In prose as spare as it is meticulous, The Size of the Universe conjures an elegant labyrinth of time, space, and memory, in which a wavering self, a self on the verge of becoming nothing, seeks a safe haven from the throes of near-religious ecstasy. It is a debut work that is inviting, perplexing, and bold.
In prose as spare as it is meticulous, The Size of the Universe conjures an elegant labyrinth of time, space, and memory, in which a wavering self, a self on the verge of becoming nothing, seeks a safe haven from the throes of near-religious ecstasy. It is a debut work that is inviting, perplexing, and bold.
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Overview
In prose as spare as it is meticulous, The Size of the Universe conjures an elegant labyrinth of time, space, and memory, in which a wavering self, a self on the verge of becoming nothing, seeks a safe haven from the throes of near-religious ecstasy. It is a debut work that is inviting, perplexing, and bold.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781573661584 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 10/07/2010 |
| Edition description: | First Edition, First Edition |
| Pages: | 136 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
the size of the universe
By joseph cardinale
FC2
Copyright © 2010 Joseph CardinaleAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-158-4
Chapter One
The Singularity
It began as a game. I was the hider and Sister had to hunt for me. I was not allowed off the field was the first rule, and the second rule was that if I was still hidden at eight o'clock, when Father wanted me to get ready for bed, I would have to come out from wherever I was, the winner. That gave her half an hour of hunting time, minus the five minutes I had to find a hiding place, plus however much extra time we saved if we cleaned the kitchen table and washed the dinner dishes fast enough. I wore a headband and a camouflaged shirt, dark sneakers that she had laced tight for me to run faster if I had to run. I had a wristwatch that counted to the tenths of seconds. I had to hide and hold still watching the seconds turn until the alarm that Sister had set inside the watch went off at eight o'clock or until she found me (she always found me) spread flat in the tall weeds or kneeling in the spider-webbed corner of the bicycle shed or hugging the trunk of a pine tree, trying not to breathe too loudly through a stuffed nose. No matter how often we played this game and no matter where I thought to hide from her, she always found me within five minutes of giving the ready-or-not warning from the porch, and she always spared me a moment, after she shined the flashlight at me, to dash wild and red-faced through the field in screaming laughter, searching out a second and third and sometimes a fourth hiding place before I fell down in the grass defeated and silent and lost. And then she would tag me and walk me back inside the house to help me into my pajamas and tuck me into bed and check for deer ticks in my ears and hair. That was how our games had always gone and that was how this game was about to go tonight if she ever finished washing the dishes. I was going to win this one. I stood behind her in the kitchen, watching her wash and towel the glasses and dishes from the sink and stand them next to one another in the cabinet.
"How many stars are there?" I asked.
"Too many to count," she said.
"I counted them once."
"Did you sponge the table yet?"
"I got to forty-four."
"You can't see every star."
"I could."
"Some of them are too far to see."
"How far?" I asked.
"Infinity," she said. "Clean the table."
I took the sponge from her. I sponged the table clean, pushing the crumbs into my palm and emptying them into the trash bin as she had taught me to do, and then I went back to the sink to see if she was finished with the dishes. I was about to ask her how long infinity would take to walk when the phone rang and she turned the faucet off and dried her hands in time to rush the receiver up on the fourth ring. A friend of hers was on the other end; I knew from how her face lightened and her voice turned higher after she said hello. Her nights lasted longer than mine. Sometimes in bed I would awaken to hear her closing her bedroom door across the hall and turning her radio on high enough for the sound to reach me through the walls, and I could never tell, in those moments how much time still had to pass before the morning would begin again. I listened to her talk to her friend for a while before I opened the back door and told her to come on-we were running out of time. She kept the phone against her shoulder and walked to the door, where she knelt and took my wrist to make sure the alarm in the watch was set to go off. I closed my eyes when she kissed my forehead. When I opened them, she backed up with her palm out and mouthed the words Ready. Set. Go.
I knew where to go. Before she shut the door behind me I bounded down the porch steps and through the weeds toward the gigantic maple I had already practiced climbing into when Sister was in her room with her homework that afternoon. It stood high in the center of the field spreading black branches over the grass where just a few days ago I had helped Father turn his sailboat upside down and tarp the bottom for the coming winter. I just had to step on the leaf-covered tarp we tied over the hull to get high enough to reach the lowest branch with both hands. To pull myself with both hands from where I stood on the boat and onto the lowest branch-that was the hardest part I had practiced in the afternoon. That was the part where I had to remember that my body was mine to move where I wanted. I was a living person.
The maple was dying. Sister had said so after one of our games at the beginning of the summer as I lay in the grass under the tree catching my breath for the walk back to bed. She had pointed at the base of a branch where the bark bulged out in the evening light like a balloon grew underneath. Infected was a word she used. And then she had noticed round black spots on the leaves fallen out. She had placed her palm on the trunk and bent her neck to see higher as I watched from the grass.
