first published in 21 Stars Review, Feb. 2007 (electronic)
In return for the many things she provided him, Joseph kept Marie inside one of his universes.
Today, Joseph cuts a slice of cake. The apartment is quiet. Quiet and clean.
“I love you in a place in my heart from which no sound emits. What do you make of that?” This is what he would have said if sound waves were quicker. She is in blue in the living room, scratching at the floor. Her breasts are full and inflated underneath her.
He comes closer, kneels down next to her. She is peering at the wood; she seems to be looking between the planks.
“Today I sat for five and half hours working on one small part of an enormous problem set.”
She replies, “I did, too.”
“All my colleagues are nervous, still no real proof for any of this. It’s only science if it’s testable, otherwise, they call it philosophy.”
“Philosophy is a nightmare.”
“What, Marie?”
“Today there was a little bit of philosophy. It crept it at the corners of my eyes, I tried to smash it but it slid down here. Down here to the floor, got between the floorboards.”
Joseph settles down and breathes deep, listening. She continues.
“I thought of your little curled up dimensions, deep down here, between the floor boards, I thought about what you said about gravity and how maybe, they say, maybe it is so weak here in our dimension, because it actually exists in others. I was thinking about how it doesn’t seem like gravity is weak because it can do things like keep things us from floating up, and make things you send up come back down, and make people, when they fall, when they fall, it can make them fall hard, it can make them…”
Her face is only slightly red, but it is glistening, and Joseph can see and smell that again today she hasn’t bathed and she is sweating, dark stains under her arms and perspiration on her forehead.
She continues to plunge her fingernails, one by one between the floorboards.
“Today,” Joseph says, “I thought about the tiniest parts of existence, about how we’ll never really know, know, for sure, if all there is is theory. Whatever theory explains the world best is the right one.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Truth is just whatever the best theory is. And I was thinking about erratic behavior of these tiny…particles, strings, whatever it is that is at the root of everything, we can tell if it even exists, we can’t place it, we can’t pinpoint it, we see it…get this Marie…we identify it by its nonexistence…this is where it isn’t, so this is where it is. It is where it isn’t. Do you understand? When it isn’t here, the best we can say is that it’s somewhere else, because it was here just a minute ago and it will come back.”
Marie leans forward holding her stomach. “No, no, no, no. It should be where it is.”
Joseph touches her wet back. He is used to erratic behavior. It is all he ever thinks about. He considers the future as completely unpredictable. He believes a train will appear in his living room, or he will inadvertently step into a wormhole and end up in the middle of space millions of years in the past. He believes in quantum physics the way seventh day Adventists believe in the return of Jesus. The future is epic and wild and just around the corner.
“Today something appeared to trace a trajectory of truth.”
“What do you mean, Marie?”
She cannot not speak in specifics, so she points to the bedroom. Joseph walked in. “What?”
With great difficulty, Marie pulls herself up and follows him in. The arrow she had traced in the window’s fog was now only an oily smear.
“What, Marie?”
“One direction, Joseph, one direction only. I see it, you have so many, so many dimensions, ten or eleven, all around you, all curled up and waiting. But I, I lost three of them. I can only go one way. I can only go one way.”
Joseph studies the small smear on the window. “Which way is it?”
“Down. If it wasn’t for this body, you wouldn’t still be here.”
“Don’t say that.”
“If it wasn’t for this body, she would still be here.”
She provided him with cake, made from flour she scooped with her own hands and milk from her own heavy, painful breasts.
She provided him with philosophy in the form of clean rooms and thin dresses. Rooms so clean with wet soap.
Finally, she provided him with a possible daughter, made from an egg and sperm and words and candles and the great hope for more dimensions.
He provided her with gravity, the knowledge that gravity was weak, that if all dimensions were present, gravity would be as strong as electromagnetism, that it would crush us; hold us so tight to the ground that we couldn’t move.
She will tell him now, why she slipped, why the floor was wet, why it was so hard on her belly when she fell. She must tell him it is because his physics does not explain that gravity is strong, that it is strong enough now, as it is, to crush us, to hold us so tight to the ground that we cannot move.
