The Physics of Imaginary Objects (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize) (12 page)

Trapped on the Subway Due to a Fire on Another Track

The scratched Plexiglas gives the feel of an aquarium, one of those cheap globes at Kmart Mercy mooned over as a child, each studded with a plump goldfish that her mother refused to buy her because she said they wouldn't last a week. The car is on a section of track closed between two walls, and Mercy is late for an appointment with a woman who makes flowers out of old calligraphy workbooks, every petal an imperfect word. She scuffs her pumps against the accordion floor and reads the newspaper over the shoulder of the man next to her. Cancelled shuttle launches, grilled chicken recipes, bomb scares that turn out to be lunch sacks. At the last station, waiting for the train to arrive, she called Jake on her cell phone, had a frizzled conversation of last syllables and interruptions until she said “I miss you,” and hung up, not sure what he heard. The walls were papered with Rodenticide warnings, forbidding people to touch or eat the bait without specifying what the bait was. A man slept on a folded blanket under the escalator while a woman next to him sat alert, scowling, as if daring anyone to disturb his delicate refuge. It broke Mercy's heart to see them, but then the train rattled in, blowing sweaty air in front of it, and she was pushing for a seat, not knowing yet about the fire burning ahead of them, not yet thinking of the orange fish and their conscribed pirouettes, their languorous acceptance of their fates.

Mercy Goes to Her Ob/Gyn for the Third Time This Year

Her doctor, who is a little Texan redhead, drawls, “It's time to start looking at other options.” Pink plumes of reproductive propaganda flutter in the air conditioning. “Y'all have just about exhausted the natural route,” she says and pats Mercy's paper-covered thigh, clicks her pen, draws a pamphlet on fertility treatments from her clipboard. She barely looks at Mercy's ovulation charts, four months cross-stitched with temperatures, mucus descriptions and do-it dates. In the park across the street, mothers yell at their children on the slides and Mercy tosses the doctor's pamphlets in the trash can atop ice cream ruins and yesterday's news. Although profoundly unreligious, she is superstitious, needle-phobic, lazy and in love with the romance of old-fashioned cock and womb, candlelit, sweaty, pungent reproduction. She figures this is a sign or more likely, a punishment for procrastination and that her best defense is graceful concession. She summons up glamorous trips, unencumbered old age, reading novels until noon, starts exchanging one fantasy for another. A chalked X greets her from her driveway, boxed like a hopscotch square, and she sneaks into the backyard to cry, knowing Jake is calculating the odds on the computer upstairs. The corner of the yard is overgrown and shady, and she crouches in the ferns. If she is quiet, she can almost hear someone else's heartbeat, someone else's breath, as if coming to her from a distance, from a future she hasn't yet imagined.

Jake Talks about Defoliants Over Dinner

Dioxin, demeton, cacodylic acid. Mercy takes this as a hopeful sign; maybe he is missing his job, longing for a lectern, research trips, access to microfiche. Miscarriage, mutation, birth defect. He rolls the word,
teratology
, on his tongue with the black beans. Midway through the meal, she goes to the kitchen for a bottle of wine and two glasses. The look on his face is that of someone surprised by disaster, the click of a land mine, the drone of a plane's engine. “Pour it,” she says. She is tired; in the crib of her pelvis, she feels her ovaries wither. He fills each glass without spilling a drop, a terrible competence. The bottle sounds heavier than it should when he puts it down on the table. They sit without eating and watch the resin spread like poison across the surface of the wine.