"What do trees do all day?" I asked.
"They grow."
"I never see them grow."
"You have to watch close," she said.
"I am watching," I said. "It's the same size."
Up on the lowest branch I paused against the trunk. I could take two different paths when I planted one foot where the trunk forked and pulled forward. The path I pulled went higher and to the left and higher and to the left until I nested in a snare of stunted branches and orange leaves at the end of a strong limb stretched out over the bottom-up sailboat. Held among the branches and holding still I saw past the trees and the lawn to the light from the kitchen Sister talked on the phone in. I heard her talking.
The second-hand was starting a circle around the wristwatch. At the end of the circle she would have to come for me.
Once I had sleepwalked into her bedroom at night. She remembered for me in the morning. She said she was just about to turn her light off when I walked through her door and sat down at her desk. At the window behind her desk, she said, I watched the wind rain against the glass for a while. Then I had taken her Earth Science textbook from the bookshelf and looked through it until a red leaf she had pressed between two pages drifted out and down to the floor. I let the book go to the floor after the leaf and then pulled open the top drawer of her desk and began picking through the papers and cassettes and coins and notebooks. She walked behind me. "Samuel," she said. She roped her arms around mine so I was stuck. "Calm down." Her grip tightened until she turned me around and asked what I was looking for. I looked at the leaf on the floor.
"The circle," I said.
"What?"
"I can't get out."
"What do you mean?"
"It keeps getting longer."
"Samuel," she said. "Look at me."
"I have to find the circle."
"Look at me, Samuel," she said. "It's not in there."
She looked for me in the eyes. I wasn't there, she said, and so she hugged me for a while and then walked me back to her bed across from the window and set me down on the mattress as she did whenever she tucked me into sleep for the night. Her trick for talking me to sleep was to flatten one palm on my chest and the other over my forehead. And then she would knead her fingers through my hair and tell me to close my eyes and imagine myself floating through outer space. A point of light burned forever ahead of me in the space she told me to imagine floating into.
I watched the second-hand start over on the wristwatch. A bird flew out from the branches behind me.
The porch light turned on. Sister was on the porch sliding the glass door closed behind her with the flashlight in her hand. She stood in her hooded sweatshirt watching the field to see if I would move first or make sound. Her hair was down around her face. Her feet made sounds down the porch steps. A snap of wind shook through the branches and she stopped to lift the hood of her sweatshirt and then knelt in the grass and tied her shoelaces. She called through wind that she was coming for me whether I was ready or not. I held stiller than before.
She walked into the field and pointed the flashlight at the shed slumped above the raspberry bushes. Opening the door of the shed, she sent the light inside, at the rusted shovels and the lawnmower and the bicycles stacked against the walls, and asked if I was in there. I watched her from above. She walked from the shed and past the bushes to the row of pines along the street. To see under the pines she had to stomach down and dust the flashlight along the grass but I wasn't there for her to find this time. I was not in the raked hill of dead leaves she got up to swim her foot through or in the fire-pit squared with concrete blocks. I was not in the weeds she kicked at or the wheelbarrow next to the tomato plants or the hollowed out stump of the elm tree that Father had axed in the autumn our mother died. I was nowhere except the highest branches of the maple watching Sister search the field saying my name. She sat lost below me on the bottom of the sailboat.
"Sam, come out. I'm getting worried."
I looked at the watch. Another four circles and the alarm would end the game.
I took the watch off and stood silent and still on the limb of the maple. I knew that whatever power I was gathering in that silence would flow out of me and back to her if I told her where I was in the tree. I pitched the watch into the weeds she sat in front of with her face down. She lifted her face to look for the landing sound and, staring at the weeds, said my name like a question.
Nothing answered her. A car was coming down the flat of street I saw from the maple.
She walked against the stiffening wind to the area where the watch had fallen a few steps from the sailboat. I leaned forward against the leaves, feeling the branch I stood on creak and slacken, and watching her troll the light around in the weeds as the car moved closer. She glanced over her shoulder at the shadow of the maple in the grass as if she had an idea. "Are you in the tree?" She moved closer to the tree and shined the light at the leaves under and around the space I was in. "You better not be in there."
The car slowed past the field. It stopped in front of our house and turned into the driveway. Father was home.
"Sam, listen to me. You have to come out right now."
She stared half at the tree and half at the house Father was in front of sooner than we expected him. His door slammed hard. She turned back again and cast the flashlight like a line from a fishing pole into the leaves I held my breath in. She fished around in the branches. A beam of light rivered around me and ran an endless line to the stars.
"Is that you?"
"No," I said.
"Sam, I see you."
"No you don't."
"You little orangutan," she said.
"I want to keep playing."
"How the hell did you get up there?"
