Dimensions

Dimensions

The traffic on the six-lane highway rumbles past. Cars, buses, eighteen wheelers pulling pups, silver recreation vehicles, and motorcycles. The cacophony of noise assaults his ears until he blocks it, creates a white-noise cocoon—a silence of sorts. Not unlike the silence of the crowd he’d stood with half a world away, before the shock wore off and the screaming started.

           This road is so familiar. He’s driven it hundreds of times. Here, it’s flat and straight. The banks on either side are hillocks. Across the road from him, beyond the high bank, the land slopes steeply into a ravine that has a creek and trees. He makes his living sculpting things, including topographical maps. He’s made maps of this place. The road is intricate. A spider-web of over-and-under-passes, exits and entrances, though, unlike a spider web it’s not designed to trap things. The traffic flows at a rapid pace, and he’s caught here on the edge. His mind wanders back.

           Back when he was standing on the edge of the sea, and saw the waves stand still. For the briefest moment he’d thought, what if, between the standing waves, there were shapes he couldn’t see?

           In school, Einstein and Miniuk’s theories of relativity and spacetime caused him to wonder if he was stranded in 2-D—a figure standing on a piece of paper that stretched in every direction he could perceive, but he was unable to see an edge? Or 1-D—where he was a single dot on a line? Whatever else was on that line with him, he could only see as one dot at a time. New dots might be placed on the line but only in one direction—always ahead of where he was. That was time. Einstein supposed the space humans call time isn’t straight. It undulates sideways, like snakes, or waves influenced by undertows, riptides, or back-eddies. It also moves up and down, like waves influenced by wind.

           An air horn blasts him back to now. Two hundred thirty thousand. That’s the official tally now, but so many were unaccounted for and simply listed ‘missing’ that he thinks the real number will never be known. She was one of those.

           He looks behind himself and is blinded by the sun. He’s never had the hovering experience described as out-of-body, or moved toward a light filled with infinite love. Nor has he ever seen a ghost. He smiles when others talk of ghosts, says he can’t summon spirits, though sometimes he tries to talk to them. It’s always a one-sided conversation. She’d felt the same.

           While travelling, she’d mocked the superstitions she saw played out. In Thailand, people throwing paper into massive fires in crushing summer heat: Ghost money, the locals explained, offered to the spirits during Chinese Ghost Month to keep them away. And the locals had warned them. “Ghosts mostly live in the water. Don’t go swimming in lakes or the ocean this month because they’ll drown you.”

           She of course wanted to go swimming and call up some ghosts. He said he knew there were mysteries, but he had no interest in seeing a ghost. She did go swimming though, and did not see a ghost. Neither did he.

           He looks both ways along the road, searching for a break. He calculates lane widths, and speed. There’s no median. Three point six meters times six. He’s no Olympian. Still, last week he ran 10 kilometers up a mountainside in 40 minutes flat. When friends kidded him about it he replied, I’ve been running all my life.

           The sun has transformed the surface of the road. The traffic rides the currents of a river of melting orange waves. It seems to have slowed. Deceiving, he thinks.

           He knew what made the waves stand still in Thailand. An earthquake. She was far down the beach from him. He’d yelled at her to run. Instead, she froze until the sea was sucked backward out of sight; then poured in again. Filled with flotsam and dead things. At least 230,000 people dead.

           Within weeks, the world converged on the entire region, helping to rebuild. He’d stayed. But he couldn’t fill the holes left in other peoples’ lives. Or his own. After a year and a half, he’d come home.   

           He puts one foot forward, shifts his weight. Runs. Muscles shot through with adrenaline and now the sound of blaring horns. He dodges, darts, then stops on a lane-line, bouncing on the balls of his feet. At the right instant, he breaks. When he hits the bank of scrubby grass on the other side, he laughs. A shaky laugh of relief. Thinks, that was really dumb.

           She’d once told him she had run across these same lines of traffic—on a dare. Said nothing could match risking death to make her feel truly alive.

           Six months before he came home, ex-pats who’d been in Thailand long enough to learn the main language told him they heard he’d climbed out on a branch of a fallen tree to try to snatch a girl from the raging water of the tidal wave and flood that followed the quake. The branch broke, but he’d been able to hang onto the tree until a boat came by. He didn’t do that to risk death.

           Without a backward glance, he heads down the ravine. Darkness is crowding in, but dark doesn’t frighten him. He makes his way through the unlit terrain into the heart of the city. Stands between buildings that stretch upward, storey upon storey, until the electric light streaming from them obliterates the stars. He sees the tall shapes: rectangles, cones, triangles, cubes, spheres, and tesseracts. He tells himself, it’s time to let her go.

           But while he stands there, listening to the sounds of the city, smelling emissions belched from kitchens, combustion engines, and factories; while he feels the heat released from pavement that soaked up the scorching sun all day surround him; while he decides what his future will look like without her, she touches him with a chill, sinks him into a curve in time—and pulls him back.