Page 48 - WTP Vol. XIII #1

Physics (continued from preceding page)
In 1930, every listener was intent upon the first sign of interruption as if importance were loitering out- side. Even as the Wagner returned, an aria at 21:00 without the solace of a broadcast excuse, those listen- ers must have shifted in their chairs and begun to whisper as a woman cried beautifully in song about unrequited desire.
The Uncertainty Principle
Lately, discomfort so deep beneath my ribs, I mas- tered sleeplessness, remembering my mother often closing her bedroom door to suffer in what she believed was secrecy. A book reminded me that spiders, on average, live through seven gen- erations of the insects they feed upon. I’m passing that number along like gossip, citing age as coyly as a storybook-Victorian-maiden six years after my long-delayed retirement.
In the changing room, during my first visit to the im- aging center, I noticed a belt hooked through a tar- nished buckle, forgotten by someone who must have been delaying his exam, sliding it needlessly through six loops of his pants, and I thought, undoing my jeans, his widow might already wonder where he left that belt she cannot see no matter how many morn- ings she’s opened his closet, closed it, and found its order a bit unsound.
Before the CT scan, the technician said, “You look good.” She meant my chances, the odds tilted my way because I showed no symptoms in my face. As if confirming, I held my breath beyond what she asked for, telling myself I didn’t want mistakes made. Soon, while I was dressing again, the clothes I was putting on seemed stranger than the clinic’s gown. I sat and listened to a man coughing in the adjoining closet.
“Goddamn this thing,” the man who coughed in that next-door closet said, and I agreed. Once I fumbled my shoelaces tight, I had a specialist to see about the photographs of a thing that hung in his office like juried art. What I never mentioned was the man who measured each day in seconds, calculating, upon wak- ing, where he had entered obsession, picking up the count precisely to monitor an impossible-to-deacti- vate bomb.
In a shared cartoon, the dead, in hell, watch a video of flames on a small television because, one remarks, annual fire-safety education is required. Though
I’ve laughed, Satan looks serious, as do the recent dead who welcome, perhaps, instruction on how to endure eternity. For years, I’ve rehearsed how to
manage the inevitable news, training to accept the worst-case like a fresh prescription to be indefi- nitely filled.
Some mornings, the deaths of former students are announced on a private Facebook page. Obituaries posted. Photographs arranged by age. Each time,
as condolence, one classmate posts five sad-faced emojis, sometimes three or four as if grief can be rated. At my fiftieth reunion, three teachers were seated together at a table set for four, and I imagined a very recent death among them. I collect those lost students like books to be autographed later or, I fear, left unsigned.
Perpetual Motion
Once upon a time, in the public schools of the United States, there were Sputnik children, closed in class- rooms geared to “accelerated” until someone learned to launch satellites that would orbit forever. While my chosen classmates and I struggled or succeeded with advanced math and science, there were rockets on the television news that tumbled and exploded and locked us tighter to physics and math while most of us, waited and waited for Rumplestiltskin to spin our homework into gold.
He never arrived, of course, but once, for a few months, my Chicken Little younger son feared the fall of space junk, that Russian debris could find him like lightning. I told him we were safe, ignorant and lying as if I expected a safe landing for plummeting garbage.
What I told him, after the remains of a space sta- tion fell harmlessly to Earth, was the story of Vil- lard de Honnecourt’s angel, the one he designed to perpetually turn, its finger always pointing toward the sun, swiveling its way into eternity like a com- forting myth.
The theories about perpetual motion seem ludicrous, yet someone always hypothesizes again, guess-
ing Bobby, Billy, Jack, and Dave as if we were rich with chances at a personal Rumplestiltsken, as if machinery were as simple as common names. De Honnecourt’s promise wheel for perpetual motion was whirled by hammers, surrogates for water, and moved nothing at all.
I’ve started far more than one wheel of my own, ex- pecting a miracle from each book I write even though the demon of foolishness has caught me by the shirt to show me how easily things are jammed. The
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