Gravity Box and Other Spaces

by Mark Tiedemann

  Peter veered toward the front door, which opened when he reached it.

  “Come on in.”

  Peter stepped into his living room. Elyssa sat in a chair, facing the door. Danny stood behind her, holding a skinning knife alongside her face. Peter turned to the right to see Newhouse aiming a pistol at his head.

  “We don’t have to prolong this, Mr. Malon,” he said. “All I want is what I was about to catch when you interrupted my hunt. You stuck your face in my business, but you didn’t actually know that at the time. Now you do, so I expect we won’t have any more misunderstandings like that. I am a businessman, no matter what folks around here might say, and right now I have a client who has been waiting very patiently for me to deliver. Diminishing patience, I should say. I always deliver what I promise, and I promised him one o’ them walking trees you got here on your land. I don’t normally have this much trouble catching what I’m after, but I’m sure we can come to an accommodation without anybody getting hurt.”

  “Except your prey.”

  “Oh, now, I wasn’t gonna hurt it. My client doesn’t want to hurt it, just to have it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up in a nicer place to put down roots than it has here. There really is no reason for anyone to get hurt. I don’t even want to hurt you, even though you have it coming.”

  Peter looked at Elyssa. His eyes better adjusted to the dimness, he saw a bruise forming on the right side of her face. “You all right?”

  She shrugged. “You give them what they want, and I’ll never speak to you again.”

  “Oh, now, ain’t that brave!” Craig said, laughing. “Ma’am, he won’t give me anything. He will get out of my way so I can collect it. Otherwise there will be costs.”

  “They’re not obliged to do anything for me,” Peter said.

  “Oh, but I think they are. I saw what you’ve been doing for them. I have no doubt they put a very high premium on your skills, so I’d like you to get their leader in here. What’s her name? Paphos? Don’t worry, I don’t want her, but I need to talk to her. Go on now.”

  Peter went out the door onto the porch, Newhouse right behind him, and called for Paphos. After a few moments, she came forward.

  Craig put the pistol to Peter’s head. “That’s close enough,” he shouted. “I don’t need you inside to talk. Now, here’s the deal. I want one of you. This isn’t negotiable. I want one that has all its parts, is attractive, and can follow instructions. There’s a collector willing to pay a lot of money for one of you. So you go back and talk among yourselves and choose one. If you don’t, I’m going to break this man’s hands.”

  Paphos stiffened.

  “Yeah, that’s right. I know what he’s been doing for you, and I know he’s far from finished. I don’t get what I want, he won’t be worth a damn to you anymore. Understand?”

  Paphos nodded and returned to the trees. Peter watched as several of the laurels changed shape and faded back into the shadows.

  “You might have a little difficulty following through on that,” he said to Craig as they went back into the living room.

  “Oh, now, I don’t think so. ’Cause if you don’t cooperate, I’ll have Danny there start skinning your wife.”

  “What if they won’t agree?”

  “They will.”

  The stillness seemed to thicken. Peter knew timing was everything. Carefully, precisely, he began shifting his weight, edging closer to Danny, gauging distances and angles. He was nearly in position when Dulcie stepped from the tree line walking in slow, deliberate steps to the porch.

  “Oh, now, I never—!” Craig laughed. “This is too easy. Danny?”

  Danny took Elyssa by the arm and pulled her to her feet.

  “Wait, I—” Peter started.

  “We are going to get out of here, Mr. Malon,” Craig said. “Just a little while longer, and we’ll let your wife go.”

  He wanted to act, but Elyssa was on the porch now. Craig waved his pistol signaling them to descend.

  They obeyed. A liquid helplessness ran through Peter, as they moved toward Craig’s vehicle. Out of the corner of his eye, the shadows altered, seemed to shift among themselves, masking movement, but Peter concentrated on finding a solution, a tactic, to stop Newhouse and Danny. Too many things in motion, too many variables, with him in the middle of it unsure which way to go, what to do next.

