Gravity
The noise grew louder every day; directly above him now, it seemed capable of rattling the old man’s dentures clear out of his skull. The construction had started on the top floor and was now bearing down on him like a bounty hunter who had finally found his mark, like a mercenary sitting at a bar just down the street. The old man now counted the minutes rather than the days.
He walked down the lone hallway in his apartment. Normally three feet from wall to wall, that space had narrowed over time. Newspapers stacked to the ceiling threatened the existence of any clear path, encroaching like thriving rainforest foliage. A yellowed, reeking remembrance of the past fifty, sixty years that now seemed as native and necessary to the place as a bed or toilet. Shuffling toward the bathroom, the old man brushed aside these familiar stray edges and corners.
Bracing his withered, tobacco leaf hands on either side of the freestanding sink, the old man raised his eyes to the mirror. A crack ran from left to right, straight through his line of sight. An argument from a time passed. Yelling at her. Yelling with her. A terrible, grotesque chorus of misplaced love. Driving his point into the reflective glass: fist hitting fist. He remembered that the anger had immediately dematerialized like steam from the mirror and the impetus for the argument just as quickly, but the crack remained as garish as ever, a stoic reminder of fleeting passion.
The old man had loved her. Or tried to love her. Or intended to love her, anyway. Remarriage had always seemed a dubious prospect. Tradition was nothing to sweep up and discard, like so much trash. Not that the urn on his nightstand would raise a fuss now. But he supposed she should stay put and the next ‘she’ might raise a fuss about that.
Still at the sink, grinding his gears on old memories, the old man splashed water over surprisingly smooth features. Occasionally, he feared the quietness of his face indicated lessons gone unlearned, a superficial accounting of things. In truth, he was ashamed of his skin, as if he had never gotten around to etching, as proof of a life lived, the evidence around his eyes. Staring back now was a younger man suddenly thrust back into the bars: whiskey-whispered wanting, his wife home worrying without him, women stacked on top of women without his wife.
Above him: the scuffling of heavy boots. The driving of nails. The bending, wheezing, and crackling of torn trim. The electric cutting of wood supports to make way for new metal. He imagined the machines ripping through the structure as a saw through bone. Dentist office sounds and then big, burly clunking. Before nightfall tomorrow, the old man knew the din would glimpse him here in his private, darkened space.
The old man went back through the musty underbrush of his hallway. Had these stacks of newsprint caused his episode at the mirror? He remembered making countless promises about the hallway, vacant words spoken for her benefit. But the stacks had continued their inexorable journey toward the ceiling. There was so much of it-and another inch every morning. He had always intended to straighten up, to clean it out. He remembered buying demolition-grade trash bags, a broom, a dustpan, a bucket and mop. He remembered intending. He guessed the supplies were somewhere in there. Buried in there. Now no one to ask even what had happened to the supplies, let alone silently shake her head at the stacks.
The old man slowly made his way to the coffee that percolated on the stove. He turned the pot upside down, spilling the dark bitterness into a mug. He sat at the table in his kitchen peering at the boarded window; white light found its way around the miscalculations of his rushed carpentry, the brightness bleeding into the room from between the slats like infected cuts. He knew the effect was in his mind, but with each crash and stumble from above, the lines of light seemed to bob ever so slightly up and down.
Elbows on the table, the old man carefully sipped from the steaming cup, alternately bringing the mug to his mouth and then back to between his hands. Those god-forsaken newspapers! He had never had the chance to explain to her. No. No: he caught himself. He had had the chance. And it was certainly not God that had forsaken the stacks.
With that thought, he turned toward those towering ramparts. The old man imagined bloodied dog tags on the ground between them, a bunker torn limb from limb; though he was watchful, as he had been for scores since that time and place, that his mind not stray too far back. Nevertheless, how small and impotent he felt in the stacks’ presence. Like great pillars of smoke, their density warping the floorboards. Another sip from his mug. Another tremendous heave from above. Those men would soon be here, in his apartment, with the old man and his old lady. He tried to consider the hallway from an objective vantage, from his visitors’ eyes. But who could remain objective about such a pitiful sight?
There remained only one thing to do. The thing he had been putting off since the construction began. Since the year before. And since the year before that year. Since that urn began collecting dust and silently accepting his stray regrets and apologies. And long before that, too. Wary of allowing anxiety and procrastination, the great adhesives, to attach themselves again, he was up and to it. But first, the old man went to tell her. He sat on his side of the bed, legs dangling over, holding the urn in his lap. Clutching the vessel in one hand, the old man looked like a genie released too late, his wishes grown gray and stale.
The way he tried to shift them from the bottom, the stacks proved awful heavy for a man of his age. Pains raced back and forth between his tailbone and the base of his skull. His shirt darkened under the arms and beneath the neck. But he kept on like this, shifting the stacks from the bottom, peeking around back for the supplies he was certain he had bought.
The old man disregarded the sound above, those tremendous aches and groans. He knew the boots and heavy metal tools would arrive tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, they would come sometime. There was no need to let their noise disturb him now. But the aches and groans grew louder now, demanding his attention. At once, the old man recognized these noises as separate from the construction. They were with him, in his apartment; in fact, they were directly above him. Dust drifted down to where he crouched looking for the bags and the bucket and mop. It settled on top of the old man’s head, covering the darkened and multiplied red spots there. He looked up to see a single sheet of newsprint float downward, rocking back and forth on top of the air, graceful as a feather. And then- For one extraordinary moment, with the old man crouched low to the ground, arms clumsily draped over his head in protection and the stack bowed over back of him, their postures taken together could have been mistaken for an attempt at some inhuman embrace. The great stack abruptly eclipsed the florescence of the overhead lamp, shading his lineless face. The old man grinned from between his clasped arms. Yes, only one thing remained indeed. When the light above him was completely smothered away, the old man bathed in the luminous darkness.
