Read The Physics of Imaginary Objects (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize) Online
Authors: Tina May Hall
The Physics of Imaginary Objects (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize) (6 page)
On his way back into the house, he gathered up the food and the flowers. The door closed behind him with a solid clap. There was no echo. A hundred mountains stood before him, but he couldn't imagine their coordinates. He was thinking about the gift of dinner, the way a car's headlights lit up the kitchen like a shrine at night, the planet traveling and him with it, surrounded by all he knew.
Based on fragments from
The Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers
by John Tyndall
Trace a river to its source.
Go to the mouth of the river Rhone. Go to the head of the lake. Pass these and push your journey still higher.
I will act as your guide. I, who am recently blown out, undone, plunged into darkness.
Look to your bedroom windows when the weather is very cold outside.
Through that clear space the thing must pass.
Light a fire, fuse metal, or burn the hand like a hot solid.
We must now be observant.
Dip your finger into a basin of water and cause it to quiver rapidly to and fro.
Imagine a southwest wind. Note the consequence.
Supposing, then, that we withdraw.
You have already noticed I entertain an affection, a passion, a desire for company. I warn you: I wish.
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.
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.