WALTON'S THEORY OF RELATIVITY
A short story
Joe Walton, his wife Anne, and their daughter, Debbie, traveled on an unfamiliar highway. To their right, occasionally popping into view from behind a curtain of gnarled pine trees, lay Lake Huron, with each passing slice of water looking endless and icy gray. The view rekindled long-forgotten memories that Joe eventually started placing – grade-school images of paintings from, if he remembered correctly, a collection of artists called The Group of Seven.
To their left, the scenery unfurled less dramatically: vast fields of low-lying crops rolled by, mundane things that would have been botanically unclassifiable to Joe if not for the occasional billboard advertising the area's upcoming Labor-day-weekend white-bean festival and the town of Fitzroy's 'world-famous' baked bean cook-off.
Debbie, a robust and opinionated twelve-year old, took the billboard information to its logical conclusion, putting down her PlayStation Portable and stating, "Holy mackerel, Dad. You and a musical-fruit festival would be one explosive combination."
"Except beans aren't fruit," her father replied. "They're a legume."
"Okay, then, the more you'd boom."
"Like you two wouldn't," Joe said, but his rebuttal was half-hearted. He was aware of his gas problem, his hiatal hernia, his thinning hair – and they were just part of a growing list. At only thirty-eight years old, he felt as if he’d already waded deep into middle-age.
Anne, engrossed in her iPod’s Google-map directions, refused to get caught up in the flatulence debate. "I doubt we'll get the chance to join the locals and make a contest of it," she said. "It says here, if I can figure this thing out, that your parent's place is half an hour west of Fitzroy and it's already past noon. We'll barely have time for a visit, let alone a tour of the countryside, before the big bash."
Joe had tried to make sure events would unfold that way, using his and Anne’s work schedules as excuses to pare a day off the front end of their stay. And why not? His father Ernie, observing his 65th birthday, and his brother Frank, approaching his 40th (the binary dates of September 4th and September 7th, in conjunction with Labor-Day, had always been cause for celebration back in the day), had made this weekend a major event, an occasion dragged out of mothballs as both a nod to the past and a salute to the present. But in Joe's opinion – beyond the obvious fact that he’d yet to see his parents’ year-old summer home – he and his family were being called upon to fulfill a particular niche: As part of the audience needed to observe the grandeur of this shared milestone.
"And Aunt Amy's going to be there for sure, right?" his daughter asked.
The question sounded dwelled-upon to Joe, couched in optimism, and he knew why. Although only a sporadic presence over the years, both Debbie and Anne found Amy to be an oasis of calm within Joe's otherwise testosterone-fuelled family.
"She's there even as we speak," Joe said. “She got in earlier today and brought her new boyfriend with her."
"Grandpa never likes Aunt Amy's boyfriends," Debbie stated. "They're assholes."
"Debbie!"
Anne laughed. "Well, that is what he calls them, Joe. You can't blame your daughter for that."
No, he couldn't. That's exactly what his father had called each of Amy's boyfriends since she'd donned a training bra; that and a litany of other slights and threats had driven her out into the world at age seventeen.
"And this one sounds serious," Anne continued. "All in all, it should be quite an interesting weekend."
For lack of a better word, Joe thought the same thing: interesting. Then the three of them slipped back into themselves, exchanging nothing more than the odd observation. When their turnoff finally came into view, Joe signaled, slowed, and left the highway.
The exit ran back fifty yards or so, through a particularly thick stand of trees and toward the lake. On the far side of the trees, they turned onto a paved road and drove past a row of large, well-spaced water-front homes.
Joe's mother had e-mailed him pictures of their new property when they’d first bought it, but none had done justice to the area. As they pulled onto its asphalt driveway, he realized what he hadn't gleaned from her photos: the size of things out here; not just of his parent's place, either, which appeared to be a faux nineteenth-century farmhouse, but of everything.
The house was the last on the road, and an impenetrable, twelve-foot-high hedge separated it from the house before it. On the property's far boundary, lying before a sea of towering oaks and maples, a shaded walking trail stretched south for thirty yards before disappearing into the incline leading to the lake, which itself stretched into the horizon.
They stopped in front of the garage as Edith Walton, his mother, appearing smaller and frailer than he'd remembered, arose from her rocking chair on the wrap-around porch. Elderly and wearing a blue sweater vest and apron (making her look, ironically, like a Walmart greeter, Joe thought), she smiled, waved and started for the stairs.
* * *
Ernie Walton clutched his glass with thick, permanently oil-stained fingers, swirling the rye and coke within, exposing the mixture to maximum ice as he spoke.