"I'm not here," I said. "Go away."
"This is not allowed. You could hurt yourself."
"I can hide anywhere in the field."
"You have to come down from there."
"No," I said. "I'm hiding."
She stood on the sailboat pointing the light straight up at me. Again she told me to come down and again I told her to find me somewhere else. Standing still on the limb with my legs against each other, I felt my arms grow heavier from holding the branch above. I felt the branch I stood on slip at the earth and I was bodiless for a floating moment before I caught the higher one back with both hands and held on.
Something clicked inside the lower branch. Sister screamed her breath in.
"Sam, listen to me," she said. "Do not move."
"You're supposed to tag me."
"It's about to break!"
"I want to keep playing."
"The game is over. We need to get you down right now."
I was fine where I was. The branch underfoot clicked again when I tried to plant more of me on it.
"Stop moving," said Sister. "I told you not to move. It's going to break if you put any more weight down. Just hold on." She had a palm given up over one of her eyes to stop from watching if I was going to fall on her. "Can you go back there?" she asked.
"I don't want to."
"Look over there."
"It's the same thing."
"Look where I'm pointing," she said. She pointed the light where the branch I stood on forked from a harder point at the center of the tree. "Now this is what you're going to do. You're going to pull yourself back toward the trunk, one hand at a time. Slow. You're not going to let go and you're not going to let your feet down. You're going to keep one hand around that branch at all times. You understand?"
I watched the house. Lamplight yellowed the windows of the kitchen. Father walked past the windows on his way upstairs.
"I thought you said not to move."
"You understand me?"
"I can just jump down."
"No. Do not jump."
The light turned on in the upstairs bedroom. I was higher than Father was at the window staring out at the field.
"He's looking for us," I said.
"Don't worry about that now."
"He can't see."
"Can you please just listen to me?"
"We should hide from him."
"Don't worry about that now."
"I'm not."
"Go toward the trunk then."
I was older than she thought. I looked at the window again and started laughing and at that instant the alarm went off inside the watch I had thrown away. Sister turned from me fast to see what the sound was coming from in the weeds, shielding the light ahead of her as if to catch a wild animal in the act of pouncing. Nothing was still there. A squirrel hurried across the grass. The alarm beeped a few times before she circled the light back to me in the tree. I was still laughing at something.
"I'm over there," I said.
"No you're not."
"I'm in the watch."
"Sam," she said.
"I'm not Sam."
In the morning after I sleepwalked into her bedroom I had slept late. I remember thrashing up from the bottom of a falling dream and finding her room full of sunlight from the window over her desk. Her window was open and I remember noticing first her Earth Science textbook opened flat on the floor and second the sound of water running in the bathroom down the hall from her open door. A mess of papers and photos and odds of trash seemed to have tided out from the half-open drawer of her desk and fallen down to the floor in the breeze that cooled through the screens and shook the wind-chimes hanging over the window. I heard the water stop running in the bathroom. I heard her footsteps down the hall until she was in the room with me. A white towel was coiled tight around her wet hair. She asked if I remembered how I had gotten here and I said I last remembered falling asleep in my bed. As she told the story of how I had sleepwalked into her bedroom, I stared at a photograph of me in the field from three years ago that she had framed on her desk next to the radio. I didn't believe her. "That wasn't me," I said when she stopped talking, and she looked at me as if I were far away.
"It wasn't," I repeated.
"Then who was it?"
"I don't know," I said.
"You don't remember."
"It changes."
"What does?"
"I can't see it."
"You can't remember it."
"I sleep in my bed."
"You fell asleep there."
"That's where I sleep."
"Yes. And you walked here."
"No," I said. "I don't remember doing that."
It was hard for me then to make her understand. That the body I was in had sleepwalked to her room in the night I believed, even if I remembered nothing of what she had told me. In the same way I believed I was once the child in the photograph on her desk. And yet the body that sleepwalked to her room in the night was not the same as the one that woke in her bed in the morning or stood for the photograph in the field. It was not the same body that held still in the tree now watching her point the flashlight up and listening to the alarm beep on from the weeds. No line connected one instance of that body to the next except the words that I remembered and the name that she called at me from the grass. And that was nothing. That was what I would have told her in the morning if I had found the words and that was what I was laughing at now as I watched her from the branch of the maple. That even if I brought the body I was right now down to the earth she would never find me. I was already dead.
"I'm nothing," I said.
"Sam," she said.
"I'm not Sam."
"Yes you are."
"It's all the same."
"Take another step. You're almost there."
"It's all a dream," I said. "We're dreaming this."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from the size of the universe by joseph cardinale Copyright © 2010 by Joseph Cardinale. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
The Singularity....................1The Great Disappointment....................15
Art in Heaven....................52
Action at a Distance....................68
May I Not Seem to Have Lived....................92
Proportions for the Human Figure....................106