1
“Anyway, my idea is that if you can go fast enough,” Vanessa was telling him, “eventually there won’t be any time that passes between one place and another place, and therefore in the end you won’t have gone anywhere at all.”
But Parker must have had a doubtful look on his face because she continued like he was dense or something.
“It has to do with the speed of light; it’s a proven fact, but the only problem is that if you screw up and somehow actually go faster than the speed of light, then you will find yourself not staying still but going backwards. In other words, you’ll actually get younger, and you know what that means, don’t you?”
“What does that mean?” Parker said.
“It means that you would have to go through everything you hated—which is why you would have tried out the time thing in the first place—all over again until you finally stop.”
Parker stared at the star hood-ornament of a Mercedes someone had snapped off and left lying on a shelf.
“No kidding,” Vanessa continued as if he hadn’t been listening at all. “But just maybe that’s what’s behind all of humanity’s rush for speed—cars, rockets, the Internet—maybe there is some kind of deep human longing we can feel but not see, which means that we know just standing around, as the two of us are right now, looking at art or whatever, isn’t going to do anybody any favors in the long run. Or the short run, either.”
Not surprisingly, they were in an art gallery when this conversation was taking place, and Vanessa’s flight of fancy, Parker guessed, was inspired by all the objects suspended from the ceiling by cords and left lying around on shelves, and on the floor, too. But art aside, Vanessa had lately begun to look up weird facts she liked to drop at various points into various conversations to make herself sound more intelligent. She had begun smoking cigarettes for the same reason although Parker had told her it was a very bad idea, health-wise.
Why was Parker even with her? It was a good question. If you asked him, he would answer she was good in bed, but the truth was he couldn’t tell the difference between good and not so good, or even terrible. No, the key words were in bed and also, that for all her tough talk, Vanessa was dying and she knew it, so she used every chance she had to work dying, or mortality, or even time, into the conversation—this speed-of-light discussion, for example.
For the record, Vanessa had been a concert violinist, and then, one day during a routine practice of the scales, she had found herself unable to reach the top end of her notes, and it was about then, or shortly after that she saw a doctor, and it was the doctor who gave her the bad news: She would never play again, the doctor said, unless she could develop a repertoire that consisted entirely of bass notes.
The show they were visiting had been billed as a protest against ownership and consisted of various items that the artist himself claimed to have personally stolen. Each item was documented by a tag showing the time it was taken and the place it was stolen from, and several had accompanying Polaroids as well. Mostly the loot consisted of a lot of hand tools—hammers, wrenches, a rusty hacksaw, and a half dozen drill bits—that, according to the tags, had been pilfered, over a period of months, from a construction site that was replacing low-income housing with luxury condos, but there were other things as well: a napkin dispenser from a now-closed famous restaurant, an old cellphone with a cracked face, and a small stack of nickels and pennies that once had made their home in a hardware store in Eugene, Oregon but had been removed from a Take-A-Penny-Leave-A-Penny change jar. At one end of the gallery was a sign instructing visitors to watch their purses and their wallets. It had formerly hung, the tag beneath it read, in a bus station in Topeka, Kansas.
II
Afterwards, however, when they had finished looking at the stolen items and were sitting in a coffeehouse that had only so-so coffee but made really excellent pastries, Vanessa whispered to Parker to tell him she was not really dying, at least not any time soon. “Also,” she spoke into his ear, “I never was your girlfriend, either, despite anything I may have said or done.” This was bad news, of course, Parker considered, but was she telling him the truth, or was this simply an attempt to help him disengage his strong feelings for her?
If it was the latter, it would be like Vanessa, he thought, who, over the time he had known her had performed countless acts of kindness, either by denying or exaggerating an obvious truth, and always in order to spare someone else’s feelings or to help them feel better. He remembered, for example, one sunny day in spring when the two of them had climbed the tallest hill they could find and lay on their backs above the green grass atop a blanket he had brought along and looked for shapes in clouds. Where Parker would see charging rhinos or hand-grenades, Vanessa would see in the very same clouds prancing ponies and baby ducklings.