"I'm not saying I don't like him. I'm saying that I'm withholding judgment for now."
The conversation had drifted to Jules, Amy's boyfriend, but Joe still hadn't met him; in fact, all he'd done since his arrival two hours earlier was take an expedited tour of the house with his mother and Anne and Debbie and Frank's wife, Wendy, only to be spit out onto the back deck at its conclusion to join the Walton men, already sequestered there for drinks. He was limiting himself to beer, though. If he tried to match his father rye for rye, or meet his brother's vodka consumption, he'd be piss-on-his-own-pant-leg drunk by dark. He'd learned that lesson the hard way while growing into adulthood – through repetition.
"It's just . . . what kind of name is Jules for a guy, anyway?" his father said next. Then, sounding as if he'd just uncovered the perfect answer: "It's the name of a guy who sells used books, is what."
Out on the lawn, near the property's cliff-like boundary facing the lake, Frank's son, Derek, chucked a baseball high into the air and settled under it, snagging it backhand with his baseball glove. He was sixteen now and had grown up lean and sinewy. Joe could see elements of both his father and his grandfather in him – more than elements, really. The boy could have been named Chip, as in 'off the old blocks'.
"Jules," Frank repeated. "It sounds fruity, doesn't it?"
Offhand, Joe could think of only two men named Jules: Verne and Pfeiffer. Names associated with literature and/or art, and a totally useless fact in the man's defense. But, fortified with three Miller Lites, he felt obliged to say something, for his sister's sake if not Jules'.
"Well, Amy's a good-looking woman, and he's dating her, isn't he?"
Frank barked out a laugh. "So what. She's famous for that kind of stuff." He turned to their father. "No offense, Dad, but her love-life's been a conveyor belt of fruity men. It's almost like she doesn't mean business."
Ernie shrugged and said, "All I know for sure is that he seems like a bit of an asshole."
There it was, Joe thought, the decree, about an hour later than he'd expected it. He downed the dregs of his beer, set the empty on his side-table with the others, and fished a fresh one from the cooler by his chair. He hefted it, acknowledging its weight and coldness as he pondered the moment. He felt as if he were coming to a familiar crossroads here, with just the right amount of drink in him to make him . . . what . . .? insightful by Walton men’s standards or finally uninhibited enough to think he was?
Joe wasn't sure, but he knew also that he was no more than a couple of fast-drained tins away from being stupid, too.
As he considered this, the back door sprung open and his mother stepped out. She carried a tray of crusted sandwiches and assorted party snacks.
"I want you boys to keep a full stomach, now," she said.
Joe smiled at how her arrival had coincided with his last thought, and how, at that exact moment of beer-enhanced perceptiveness, he could see the members of his family, each in their own role, corresponding to a cast of all-American semi-dysfunctional characters he might have been forced to read about in high school – in an Arthur-Miller type play maybe, with the matron coming out to make sure that the surly males ate while they drank to keep the mayhem to a minimum.
Edith set the sandwiches on the deck table. As she backed away the men reached out in a logjam of hands, with Frank snatching both halves of the lone pastrami on rye before Joe could get to one of them. From out of nowhere, and still clutching his baseball glove, Derek had joined the fray, radiating heat as he stretched for a peanut butter-and-jam pinwheel.
Frank looked up at him. "Hey. While you're eating that thing, why don't you go get my glove from the car."
"Yeah, sure," Derek said, stuffing the sandwich into his mouth and scooping up another for the trip.
Frank then turned to Joe. "You didn't happen to bring up a glove, did you, little brother?"
"Sorry, didn't even think of it."
"Well, luckily, I packed a spare." As Derek hustled toward the garage, Frank called out, "There's two in the trunk, Kiddo. Grab 'em both.
"What about you, Dad?" Frank asked. "You wanna dig up your glove?"
"As a retiree," Ernie said, "I’m here to fish, drink, and barbeque. Nothing else."
"For Jules to use, then," Frank said. Both men stayed silent for a moment before guffawing simultaneously.
When the laughter subsided, Ernie said, "I could fetch him Edith's dinner gloves." There was another pause . . . then another eruption.
Joe doubted that his mother even owned dinner gloves, but that hadn't stopped the two men from enjoying the statement. Obviously, they'd completed their analysis of Amy's boyfriend through up-close-and-personal observations made in a fraction of a single day.
