THE PHYSICS OF LARGE OBJECTS by Pete Duval
You’re awake, and your name is Norman. You say, “Hear that?” You say, “What is that?” But your wife doesn’t stir. You twist larvally in the sheets and raise yourself to kneel on the pillow. You part the aluminum slats of the Venetian blinds, wince under their buckle and snap. Your eyes can feel the cold coming off the window panes. This makes sense to you, Norman; it’s December. But what you see through those panes you don’t immediately understand. Only moments before, or what seems like moments, you were weightless, falling like a moist clump of snowflake or ash through the warmer tiers of hypnagogia, a sensation that, interrupted, has left your joints with an over-oiled thickness and your perception a little downy at the edges. And you marvel now at how what you see out there seems to arrive in parts that your mind assembles in real time. You’re aware of the texture of your awareness. It’s like watching yourself totter along wearing a diaper in Super 8 mm slow motion, in the desaturated medium of a hazardous photographic process. The burnt-dust smell of your dead father’s overheated film projector comes to you, rising through layers of forgetting, its warped reels turning, and you half expect to catch a whiff of bulb-softened celluloid. From some parallel cognitive track, a voice that often comments on what you, Norman, are doing at any moment, or thinking, the voice-over of your life, notes dryly that the analog world so perfectly emblematized by that projector is really gone. Gone. But do you know what that even means? Gone where? It occurs to you that when the voice ceases its commentary, you’ll be dead.
Or what has been “you.”
But out there, now, angled against the curb that separates your neighbor Boyd’s yard from the broken asphalt of your street, the cab of a truck sits idling. All the houses are dark. This makes sense; it’s just after 3:00 AM. You squeeze your eyes. You reach for your glasses. Yes. A tractor trailer. An eighteen-wheeler. Its two-ply rear wheels rest in a bramble of lilacs at the edge of your yard. And reflected in the curve of the trailer’s chrome tank, everything, the brambles, the streetlamp, the Dog Star in its brittle opalescence, even you yourself, Norman, if you look closely enough: the entire visual field stretches like taffy, in keeping with the principles of reflection and the limitations of the perceiving eye’s – your eye’s – point of view.
“Wake up,” you say to your wife. Softly. She doesn’t wake up.
A figure in a thick insulated jumpsuit of indeterminate hue – because of the color-sapping sodium streetlamp – opens the cab door and climbs in and closes the cab door with a fluidity suggesting long habit or studied nonchalance. The self-aware swag of a unionized laborer at work. However unlikely, you do not want to be seen by this person. Not an unusual urge these days, not for you, who spend so much of your time alone in the house, forcing yourself to do things that might or might not result in financial return; you would call it work if the word did not imply that what you do has a purpose, or at least some measure of innate meaning, which most work does, even to the uninformed eye and is, come to think of it, the very definition of work. A consequence of spending so much time “working out of the house,” purposefully occupied or otherwise – sometimes just eating handfuls of sponge cake, truth be told – is that you often find yourself in just this position, peeking out between blinds or ducking behind the lower half of the aluminum screen doorframe after spotting Boyd retrieving his mail or making a huge production of maintaining his lawn as if to reassure the neighborhood that he, Boyd, has the maintenance of everyone’s property values in mind. So it is from long habit that you crouch a little, allowing the slats of the blinds to narrow. It’s a wasted precaution because the figure in the cab seems wholly preoccupied.
You try one more time to rouse your wife, but she’s dead to the world. It’s sad, in a way, that she’s always coming while you’re always going. How, for instance, she’ll be reading a book while you’re down in the basement wet-vacuuming rainwater seepage off the cement floor with a red plastic Hydro-Vac, a satisfying, sensually engulfing experience that she’ll never know, one that arouses in you an anxiety involving the inhalation of vapor-riding black mold spores that implant and spread along your lungs’ pink tissue. Infiltration, deep and irreversible, and all the more nefarious for its domestic origins. Your wife’s mouth hangs slack. She snores once, but doesn’t move. Norman, you’re on your own.
You rise finally and feel for your slippers, inexpensive black flats that figure significantly in a vaguely drawn scenario involving future lessons in Kung Fu. You find them. You slip them on. The sound that awoke you grows louder, clearly the grumbling of a diesel engine. Diesel. Even now the word still holds much of its original erotic appeal, though you no longer repeat it like a mantra to get to sleep. Such are the transient enthusiasms of the suburbs. The car you drove for close to four years – a champagne 1985 300D Mercedes Benz – sits in your garage, cocooned in its own desuetude. That it was powered by perhaps the most successful diesel engine ever manufactured for a passenger vehicle was once a source of pride for you. Of a piece with the loose rattle and knock of its five pistons, and with your visceral intimations concerning the nature of existence.
