Posted on Saturday, 04/08/23.
“I want to be kissed somewhere I would never think to be kissed,” says Sam, “I want to be shocked.”
“Like, on your feet?” asks Gwyn, crosslegged. She takes a bite of tunafish. Sam, badly scoliotic, smiles up from where her head nearly touches the hallway floor. The pariahs of lunchtime pass their alcove at intervals, humping their JanSports. Settled dust from the construction up on three allows Gwyn to draw figures on the laminate, which soothes her. School smells abound: plastic and ozone. She circumscribes a triangle.
“Feet are obvious—I mean way esoteric, Gwyn. I mean unknown and inscrutable. Lateral knee, under-scapula, the lowly perineum.”
“And then what?”
“And then that means love, Gwyn—what specificity always means.”
She nose-wrinkles, “One morphism too far for me.”
“It’s not though—specificity is the antitoxin of dead experience. It glows from first principles. As soon as something’s general it’s asystole and gurneyed. Consider that real love might comprise the kind of stuff that, were it to happen to you, as in really occur, that you wouldn’t be so sure at first what it had been—that it had even been okay.”
Gwyn puts her finger at the intersection of perpendicular bisectors, and holds it still: “But then the obvious, Sam: how do you know it was okay? How do you figure it out?”
Sam bites ham-on-rye, chewing carefully: “I’m not saying I’ve got all the answers.”
“Humph,” says Gwyn.
“Are you humphing me?”
“Humph.”
Sam is quiet for a little. “Just means you want to be kissed somewhere unthinkable, too—just means you aren’t willing to ask for it, to want it publicly—aren’t willing to do what it fucking takes.”
Gwyn watches her bite a carrot stick. She hears the rattle of her milk carton, sucked dry. They sit in silence, letting the sounds of lunch gently wash them clean.
The previous winter Sam had started messaging on forums, sending Gwyn screenshots. She spoke to men at length, Sam did. She made evisceratingly detailed charts and observations. Sometimes she repeated what some of them said, without letting them know, to others.
Sam was severely infolded. She had been since they met. She was so isolated and involuted that when they talked it felt like she had made the entirety of the language of each conversation bespoke: for her.
Despite what Gwyn had initially thought, the forums, the messaging, the dating, didn’t seem to imply that this had changed. If anything it had all gotten stronger, like Sam’s basic traits were now hyperbolically lensed. The more they talked about it all the more it felt like Sam had changed very little, which made Gywn wonder if someone could be so unyielding, so unpliant, that things could be forced instead to warp around them—if inside such extreme contortion there could be no space for anything like meekness, or fear.
Gwyn thought it could be possible that in all this squeezing Sam’s amygdala had gone hypoxic, and died. This was her theory. Like some paradox of a self-wrung sponge. She sometimes thought very hard, especially when she was feeling particularly bad or alone, if there was not something she had missed. If there was not something essentially desirous in what Sam was achieving.
Sometimes at night Gwyn watches a video of an old mathematical tutorial showing how a sphere could be turned inside out without cuts or hard pinches. The narrator not only explains but shows how this can be done, with a beautiful animation. It’s something that seems impossible until it is not. Gwyn once masturbated to it.
The dust left on her finger-pads by the figures she draws agglomerates into gray crescent moons, which flake off when they grow too large. Part of it is that she can’t use men’s essential stupidity the way Sam does—she doesn’t think—can not inhabit it and work within it—preferring, as she had until recently thought almost all people also preferred, to let things unfold, relax, and regularize: to see, to encompass, and only later draw careful, planar lines between crucial observations. She loved lines.
She thinks Sam must be wrong to have said love exists in details; the details are where all of the precise work is done. Precision comes from the Latin meaning to cut or to pinch.
“Can you scratch me a little,” asks Sam. Both of them have packed up their food, placed crumpled baggies inside other baggies. Flung sporks into blue bins. Gwyn reaches and tucks her hand in the gap around which Sam curls, like the shell of a nautilus or the beak of a squid, rib to hip in a circle. She readjusts the shirt’s fabric so that it rubs less bad. Sam’s face smooths like oil on water.