  Suddenly, Newhouse’s Jeep rose up, tilted, and turned onto its side, pushed over by a laurel that had not been there seconds before. Danny lost his grip on Elyssa. She yanked free, spun around, and ran for the house. Craig raised his weapon. Peter screamed and charged at him colliding with Danny instead. Dulcie began to transform, one arm reaching for Newhouse’s gun hand. A shot cracked the air. Peter looked up and saw Newhouse suspended by one arm in the thickening hold of Dulcie’s branch.

  Pain seared across his chest. Danny had sliced across it, cutting through Peter’s shirt, etching a groove. Peter caught his wrist, twisted, and drove a fist into his face. The nose smashed and blood spurted down his chin. Peter hit him again and wrested the knife away from him, stood—

  —and saw Elyssa on hands and knees, halfway to the front door.

  He scrambled to her, catching her as she collapsed. Blood soaked her shirt from just below her sternum where the bullet had exited. She looked at him, surprised, mouth working, gulping air. Peter’s body strained, as if by force of will he could keep her here, alive.

  But she faded, too quickly. She reached up to touch his face, surprise turning to consternation, then absence.

  “No!”

  Not his voice. He looked back to see Dulcie, caught between states, one arm dangling Craig Newhouse by the neck, her face stretched in a perfect echo of the pain beginning to burn through Peter.

  Sheriff Edmunds knocked on the door frame and stepped into the studio. Peter acknowledged him with a nod, then went back to smoothing the base of the wrist on the arm he had been making.

  Edmunds picked up one of the fingers and examined it.

  “Danny’s being transferred north,” he said. “Thought you’d want to know. Assault. Thought about kidnapping, but that’s federal. Might bring too much attention.”

  Peter nodded again. Edmunds had taken his formal statement that night, though they both knew his report was at best a partial fabrication. Newhouse was a known poacher. He had been trespassing. The situation had turned tragic. Both Craig and Danny would be going away now, finally.

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you packed it up and left,” Edmunds said. “I’d just like you to give us some time to find someone—”

  “I’m not leaving, Sheriff.” He looked up. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  Edmunds waited for more, then nodded. “I’ll be checking on you from time to time. When you’re ready, don’t be a stranger. There are some good people in Saletcroix who’d be glad to help.”

  Peter watched him go. The sheriff meant well, he knew, but just now “good people” and “help” sounded alien and useless. He glanced at the canvas-covered statue still in the center of the studio and wondered if he would ever look at it again.

  He continued working. He had not seen any of the dryads since the incident. They had disappeared into their glen, and he was just as glad not have to deal with them.

  It had been weeks since he had slept. There had been arrangements with Elyssa’s family in Chicago for return of her body. Somewhere he had the notes for the funeral. For all he knew, he had missed it. Their attorney had called. She had left him everything. As if that mattered. She was everything.

  He continued working, making the forearm as lifelike as he could. The sound of canvas sliding over wood snapped him around on his stool.

  Dulcie stood before Elyssa’s statue, gazing at it, the canvas dangling by a corner from her right hand. He looked up at the reflection of his dead wife, felt the sharp sting of loss, and made himself look outside. Dulcie had come alone.

  “Please,” he said.

  “I m
iss her,” Dulcie said. “It’s hard to say good-bye. What will you do?”

  “I don’t know. Try to figure that out, I guess. Why are you here?”

  “I have nowhere else to go.”

  He focused on her. “Hmm? What do you mean?”

  “We do not kill. I killed. Our bond has been broken.”

  He almost protested. He knew how that felt, though no one had ever said it to him. He just knew.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m no longer myself. I don’t know where to go.”

  “Paphos told me you didn’t talk to anyone. Until Elyssa.”

  “She accepted.”

  “Yeah, she did. There’s no one else I could ever talk to.”

  “So are we both mute now?”

  Peter felt a twist, a warming in his sinuses, a tightening in his chest. “You can talk to me, I guess. I’m not Elyssa—or Paphos. But I can listen.”