When Mercy Goes Outside to Pick Basil for Dinner

She finds a man crouching by her back door who fumbles chalk into his pocket, says, “I thought you weren't home. Your car &” She says, “We're having the timing belt replaced,” almost apologetically. When he turns his face toward her, she recognizes the man whose dog they hit, and she recoils as if the windshield is breaking in front of her again. Into the awkward pause she asks, “Would you like to join us for dinner?” When she goes upstairs to get Jake, he hisses, “There are limits to politeness.” Back down-stairs, at the kitchen table, the man sits with a sweating bottle of Corona untouched in front of him. Jake says, “Hi there buddy, long time no see, what have you been up to?” Mercy says, “It's not much, just pasta.” Jake flings open the refrigerator and says, “Ham, we've got ham, and brie and look at these plums, gorgeous, big as fists.” He is yanking food out and slamming it onto the table. “How about another beer?” He opens the rest of the six-pack of beers and puts them one by one in front of the man, pulls containers of olives and cherry tomatoes out of the refrigerator, piles pita bread atop takeout fried rice atop romaine. Carrots tumble over blocks of butter and eggs tremble at the edge of the table as the refrigerator rattles to life, leaks its cold air over them. The man doesn't touch a thing. Jake takes one of the beers and drinks it in noisy swallows, drops it onto the table where the bottle cracks into three pieces. Mercy says, “Please, Jake.” The man reaches across the table for the shards, stacks them into a lopsided pyramid. Jake asks, “Have you ever seen plums that big?” softly, as if truly puzzled by their appearance.

What They Learn

All the man's knuckles are bruised brown, and Mercy wonders if he is diabetic. He works the night shift at the ammunition plant out by the interstate. He checks the plastic honeycombs filled with bullets as they slide down the line to the boxing station. If one slot is empty, his job is to find the proper caliber and fill it before the case passes out of reach. As the light fades, Jake rummages for candles. He finds two his nephew made him last year in a class project—wax-filled seashells that tip on the table as if rocked by invisible waves. During the day, the man refills candy machines at local restaurants. Mercy can imagine it perfectly, the click of the candy like bullets filling the glass jars, the sweet metallic residue the man washes from his hands each morning and evening. The beer is finally getting to Jake, and he says, “Why the Xs?” The dog whines at the door to be let in, and they all pretend not to hear it. The man fingers a bit of bread that has fallen next to his plate, rolls a ball and flattens it. “It's funny,” he says, eyes trained on the row of crumbs he is aligning. “I used to yell at that idiot mutt ten times a day.” Mercy touches his elbow, hesitantly. His arm goes still as if she is a wild animal he is afraid of startling. He says, “You guys are nice people, good people, I can tell.” She clears the dishes as Jake leads him to the front door. Jake comes back with a plastic tub half-filled with Chiclets and says, “He wouldn't take no for an answer.” Mercy remembers chicken-fried steak at a roadhouse called the Chuck Wagon near her grandmother's farm, the begged nickel, a handful of lacquered gum, the blissful ache of sugar seeping into teeth.

Mercy and Jake Go Backpacking

There is something she loves about it, beyond the trees and the lichen and the clear streams. It is the release of knowing the only things she has to think about are shelter and food, how to get from one point to the next. By the end of the third day, her shoulders and hipbones are too sore to be touched. Jake blows on them, singing songs he remembers from church camp. The tent is tiny, a nylon shroud they share. “What will we do now?” she asks. He sings, “All is well, safely rest.” He says, “There is no limit to loveliness,” and his breath floats over the raw places. Rocks push through the foam pads, and trees growing on the bones of those cut years ago inch toward the night sky. Everything struggles upward, as if the stars are apertures to brighter worlds. Mercy and Jake eat freeze-dried beef stroganoff with the map stretched between them. It belonged to his father, and its creases are white with use. Some things have changed: landslides, shifted rivers, dried-up waterholes, and new highways. They often are lost, often must rely on nostalgia to guide them.

