Tina Hal - The Physics of Imaginary Objects

Mercy is flipping the deck of yoga cards, looking for her next pose. Jake is in the bedroom playing Internet poker. This is what he does when he is not at his flyspecked office in the history department or at yet another training camp on passive resistance. Ticking signals the dealing of hands. It sounds like a roulette wheel or a leaf caught in the spokes of a bike. Vrikshasana , tree pose; Mercy wobbles. She stares at her driste , her focal point, which is the thermostat on the wall. It is one of those old ones, brassy and pregnant with numbers. When the heat clicks on, a blue spark shoots out. Jake's Internet poker name is lowluck99; he says it is best to pretend you are a bad player to trick all the other players who are also pretending. When someone enters the table with a name like acesonly or TeddyKGB , you know he's a chump. Ardha Chandrasana , half moon, “I surrender into the flow of life.” Outside, children are shrieking. Mercy remembers a game she played as a child called “statues” in which the goal was to stay frozen mid-motion as long as possible. This now strikes her as a game made up by adults. Jake types in the bedroom. The players talk to each other via a little column that runs alongside the graphic of the poker table. They use abbreviations to comment on hands: TY for thank you, FY for fuck you, TYFY for thank you and fuck you, NH for nice hand. Eight months they have been trying now; they have different opinions on what magic might work. Mercy breathes out and sings Om , “I am a part of Life's joyful sound,” four parts: ah / oh / mmm / silence.

When they make love, Jake lights incense from Tibet. Mercy wears her kimono with the embroidered rabbit. To know it is the proper time, she uses a digital thermometer made in Germany. She places a dense Swedish foam pillow under her hips. The sheets are antique linen bought in Paris; they are worn thin from years of loving and washing on the part of a French farmer and his wife. Waiting on the bedside table is a pot of tea, the leaves harvested in Africa, packaged in cheap pastel paper boxes labeled with the names of ailments, and located in the grocery store's natural foods section. The rug is from Iran, the bookshelf from West Virginia. The condoms Jake used were made in Canada and have maroon wrappers; now, they linger in his sock drawer like love letters. The white-noise machine has many components, some from Mexico, some from Taiwan. Next to the teapot is a small fat rock that they found on a beach in Texas. Afterward, Mercy lies still and listens to the Williams-Sonoma egg timer tick off the minutes with metallic pings; this is the sound of hope. Under the bed: months of dust. It is bad luck to sweep there when trying to call a child home. It is bad luck to throw anything out.

The mystery of them — the old-time tilt and shadow. Black netting casting constellations over noses and cheeks. The fedora's come-hither modesty, the pillbox's nod to convention. Her grandfather owned a millinery shop in Des Moines sixty years ago. He had a blond-ringletted girl front for him, and he ordered hats and gloves from New York and San Francisco. They came in paper-board boxes cushioned in pink-tinted newsprint, smelling chemical, festooned with small hard fruits that popped white foam if pressed too hard. During the war, when the hats were all plain straw and skimpy felt, he ran a black market in silk stockings, which he kept under the counter in industrial-sized rat poison tins. His customers would kiss him thanks — waxy, crimson prints that earned him eye-rolls and gelid roast beef at home. The store folded in the late sixties, and he folded soon after, when Mercy was just a child, hardly old enough to remember his stories, the boater he constructed of blue typing paper, the lethal dust that sifted from a stretch of silk.

The sidewalk outside the coffee shop is littered with handbills promoting garage bands and diet supplements. Sometimes Jake is so quiet, especially in the car, that Mercy wants to run into something just to get a reaction. Her friend Morris says he spent his Saturday night hunting down cough syrup for his son. He went to three drugstores with the child strapped in his car seat, wheezing angrily. “The doctor said only brands without dextromethorphan.” Mercy brushes a beetle off her napkin. Its wings open, glossy and iridescent, as it drifts to the table leg. “And then he won't touch anything grape-or cherry-flavored. Three years old and he already knows his own mind.” Morris tells how he left the child in the car, shuddering with phlegm and weariness, while he went into each store. He says people were giving him dirty looks, but what do they know about a sick child. At the last drugstore, the one where he finally found the right medicine, bubble-gum-flavored, a man in an Army jacket stopped him on his way in. He asked Morris to buy him Evan Williams and knew exactly how much it cost. He had it in coins. “He said they didn't want him coming in there anymore.” Mercy sees the way her life is going to go: coffee with friends, silent car rides, plucking stray hairs from her face, shopping trips to large cities. Morris hits the table with the flat of his hand. “I bought for him, of course. I bought for him.”

Mercy reads the web forums moderated by female nurses and fertility experts with porn star names: Tiffany Titus, R.N., Ginger Mellon Bonaparte C.N.M. They are having a spate of what used to be called Indian summer. Even with the windows open and fans roaring, the house is steamy. Weeds are rotting in the drainage ditches, and by mid-afternoon, there is a haze in the air, stagnant clouds sifting down. The liveliest thread on the websites is about “motility issues.” “Have hubby take a cold shower thirty minutes before sex.” “Have hubby drink a cup of coffee — give the spermies a boost!” Baby talk for the childless. Mercy and Jake take turns watering the grass, clusters of gnats sticking to their knees. They have become superstitious about pleasure. She has spent hundreds of dollars on lingerie in the last eight months; the snap of elastic makes her think of her credit card. The weatherman is perpetually saying that this is the hottest year on record. At night, in the dark bedroom, sweat rises at the smallest touch. Mercy hangs her satin corsets and filmy underwear on the clothesline in the corner of the backyard, where they bulge and twist with the barometric pressure, as if trying to seduce the air.

He leans against the sink. She sits on the lip of the cabinet that holds the good china. Neither one of them ever bothers to polish the silver. He has just come back from a run and is shirtless, skin swelling from heat and salt. His nipples are perfectly aligned, only slightly darker than his skin, wrinkled like eyelids squeezed shut. The dog eats its food without looking up. These are long, happy fights. Jake says, “Her hair is clearly red; how can you not see that?” Mercy says, “The plot wasn't even consistent.” They switch positions mid-argument. Mercy chops carrots; Jake scoops out the rice. He levels the grains in the metal measure with his fingertips. They listen to Billie Holiday or the evening news as they cook. A little sadness makes the water boil faster. Another forest fire, a mudslide, an earthquake. A suicide bomber in a hotel pool. An air strike on a wedding party. When the flour tips off the counter onto the linoleum, their footprints materialize like magic, ghost steps, a diagram for dancing.