October 16, 2008
FASTER THAN A SPEEDING BULLET
| BECCA DE LA ROSA |
It was neither a bird nor a plane. Callista and I sat on the roof garden, drinking cold, clear beer and discussing lust. “What are we going to do?” Callista asked, meaning a tapestry of things, calling me by her husband’s name. We smashed our beer bottles like fortune cookies to decide our fates. Under the trip of high-heeled shoes along the flagstones, the glass shards looked like shattered bones.
Callista is a piano tuner. She goes to work in her blue VW van, and every note in every key lives inside her smiling mouth. I wanted to bite her bottom lip as though my teeth might be the needle on a record player, all that was needed to release a river of music, and I would be flooded, I would drown. Callista is married to a piano teacher. He does not play the piano.
”What is it?” Callista asked, the first time she looked up. I’ll give you a clue. It was neither a bird nor a plane.
These days are hard times for those who believe in the science of flight, in airfoils and frictional drag and turbofans. The days of internal combustion engines are numbered. Aerodynamics is a ritualistic study, and an esoteric one. I’ll give you a clue. The speed of light is no longer a formula that rests neatly in your mind like a mummy in its sarcophagus. The speed of light is a runner bean, and it has grown flame-red flowers and seed pods. How did this happen? Science has given birth to mythology.
This man, he was born in red and blue, he can see in the dark, for him the laws of physics are medieval artistic perspective, two-dimensional. This man has a taste for latex and leather. He married a costume designer. His children grow up to fear him, but he is a thoughtful man, his fist is strong and just, he can save the world. He has dreams in which he is a caterpillar. He spins a cocoon, and tries to sleep away the days until he can take wing, and just as he is about to break out in a flame of colour and flight, he is eaten by a blackbird. He wakes from his dreams crying. His wife kisses his smooth shoulder blades. “It was a bad dream,” she says, “just a bad dream.” He can’t tell her that this is the best dream he’s ever had. That he is crying only because he woke.
Callista and I sat on the roof garden, drinking beer. “What are the ramifications of divorcing ourselves from science?” I asked.
Callista shook her head. She rested her bottle against her cheek, her cool cheek.
I went on, “What are the ramifications of the physical without physics?”
She smiled. “I don’t know.”
”If the laws of physics don’t apply,” I said, pressing my hands together, “then what applies? What laws apply? The laws of fiction?”
Callista laughed, but she turned away, one eyebrow raised, as though she was displeased.
Callista’s husband, he used to be a concert pianist. He travelled the country with a chamber orchestra. Bent over Stravinsky, his hands bucked and darted like small animals, and his head tipped and tilted, his hair pulled neatly back, the muscles in his face warped and twisted. Seeing him play the piano, you could believe that he understood something too complex and impossibly passionate to articulate. Callista’s husband left her alone in their echoing house for months at a time. One day in December a patch of ice tripped up his car, sent the pair of them dancing into a stone wall; and his hands, braced against the dashboard, crumpled like cloth; and his radii and ulnae shattered like saucers at an unfortunate afternoon tea; and that was all it took, one spill of frost, to upend his life and his musical career. He never played the piano again. Now he teaches children how to play “Mary Had A Little Lamb” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and “Goosey Goosey Gander,” their fingers taunting him, so stiff and sticky on his multilingual Steinway. I met him after the accident at one of Callista’s disastrous parties. The two of us sat on the roof garden, drinking beer. The skin of his hands puckered around the twisted bones, like a votive candle, half-melted. “How do you know my wife?” he asked, politely, but I couldn’t answer. My chest tugged like a wound. I wondered if he was jealous of Callista, the way she carried clear notes around in the pocket of her jeans to distribute freely, cheerfully, as though they meant nothing. I wondered if Callista loved her husband’s broken bones. If she loved her husband. If anyone had ever been loved the way I loved Callista. “We met at a party,” I said.
I think I was asleep that night on the roof garden. If I was asleep, I would have dreamed that I was a caterpillar. I would have dreamed up a cocoon. That big shut-eye. The solace of silence.
Callista pressed her hand to her husband’s arm, her head tilted towards the sky. “What is it?” she asked.
I’ll give you a clue. It was neither a bird nor a plane. If there is no such thing as frictional drag, what do you have in its place? Fictional drag? Does the universe always right its imbalances? If my name was his name—but it isn’t, it has never been his name—would I have shattered hands or would I be able to fly?
Callista laid her hand on my hand, my hand that would never play the piano, never break like fine china. All I wanted was Callista. All I ever wanted. I wanted her to devour me, wingless. I woke up crying. On the roof garden my smashed beer bottle was a fortune, mine, his. Callista lifted her dark head. “What is it?” she asked her husband, but I was already gone.
Becca De La Rosa lives in Dublin, and wishes she was still a student. Her fiction has appeared in various places, including Strange Horizons, Farrago’s Wainscot, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Fantasy Magazine. She has nothing against superheroes. You can find her online at www.beccadelarosa.com.