into a tower of setting lotion and Final Net. As though she didn’t notice she was being watched, Lily took a rat-tail comb
out of her purse and scratched her scalp. Pat thought of the hostess at the first place she’d ever worked banquets, whose elaborate hairstyles were set once weekly, and who was otherwise trapped beneath them, and scratched the same way with her rat-tail comb when she still had a day to go before her shampoo.
For her part, Lily glanced from Pat’s head to her feet and back again to her eyes. It felt a lot like going down to the Legion to collect her father on a Saturday afternoon, with the Legion wives looking over her jeans and her long, undressed hair and her sandals with that same glance, from inside the same lavender double-knit suit and fearsome bouffant. The same oppressive censure, but this time from Lily goddamn Gibbs herself.
Later that night, Pat got the Volkswagen back with an empty gas tank and a strong scent of lily of the valley. She slipped in past the dumpster, along the corridor past the storeroom, and emerged behind the bar, where Ken was standing, his hands pressed flat on the scarred wooden top, his TEAC reel-to-reel beside him.
Lily Gibbs was just taking the stage in her kitten-heeled pumps, accompanied by men in neat ties and dark suits a little shiny at the seams. Pat’s mind went again to the Legion, collecting her father from the smell of stale beer in old carpeting and a still basement room shut up tight against the summer heat.
Then none of that mattered, not her immediate mistrust of middle-aged men in dark suits, nor the disapproval from the woman on stage. None of that mattered because Lily Gibbs opened her mouth and sang for a ninety-minute set that ended the only way it could end, with the terminal question: Where does that water run, poor boy? Where does that water run?
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2016 Page 9