  Dulcie folded the canvas and came over to the bench. She studied the carvings for a moment. “I am no longer what I was. I have to find—I have to become—something new. Maybe you do, too.”

  “No doubt.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I’ll be like, never seeing her again.”

  “We can both talk because of Elyssa.”

  “Dulcie—”

  “I need to be new. I need somewhere to be.” She picked up a knife and handed it to him. “She will always be with us. I can think of no one I’d rather be.” She nodded at the statue, and then faced him. “You can talk to her. I can talk to you. We can heal.”

  Peter’s hand trembled. Dulcie leaned forward.

  “Go along the grain,” she said. “It’s always best.”

  Forever and a Day

  “I’m not really bisexual,” Audry said.

  “Then why are we doing this?” Lora asked.

  “With you, it’s different.”

  “That’s—no, sorry, it doesn’t work that way.”

  “Speaking from long experience?”

  “Speaking from some experience. It doesn’t take a lot to understand certain things.”

  Audry looked puzzled. “Does for me. Are you attracted to me?”

  “Very.”

  “And Jeff—”

  “Very.”

  “And both of us at the same time?”

  “Why did you agree to this, Audry? You don’t sound like your heart’s in it.”

  “My heart—Jeff has my heart.”

  “He wanted it?”

  “He wanted you.”

  “And you’re going along with it because—?”

  “I’m happy when he’s happy.”

  “And if it lasts forever?”

  Audry shrugged. “Nothing lasts forever.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  “Don’t leave.”

  “For now. But tell me something. What are you getting out this arrangement?”

  “It’s better now. He’s better. He’s better with me. What about you?”

  “It’s good.”

  “For now?”

  “Now could last the rest of our lives.”

  Audry smiled, but Lora thought it was an unconvincing one. Before she could say more, Audry reached for her. “Can we try again? I want this to work.”

  “I lived with someone for three years. Then I was married for five. Neither worked out” Lora explained.

  “Bad fit?” Jeff asked.

  “Entropy,” Lora said. “I’m not sure people—I’m not sure I am suited to lifetime commitments.”

  “Or maybe you just haven’t found the right people,” Audry said.

  “Like you two?”

  Audry grinned. “Yeah.”

  “Then why do you need me?” Lora asked.

  “Well,” Jeff said, “when you find paradise, sometimes it’s nice to share it. Expand the boundaries, stretch the horizons. Besides, we love you.”

  Audry reddened.

  “That’s today,” Lora said. “Maybe tomorrow and next month. Things change.”

  “It’s a risk,” Jeff admitted. “We’re all risking it, though. That’s what makes it workable. There’s equity, both in the risks and in the rewards.”

  “Egalitarianism as the answer to relational problems?”

  Jeff grinned. “It’s a good start.”

  “So as long as we remain the same

  “Can’t do that,” Audry said. “Change happens. But as long as the foundations we bring to this don’t fall out of balance, the changes only add to it.”

  “Sounds utopian.”

  “Utopias never change,” Jeff said. “This is better.”

  Lora sighed. “I love you, too. Both of you. I’m not leaving. It’s just—”

  “Yeah,” Audry said. “It’s just.”

  “It was hard enough with one other person, how do you hope three of us can do it?”

  Jeff shrugged, smiling cryptically. “Maybe with the right people, it’s easier with more. With the wrong people it doesn’t matter how few, it won’t work.”

  “And how to define ‘right people’?”

  Audry looked almost ready to laugh. Instead she brushed imaginary lint from her breast. Jeff stretched back, arms above his head, and Lora thought she had never seen a man look so impossible to leave alone. Her right hand began the short journey to his chest, but she pulled back.

  “People who don’t resent sharing,” he said. “Ever.”

  “How do you know you’re like that?”

  Jeff laughed. “What did we just get done doing?” He waved a hand to encompass the three of them, arrayed on the bed.

  “Yeah,” Audry said, “but that’s just sex. There might be some things we don’t want to share, even with each other.”

  “And some things,” Lora said, “we can’t share.”

