What If The State Is Disequilibrium? (Novel excerpt)

“When an object sits at rest or moves along a straight line with no change in momentum, it will continue in this undisturbed state” (Isaac Newton)

The road stretches ahead straight—its path outlining terrain against an arc of color along the northern sky—for logging trucks used to build the lodge. I guess, because why else does it etch a line from here to there except to accommodate. An arrow. The night shows only a blanket of cloudless light shielding a three-quarter moon. Ahead shadow marks shallow pockets left by spring rains. Their predictable pattern lit by the moon’s occasional luminescence. Orion’s belt. Sirius. Little dipper. Big.

Behind, voices fall into the gravel grating gravel under thick treads laced up to just below the top two eyelets so my shins can fold in each step. Not protocol. My first reminder. Birch stands at attention waiting commands. My second reminder. Frogs, crickets go unmuffled in marshy reeds and cattails. Apart from the birch, frogs, and crickets I rely on memory marking my path. Bends, roots at the edge, the depths of black. Really, it’s the humidity clinging to my nose, eyes blinking back salt. Memory—dank 10 o’clock. Footsteps carry me so this too is a provocation. Newton. I move in the straight line, no change in momentum, undisturbed. But it doesn’t work that way. Another reminder. Disequilibrium racks in me as the milky wisps winning against the moon. A thick mass revealing in motion. Rack. Does it work that way in me as it does with cloud-covered moon? Its speed leaves me unsettled. The next reminder.

What rests with no change in momentum? Do I count as being ‘disturbed’ by the shifting light above me that unsettles me? I won’t change motion otherwise. This path is my straight line to follow. My arrow. The path curves ahead. Another reminder. Then safety.

Emissions flicker in the void above. Star bright. No Orion’s belt. Sirius, or dippers. Stillness except for the inhale, exhale. One I hear inside of me, the other outside.

The young woman tucks next to my arm hugging a baby close and in my other arm rests a child against my chest. Four? Five? The woman’s hair gleams against night somehow making this uncertain time steady as the shallow quick pants of the child sitting warm on my neck. That one spot above the clavicle almost at the jugular. Or is it the carotid? The rhythm of blood and breath in him and me throbs unrhythmic in my ear and along her three steps to my every two. Will he suffocate? I wait for each in and out as a parent watching their baby sleep. Metronomic progress evens the pace and I have to consider my 5’10” height to her more than 12” shorter. His two pants to my every one step stretch into the road pocked in war; I work carefully as does she. We both seem to know a war’s unpredictable way. I scan the overgrowth sagging in dense air and I envision Walt shirtless in his back yard, burying bulbs, pruning, singing off key against a matching humidity and temp. WWII he tells me one day. Broken heart. The description now is post-traumatic stress. The absurdity of his image curls into a one-sided grin. I’m glad for the temporal break.

Her dark clothing shields her baby. The child in my hold rests naked except for a similar cloth around him.

Rice field meets the road. We’re near. Sleeping weight goes unnoticed until the one holding him suddenly feels heavy under his 35 pounds? And tingling. I flex my hand gently and stretch two, then two more of my fingers. Yet, for reasons of alerting shadows and because I don’t want to wake him, I stay steady. Just a matter of yards. The baby sleeps. The boy rustles and as I figure she might, I’m automatic to caress the shiny black fringing his head. He presses in. In a glance she lips silent words. I train to hear over our cadence. Her shoes slipping now and then. Thrumming between ears.

The rice field passes. Momentum measures each step. Gravity has no pull except grounding us in this place and time. Equilibrium leads us undisturbed. Her home far behind, causes me to wonder if she’ll ever return. Would I? Soldiers take me and my children? Trust is the dictum I ask her to see in my eyes, hear in my silence, feel in my hold from the moment I put my finger to my mouth when I see her standing at an entrance to her home. Silent, ‘shhh’ is our shared language. Raised on posts, I hoist up to her holding the baby, the child asleep. 

The road shortens. Her lips are no longer moving now, instead wet. Fear? I don't risk any uncertain pattern to scare or disrupt the sleeping in our arms. Our walk continues as unlikely segments, euphony that carries me through—breath, step, shadow, light. The mass moves to reveal the moon but light is no longer an unwelcome opponent as we near the camp. Voices meet us, and this occasional calm night holds fast against war. Her shoe catches; then her breath. Silence stops. Her comfort comes in the hushed voices breaking in and for a moment I mistake them for hers. She can leave her silence but doesn’t as I send her toward the women in camp.

A turn in the road stretches open into The lodge. Soldiers. No. Vets. 

We’re met and gestured in.

I’m waved in.

10 o’clock is gone with the din of another hour resting in plaintive chuckles. Unhesitating. Loss doesn’t forget easily. 

One war meets another and there’s no moratorium. Rather, alternative. One road transitions to another. Circumstance confuses with memory. No demarcation line. 

I watch him move into the room. He catches my eye and nods over the heads of the children a few years older. A few of them continue to laugh in entropy’s departure from that road left behind. Our road is an arrow of time where war doesn’t let go.