Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

Nobody was arguing with Jacob at this point, but he was all revved up and couldn’t stop.

“Art makes you feel things nobody ever taught you to feel before, because you’re feeling what some stranger felt when he, or you’d better bet she , made it. It’s living vicariously. It makes you love from inside someone else’s heart and hate with the acid in someone else’s guts. It’s the only thing on this planet that can make us leave the pathetic smallness of our insignificant speckness and not just connect but become someone else. It’s got to be metamorphic, or it’s just fucking television.”

Then Jacob stood, triumphant, and exposed himself to everyone. The snow swirled around his head as he brought his hand to his lips and cried, “TOOO DOOO! TOOO DOOO!” He saluted George, marched out of the tub, went inside, and passed out facedown on the couch.

“William,” Irene said, “come help me get a towel over him so he doesn’t die of pneumonia or something.”

William looked away until Irene was in her robe, then climbed out to join her. They went inside together, and it was the last that George or Sara saw of either of them until morning.

Alone together at last, George moved around to Sara’s side of the hot tub and put his arms around her. She laid her head against his firm shoulder, and they sat that way, in silence. The sky above was pink-gray and starless, as it always was in the city. They gazed across Lexington at the office windows. Far below were taxi horns and car alarms and the rumble of the M102, going south from Harlem to the East Village. These were the noises of their great, unsleeping city. The familiar creaks and groans of their home.

George hoped he looked calm, even though he was cursing himself for not bringing the ring back outside. He didn’t know where he would have hidden it, exactly, but this seemed like the moment he’d been waiting for. But how to get back inside and come out again? Could he say he had to go to the bathroom? That’d kill the mood.

He was overcome with a feeling of rightness, as if for once his outside matched his in — and yet he was stuck. To get up would be to ruin it. And as they sat there, the silence lengthened, and he began to worry it had gotten too long, and so he tried to think of something to say — but the only thing he could think of was the accident he’d seen on the way back from Long Island. He didn’t want to think about it, but there it was. A perverse pricking began on his lips. He had to say something, and the only thing he wanted to say would, again, most assuredly ruin everything.

“I saw a dead body today.” God, the relief to say it out loud.

Sara gasped and squirmed around to look him in the eye. “At work?”

George shook his head. “No. On the LIE. That accident I told you about. A guy died.”

He had nearly missed it. He’d been sitting in traffic, thinking about Sara and what he would say to her that night at the party. He’d been watching the snow start to fall and checking the ring in his pocket every few minutes. Then at long last, he’d come to the head of the bottleneck. Having been sitting in the car that whole time absolutely fuming about rubberneckers, he was eager to speed angrily ahead. He wasn’t going to look. He wanted to prove that he was above such petty gawking.

But then he had. At first all he had seen was a green Isuzu with a great big hole in the windshield. He had been taken in by the size of the hole, and then he’d noticed that there was no one in the car. Of course , he’d thought, they’ve gotten him out by now. He’s back by the ambulance getting insurance forms filled out. But then George thought — what if? What if he had sailed through the glass — headfirst — the initial impact almost certainly knocking him out, if not killing him instantly? What if he had gone straight through the glass and been launched into the air (George could see it happening in slow motion, as in a terrible soap opera), and then had landed on the pavement and crumpled—

And then George had seen it. The body. Not his imagination’s pale little TV version but real, there, on the pavement. Right where the horrid calculator in his brain intuited it should be, given the weight of a grown man versus the resistance of a windshield versus the momentum of sixty-five miles per hour rapidly become zero, launching him into flight while gravity, that sick constant, pulled him to the pavement. Right there. The man was there and not there at all.

Thank God the man’s face had been turned away; the body was hunched over, head bent to the pavement as if he were merely praying.

All this had happened in just three or four seconds. Soon the honking of the other impatient drivers brought George back to reality, and he’d sped off. But in that brief instant, he’d felt that man’s impact with the glass as if it had been his own. He’d felt his own knees hitting the pavement — his own face coming down, hard.

He had been trying to shake that feeling the whole night, and only now that he’d mentioned it to Sara was the feeling easing. He stroked her neck gently with the side of his hand. It was a moment before he realized that she was looking down. Long, dark tendrils of hair fell around her face.

George could see that she was crying. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it about the accident?”

Sara shook her head.

He began to panic. “Did Jacob say something to you?”

She sobbed. “Irene went back to the doctor.”

George shushed her gently. “It’s going to be nothing. She’s young. She’s practically a vegan. She’s basically Wonder Woman. Don’t worry.”

But Sara would worry; George knew that. In fact he loved it when she worried about things, because it made him confident for the both of them. That was the best part of love, he thought. Better than sex or not waking up alone or cooking without having to halve all the ingredients. Sara made him braver, and George made her calmer. Vicarious. That was what love could do. This was the reason he wished he’d thought of, before.

A few light nudges with his nose made Sara turn up and close her eyes to kiss him. The snow was really picking up now. Sleepily, they watched the flakes dancing down across the street into the rising steam above St. Bartholomew’s and all across Midtown. Down it came, over the Village and the Bronx, blowing across both dark rivers and along the whole of Long Island. Piling high on the steel guardrails and concrete medians, and the roads that ran through the city and out in all directions.

George knew the time had come. Ring or no ring, this was his moment, and it would never be quite like this again. He loved this woman, and he knew he would never stop loving her — first, better, always, most. He could see Sara’s heart pounding. Somehow she always knew what he was about to say.

1

On Tuesday, George Murphy arrived at the office to discover that his star was on the verge of collapse. Perhaps in some metaphorical way, but also actually—237 Lyrae V, a prestellar core in the Ring Nebula that George had been studying for the past four years was experiencing a highly unexpected gravitational collapse. This, at least, according to the note he’d found on his desk that morning from Allen Ling, his cubicle mate at the astrophysics department of Brookhaven University. He had scrawled “ She’s gonna blow! ” at the top of a spreadsheet whose rows and columns — much to George’s annoyance — did appear to delineate the variations in temperature and density that might characterize the beginning of a collapse.

Not looking up, George said, “You are a delight to work with.”