***
On trips Mrs. Kanehara insisted on preparing identical brown-bag lunches for the team. Passersby at that highway rest-stop on that day in April would have seen a phalanx of high-schoolers receive their rations. The students with tree-nut allergies, some thirty-per-cent of the roster, had almost all remembered this time to preemptively tote their own: to accept their bags, but dispose of them quickly. Those who forgot were offered spare bites of bologna-on-rye, orange slices, carrot sticks, string cheese. The team was almost sixty strong including alternates. Some wore matching t-shirts, though most wore individual, totemic garb. Threadbare sweaters over polos. Lucky sweatpants with holes in both knees. High-diopter ovoid spectacles with paracord straps. The summer sun shone against their collective paleness. Many of them had heads so large that in moments of extreme focus or fatigue their necks preferentially buckled to one side, giving an impression that they were a tired group, or a bored group. They were not. Most of them were already three-bedrooms deep in their mind-palaces, their Montessori breath-techniques, their complex mnemonic methods concerning incenters or the relation between means or the misleadingly-named basic identities of the combinatorics of hypergeometry. Most had their own cool-downs and warm-ups. One student muttered in Russian the basic ansätze for Bessel-like diff-eqs, including edge cases. A small boy rubbed out an octant of a personal-size stone slate and rechalked a key relation.
Mrs. Kanehara, unliked by many for reasons personal and specific, nevertheless doled out solid practice problems to those without their own routine, and a small hemicircle of the younger students sat around her, answering in the form of the sums of the numerator and denominator of fractions in reduced form. No one could deny that her tenure had brought success, even domination. For important competitions she carried Werther’s caramels, which attracted even some of the third-years to her drill sessions. Students drank water as if they might never be able to again.
Most of the kids had come into the seriousness of this, despite all appearances, independently of their parents’ desires or pressures—Gwyn knew this because if the parents learned what competition math really was, what it truly felt like to bang out the kind of impersonal, vulcanized manipulations that it took to get to the very top, they would see just how far away their babies had strayed from the sort of cool, comfortable confidence that allows one to purchase a home early, to raise smart children, and to grow old. None of the kids was here because this is what they thought they should be doing. They were here because they were indebted, which to Gwyn was beyond want or pleasure. Gwyn, who had grown to appreciate Ms. Kanehara’s crustless tunafish and her dense nutritious peanut-butter magic bars, ate in silence in the lenticular intersection of two umbrellas’ shadows. She watched the refraction above the tarmac glisten and wiggle. She computed the area of certain common geometric figures, which felt like opening and closing a fist. She felt the coming summer’s spirit seethe. She bit the tunafish, always ice cold, and felt extremely, devastatingly focused.
***
The first month they know each other, Gwyn and Sam don’t talk. Sam watches Gwyn draw figures on paper in the school library: complicated ones that she has memorized from early treatises on geometry for optics and orbits. They are like spiders. She uses a hard Staedtler pencil sharpened to a fine tip. They are accompanied by Latin explanations that Gwyn never really has to learn, because the work speaks for itself. Sam will later say that the gentle scrape of the compass was ‘spine-tingling.’
It is not until Gwyn’s dad finally passes away, late in their summer before high-school, that Sam begins to ask Gwyn questions about what she has scribed: questions for which Gwyn realizes, slowly, she does not always have good answers, not right away at least. Sam draws them out of her like silk. Sam shows Gwyn the lip of her brace, opening her oversize cardigan and lifting the hem of her camisole, revealing patterned fiberglass. They tap on the laminate library table tops, identifying bubbles and pits in the glue underneath, purely by sound. Sam discusses adhesives, resins, and tars in detail. She knows things about book mites and bone folders, arranging them in conversation as if she were readying herself for a long and speculative procedure. She says things like that she has been ‘under the knife,’ many, many times. She describes things she could seemingly not have known had the anesthetic taken full effect, like the banter between orthopedics and radiology. She knows the measurements of a 000 suture.
