The Physics of Imaginary Objects (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize) (7 page)

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.

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.