And once, when Vanessa found a wallet stuffed with cash on the pavement in front of their local discount supermarket, she had taken it straight to the cashier to be returned to its owner even though Parker pointed out that there was no guarantee that the wallet would not wind up in the cashier’s own purse, and after Vanessa had thought about that possibility for a while and agreed he might be correct, she reminded him that cashiers in such places are severely underpaid as well.
Thus, it would not be unlike Vanessa to pretend she wasn’t dying when she was. But next, shortly after that, in order to spare his feelings even further, she took a step even Parker had not thought of: She found someone else, a muscle-bound gym-rat named Leon, and started dating him, anticipating, probably correctly, that if she had to date someone in order to protect Parker’s feelings, then the effect on Leon following her termination would probably be cushioned by layers of steroids.
So not only had she found it necessary to replace Parker with Leon but, like a mother who, in the face of a run-away vehicle, will pick up her child by his or her snowsuit and fling him into a drift as far away from the site of impact as possible, she attempted to increase Parker’s distance to the maximum by reciting in detail Leon’s prowess in bed, his wit (doubtful), his taste (also doubtful), interlaced with long and lingering descriptions of his magnificently sculpted torso, stopping nowhere.
Parker was not fooled.
III
Weeks passed, and then months, until one afternoon, when coming back from a benefit reading of poetry, Parker found himself right in front of what used to be one of his and Vanessa’s favorite places to hang out: Wendy’s House of Weeds, a flower shop that featured those species most people (though certainly not Wendy), would classify as a nuisance: dandelions, of course, but also ragweed, wild carrot, chickweed, purslane, thistles and nettles, plantain, pigweed, yarrow, mallow, fireweed and spurge, among others, all of which Wendy arranged in attractive displays that exhibited the best characteristics of each plant, as if to say: People, open your eyes to the beauty that is around you every day, and has, in fact, been in front of you all along, but which, because of your rigid standards and preconceived notions, you have been unable to see, at least until this moment while wandering through my shop. So it was at this same House of Weeds that Parker chanced to come upon Leon and Vanessa in the exact space he, Parker, had always thought had been reserved for Vanessa and him. Vanessa was wearing her trademark pedal pushers (an ironic fashion statement for someone who refused to learn to ride a bicycle) and Leon sported a skin-tight tee-shirt cut to emphasize the ridiculous muscles of his arms and neck, as he bent to stroke the very same weeds Parker used to stroke, commenting on the overlooked beauty of this or that scorned plant like a Hollywood scout who can recognize the hidden star-quality of a minor cast member in a high school production of Charlie’s Aunt.
What was Vanessa doing? She was holding up a weed to Leon’s beautiful nose and, next, taking one of his fingers made strong by years of grasping dumbbells, she was pulling him over to the section where Wendy kept the nettles, the place out of all places in the shop that Parker loved above all.
Parker watched, knowing he should move along and not face even more humiliation by seeing his old memories stirred up only to be torn apart, but he stood as rooted as any weed sprouting up between the cracks in a sidewalk.
Until at last, Vanessa stood behind an impressive stalk of thistle and laughed, sharing some private joke he would never hear the punchline of (unless she was recycling one of her old ones he already knew for the benefit of Leon!), lowering her head as if to feel the rough touch of the thistle against her cheek. Then she shut her eyes in a sort of private reverie as she lowered her head still farther, and farther still, until her actual head disappeared entirely from view only to reappear on the damp floor of the shop as she lay twitching slightly while that lug Leon stood over her waving his arms, calling for Wendy to put down whatever plant she happened to be nourishing at the moment and come over to give him a hand, even then silently flexing his muscles as he waited for Wendy to arrive at what used to be their spot.
Which was Parker’s last sight of Vanessa: prone, a muddy smudge on her cheek, a few dry leaves stuck to her hair, a groan coming from somewhere deep inside her, her pedal pushers with one leg higher than the other and, above all, her kindness.
Jim Krusoe has published six novels and two books of stories, Blood Lake and Abductions. His first novel, Iceland, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2002. Since then, Tin House Books has published five other novels: Girl Factory,Erased, Toward You, Parsifal, and, in 2016 The Sleep Garden. He has also published five books of poems.