When the sun goes down, the diamond muntins of the library windows sheer and redden on the opposite wall, angles yawning and tightening. Sam says that the position of the sun taken at the same time of day for the course of a year traces a figure known officially as an analemma. Gwyn draws it. Sam points to the bottom, then the top: the Tropic of Capricorn, the Tropic of Cancer. Fingers on paper indicate, raspingly, the immense sweep of the Coriolis effect. There is not as much to say about how people die as Gwyn expected there to be, when it comes down to it. When her mother’s car sometimes fails to show up, past sundown, Gywn spends the carpool home smelling the warm neutrality of the nubuck of Sam’s mother’s Accord.
***
Sam’s head rests in Dylan’s lap as he kills demons from Hell. LCD screens are prone to burned-in afterimages on repetitive use. They emit a buzz that only the young can hear. They create the illusion of movement and color with coordinate grids and flicker. In the corner of the room Gywn sips a strawberry Safeway-brand soda from the fridge downstairs—Dylan’s mom had made a fuss about drinks. The bendy straw floats up. The game’s music is low and repetitive, like a heartbeat. Sam occasionally touches on Dylan’s knee, at which he produces a small silver flask from the breast pocket of his greatcoat and guides it to her lips. The smell after it is opened is sweet and lingering. He wears a trench-coat indoors: has every time Gwyn has seen him. It is just after 6pm on a Friday in mid April. The windows have been left open a crack but there’s no breeze. The twin cans of soda Dylan’s mom forced on him and Sam remain untouched and bead sweat on the shag. It is quite warm. Sam had assured Gwyn that another friend would be coming over before seven, giving pretense to having brought her along. Dylan’s hand slides somewhere complicated and Sam buries her face in her boyfriend’s trunk.
Gwyn shudders again at her memory of the mood on the bus home from the regional AMO feeder tournament—the sheer magnitude of received humiliation required to imprint legible sterility and forlornness on the faces of students for whom these descriptors are considered par. A small boy named Rohit had vomited quietly behind the hump of a wheel well, on his knees like a disgraced samurai. Those who noticed had just accepted it, lifting their feet against its creep. It was only the second time that Mrs. Kanehara had refused to let students see her face while they disembarked in front of the then darkened school. The night air had smelled of dogwood and freshly killed sprinklers, which normally would have elated Gwyn. Made her smooth. A dog had been barking far away. She had strapped on her helmet and peddled for her appointment with Sam and the boyfriend, pushing especially hard to tamp self-hatred, which led to nausea and cramping. She knew she had been losing weight, but the moment she stole for herself in Dylan’s house’s bathroom before meeting everyone, looking in the mirror, fixing her helmet hair, had been frightening. She had sipped water from the faucet.
Dylan tells Sam he is simply thrashing his previous score, no doubt because of her, taking no prisoners as low-resolution genocide unfolds at thirty frames per second. For Sam, this comment seems to be thrilling. The sound of the joystick slamming into its surrounding plastic collar. The posters on the walls are mostly of women draped over cars. The cars look very sharp and fragile. Quietly one night during a sleepover Sam had described to Gwyn the unusual care that Dylan took in making sure that nothing was left to chance with her pleasure; how the language of his probing questions was not, as one might first infer, medical, but instead enthrallingly precise. She says to Gwyn he has been the first man to see her out of her brace.
***
Gwyn stands next to Sam in the stationary tilt-a-whirl—deep from its belly come the frustrated sounds of its maintainer, who has crawled below. The late May sun beats on the heads of half of the other stranded riders, some on their phones, some idly chatting with their neighbors, some staring up into the sky unblinkingly. They are caged in pink and yellow powder-coated steel. Vinyl cushions cup Gwyn’s lumbar and calves while Sam lays on her side, both of them gently inclined. Sounds of wrench on metal. The underwater twang of long hollow steel hit hard. The rest of the fair tumbles on outside like a car crash. The school has hired five different large machines and three times as many small stands for their annual end of year carnival, though Gwyn hadn’t seen most of them, following Sam’s advice to not eat before the tilt-a-whirl. Gwyn feels incredibly empty and sugar deprived as funnel-cake off-gas wafts in hot wet air. She feels clear. The sound of bells hit by hammered weights on vertical rails. Balloons popping. A small child held by its parent begins to cry on the antipode of the tilt-a-whirl, which is more properly called a gravitron. The operator, unseen beneath, starts to curse in his first language. Gwyn begins to wonder if there is a danger that the ride might begin with him still down there: if any resistance could be offered by a human body against the unstoppable mechanisms of fun and amusement.
