“C’mon,” said Billy, goading me on. “You said you wouldn’t chicken out.” “I’m not chickening out,” I argued, trying to think of ways to buy time or make a dramatic escape. Unfortunately any effort to flee would be hopelessly slow (I was a terrible skater). I took a breath and tried to steady my nerves for the inevitable. “Okay. I’ll be back.” “Good luck,” said Billy, not turning away from the arcade game. “Slip her the tongue if you guys end up making out.” “I hate you.” I rolled away unsteadily in my rented skates and went over to where Kelly was seated with her friends. I stopped just short of bumping into her. She was somehow even prettier than I had remembered, and as she smiled at me I felt certain there was no one in the Universe as lovely as she. I felt my knees weaken and my heart begin to pound. The girls at the table paused in their talking to look at me, this sudden interloper. But I ignored them and looked only at Kelly. She looked at me. For a moment nobody spoke, and I wondered if we might pass the entire song in such a manner, gazing at each other in silence. It seemed a fine outcome in my estimation. Then, just as I was beginning to resign myself to this (acceptable) fate, she stood up and faced me directly— which involved her looking slightly down, as she was half a head taller than I. “Do you want to skate with me?” she asked. I nodded and blurted out: “Yeahokay.” She put her hand out. “Here,” she said. “Let’s go.” Wow, I thought, and we were off, leaving her stunned and giggling friends behind.
The first time I ever talked to Kelly she was standing at the edge of her yard looking straight up at the sky in the early spring twilight. It was so arresting and unusual a scene that I nearly veered off the road with my bike— why would someone stand and look at the sky all alone? The only stories I knew of people who did such things implicated them as crazy in my corner of the world. Almost of its own accord my bike stopped, the rubber tires skidding lightly against the road’s gravel, and I was in front of her. My stomach had twisted itself into a knot and my heart was racing in my chest and for a moment I forgot entirely how to speak. “Hey.” “Hi.” It was more than we’d ever said to each other. I felt a terrible urgency to maintain the conversation’s momentum. “Whatcha doing?” For a brief instant she looked almost embarrassed or self-conscious. Then she turned back to the sky. “Nothing. Just looking.” I looked up. There was only a thin sliver of moon and already the sky was being drained of all color. A few points of light dotted the smooth expanse of near-darkness. I could feel the air cool around us as the evening deepened and I could hear the steady sawing of crickets. I was late for dinner and yet I knew I couldn’t leave; had you asked me, nothing in all the world could have pulled me away from where I was. “Are you looking for anything in particular?” She shook her head, still staring up at the sky. “No. Just the stars. You can put your bike down, if you want.” I looked at my bike as though seeing it for the first time. Then I set it down against the curb and walked to where she was standing and looked up at the sky with her. Rather, I tilted my head back and pretended to look— in truth my attention was entirely on her. The sky could have been on fire and I would not have noticed. After several seconds of silence she pointed. “There,” she said. “That’s the Big Dipper.” “Huh?” She moved her hand around. It looked very small against the heavens. “There,” she said. “Those stars are the Big Dipper.” I looked. From the abstract points of light a form emerged as if drawn out by her fingers. “Oh yeah. Neat.” “And that’s Ursa Major.” “What’s Ersamajor?” She traced an outline with her hand around a cluster of stars. “Those right there, including the Big Dipper. They’re the constellation Ursa Major. It’s a bear.” I looked and followed the line of her hand around the points of light. “Oh,” I said, squinting and nodding and waiting for the bear to appear from the night sky. I added, “I see,” even though I couldn’t see at all. It wasn’t nearly as clear as the ladle had been. “How do you know so much about the stars and stuff?” “My dad taught me. He told me I could collect stars and constellations, because I could take those with me wherever I went. I used to collect rocks, but they were too hard to keep moving around. I had all types. Igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic. I had some slate, sandstone, even a piece of limestone with a tiny fossil in it.” “Like a dinosaur?” “Not exactly. But maybe it was from when dinosaurs lived.” “Wow. That’s pretty cool.” “I guess so. Did you ever collect anything?” I weighed this question. I’d tried to start a rock collection, once. Most of what I’d found had been gravel or bits of broken glass. One day when my mother was cleaning my room she mistook it for dirt —not entirely inaccurately— so she yelled at me and then threw it all out. “Um, I used to have a rock collection,” I said, stretching the truth to its very limits. “And I collect comic books. Mostly Wolverine.” “That’s pretty cool.” “Yeah, I guess. But I never found anything with a fossil in it. Where did you move from?” “Georgia.” “Cool,” I said, nodding as though this meant something to me, although I could no more find Georgia on a map than I could find any other state save my own. “So what do you collect now?” She looked up. “Just the stars,” she said. “Stars and constellations. But there aren’t hardly any stars here,” she said then. “Not like some other places I lived.” I studied the sky and the few points of light, the only stars and the only sky I’d ever known. “What do you mean?” “You can’t see as many stars here as other places. My