  “Like what?” Jeff challenging, sitting up. He looked from one woman to the other. “Come on, now. You may have a point, but I want examples.”

  “Well—” Lora stopped. “Hell, I don’t know. We may not even have it yet!”

  “So you’re expecting to acquire something in the future that you might not be willing to share with us.”

  “Not intentionally. I mean, I’m not going to go looking for something just to have an example to counter your argument.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Okay, smartass, what about dreams?”

  “Dreams as in what do you want to do when you grow up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t plan on growing up.”

  “Neither do I, but it happens anyway.”

  “Well, there is one thing,” Audry said. “Sometimes you have to keep a piece of yourself just for you.”

  “Privacy? By definition you can’t share privacy. You can only grant it. Beyond that, though, what wouldn’t you share with me if you had it and it could be shared?”

  Audry shrugged. “With you, I’d share eternity.”

  “Let’s keep it in the realm of the achievable,” Jeff said. He looked at Lora. “You?”

  “I guess—” Lora paused. “I guess I would share my mortality with you.”

  Jeff’s face seemed to soften, as if a deeper light had fallen onto the skin and penetrated to the bone to show his feelings. “That’s pretty much everything. Don’t you think?”

  Lora set the reports aside when Jeff and Audry entered the living room, arms around each other’s shoulders, the last echoes of laughter falling from their grinning mouths. Lora felt her own mouth flinch into an answering smile, but the effort exhausted itself before it really began.

  “Hey,” Audry said, stepping away from Jeff. “What’s with the face?”

  Lora glanced at the documents lying on the end table. “You first. How’d it go?”

  “Exhausting,” Jeff said. He dropped into the armchair, long legs thrust out, ankles crossed. He closed his eyes. “I didn’t think living forever would be so tiring.”

  Audry bobbed her eyebrows at Lora. “Bitch, bitch, complain.
They said it would be a few days of mild flu-like symptoms at worst, and then we’d feel the effects.”

  “Yeah, but they didn’t say what the effects were that we’d be feeling,” Jeff said.

  “Do you want to take it back?” Audry asked.

  “Can we?” He laughed. “No. I’m just—” He looked at Lora then. “Hey, there is something wrong. What’s the matter?”

  Lora, watching their byplay, felt on edge. Pressure rose behind her eyes. She did not want to cry, but it seemed inevitable. Happiness, horror, they both caused the same reaction at the extremes, but together—

  “What’s this?” Audry asked, gracefully crossing the room and snatching the top report before Lora could grab it. She flipped open the cover. “The Institute—your assessment?”

  “I’ve been rejected,” Lora said, hoping she had beaten Audry to the relevant paragraph. “My make-up won’t allow it.”

  The silence that enveloped them instantly went deeper than the absence of sound. No one, Lora knew, was thinking. Sensation ceased for seconds. The fabric of the present muffled response and suppressed reaction. The silence of soul-shock.

  Audry and Jeff spoke at once.

  “No, that—”

  “—has to be an error.”

  “The numbers are there,” Lora said, standing. A thrill of trembling, like a promise, ran down her legs, but she did not stumble as she walked toward the door to the kitchen. “It’s pretty final.” She stopped at the doorway, hand on the frame, and said over her shoulder, “However, I have been accepted into the Orion program.”

  Before they could react to that, Lora went into the kitchen, heart pounding.

  Out of their sight, in the recently redecorated kitchen with its new cabinets, faucet fixtures, stone tile floor, and skylight above, Lora leaned against the center island, squeezed her eyes shut, and for nearly half a minute concentrated on waking up, on the off-chance that this was a bad dream, and all she needed to do was open her eyes.

  Her dreams had always been exceptionally vivid and fooled her with their veracity sometimes for minutes after waking. Not this time. This time, reality had handed her an impossible situation to assimilate.

  “Lora—?”

  Audry came up beside her, placing a hand on her shoulder. Very tentatively, almost like the first time they had made love, as if too firm a touch would cause Lora to reconsider and run away.