A pack of girls screams far away. Someone yells someone’s name. Sweat collects on her lumbar and pools, trapped. The vertical parallel bars which riders can grip during the ride’s intense spin have, at the places Gwyn’s hands would naturally rest, been worn of their paint, the underlying bare metal burnished and warm. People had been here before. She is with them. The sound of something small and hard caroming and pinging on the asphalt far below. An invocation of God’s first name. One of the other riders, annoyed at the young child’s cry, has offered the parent of the child a piece of hard candy to get it to shut up, and while the parent at first appears to try and explain something to him, he eventually pockets it. She and Sam are not in the sun, for which she is thankful. The child looks so small and sleepy. The tilt of the tilt-a-whirl places Sam and her slightly above everyone else. Sam texts privately on her phone, smiling to herself, turning it over when she is done on her thigh, face down, before a buzz makes her flip it again. There is a growing sense that they will either be quickly released or stuck for a very long time. Someone begins to unwrap a sandwich they had hidden in a pocket. Gwyn has always liked the simplicity of the pleasures of the tilt-a-whirl, the force on her back making her feel flatter and more contained than she has ever been able to be in normal life, this force causing her eyes to become slightly oblate and unfocused and wobbly, this force’s ability to trick her limbic system so easily into believing false things. All of these effects make Gwyn remember, like a soft headache, that force is not real—that it is a purely geometric phenomenon—that as much as it feels as though the ride might press against them, they are the ones pressing back against it. She starts to turn to explain this to Sam.
A low buzz. The tilt-a-whirl begins to tilt and whirl. Whipping her head reveals the operator triumphant but huffing, back by the small booth attached to the ride by thick twisted wires and chains. Exhaustion drains from the face of the father with the child, and the more nervous on the ride reach out to grip the bars in front of them. The azimuth precesses. Everyone goes silent and this causes the sounds of the fair to rush in more fiercely. The half-moon of sunlight rotates slowly and oppositely to them, plunging Gwyn into occasional cool. The wind begins to dry the damp at her hairline. The tilt does not change but nevertheless with increasing speed it appears to change, and she relaxes. She tries to imagine what the path of a rider would appear to be to a stationary observer far away, but without knowing the gear ratios, without knowing the mechanisms of the machine, she can’t.
A series of pops rings out from somewhere far away. The ride continues to gain speed. The occupants, skin pulled back on their faces, have begun to scream with the intensity, though these screams are also far away, and seem to shatter and dissolve in the roiling air trapped within the ride’s steel ribs. More pops. Soft lurching. A sense that at every tilt within each whirl there is also a shudder or skip, and that the speed of the thing is now faster than any ride, Gwyn feels, she has ever been on before. She lets out a long yell. She screams Fuck Yes! She tries to turn to make eye contact with Sam but the Coriolis effect makes her dizzy and her vision grays at its borders. She brings her knees up to her chest, stuck to the vinyl by pure geometry. She wraps herself in herself. The screams come from every direction and distend, thinned by speed. Trying to look between the slats of the ride to track the position where the operator should be, where the queue would be stood by waiting, yields only visual noise, and all outside is now a great effluvium of color, like a raised summer rash. At the nadir of the tilt the antipode of the ride seems suspended directly above her, and she sees the father and the child, who by all appearances could be said to be asleep, save that his soft infant body has smushed and flattened to something like twice its original diameter, filling every crevice of its dad. Gwyn feels Sam’s hand on her own, mated perhaps only by the extreme spin, but Gwyn couldn’t bend to her if she tried.