Folded a brontosaurus. Dinosaurs are cake. Folded a water beetle.
Carla and her bugs. Sometimes I leave little ones in the tree outside her dorm room. Only at night. Sometimes I leave them on the trail to the boathouse. Left one yesterday after whatever it was that happened in my apartment. Somehow she made it back to her dorm without the dorm parent noticing. The start of every year can be a little rocky.
After her practice with Excessively Tall Alta, Carla should find the bug I folded. Newton must have rowed. Take a rowing shell moving across the surface of a lake. Take eight oars and a bunch of overachieving girls, and what do you have? Uniform motion.
The major source of resistance in rowing is drag. Misfits of Science know the idea as wind resistance. Think badminton shuttlecock versus baseball. The shuttlecock has greater drag. Now, think rowing shell. The surface of a rowing shell, the tiny slivers and divots in the shellac, the grain of the wood, creates friction, hinders the movement of a solid through liquid. The viscosity of the surface moving through the liquid or gas is the skin.
I’m all skin drag. I’m resistance. I’m the thing that slows movement. What I’ve done to Carla. What I did to Kim when she ran to catch the phone. What people do in relationships. Drag. The force that weighs down, works against the uniform motion of objects in action.
The lab reports I was working on, the lab I hoped the Misfits of Physics would grasp, was Newton’s First Law: An object in motion continues in uniform motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.
It’s like this. A person is strapped into a vehicle, therefore one with the thing. The vehicle moves, the person moves. So, if a person is stupid and doesn’t wear a seatbelt and the vehicle hits a wall, boom. Person and thing are no longer one. A person becomes a projectile. Bye-bye.
People are supposed to be smarter, make choices. Asians are supposed to be smarter than anybody. In a relationship, both people are strapped in. If one stops, the other goes bye-bye.
Planes being blown out of the air are a different thing. Say, people are flying to Seoul. Say they’re moving 500 miles an hour on a Korean airliner, and boom, a Soviet missile hits them. Imbalance. They and plane become a million pieces. All 269 lives shattered. Bodies in pieces. Nothing to bury. Koreans caught in the Cold War. Who knows what Reagan will do. But the U.S. and Soviet Union? They are a different law: equal and opposite reaction. Can’t touch without being touched.
Carla and me? We hurtled a million miles an hour together for an instant, but then, I stopped. Imbalance. She is now a projectile, and no origami bug will help her. And it’s like this: No one who causes her pain can help her out of pain.
Newton is amazing.
First time our paths might cross is dinner. That mural in the dining hall gives me the creeps. Truth is, light reflecting off paint can’t make eyes follow the viewer, but that one boy in the mural follows me to my seat at the dinner table.
I’m assigned to chaperone dinners with the rower, Taylor, Queen of the Tall Girls, cross-dressing tonight, skirt, pressed shirt, Eddie Bauer jacket, no tie. Good thing. A tie would make students talk. They’d call her weird but wouldn’t have the word for the other thing. Tall, no boobs, deep voice. Got to be. Newton never had a law for that. Sir Herbert of the Encyclopedias could look up laws. What do you call a woman who dresses in sweats, runs ten miles a day, and has no boobs? Doesn’t take a rocket scientist.
But what was she doing with Mr. Rower-Man coming out of the bathroom at the faculty party?
Of course, Sir Alex of the Tall Boys swings by our table tonight. Positive and negative valences. Attraction. Predictable.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” Mr. Clean-Machine Alex says to me. He sticks his hand across the table, and his hand is the size of a shovel.
“Yeah, Jack Song, Physics,” I say.
“Hey, nice to meet you. Never could figure physics.” He thinks he’s being cute. He turns toward Tall Girl and flashes a Mr. Clean grin at her. The two of them are teeth and meaning.
Since she’s been here, Tall Girl has been wave drag, slow and steady friction, something heated and magnetic and sad. She’s barely holding on and leaving a wake. She’s how I was after Kim. Grief is like that, dead weight in the water. Maybe rowers know that type of drag. Maybe Mr. Clean knows it, too. Whatever they have between them, the kids at the table are watching. In a moment they’ll make two and two go five.
“Tommy Underwood,” I say, “Prince of the Untucked Shirt. Dress yourself, young man.” My voice comes out big, low frequency, air pushed through appropriate passage. Tommy looks quick, like his fly is down, turns toward the mural, undoes his belt, unzips. He tucks front-left, front-right, tucks back-left, back-right, zips up, tightens his belt, and turns quick around. He’s blond, and his fat cheeks are burning red. The boys on either side jab him.
The bell. Dorothy White, Mrs. Headmaster, dings her dinner bell. All heads drop. Except Taylor’s. She’s looking around. I catch her eye, blue eyes, big circles, grief reflects in the face, and my head exaggerates bending.
Dorothy White’s voice is flat, crackling, not enough air through not enough throat, “For what we are about to receive . . .” and I catch Carla watching me two tables over. Does she think no one is looking?
At that god-awful weekend in Rehoboth, with a towel around me, I came out of the bathroom with another towel to dry my hair, and there she was in bed, looking at me, assessing. The sheet draped over her, it showed her feet, her hips, flat stomach, breasts. Her one arm up over her head on the pillow, her muscle and freckles, her curls all over her face, the pillow. She looked at me, those brown eyes following me out of the bathroom, magnetic, in Rehoboth that one weekend, the weekend we slept in separate beds, slept with no sex. Couldn’t do it. Too often I forget Carla is a kid even though she’s eighteen. Her brown eyes tonight are different. They’re small, a child’s. I am Mr. Lecherous. Mr. Loser. I am now wall, the unbalanced force. She is motion, projectile. Bye-bye, Carla.
“Mr. Song,” somebody at the table says, and I don’t even know everyone is sitting down but me. “Pass the potatoes,” the kid says. Eating machines. Taylor looks straight ahead. Nobody’s home.
“Whoa, whoa, ladies and gentlemen,” I say, “this is not the feedlot. Put your forks down. Now, each person turn to your colleague on the left and your colleague on the right, and say your name and what form you are in. That’s it,” I say, “Commence,” and it’s a race. The younger the student, the faster it goes.
“Marty Kraus, Fourth Form,” he says to the kid on his left. “Marty Kraus, Fourth Form,” he says to the kid on his right, and Marty Kraus grabs a dish.
Taylor Alta, still not there. She turns to the student on her left, opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. Earth to Taylor.