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| Photo montage: Michael Hale |
It's a hot, cloudless day at around two in the afternoon. A breeze has come up, but the hovering length of rope doesn't move.
At this moment its shadow falls perpendicular to the lines of paint that mark the boundaries of parking spaces. The lot has recently been repaved and the white lines are crisp against the tuxedo black of the new asphalt. There are no cars in the parking lot at this time.
A man who is wracked with indecision is thinking if I phone her right now I might catch her heading out the door for work. But he senses that this impulse is somewhat misguided, and he puts it down to the surge of caffeine from a recent cup of lukewarm coffee.
Try to imagine the complex caffeine molecules locking like LEGO blocks into the slots of some esoteric matrix of the man's brain chemistry. (Let your mind float tangentially enough to see it as a multicolored, animated simulation; or an illustration with arrows, captions and cross-sections of brain cells—a page from a Scientific American article, perhaps.)
It is foolish of the man to think that talking to her now will make any difference at all. She has told him outright that their relationship has no future. But it is not caffeine alone that changes his mind about making the call. He keeps falling into the memory of the shape of her nipple in his mouth, the damp coolness of it grazing his cheek...
Turn your attention back to the rope: No one has noticed it yet. The parking lot is not often frequented; the liquor store is the only viable business left in the strip mall and it does most of its business between five and seven o'clock. The neon COORS sign is barely visible in the glare of the midday light.
There is a beauty to this place that would have made the caffeine-addled man's forbears gasp: the fastidious uniformity of the lawns among the parking lots; the abundance of trees: mature oaks, maples, and butternuts lining the boulevards; the illusion that a solitary pedestrian is safe in his solitude, that the sun and odorless air are not lethal, but benign.
For the duration of this hypothetical visit, the great great grandfather or great great uncle, say, would forget the dull ache of his obliterated teeth and more than likely sink to the knees of his matted woolen trousers and say a few words of thanks—to God, the God he assumes has brought him here. He would reach beyond the sumptuous curve of the concrete curb of the intersection, where it dips to accommodate wheelchairs and baby carriages, and with a tentative finger touch the warm, pewter blanket of recent blacktop. He would be persuaded, for an instant, that he is indoors. There is no soil here, no dirt. Only this odd, black, sun-baked floor with its ribbon of concrete (like perfect pie crust) butting the thick carpet of grass. There is no smell of dung, bad breath, or sweat-marinated linen in this place. No scent of lilac, or hawthorn. Not an insect or bird in sight.
Back to the young man now, and his obsession with this particular woman. In the air, there is a ripple in the electromagnetic field fanning out across the square miles of the man's community. It has been triggered by his speed dialing of the woman's cellular phone number. (He is somewhat bereft; for he believes, in his solipsistically adolescent way, that his hesitation has sent her out the door and on her way to her job in the city—she has told him she works for a large brokerage firm in Minneapolis. The afternoon shift—which didn’t make sense at first, but he has come to accept it for what it is. The way he has come to terms with traffic congestion and his need for coffee.
Like a pebble tossed into a lake his call is just one of many thousands of EMF pulses saturating the air of this Midwest community. Somehow, this solitary signal, like a sperm cell finding its way to the egg (You may be tempted to digress once more and conjure up an image from a "The Learning Channel" special about the miracle of birth.) has reached the phone in the woman's purse.
The purse is on her dining room table. She is in the bathroom, and the chirp of the off-the-rack ringtone—and the screen that is glowing now, bathing her imitation tortoiseshell compact in a pulsing, mythic, neon—is lost in the flush of the toilet and the rush of water blasting from the vanity faucet.
She actually works at the liquor store, the store in suburban St. Paul strip mall where the three foot-long piece of rope hangs suspended in bright sunlight. She tells herself that her part time job is only a temporary position; she is planning to go back to school in the fall. She is hoping to be accepted into a Masters of Business Administration program at a college in Illinois. The expensive phone was a present to herself; she believes in the rituals of creative visualization. Mastering the multi-functionality of the fancy cutting-edge phone is a prefigurement of her future success in the business world. The shoes she wears, even to her job at the liquor store (the men she goes out with) all are calculated to redirect the flow of her life, move it in a positive direction; she sees these fine adjustments to her daily comings and goings as a form of nomadic feng shui.
She is thinking about the man who is calling her on the phone (and how relieved she is that she dumped him when she did) just as the water level raising the ball cock in the tank shuts off the valve. This verbal connection is lost on her: the risqué allusion that it conjures up—it would be more surprising if it wasn't beyond her ken; Alicia knows nothing about the workings of a toilet.
She remembers the feel of his tongue circling her nipple, and that he works for a prominent accounting firm out in St. Louis Park; a fact which, more so than the memory of his tongue, places a counterweight of regret on the scale pan of her decision.
The ends of the section of rope floating seven feet above the suburban liquor store parking lot are cut cleanly, as if by a precise and exceedingly sharp razor blade. The length of the rope at thirty degrees Celsius is exactly one meter. The temperature of the air around the floating rope has risen point seven degrees Celsius since the man dialed the woman's cellular phone number. This change in ambient temperature has made no appreciable difference to the length of the rope.
She hears the phone, at last, and answers it.
"Hello?"
"Hi. It's me, Jack (not his real name)—"
"I was just thinking about you—"
"Thinking about me? Isn't that weird? So was I. Thinking about you, I mean. So. Something on your mind? Something you wanted to say?”
This puzzles her—the circular nature of his approach to the conversation. "You called me," she says, after a moment.
"Yeah. I was going to call you and, well—I did. So. How are you?"
"Fine, I guess.”
There is a crackle on the line for an instant—an attenuated, digital stutter. Cell phone interference. This is a throwback to the noisy, scratchy, phone conversations her great grandmother used to have back in the nineteen-twenties, the nineteen-fifties. "I was just leaving—"
He hears what sounds like a modified, exasperated sigh—at least that's how he perceives it. Again, it could have been static.
"I'll call you later, okay? From work—" she says then.
“No. Don’t call me from work.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll be busy.”
“So, if I call you from somewhere else, you won’t be busy?” She is remembering why she stopped seeing him, now. His voice has triggered a memory of dread; an unspecific dread. The way he would exhaust her, even when he was giving her pleasure.
“Just call me from somewhere else, okay?”
“I’ve gotta’ go. I’m late.”
“lf you call me from work, I probably won’t pick up.”
“Fine.”
“Text me.”
“What?”
“Text me.”
“Text you?”
“Yeah. Text me and tell me you tried to call.”
She tries to put body language into what's going out through the mouthpiece. She sighs again, deeply—she hopes it’s getting through to him this time: her eagerness to be somewhere else. An analogue representation of a sigh, a cartoon sigh (although she doesn’t think about it in these terms; she would never use the word “analogue”—even in the context of her own stream of consciousness.) “Let’s just forget about the whole thing, okay? To be honest, I’ve got nothing to talk to you about.”
At the moment she sighs an uprising of thermal turbulence causes the rope suspended above the parking lot outside the liquor store to move. Not as you would suspect, up and down, or side to side; but within itself, so that the length of it changes. It compresses then expands no more than a millimeter. No one notices. No one has driven by in more than two hours; no one has come close enough to the parking lot to notice.
The period of flexing is twenty-one seconds. Its shadow has moved since the man dialed the woman’s phone number; it is now 8° off perpendicular to the parking demarcation lines.
The woman hangs up on him and turns off her phone. She puts the phone back into her purse and leaves the apartment.
By the time the woman arrives at the liquor store parking lot the rope is gone.
Copyright © 1995, 2011 by Michael Hale
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