Relativity (13 page)

Ethan raised his hand to his forehead. Something was wrong back there, behind the cushioning of his skin and hardness of his skull. He imagined his brain wired like a house, long cables running behind its walls. Circuits and switches, outlets and meters. But his wiring was faulty. Live wires dangling hazardously—sparking and crackling—overloaded with voltage and amps. Ethan knew “unusual” really meant “abnormal.” Weird. Even inside his body, in his cells and neurons, he was a freak.

“The good news,” Dr. Saunders said, “is that Ethan hasn't had any more seizures since he was admitted. I'm going to place you under observation for the night, but if everything goes well, I'd be happy to discharge you in the morning.”

Ethan smiled. “Really?”

“Thank God,” Mum said, putting her hand on his knee. It always struck Ethan as a funny thing for his mum to say; she didn't believe in God but kept expressing gratitude to him. She stood up. “Dr. Saunders, can I have a quick word with you? In private?”

Dr. Saunders nodded, leading her out of the room.

As Ethan watched his mum and the doctor speak on the other side of the glass, he wished he could lip-read. Sometimes he could read his mum's eyes—happiness swelling her irises, sadness shining in her cornea, anger tapering her eyelids—but he didn't know all these movements of her mouth. Rounded vowels and puckered shapes, nodding, wrinkling, frowns. They were talking too fast. Syllables, words, sentences, phrases tumbled too quickly from their lips. Ethan felt dizzy trying to keep up.

Then the room froze.

Dr. Saunders stopped speaking midsentence. His arms and face went stiff. His gaping mouth reminded Ethan of those laughing clowns at the Royal Easter Show, their heads swiveling back and forth. Mum was rigid too, pressing her lips together like she had no teeth. It made her look like an old lady. Every particle of dust in the room was still, every atom motionless. The air had crystallized into solid mist, hardened fog.

Ethan turned to Alison. She'd frozen too, stuck halfway through turning a magazine page. It was like somebody had pressed pause on real life. Or like being inside the static world of a photograph. Only Ethan could move. He waved his arms around in the air and started yelling. He jumped on the bed. Nobody reacted.

But he could hear soft noises, a distant rumbling, slowly getting louder like an approaching train. The sound was closer now, thundering, rushing toward him like wind. He heard his name.

“Ethan,” Alison said. She raised her voice. “Ethan!”

He blinked. The room was normal again.

“They're letting you go home?” She sat upright in her bed. Under her eyes, her skin was dark and hollow. Ethan was reminded of Will's black eye. Her seizures had beat her up and punched her in the face.

“Yeah, in the morning.”

Alison lay back down on her mattress.

“What's wrong?” Ethan asked.

“Nothing.”

“How much longer will you need to stay here?”

“I'm not responding to my medicine this time. I'm not getting better.”

Ethan felt guilty for a second. He was better; he was going home. That wasn't fair. Although now that he thought about it, going back home also meant going back to school and he didn't really want to do that. Maybe it would be better to stay in the hospital forever. From the corner of his eye, Ethan noticed his mum still talking to Dr. Saunders. She was wiping tears away with the back of her hand.

“I could visit you?” Ethan offered. “On the weekend. Or even after school?”

“Really? Would you SOOF?” Alison asked.

“SOOF?”

“Swear on our friendship. You'll need to spit-swear,” Alison said, getting out of bed. “I've never had a visitor who wasn't a member of my family before. This is a big deal.”

Ethan grimaced. “With real spit?”

Alison spat on her hand and gave him a solemn nod. “An oath bound in saliva,” she said theatrically, as she held out her wet palm. “Sealed with spit.”

He tried to collect saliva inside his mouth. Spit pooled under his tongue made him want to gag. He spat. The bubbly mucus cooled quickly in the middle of his palm.

Alison grabbed Ethan's hand, the surfaces of their skin clapping together. She gripped her fingers around his and looked straight into his eyes. Their saliva blended—squelching, fusing, moist palm against palm—as they steadily shook hands. “Spit, shake, swear,” she said with a serious tone.

“Spit, shake, swear,” Ethan repeated, returning her steely look. He had to stop himself from laughing as Alison maintained her earnest, unsmiling face. She took everything so seriously. Ethan pulled his wet hand back, wiped spit on her nightgown and grinned.

