Tina Hal - The Physics of Imaginary Objects

The Chinese film they are seeing is folded away in the smallest theater, and the only other people watching are two elderly women who whisper through the credits. Morris puts his hand over hers without looking at her. Mercy holds her breath as the colors stain the screen. A chartreuse dress, gold lanterns, indigo streets burnished by lamplight. The subtitles flash too brightly and create a sensation of flickering vertigo. Mercy turns to Morris, finds his mouth, sinks into a kind of oblivion, the long kisses she remembers from high school, the kind that went on until it wasn't about desire anymore, was simply the pursuit of texture, dark fleshy spaces that stretched until everything felt like an extension of one's own body. She relaxes into this moment, despite Morris's inept rubbing at her shoulders, the giant paper cup of soda with its straw squeaking between them, the chirps and gongs of the fight scene. When she pulls away, her mouth is tacky with saliva and Morris looks blissfully at her, like a dog , she thinks and is startled by her bitterness, the extent of her betrayal. She tries to pay attention to the movie, but the subtitles seem wrong for the action, and she doesn't know if it is because she has missed crucial information or if it is just shoddy translation. Her jeans are wet as if something inside her is weeping, flooding with the onscreen dialogue, a language she doesn't understand.

Someone is calling and hanging up. The chalk Xs continue to bloom on their property, and Jake refuses to get caller ID. Mercy hacks his hotmail account in search of chat room hussies and grad school crushes. She sniffs his underwear, finds only the musky almond scent of him, scans his shirt collars like a fifties housewife. At work, she goes over their finances while the Catherines mutter at their sewing machines. No plot is beyond imagination: offshore accounts, angry bookies, a looking-glass family in Tennessee. A gray Cadillac passes her twice while she is running; a woman in the coffee shop is wearing the same cardigan as she is. She imagines her china rearranged, a shadow in the bathroom mirror, every horror movie cliché burned into her brain during countless bad date drive-ins and basement sleepovers in high school. When she calls Morris to ask if he is stalking her, he says, “It was just a couple of kisses, pretend we were drunk.” And then he laughs his horsey laugh, and she knows there is no way that Morris is creeping around her house at night. It is the season of thunderstorms that blow up without warning and a sky that darkens as if a filter has clicked into place. One evening, when the power has gone out and Mercy and Jake are sitting on the porch, lightning strikes the neighbor's fir tree. The air turns purple, their fillings hiss, and the light is so thick it hurts their sinuses. In that moment, she sees the figure in their yard, half hidden behind the elm. She runs toward the spot, leaving Jake shouting after her, knowing that nothing will be waiting there, just the smell of burning sap and loosed rain, the sound of water hitting skin.

“I'm mortified,” Mercy tells her sister as they line up for yoga class. She is visiting her in New York amid meetings with department store buyers. Her sister is the one person she can tell about Morris because they aren't particularly close. They have a two-hour threshold for mutual tolerance, worked out after rooming together for a year of college and nearly killing each other over mildewed dishrags and borrowed belts. The yoga instructor greets them all with a half-bow and ushers them into the small, mirror-lined room. He is shirtless and his skin is ruddy-tan, stretched tight over his belly like a roasted pig. They start with cat tilts, and her sister whispers, “Is it serious?” “Of course not,” Mercy hisses and feels the arch of her spine crimp. They face the wall for dancer pose, and Mercy says, “It's fucked up, right, making out with my best friend while my husband and I are trying to get pregnant?” She stumbles into her sister and they both yelp. The instructor squints at them and intones, “Get grounded.” During boat pose, Mercy inhales the dust of the mat as her sister rocks placidly beside her saying, “You just needed a little attention.” In corpse pose, she can feel every bone of her back touching the floor, and she imagines her body a crypt, each vertebra a walled-up secret. The instructor places his hands beside her ears to realign her head, and a small space opens at the base of her neck, radiates relief.

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.

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.