Tina Hal - The Physics of Imaginary Objects

This is the year of nine hurricanes. Mercy loves the whole system of it, the alternating names that transform the storms into petulant cousins or strange great-aunts and — uncles, the visitors who will not leave. She would not be so sanguine if she didn't live halfway across the country where the storms peter out in flurries of rain and hail. As a teenager, Mercy read only tales of true love and stigmata stories. She Googles “hurricane names,” finds the FEMA-for-kids website, and is happy to live in a country that packages disaster for children. In dreams, faceless lovers and mysterious wounds still appear — fantasies of being chosen. She learns that only women's names were used for hurricanes until 1979. She learns that the list for Atlantic hurricanes may include French, Spanish, and English names. There is no explanation of which languages may be drawn upon for Pacific hurricanes. The romances she has given up, but she can't resist a good stigmata. On the satellite photo, a hurricane is an ephemeral thing, a veil of spinning mist. Sergio, Olaf, and Georgette. Flossie, Seymour, and Wallis. Visions of silent-film stars and bingo nights. Recently departed distant relatives summoned as if in séance, safe in a circle of clasped hands.

Catherine B., Catherine P., and Bridget crimp and sew and harden hat forms all day in a rented storefront downtown next to the bank. They are thirty years older than Mercy and call her honey pie or sweetpea when they are angry. They wear gasmask-like filters when they work with fixatives or fire-retardant. Mercy tells them her troubles; the buzz of the sewing machine loosens her tongue. One day, the mayor stops by on his tour of local businesses, and the Catherines fuss over him and force him to eat a brownie. Bridget ignores him because of the zoning decision that allowed a Walgreens to be built at the corner of her neighborhood. From her office upstairs, Mercy hears Catherine B.'s seal laugh and smells acrid whiffs of sizing and scalded coffee. She provides them with health insurance and Christmas bonuses and a refrigerator stocked with Diet Coke. They give her advice-column stories of surprise babies and chocolate-flavored calcium chews. They are hopeful and resigned at the same time. They get calls on their cell phones from their grown-up, moved-out children and their retired husbands that involve phrases like cream of mushroom soup , and the third time's the charm , and it was there yesterday.

It is autumn and late at night and the moon is shriveling like a mum. Mercy buys olives, soda water, bright red pistachios. She has cravings; sometimes she licks salt off her index finger if there is nothing else in the house. The store is air-conditioned and fluorescent. There is a frost warning for tonight. Mercy and Jake wrapped their shrubs with burlap, and now it looks like a row of decapitated heads rings their house. The sliding doors at the front of the store whisper. Mercy has a hard time triggering automatic things — doors, faucets, towel dispensers. She spends a good portion of her time in public waving her hands at electronic eyes. In the fish section, the banks of ice are barren. The salad bar is lidded and dark. An old woman in a motorized cart is parked in the produce area. “There is no cilantro,” she says plaintively. Mercy weighs limes in her palm. “There is no cilantro,” the woman says again, this time as if in warning. Mercy brushes her fingertips across the paper skins of garlic, lifts a cantaloupe to sniff. Don McLean serenades the wide aisles. Somewhere, loaves of bread are rising.

“Please not the fake fur,” Mercy says. “We just had those machines oiled.” Felt pumpkins, candy corn onesies, Red Riding Hood with ruffled panties — things to be gobbled. This is how the Catherines talk about the babies, as delicacies. “I just want to eat him up,” they say. And, “Her hand is so perfect, I could bite it off.” Hungry, aggressive grandmother love. Mercy knows the feeling, the ache in the jaw at the sight of a plump baby, the urge to chew and chew until that sweet thing is a part of her. When she was a teenager, they set up an X-ray at the mall on Halloween; kids in plastic skeleton outfits peered into the monitor at their ghost candy, waited for a needle or razor blade to fluoresce. Jake buys the most lumpish pumpkins he can find, the underrepresented pumpkins. Halloween night, they have few visitors. Their house is old and dark with a tipping porch, set back from the street. Morris comes with his son, who is dressed as a caterpillar or a leech. Mercy and Jake give him too much candy and go back to the doorway with their Tupperware bowl of packaged offerings, hoping their friendly silhouettes will draw the children. It's a pastoral scene: the scent of cider doughnuts and burning leaves, hollowed squash blackened by leftover citronella tealights, recorded moans blowing across the yard on wisps of nylon spiderweb. Miniature gods and demons drift down the street, demanding their empty sacks be filled.

It used to be striped rusty red and white, tea-stained and molting over the town. The pale blue paint makes the tower fade into the sky, and the town's name, stenciled in large black script, seems to float unmoored overhead. Morris's car is filled with burger wrappers and cases of generic diet cola. Mercy nudges a sock under the floor mat. Morris has been divorced a year; his beard is unkempt and he clutches her shoulder whenever he makes a joke. The scaffolding is still up on the north side of the tower. “Let's climb,” Morris says. The layers of paint are lumpy on the cold rungs and her sandals slip before catching. Once they reach the top, the town is spilled before them, so quiet that she hears the courthouse clock hiccup before it chimes the half hour. She hiccups too, suddenly absurdly aware of time's passing. Morris puts his hand on her shoulder. “It's nothing,” she says. They eat lunch in the car. Morris takes a carton of cut-up vegetables and a shaker of salt substitute out of a paper sack. Mercy has a bagel and a child-sized yogurt for which she has forgotten a spoon. He crunches away at half of a red pepper, and she thinks how bitter-sweet it is, the belief in self-improvement.

The streets disappear, and Jake and Mercy hole up in the house watching the sci-fi channel. That evening, they unearth the snowshoes from the garage and head toward dinner at Jake's department chair's house. They take the shortcut over the golf course, leaning into each other as they slip down hills, and come out on the main street almost directly across from Mercy's shop. The electricity has held, and her hats glow in the window display like alien spacecraft, quivering in the draft. Other people are out on their snowshoes as well, whole families with babies bundled into carriers and dogs bobbing in the drifts. There is a carnival atmosphere, the scent of woodsmoke and roasting bird, the carrion yells of the children flinging snowballs. Jake takes her hand; the warmth radiates as if they are holding the heart of a small animal between them. When they get to the house, they unpack Ziplocs of nutmeg-scented mashed sweet potatoes from Jake's bag, their contribution, along with a bouquet of icicles pilfered from the bus shelter's overhang, sharp as knives, already melting.