The night air cold, you descend your back steps. You keep your eyes on the cab of the truck as you cut a diagonal across your driveway and across your lawn. Your lawn. Frozen now into hillocks, the hemorrhages of last summer’s 10,000 mole-hours jam and jilt your ankles with each step. Like some object lesson in the perils of neglect, the moles’ transformation of your lawn into green sponge cake has shaken you to your core. You’ve come to realize – perhaps too late – that they’ve been telling you something about yourself. Dispatched from Mount Olympus to deliver a message. The more you’ve researched the problem, the more aware you are that, like the agony of tooth decay prior to the advent of modern dental care, moles are something of a universal human pestilence, their mere mention wrapped in a nimbus of folklore and quack-remediation. Leave chewing gum at the rim of their holes (they’ll eat it, experience excruciating constipation, and die of intestinal distress), flood their tunnels, buy a cat, rent a jackal. Your father-in-law – the man goes old-school, Midwest style; having established a zero-tolerance policy, he hovers above his own lawn in the twilight with a sharp-edged spade, like some revenant from an excised chapter of Leviticus, until, at the merest premonition of subterranean stirring, he swoops down in theophanic fury to dismember those blind, flightless incubi.
You pause at the end of your lawn. What are you looking at? The truck’s cab has been airbrushed with metallic high-gloss paint. On the door, in a nest of unintelligible script hoary with elaborate curlicues, hangs the face of a medusa with wide eyes and smiling snake heads all awrithe. The driver clunks the rig’s transmission into reverse. You can see his hands on the wheel as he tries to angle the rear end free of your lilacs. They’ve become entangled in the undercarriage and are being yanked from the frozen earth at the roots.
You understand the situation now. The driver’s trapped. He can’t turn the rig around, and he doesn’t trust himself enough – here you’re speculating again – to back it straight down the hill to the highway half a mile distant. Nor is there a way forward. The driver must have veered off the interstate and borne right instead of left, chosen the road less traveled. He’s doing time for this lark in a Dantean hallucination set on the edge of the suburbs, the stars cruel in their indifference, the split-level ranches arrayed like fossilized tortoises. A panic you can only imagine is mounting in the man’s soul as he struggles with what should be dawning in him now – that he is, for all intents and purposes, screwed.
You wonder if they’ll have to airlift the poor bastard out.
Then the driver opens the door and climbs down and stands with his hands on his hips. He hasn’t noticed you yet, except it isn’t a he, it’s a she.
“I take it,” you say, clearing your throat, “we have a problem.”
The driver startles, spins. “Oh, Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me.” In the ghostly blur of the sodium lamplight – the shadows sort of starship green but limned with orange lowlights that linger and smudge when she moves – the driver could be standing on the outer skin of an orbital platform, a refueling hub for unwomaned missions to the Oort Cloud. “You gotta watch it, sneaking up on people like that. It’s dangerous.”
“Can I be of some help?” You feel insubstantial, constituted from the interstices of night. You’re just an impulse quivering on the verge of action, ghostly yourself.
“Not unless you can handle an eighteen-wheeler.” She draws closer, her attitude relaxing. And you realize that you’re on the same side, you and this woman, both human, both cold-cocked by yet another manifestation of the cussedness of things. “I can’t clear that telephone pole.” She motions along the length of the rig. Her double, reflected in the chrome of the trailer, motions as well but in grotesque elongation. “And I can’t clear her the other way either.” She points at the retaining wall your neighbor Boyd constructed last summer, ending years of exasperation over the erosion of his topsoil along a steep drop-off whenever it rained.
You lean back, angling your line of sight. You want to ask her how things could have gotten this bad. You don’t.
She snorts and wipes her nose. “I almost just said the hell with this, and took the pole out and just drove off.”
“Right,” you say. “The hell with it.”
She leans over to spit. She’s been chewing tobacco. “I’d a been in another state before anyone’d be the wiser.”
You imagine a gaggle of wire-bedraggled telephone poles jangling madly behind the rig as it accelerates on the interstate, the driver wailing on the horn and laughing crazily.
“‘Cept now that you seen me, I gotta kill you.”
“Right,” you say, trailing off.
She points at the skein of lilac brambles. “Sorry about the bushes.”
To imagine this barren brush bringing forth the sweet scent that envelopes the flower in April seems, to say the least, delusional.
“Those are yours?”
“Don’t give them another thought.”