This, of course, brought Joe back to a more familiar thought, one always enhanced by the drinking and enforced closeness of this sort of gathering, and that was what Frank and his dad thought of him – through up-close-and-personal observations made over their lifetimes. But before he could even start to contemplate his answer, Frank asked:
"So, you still got that crazy, looping curveball, Joe?"
"Jeez, I don't know. I haven't thrown a ball in years."
The truth was, Joe wasn't even aware that he'd possessed a crazy, looping curveball. He recalled practicing a breaking ball years ago, when they'd played catch together: index finger and middle finger together on one side of the U seam in the rawhide, thumb on the other, combined with a fast-snapping wrist action upon release; but he had no memory of throwing the pitch with any efficiency. And he recalled nothing in the way of acknowledgements or compliments, spoken or implied, regarding it or any games they’d played together as boys.
Shaking out his right arm in anticipation of the looming strain, Joe took another pull on the beer in his left hand before saying, "But, sure. I don't see why not."
* * *
1:10 am.
Joe did still possess a looping curve ball, although it took him half an hour and tremendous stress on his elbow to rediscover it.
Now he sat in the basement – a sprawling, broadloomed rec room with a full bar, overstuffed leather furniture, and a sixty-inch flat-screen television – pressing a rapidly warming tin of beer against the inside crook of his right arm while wondering if his forty minutes of afternoon foolishness would result in him needing Tommy-John surgery. Two more beers, still in their plastic rings, rested on the coffee table in front of him.
Along with his alcohol consumption, some of his mother's more potent painkillers had kept the hurt at bay all evening, reducing the throb in his ligaments to a background pulse, but the codeine-based tablets held a sizeable amount of caffeine, hindering his ability to sleep.
Discovering halfway through the evening that the huge television set in front of him had been Frank's and Wendy's birthday present to his father hadn't helped in the slumber department, either, but his mother had taken him aside as she washed and put away the set of crystal ware he and Anne had brought as their combination birthday-and-belated house-warming gift, telling him, "Don't you worry, Honey. It's not a contest."
She was right, and it never had been. Not while they were growing up, with Frank old enough and driven enough to make every rite of passage familiar yet inaccessible territory, and certainly not after his brother had finished college and stepped into his father's small tool-and-die business, modernizing it and turning a career-long break-even concern into a wildly successful operation.
It took Joe a full year at the shop, much of it humiliating, to realize he couldn’t follow in footsteps that all agreed were much too big for him. When Walton and Sons Tool and Die reverted back to Walton and Son, Joe stumbled into the second job he’d ever known, eventually rising from dishwasher to branch manager for Ample Foods, a university catering service. Anne came into his existence shortly thereafter, then Debbie, and, in the greater scheme of things, life was good.
But ...
He set down his beer, picked up the converter, and turned on the television, instantly bathing the dimly lit room in a high-definition glow. The picture, huge, clear, and crisply colored, only enhanced his feelings of inadequacy, but he stifled them and began thumbing his way up the dial, enduring a cluster of half-hour commercials promoting everything from Russian party girls to miracle slicers before moving into the more intellectually stimulating realm of Seventies’ sitcoms. He pushed on, finally coming to a computer-animated display of a man in a cut-out spaceship apparently racing with a ray of light. The Discovery Channel logo rested in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and a baritone narrator explained the image on screen.
"If you were traveling in the same direction as a beam of light and could move at half of its speed, you would expect the accompanying beam to appear to be traveling at half of its speed: it doesn't. The light will continue to travel at its established speed, 186,282.4 miles per second, nature’s speed limit, independent of your motion. No matter how you move, you cannot catch up because time becomes relative as you approach the speed of light."
Joe thought about this for an instant, not fully grasping the information's implications. He knew he was wasted on beer and pills to the point of passing out, but something still didn't seem right, not real-world right, and he couldn't put his finger on it.
"And, contrary to popular belief," the narrator continued, "light traveling through space is not moving through a true void. We know this because objects containing mass bend space, the way a bowling ball might bend a sheet of rubber. This explains why smaller bodies orbit larger ones; they're circling within the indent created in the invisible fabric of the universe."
This physical analogy, a bowling ball denting a sheet of rubber, Joe could understand, mostly because of the new onscreen graphics showing a bowling ball warping the lines on a grid, pulling them downward. But he had to lump the invisible fabric statement in with the speed of light/time information as, if not scientific gibberish, then something he just didn't get. If Frank were here, he'd have snatched the converter from his hands by now and said, "We’ve heard enough bullshit, bro. Let's find some MMA, or better yet, some t and a."