dad says it’s because of all the light coming from the cities. That’s why you can only see the brightest stars here.” “So what does the sky look like where you were before?” For a moment she was silent, and I wondered if she had heard me. “It’s amazing,” she said at last. “The sky is filled with stars. So many you can’t count them. You can’t even start counting because the moment you do you get confused and lose track. I know because I’ve tried it. In some places you can even see the Milky Way.” She paused. “But not here.” I tried to imagine such a sky and though I had never seen it I felt somehow impoverished now that I knew of its existence. There were other skies? Other nights? “Man, I wish you could see the Milky Way here,” I said, without the faintest idea of what that would look like. Visions of dairy products floated before my eyes. She nodded. “Me too.” “Do you move around a lot?” “Yeah, I guess. Did you ever move?” “No. Never.” “That must be nice.” I wondered then, for the first time ever, if it was. We stood for a long while, side by side, staring up at the night sky. After some interval, I was aware of nothing more than the darkness and the lonely stars and her form next to mine, so close that her bare arm occasionally bumped against my own. All else —the neighborhood and the passing cars and the crickets and wherever I had ridden my bike from and wherever I was going— faded away as surely as the twilight had, leaving only us and the sky.
Since that day on her lawn we’d spoken two more times: once in the school library, while pouring over an astronomical chart together for a class assignment, and once while we waited for our respective parents to come pick us up after a school function. Never in my life had I been so thrilled to have a father who was habitually late. But never had we intentionally touched— until now. We skated, doing laps on the polished floor as All-4-One provided the appropriate soundtrack and the reflected lights of the disco ball wheeled around us in the dimmed roller rink. Painted murals of stars and planets whizzed by us on the walls. I felt Kelly’s hand in mine and traced its shape and contours the way a blind man might, with an attention to detail so focused that for a moment it seemed as though my entire world was contained in the ligature of our hands. Emboldened by her invitation and by our clasped hands I turned to look at her and tell her exactly how I felt. The fear was almost gone, replaced now by something new: hope. And when I looked at her I saw that she, too, was on the edge of speech. I knew deep in my bones what she was going to say, and I knew it would be the mirror of what I myself had wanted to say to her for longer than I could remember. Just as she had anticipated this invitation to the Couples Skate, so too would she be one step ahead with her declaration of affection… I really like you, I would say. From there my tiny corner of the world opened into a universe of possibilities. That moment in the roller rink was the point from which any hundreds or thousands of branches might spring, all of them involving her. I like you too. I saw a whole summer vacation of possibilities: phone calls, dates at the movies, bike rides into town, maybe even a trip to the shore. I might see her in a bathing suit, I thought, and my teenage loins stirred with strange new feelings... Do you want to go out with me? We would be boyfriend and girlfriend. Then another school year, and time for furtive glances and whispers in class, time for walks through brittle, many-hued leaves, time for winter coats and snowmen and Christmas gifts. Time, time, and more time, just for us to be together. Okay. I pictured in my mind’s eye all the dates and walks and secret notes and telephone calls and movie-theater kisses that composed the idea I had of what it meant to be thirteen and in love. Awesome. I looked at her, holding back my own admission as I waited for her to speak, hoping and thinking and dreaming all at the same time… “I’m moving away next week,” she said.
“Oh.” For nearly a full lap we skated in silence as I let the weight of this new information settle. I stared at the passing mural of the stars and planets and galaxies. The earlier future of my imagination dissolved and left only the bleak present and an even bleaker future in its wake. “Where?” I asked, as though it made any difference. “London,” she said. “For three years. And then we’re moving back here.” I wanted to curse the fates. Moving away only to return! At another age our fledging relationship might endure three years apart —occasional visits, letters, long-distance phone calls, something called “email” that I’d just learned about— but for us it was an eternity. It might as well have been three hundred years in different galaxies before her return. The song was past its halfway point, quickly rolling toward its inevitable end. A few of the other couples, perhaps too uncomfortable to endure the lingering finale, were already making their way off the rink floor. Kelly slowed and I slowed in response and we nearly came to a stop, each looking at the other. Soon the lights would be raised and the disco ball would stop its spinning and the slow song would end, bringing our brief courtship to its end as well. “I really like you,” I said, the words coming out all at once and nearly joined together. I knew it would not change anything but wanted to say it all the same. “I really like you, too.” “Really?” “Yeah.” In the face of our divergent paths such knowledge gave rise to both hope and hopelessness. The world seemed a far more unjust place than ever before. The final notes of the song were playing and only a few intrepid couples remained. I moved to exit the rink.
