What I didn’t tell Kyle about his falling-brick, falling-body question is G, the Universal Gravitational Constant, 6.672 x 10-11 N2/kg2. Newton is amazing. Actually, it was Cavendish.
That Kyle, Mr. Different, there’s something different about his different.
After class on the way back to the dorm, the leaves have fallen in turbulence. No scientific way to predict how they fall. The bench by the lake under the birches is free. Good view. The lake is wave drag. Those birch leaves in the sun, they smell like ironing.
No one else could, so I did what I could for Kim: ironed what she used to iron. Shirts, skirts, napkins. It’s not like my parents weren’t able to iron, or exert the force required. None of that. It was grief. Too much emotion through too small a vessel.
The last year or so, Kim was too weak. Too many episodes. Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, such a stupid, rare disease. Purpura, bleeding into her skin. Her blood not making platelets. Her body throwing clots wherever. Her cane tapped on the sidewalk. She was eighty-something, not her real age, twenty-something. I could always find her. Just listened. Mom worked less and less. No painting. Less money. After college, I came home.
Every morning, two flowers in a Coke bottle on the kitchen table. Every morning, Mom and me and coffee. Black.
“How’s Kim?” I say.
“In bed.” Mom doesn’t look up from the dishes she’s washing. Last night’s burger plate, Dad’s beer bottle, the morning’s coffee pot already gone. Dad downed his cup, left to join the paint crew. Not only houses any more. Big jobs. Industrial. Face masks and ventilators.
In Korean, she says, “Too much tired,” and she puts her hands on the counter, her shoulders rounded beneath her white T-shirt, the one I gave her from Stanford.
“She’s amazing,” I say, “the way she bounces back.”
“Not much now.” Mom leans forward on her hands.
Outside the window in front of the sink, agave leaves stick up. A century plant has green buds high in the air, and a jade has grown thick in the fifteen years we’ve been here. The lawn is nothing but lava rock and cactus.
Not much any more are the evenings my parents spend on the front deck, listening to Elvis, drinking beer, laughing in Korean. We spend our evenings putting pillows under Kim’s swollen knees, gently rubbing her skin with all the blood bubbles, taking her to the hospital when her heart rate gets too high.
She shouldn’t have died that fall, 1980. Too much blood, nowhere to go. Getting out of the car, her cane. Phone ringing inside the house. Mr. Japanese-Man, her boyfriend, might be calling. She had to get there, had to answer the phone. She tripped, and I didn’t catch her. Flat on the sidewalk. Clots, enzymes, autopsy said she threw a clot to her brain. Inherited rare disease, TTP, I could have it, too.
That paisley blue and gold shirt, button-down, with a navy skirt. Lots of pleats. The ironing board is wooden, thin legs that cross. I iron everything on the green dot, red dot, orange dot cover. Unzip the skirt and pull it around the board. Hold the waist with my right hand, fold the one-inch pleat along the crease, put a finger on it, press the steaming iron with my left. With a few minutes free time, I can iron anything. Skirts are cake.
Hot on a fall day. The window over the sink bright with agave leaves, the afternoon sun. Turn the skirt. Fold the pleat, press Kim’s outfit. Nose the iron into the seams by the zipper. Smell the steam. Hear the sound of release. Water turning to steam is amazing. At sea level, the temperature that water converts to vapor is 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Move higher in elevation, the temperature needed to boil falls. At 8,000 feet, the boiling point is 198 degrees. Kim loved little facts.
She looked younger than eighty, younger than twenty, lying there in the pleated skirt and paisley shirt. The funeral home smelled of plumeria and jasmine. White flowers. Kim’s face so cold, so smooth. No blood bubbles any more. Dark eyebrows, no lines between her eyebrows. No more laughing at stupid jokes. Mom and Dad and I were done with sitting on benches in the hospital, always the pages announced overhead, the doctor’s names too loud.
“Mr. Song,” someone calls. The lake in front of me, the student behind me. Kyle, I presume.
“Mr. Not-Dressed-for-Dinner,” I say. I don’t even turn my head.
“Can you show me?” he says. He sits down on the bench next to me, his backpack still on so he’s pitched forward. His hand is stuffed with paper, brown package wrap, and colored construction paper, and a few sheets of gift wrap.
“Exactly what, young sir?”
“How to fold,” he says. He spreads the paper on the bench between us.
“An airplane?”
“No,” he says, “something real, like a bird or dinosaur.”
That thing in my chest happens. That Taiko strike to my sternum, my ribs vibrate. Did he see me put the dinosaur in the tree?
“Origami,” I say. “It’s an art, Mr. Harney. Not just anyone can do it.”
“Why not?” He looks at me with small eyes, animal eyes.
“Why do you want to do it?” My ribs are loud with the drumbeat.
His greasy mop of hair, he turns his face away from me. “For Carla,” he says.
My ribs can’t hold the drumbeat. Carla. My forehead is part of the drum. The waves on the lake are cresting, white caps. The sky holds in the sound. The leaves are falling around us, falling unpredictably.
“The Sixth Former?” I say.
“Sure,” he says. “She likes origami. I’ve seen her collection of bugs and dinosaurs and birds and things.” He picks up a piece of the brown package wrap, hands it to me.
“Young man, origami is not for impressing girls.”
“Okay, can you just show me?”
I take the brown package wrap. I exhale while the Taiko mallets strike. Young man, big dreams. The mallets soften. To him a Sixth Form girl is the Holy Grail. No pounding in my ribs.
“Do you have a notebook in your backpack?” I say.
And he twists his body to pull the backpack off. He pulls an enormous three-ring binder out, and papers fall as he lifts it. Papers tumble in the wind and land around our feet. The wind picks them up, and we’re trying to step on the papers flying around us. We run to ones turning cartwheels on the lawn. I get a foot on one, and another flies off. He stamps on one, and falls forward to catch another. We’re playing Twister, on all fours. We move one limb toward the other so we can grab more than one paper at a time. We both are crawling on the ground and we look at each other. Kyle’s eyes are child eyes. Papers come up with leaves in our hands, and we rise up off the lawn.
The binder is worn in the creases. On the cover, he’s drawn silos, water towers of nuclear power plants. Spiraling lines of the vapor escaping from the towers. Hard, dark lines in pencil, dug in, smudged. Around the towers are bodies, masses of arms and legs and faces melting, piles of bodies, cars upended. His notebook is nuclear holocaust, the point of detonation.
The binder goes on top of the pile of paper he wants to fold. The piece of brown package wrap in my hand goes on top of the drawing on his binder. Each fold I show him, the angles, the different basic patterns. He watches, and his eyes grow bigger than teenage eyes. They get big like a camera lens, like he’s recording. And we sit past the warning bell for dinner. And the light on the lake goes purple. We sit on the bench, and I fold, and he folds, and the light from the dorm behind us goes on, and we make cranes.
The part Kyle likes the best is folding down the wings and pulling on the head and tail to expand the body. He likes blowing on the body to fill it out. Enough air to fill enough space. We make real things. Cranes. No gravitational force needed. Cranes spill over the blast zone of his binder. Out of the annihilation, out of the mess of papers, before a lake perfectly calm at night, cranes rise.