Mercy Searches Out Small Graces

This is the year of missing children and confessed serial killers who go by acronyms like revamped fast-food restaurants. This is the year of media alerts, dead girls in cheerleading outfits, and alarmist digital-ticker headlines synchronized to symphonies in B minor. Mercy and Jake's neighbor believes the spirits of five children circle every woman's head, waiting to be called down into the bloody mess of her womb. She says her seventh child is one of theirs, a celestial adoption. In the driveway, over a borrowed pair of hedge clippers, she tells Mercy about the child's surprise asthma, the nine-hour emergency-room visit last week, the stockpile of hermetically sealed inhalers taking up the toothbrush drawer. She says all this while looking accusatorily at Mercy, or rather, at the space over Mercy's left shoulder. She says, “He is still our little angel though, a perfect angel.” The ice cream truck squeals at the corner. Mercy opens and closes the clippers,
snip snip
, as if cutting holes in the neighborhood. All the missing children seem to pass through Florida. Mercy likes to imagine them there in the swamps, swaddled in mosquitoes and moss, feet happily muddy, wrestling the alligators, loving them for their bumps.

Like a Snake, a Cicada's Greatest Art Is Its Doubling

Late August. The things they planted have grown and been plucked or eaten or given away. No more Xs bloom on their siding. Jake builds a bonfire of vines and tree branches in the backyard. The charred ring that results is as solid as the moon. Mercy chews hard lozenges of gum and spits them into the garden or swallows them.
Seven years
, she thinks, but maybe that is bad luck and mirrors or growing a new skin. There is a lull in the evening news, and the anchors turn to politics and taxes. A new season of disasters is predicted, but no one can ever truly know what might happen. Earlier in the summer, they helped their entomologist friend tag cicadas with white dots. Each bug was a hard suitcase of longing and patience, difficult to hold—their hearts were so steady and droning. As a child, Mercy used to tie them onto strings and launch them into the air as if casting a bit of her own heart into orbit. Now, sitting on the porch with Jake, drinking day-old wine, she spots a paper-skin ghost of a cicada gripping her chair leg and is suddenly awash in happiness, recalling the way these somnolent insects sip tree sap and wait out the dark, the way they sing themselves from the ground.

Thanks to all the kind and patient editors who published stories from this collection in their super fabulous literary magazines and who were scrupulous and inspired in their edits. “By the Gleam of Her Teeth, She Will Light the Path Before Her” appeared in the
Collagist.
“Erratum: Insert ‘R' in ‘Transgressors'” appeared in
3rd Bed.
“Faith Is Three Parts Formaldehyde, One Part Ethyl Alcohol” appeared in the
minnesota review.
“For Dear Pearl, Who Drowned” appeared in
Water-Stone Review.
“In Your Endeavors, You May Feel My Ghostly Presence” appeared in
descant.
“There Is a Factory in Sierra Vista Where Jesus Is Resurrected Every Hour in Hot Plastic and the Stench of Chicken” appeared in
Quarterly West.
“This Is a Love Story, Too” appeared in
Fairy Tale Review.

An extra special thanks to Joseph Reed and Amanda Raczkowski of the wonderful Caketrain Press who published “All the Day's Sad Stories” as a chapbook and made it more lovely than I ever could have imagined.

Much gratitude to The Corporation of Yaddo for a magical snowy February.

And many, many thanks to Drue Heinz, Renata Adler, and the University of Pittsburgh Press for putting their faith in this odd collection and making an actual book of it. I am especially grateful to Deborah Meade for her meticulous and intuitive edits.

Thank you to Trudy Lewis, friend, mentor, and writer extraordinaire, whose sense of humor and integrity have taught me how to make a writing life work. Thank you also to Jeff Williams, whose unshakeable support has been invaluable. And thanks to all of my friends, students, and colleagues at Hamilton College whose kindness and enthusiasm have made my teaching life a joy.

Love to all of my family, especially my parents, who never flinched when I talked about being a writer. And to Hoa, who always steps in to do what I cannot. And to Tycho, who came into my world and blew it apart in beautiful ways.

Book design and composition by Landesberg Design, Pittsburgh, Pa., typeset in Charter ITC and Whitney.

Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc., on 60 lb. Natures Book Natural, an FSC certified paper containing 30% post-consumer waste.