Tina Hal - The Physics of Imaginary Objects

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.