Alison screamed. “Yuck!” she said, running away from him. “Stop it! Ethan! That's disgusting.”

“And spit-swearing isn't?”

They chased each other around the room with their sticky hands, laughing and shrieking, pretending for a sacred moment that they weren't in a hospital. Alison wiped her hand on Ethan's back, whooping with victory. Their blended spit dried into the lines of his hands, his palm coated in white flakes of drool. It should've been gross, but it wasn't.

The morning nurse peeked her head into the room. “Alison! Ethan! Back in your beds right away. You both should know better than to overstimulate each other. Especially you, Alison.”

The children did as they were told, giggling and sharing mischievous glances when the nurse wasn't looking, as they climbed into their beds and under the covers again.

Alison gave Ethan a weak smile. “I don't feel so good. Maybe you could read to me?” She picked up the book that was on her bedside table. “Will you read me
Alice in Wonderland
?”

Ethan got up and took the book from Alison's hands. He sat at the end of her bed. From under her blanket, she kicked his thigh and snickered. But even her smile couldn't conceal the cloud forming in her eyes. Ethan opened her book to a random page and read aloud. Alison was asleep before he reached the end of the chapter.

Ω

MARK HAD THE HANDS
of a pianist, long fingers bowed like the neck of a swan. He tapped them on his knee, each movement striking notes of a nervous sonata of the fingertips. But this was a deceptive elegance. His body was all angles, sharp corners, and hard lines. Sweat beads collected in the tide of his brow. There was no softness there.

The train came to a stop and with a myopic squint he read the station name. Circular Quay. Not yet. He removed his jacket and wiped the sweat off his face with the back of his hand. He was dressed in shades of neutral—slate, charcoal, asphalt, stone—and, if put against the Sydney cityscape, he might disappear. Mark worked in ore lodes, inside a lab inside a pit; he wasn't used to dressing up. His leather shoes lacked creases, his laces without the frays of regular wear. The passenger sitting opposite looked at him and their eyes met. They both smiled, but Mark had the sort of downward smile that was actually a frown.

From the pocket of his jacket, he pulled out a present, green paper tied with a pink bow. With a swan finger, he touched the edges taped into precise corners. The train stopped again. St. James. This was it. He followed the tiled tunnels, up the stairs to the vintage neon sign. “Chateau Tanunda, The Brandy of Distinction.” The blue and orange sign had been there for as long as he could remember. His mother used to take him to the city, past St. James station, to have soup and sandwiches at the café on the highest floor of David Jones department store.

Claire was waiting for him at the station exit, leaning against a wall. The afternoon sun lit her hair, but she had such high cheekbones that even on the brightest day, a shadow always fell on her face. She wore an old white sundress—Mark remembered it—that had somehow managed to stay impossibly clean.

“You're late,” Claire said.

“Yeah, I know, sorry, the train.”

She looked at her watch. “I don't have much time.”

This wasn't the greeting Mark had expected. “Let's just grab a quick coffee then.”

“There's a coffee shop around the corner,” Claire said, leading the way. As they walked, she kept a wide gap between their bodies. When Mark stepped closer, Claire moved back. They were like two kids learning to waltz as they renegotiated the space between them.

The coffee shop was crowded when they arrived, the line almost out the door.

“Long black with a splash of full-cream milk, no sugar?” Mark asked.

She nodded.

He smiled. “You haven't changed.”

Claire smiled back, but immediately looked away. “I'll wait out here.”

Mark went inside. The line wasn't moving and he kept glancing backward to see if she was still there. He rubbed the back of his neck. It was loud—roar of the coffee grinder, whistle of frothing milk, staff yelling—so Mark couldn't organize his thoughts. The barista was listless, working leisurely: grind, dose, level, tamp. Mark ordered and tapped his foot, wanting to run behind the counter and make the coffees himself. Finally, they called his name.

“Thanks,” Claire said as he handed her the paper cup. “Let's sit in the park.”

Mark hadn't been back to Hyde Park for years. He used to study on the steps of the Anzac War Memorial, occasionally looking up from his books to stare into the gray water of the Pool of Reflection. Nothing much had changed. Elderly men still played chess with the giant pieces in the Japanese Garden. Office workers still sat on the grass during their lunch breaks, sprawled on the lawn, turning their faces toward the sun. Down the fig-lined avenue, Mark could see the spraying jets of the Archibald Fountain.