Frank wasn't here, though, and Joe was willing to give the program another minute. He snapped open a new beer and watched as the program continued.
"But before we delve more deeply into what we know of the present-day universe and its possible futures, including something known as The Big Freeze, let us look at its origin. The most likely scenario, scientists agree, took place almost fourteen billion years ago, when all matter and energy was contained at one point, in an area unimaginably hot and dense and small. We call this state Singularity. What occurred next, although labeled The Big Bang, was not so much an explosion as a rapid expansion, highlighted by the Inflationary Epoch, where, in an instant of less than one one-thousandth of a second, Singularity expanded in size at many times the speed of light, giving birth to both time and space."
Except nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. The guy had just said that. Now Joe had heard enough bullshit, but when he considered following through on his postponed decision to change the channel, he realized the show had served its purpose.
Nestling deeper into the crook of the sofa, he rested his beer on his lap and let his head sink into the supple leather behind him.
* * *
The next day began with Edith gathering everyone in the dining room by 9:00 am for a breakfast of pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausages, home fries, toast, coffee, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. She’d found Joe in the basement, splayed out on the couch and still gripping his beer while a deep-sea documentary droned on in the background.
Amy and Jules, so hard to pin down the day before, sat at the table, too. Acclimatization was over; this was the start of the festivities.
"So, Jules," Ernie said from the head of the table. "We didn't get a chance to talk much yesterday."
"No. I'm sorry, we didn't," Jules said. "Amy and I got caught up in the area's nature trails. By evening, we were wiped out."
"There are hundreds of miles of hiking paths around here, Dad," Amy said. "Along the escarpment, into the woods. The scenery is beautiful."
"I know about the trails, Honey,” Ernie said. “I did buy the property. But I was hoping to find out a bit about Jules here this weekend – without being too nosey, mind you."
Jules, with one piece of toast and an egg on his plate and a cup of black coffee in his hand, took his cue. "Well, basically, I'm thirty-four years old, Ernie, and I sell used books."
"Yes, I know the basics, but not much more. For example, your operation – do you run it from the internet, the trunk of your car, a shop?"
"I own a store in the city’s northwest – Gastown."
Ernie nodded appreciatively. "Good area. You specialize in any type of book?"
"No preference whatsoever, although I do try and filter out the crap."
Frank, smiling through a mouthful of sausage, swallowed then asked, "Really? I've often wondered how, in a business like yours, you can tell the difference between crap and non-crap without reading everything you sell?"
"It's simple, Frank. You can smell it."
Frank looked at him blankly.
"Alright, seriously then," Jules said. "Reading's important, and I do a lot of it, but I also rely on common knowledge, good judgment, other peoples’ word, and the vast amounts of information readily available these days. Plus," Jules locked directly into Frank's gaze as he emphasized the word, "sometimes I do peddle crap. But then, don't we all?"
They'd been at the table only a handful of minutes, and the men weren't actually harassing Jules yet, Joe thought, but if yesterday's talk on the back deck about Amy, her choice of boyfriends, or Jules's name and possible disposition were any indication ....
"Well, it sounds like an interesting job to me," Edith said chirpily, as if she sensed what Joe was speculating and meant to stem the tide. "I mean, it's definitely no run-of-the-mill occupation."
For the next while, chewing, clinking, and the almost palpable sound of unexpressed thoughts buzzing in people's heads permeated the table, leaving Joe to ponder what, exactly, his father and Frank had found wrong with Jules in the first place – besides his name. Tall and rangy, with wavy brown hair, gold wire-rimmed glasses, and a slightly cleft chin, the man was handsome in a scholarly way.
Of course, that last attribute, scholarly – easy enough for some to confuse with fruity – might have been part of the problem, but Joe didn't foresee trying to defend anyone today. Not yet anyway, and not without a single beer in him . . . or a painkiller. His elbow still hurt, a hangover befouled his existence, and having passed out on the downstairs sofa had put a crick in his neck.
How had he done it? Up here less than a day and he felt twice his already physically advanced age.
"Do you have any more of those pills, Mom?" he asked.
"Eat some food first, Dear," she said, nodding to his plate.
Dutifully, Joe shoved a forkful of scrambled eggs into his mouth.
For most of the morning Joe stayed low-profile, exploring the immediate grounds and taking a long walk down the tree-lined access lane with Anne and Debbie.
He napped after a late lunch, awoke around three-thirty, and grabbed a beer to sip on the front porch. It went down like water. When he returned to the kitchen fifteen minutes later, he found that the women, or most of them, had moved in, congregating around the table and sink to shuck corn and prepare salads.