Beneath the insulated jumpsuit, she shrugs, its stiff hood lifting from her forehead. “Oh, well.” A two-way radio in the cab squelches to life, a few syllables donald-ducking into the wastes. “I’m going to give it one more try.” She mounts the wheel guard. “Maybe you can help me, be my eyes.” She jabs her crooked index and middle fingers at her own eyes, then at yours. A gesture you’ve always appreciated for its succinct expression of confidence and wordless camaraderie. She’s wearing yellow leather gloves a cowhand might sport; they have yellow rawhide cinch-straps with little red balls at the ends. “Out back.” She motions behind her. “Let me know how close I am. Can you do that for me?”
To be of service, yes. That you might begin again, the slate still damp. Would the revelation that you were once a joyful child, a proactive, barely containable force for jellybean humanism and insouciant goodness, meet with disbelief? But there’s no time for looking backward. You aren’t dead yet. Isn’t that right?
“I’d be happy to,” you say.
She smiles – you think she does – and sinks into the darkness of the cab and shuts the door, her elbow draped over the lowered window. The diesel revs, lifting tenderly the rain cap from the crown of the vertical exhaust pipe. You step into the street and draw a bead once more on the line of the trailer’s rear tires – forward and back. She has room. You hear the gears shift, followed by a new and more determined engine pitch. Blessed be thy diesel. The wheels begin to move toward you, the rubber of the tires morphing to swallow the last of the curb like sluggish black cream. You can see the driver’s face in the rectangular mirror on the near side of the cab. You wave her back, back, the distance narrowing between the pole and its chubby reflection in the curve of the chrome. What’s she hauling? Butane? Liquid nitrogen? Milk? From the undercarriage, your lilacs dangle like snagged tumbleweeds.
“More, more,” you tell the night. “You got it. Keep coming.” She can’t hear you. You indicate she should slow, your palms down as though to say, quiet, it’s late. She knows exactly what you mean. You stride to the open window of the cab, and she squints down at you, her jaw working. Though her face is in shadow, the clouds of her breath curl wraithlike through the wash of orange lamplight. How old she is you can’t say. Nor whether she might be considered attractive or not. You’re beyond such conventional preoccupations. Beyond all that. Your extremities are numb. “If you cut back right just a bit,” you say, “I think you can clear the pole. It won’t be by much. I’m going to stand right there – ” You point to a spot a few feet beyond the telephone pole, its rough surface pocked from years of abuse beneath the linesmen’s climbing spurs.
She tilts her head. “I got room? You sure?”
You nod.
“How much?”
You hold your index fingers four inches apart. “Enough.”
“That’s not much.”
“You don’t need much.”
Her lips tighten. “I’ll tell you what, buddy, it’s gonna suck if the pole comes down. Know what I’m saying?”
“The pole’s not coming down. Push straight back. Then cut it right on my signal. Easy.”
She sits staring straight ahead. “I think I’m going to call in, have them run someone up here who can drive.”
You ride the pause for all it’s worth. Then: “How long have you been hauling the big rigs?”
“A month.”
You keep your face stiff. “Hell, you can do this.” Look at you, impersonating a guy who knows what he’s talking about, pumped tight with a bravado born of intimate familiarity with the physics of large objects – the métier of tugboat captains, crane operators, men who labor at the nation’s ports of entry, durable goods and Pez dispensers by the millions in orange shipping containers stark against blue skies. The tonnage moving with the fluency of thought. You smile. You’re nobody’s fool. You give her the thumbs up, a big double heaping.
She nods, absently, her mouth bunched and bitter. She revs the engine again as you walk to your position.
In the concave surface of the tanker’s rear end, as you begin to wave her on, you watch yourself. It’s hard to concentrate on the task at hand. Who is this person? Distorted beyond recognition, bulging forward from the recesses of the night, you’re a gnome with a sodium-lamp tan. But is it you, Norman?
As the distance between the tanker and the pole narrows to an inch, you slow her down. “Is that far enough?” Does she have enough room to clear Boyd’s handsome cement-block retaining wall? Or will she carve a gash into it, and disentomb scores of frozen mole carcasses, rodent Lazari who’ll wait forever for their weeping Jesus?
She thrusts her hand out the window, her forefinger and thumb indicating how much clearance is still needed up front. You wave her on, slowly. She nudges the pedal, the knobs of rubber on the rear tires creaking, creaking, until the bulge of the chrome kisses the pole.
“Hold up!” you shout. You don’t move, not a muscle. The telephone and cable wires tremble above. With just your eyes you trace the faint waves of displacement that ripple outward from the pole, note their faint return. Soon the wires are still again, and you stand there wondering, were you to spread your arms and rise now into the black vault of heaven, could they hold you down? Or would you burst through? And might you ascend into the blessed darkness to take your place, however briefly, at the right hand of the Father?
Pete Duval is the author of the short story collection Rear View (Houghton Mifflin). His stories have also appeared in Northwest Review, Exquisite Corpse, and The Sonora Review. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.