Ω

ONE DRUNKEN NIGHT
in the height of Sydney summer, many Januarys ago when the balmy late night felt as hot as noon and the humidity soared, Claire had persuaded Mark to jump into the fountain. He liked how impulsive she could be, how uninhibited, except when she tried to make him act recklessly too. But as Claire climbed the marble plinth and bronze statues—wet dress clinging to her body, hair slicked back, her magnetic face glistening in the fountain's mist—Mark reflexively followed her into the water.

“Diana, goddess of the hunt, of purity and the moon,” he said, pointing at the statue. He'd studied classics at school, knew all about ancient Greek and Roman mythology. “The Greeks called her Artemis.”

“Show-off.” Claire splashed him and gestured to the bronze man in the middle of the fountain. “Who's he?” she asked, drops of water dripping off her chin, the fountain's floodlight igniting her face.

“That's Apollo. Diana's twin brother. God of the sun, of beauty, music and light. He was the god of healing too. The ancient Greeks thought the twins shooting arrows at people caused illness and death. So they prayed to Apollo to cure disease.” At the statue's feet was a horse head; water spilled from its flaring nostrils. “I guess he was a multitasking god.”

Claire laughed and waded through the water to the other side of the basin, lifting the hem of her dress. Tortoises shot water from their mouths at her feet. She had the most beautiful legs. Mark saw the ballet training in her walk—her turned-out hips, her pointing feet—that elegant gait engraved into her body by years of bending at the barre.

She lifted herself onto another statue and smacked its bronzed behind. The metal had oxidized, turned slightly green. “And this guy?” she asked. “What's his story?”

“Theseus,” Mark said. “Slaying the Minotaur.”

“Theseus was a bit of a hunk,” Claire said as she mounted the basin at the center of the fountain and stood below Apollo. “Look at his ass.”

In the shadow of St. Mary's Cathedral, under the fan of spraying water, Claire looked more striking than any neoclassical sculpture. Mark wanted to touch her. Carved into clay, forged and wrought, cast with molten metal: she belonged in a museum. But she was greater than any statue—animated, fearless, determined, painfully stubborn—and she'd pulled Mark out from his hard shell, taught him how to feel truly alive.

“And look at this ancient mythical creature here,” she said, mimicking his voice as she placed her hand on a water-sprouting bronze fish. “His name was Trouteus, and he was the god of swimming in forbidden fountains at two in the morning.” She pouted, curling her lips to resemble the fish. “And he represents vomiting when you've had too much to drink.”

Mark came after her, scaling the granite slabs, sliding on the slippery polished stones. “Claire, I love you,” he blurted out. He'd never said it to her before and suddenly felt self-conscious, hyperaware of his sticky wet clothes.

Claire stood there for a moment, wobbling in the pool of water, her mouth agape. “I love you too,” she'd said, a little breathless.

Crescents of water shot over their heads as they kissed in the moonlit fountain, before they lost their balance and slipped in the basin. Mark had loved the languor of those warm evenings of their careless youth. Laughing hysterically, their bodies submerged, they kissed again in the hexagonal pool. Above them, the bronze mythological figures looked into the distance.

Ω

SEASON FOLLOWING SEASON,
year after inevitable year, Diana, Apollo, and Theseus hadn't moved. The lifeless statues still held their poses; the jets still sprayed their streams. Mark wondered if Claire remembered jumping into the water as they overlooked the fountain now. Had she forgotten that night? She carefully brushed leaves off the bench before sitting down.

He studied Claire's face. A little more worn than the last time he'd seen her, her eyes a little older but unsettlingly familiar.

“You look beautiful,” he said.

Claire crossed her arms. “Don't you remember? You used to tell me I wasn't beautiful, I was symmetrical.”

“Oh,” he said, staggered by her comment. It was never meant as an insult; symmetry wasn't subjective, it was absolute. Her beauty could be quantified by mathematics, by divine measurements and ratios. “I've got something for you.” Mark reached into his pocket and handed Claire the wrapped present.