As he walked to the fridge to get another cold one, his mother asked, "Have you seen Amy anywhere?"
"No, Mom. I sort of just woke up."
"Well, if you do, tell her that Uncle Bert and Uncle Phil have phoned from the road. They’ll both be pulling in within the hour, so there's plenty of work for her here."
"Sure."
This evening, he knew the party would start in earnest, with the closer relatives here to eat, drink, and go hard well into the night before crashing in the remaining spare bedrooms or on sofas and fold-out cots; by tomorrow, friends and more distant relatives would litter the landscape, transforming this idyllic setting into a fairground.
He opened the back door and stepped out onto the deck. At the far end, the men clustered around the barbeque, a four-wheeler as big as a kitchen counter and hooked up to a gas feed from the house. Frank stood before it, pulling an inch-thick steak from a marinating vat and adding it to the growing stack by the grill; Derek stood beside him, holding a lite beer and grinning broadly. Ernie and Jules, paying no attention to the others, sat in the midst of debate on two side chairs.
"So, you're telling me," Jules said, "that you think the government should cut grant programs for literature, theater – for all of the arts?"
"Taxpayers might as well wipe their asses with each dollar handed to those freeloaders for all the good it does," Ernie answered. "You either make the grade or you don't. That's how it works for everyone in the real world."
"But the real world never tries to better itself in its barely regulated free-for-all," Jules countered. "Improvement occurs only as one possible side effect to profit."
Joe stood there for a moment, weighing his options; when no one turned in his direction he made his decision, slipping across the deck, down the stairs, and towards the Western walking trail. He wasn't actively looking for Amy, but he'd seen the lake only from the precipice looking down onto it. He'd yet to walk the driftwood-littered stretch of beach below.
The trail snaking down the left side of the lot was steep and craggy, littered with rocks and roots, and near the end of his descent Joe realized why he'd been avoiding it until now. Catching a foot on something, he rumbled down the last ten feet like a human avalanche, his arms flailing, his almost-middle-aged heft helpless against momentum, until he finally belly-flopped onto the sandy strip at the bottom.
"Son-of-a-fucking bitch!"
"Classy entrance," Amy said, laughing.
Joe looked to his right, towards the source of her voice. She sat, still smiling, on a four-foot length of log.
He stood and dusted himself off. "So here you are," he said.
"Are you looking for me?"
"Sort of. Others are anxious for your company."
"Come," she said, motioning. "Have a seat."
Joe walked over, sat beside her, and started brushing the remaining sand from his shirt and half-depleted, partially crushed beer can.
"So," she said, nodding back towards the house. "Who up there is looking for me?"
"Well, Mom wants you in the kitchen so you can pitch in with all the so-called women's stuff before the crowds arrives, and I think Jules wouldn't mind seeing your face, too. He's stuck in a chair across from Dad right now."
"Good."
"What do you mean, good?"
"I steered him there then abandoned him," Amy said.
As Joe pondered her response and sipped at his foamy beer, Amy took a joint from her shirt pocket and lit it. How long had it been since he'd smoked? Pre-Debbie, most likely. But before his minor shock could become obvious, he composed himself and asked, "Are you and Jules serious?"
With her lungs loaded and her lips pursed, Amy could only nod. Finally, she blew out a smokey, "Yep." Then, "That's why I left him up there – not to see if Dad can accept him. I'm here to see if Jules will accept Dad – accept everyone, I guess. If he can't, life's going to get a bit awkward for a while."
With that, she offered the joint to Joe.
Now what? he thought. Was she just being polite in her Amy-ish way, knowing that he'd smoked a bit in the past, or was this a test, a drawing of some kind of familial line in the beach sand, a nonverbal, are you with them, the establishment, or are you with me? She'd had plenty of time to smoke before he'd arrived.
But then, how could she have known that he'd come here?
Not sure what to do, Joe reached out, took it, and toked, coughing as the hot draw scorched his throat.
They didn't talk until they'd finished the joint. As Amy dropped the roach and buried it in the sand with the toe of her sandal, she said, "What the hell is it, Joe? What incomprehensible law of nature is at work here?"
Her tone and words straddled the line between rhetoric and question, and he wasn't sure if he should answer, let alone how. But before he could even contemplate a response, she started talking again.
"I was a kid when I took off, not much more than a runaway, sick of the blow-ups and bullshit. I couldn’t get away fast enough. But you know what? Regardless of how young I was, what ignited the explosions, or how far away I moved, some indefinable force keeps pulling me back, keeps . . .."