She shook her head. “My dad told me that when you go really really fast time slows down for you but speeds up for everybody else. Maybe if we go fast enough we can slow everything down for us and make the rest of the world pass by. Then my parents can go to London and by the time they get back in three years we’ll still be the same age and can go on like nothing ever happened.” “That’s crazy!” “No,” she said. “That’s reality.” Everything around us began to move with extraordinary speed, like some switch governing all the known rules of physics had been turned off in the Universe. The skaters and the walls and the rink blurred and became little more than flashes of lights and colors, as though I were watching a film played at twice or triple the normal speed. “Holy shit!” I said. “I think it’s working!” Kelly smiled. “I told you. C’mon! Keep going!” The world was little more than a continuous blur by this point. Crowds of people entered and left the rapidly aging and deteriorating rink in less than the time it took us to do a single lap. New groups of students came and went —the children and then the grandchildren of their classmates. “Wait,” I said. “I think we need to slow down.” But she kept skating. The rink grew old and fell out of use. The painted solar system on the walls faded and then flaked off. An instant later the roof was gone and then the bare walls crumbled into dust under the great blue dome of the sky. Grass sprung from the rotted floorboards. Vines and trees grew and swallowed the fragmented ruins of the old building. Still we skated, now looking ahead at the aging world before us, now looking at each other, teenaged skaters beyond the realms of age and time. The world became bright and then very dark and then bright again, so bright that soon all traces of the fertile overgrowth and the buried roller rink were gone, replaced entirely by that bright light, before everything went dark. When my eyes adjusted I saw the vast and boundless Universe itself, a black expanse dotted with the light of thousands and millions of stars. It was a night sky unlike anything I had ever seen. “Wow,” I said, still holding her hand in mine. “Pretty amazing, right?” “Yeah.” We floated through the ether, faster still, and the pinpoints of light winked in and out of existence. Galaxies coalesced and collided, entire civilizations rose and fell in an instant. We passed through a cloud of interstellar dust and watched the birth and death of a solar system, and I wondered whether any of its planets were inhabited and if so whether any of them had roller rinks as ours had had, some billions of years ago now. As we tore across the Universe I looked at her, at the bangs framing the face that was now older than the galaxy from which we had come. Around us a cloud of dust congealed into planets, a sun, moons, asteroids, only to be swallowed by a passing black hole. Kelly looked back at me and I felt my world turn inside out. The limits and laws of the known Universe bent and strained and a moment later we felt the entirety of existence collapse and fold about us and disassemble and reassemble itself into a million pieces. There were bursts of light and we saw colors that bore no name nor any experience in all of human history and we heard the music of the Universe itself. An instant later and we shed our skates and then our bodies too, tearing through the very fabric of space-time, doing vast elliptical orbits across the interstellar void, and I knew we would never, ever have to leave each other. Thus space and time fade into subjective conceptions, just as subjective as right hand or left hand, front and behind, are in ordinary life. Will we be okay? We will be okay. How can you know? You can’t know.
When I went home that night I pulled several dusty old volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica off my parents’ shelf. In the cone of light thrown off by my desk lamp I looked up entries on stars and constellations and the Milky Way. With the aid of the books’ black and white photos and simple line drawings I tried to imagine the sky of my dreams, the one she had described for me. Through my wanderings among the books’ entries I read of Relativity and the movements of light and matter and time. I learned of distances so vast I could not comprehend them and speeds so great they were all but meaningless. But in all the cosmos I envisioned it was always she that outshone all the other stars, and always she that seemed the furthest away. [Italicized sections taken from the Encyclopaedia Britannica: The New Volumes, 12th ed., vol. 32, 1922, now in the public domain] |
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DreamForge Anvil © 2021 DreamForge Press
On the Electrodynamics of Skating Bodies © 2021 David Boffa