She paused in her impromptu soliloquy (this time with a tilt of the head, as if she were searching for an elusive concept), and even though she'd failed to finish her sentence, the words she had managed to spill held the seed of something both familiar and unfathomable to Joe.
"Meanwhile," she said at last, "the less progress I make in my own life, the faster time flies. I'm only thirty-two years old, but the months are starting to flip by like calendar pages in one of those old black-and-white movies. Are the years going to be next, because I just don’t understand?”
She fell quiet again, leaving the two of them to stare out at the blank canvass before them, watching Lake Huron's gray waters waver against charcoal clouds in an almost seamless horizon, and once more Joe didn’t know what to say. All he could contemplate was his own bizarre situation, sitting there listening to a kid sister he saw every two or three years, almost a stranger now, really, open up to him as a fine, misty rain started falling and a buzz that he hadn't felt in more than a decade began to overtake him.
But as their silence stretched, a response to Amy's sprawling query came to him, sudden and clear.
"I do," he said at last.
Amy looked at him blankly. "Do what?"
"Understand. It's all relative. Of course, gravity's involved, too."
"Okay, now I really don't understand," Amy said.
Joe couldn’t bring himself to describe the first part of his new-found theory; he didn’t even know how it came to him – complete with unasked for images linking his parents with . . . with what . . .? The Big Bang? He pushed that unsavory thought aside and began with what immediately followed.
"It's like when you're an infant and have no concept of time. You're brand new, with no references. And later, when you try to think back on that time, you can't; there's no before, no measuring stick. It's as if you've moved through your initial growing stage instantaneously, faster than the laws of nature would allow."
Amy raised an eyebrow. "Or you just don't remember it."
"Sure, if you want to be a stickler," he said. "But time does move relative to you, where you are in life, and the speed you’re living it. When I was a kid, I was always on the go, but the faster I moved, the longer summer seemed. Now I drag my sorry ass to work every day, do nothing every evening, and it feels like I've barely detailed the barbeque before I'm rolling it back into the garage for the winter again."
"But shouldn't it be the opposite?" Amy asked. "Shouldn't time feel like it drags when your sorry ass does, too?"
"You'd think so, wouldn't you," Joe said, "but you just said yourself that you weren't making any progress and that the months are flying by. Well, I've got news for you – the years will be next. And they’re going to keep flying by . . . until you’re in your grave, anyway."
Amy laughed and said, "Aren't you a fountain of optimism. But go on. You mentioned gravity, too. What does that have to do with anything?"
"Well, what brought you here this weekend?"
“I've already said . . . I’m not sure,” Amy said. “I live on the West coast, I'm busy enough to justify staying home, and Jules is strictly my business. I could have sent my regrets in a phone call or a text, but every so often something pulls me back – some force I can’t describe."
"Exactly," Joe said. "You may not want to be here, I may not want to be here, but here we are. It's as if we're held in tow, circling around the lip of some massive indent within the invisible fabric of the Walton universe."
Amy looked at him, smiled and nodded. "Time, gravity, the Walton universe . . . it sounds to me like you’re officially ripped, Brother. Any chance you could clarify?"
Joe wanted to clarify, wanted to say more, but he couldn’t; by now he was fully stoned and twenty-four hours worth of beer and prescription-grade painkillers had magnified the joint's unfamiliar effect, bringing him dangerously close to his limit. Something beyond his present state of impairment weighed on him, too, something he couldn't put his finger on.
So, they sat, looking out at the horizon as the light rain grew in intensity and plump drops bounced off the lake’s surface like hail off of ice. The accompanying wind had kicked up an army of whitecaps, sent them roiling towards the shoreline, and through the rough, rhythmic start of this sudden Nor’wester, Joe suddenly imagined himself riding the crest of a wave – not one of those out on the lake, but a wave in the elusive nature of time itself, as if he were hanging ten in that never-ending instant between the past and the future. He couldn't see where he was headed, though, and looking back was dangerous because the act itself would certainly jeopardize his footing. Amongst all this uncertainty, the only thing Joe could do was try to stay upright and the only thought he could be sure of was this: whatever shoreline lay in the distance was dark, barren, and unavoidable.
"Well, Einstein," Amy said at last. "We're getting soaked. Maybe we should head back up to the house."
"Huh." With his reverie shattered, Joe shook his head and hefted his empty tin. The sudden motion sent a bolt of pain through his elbow.
"Sure. Let's go. I need a refill, anyway."
Jim Kearns is back on Saturday.