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"Nimrod," he yawned. "A mighty hunter before the Lord. Same corpse. He's dead. Been dead so long nothing's left but stars. And them only when it don't snow. Heroes are alive. Sleep all day and come out at night. Nope, there are no heroes."
"What about a real star," I said. "Like Ronald Reagan or Shirley Temple Black?"
A distant thud below our feet. Stomach thrown down thighs into ankles. The lights went out. The importance of my appointment at floor 49 shrank. I stood still; said nothing. I knew it was womanish to scream or lunge during mechanical failures. The orange glow from the button marked 49 grew in intensity as my eyes accustomed to the gloom.
"Looks like the harvest moon," chirped the invisible operator. "Rising up over a Memphis whorehouse, don't it?"
My mouth went dry. I cleared my throat. There was nothing to clear. All I did was gasp—a sound that could easily be interpreted as panic. I tried to whistle—to appear calm. My lips were dry as a dull needle stuck in a cracked record between songs.
"We're in between floors," came the operator's runt voice somewhere in the claustrophobic neighborhood of my groin. "I don't think we're falling. You think we're falling?"
"Gravity's an illusion," I heard myself say. I wanted to say more, explain how acceleration is equivalent to gravity, blurt out how if we dropped a book and the book hung where released, instead of falling to the floor, then we were accelerating downward and the situation was grave and we'd better pray for mercy and candy canes after our crushing like bugs caught in the cookie jar at the bottom of the shaft. But my lips were too parched from what I persisted denying was fear for me to say more.
"Too dark in here to drop a book," the operator muttered. "You know that old trick? It's something you only get to work once. It's not like politics or acting in the movies, where cutthroats called 'speech writers' do it for you, or you get as many takes as it takes to make the transparency say you did superhuman. But we could listen for the sound. You know that old trick about the book, Mister?"
The little voice pounded at my groin. Irrationally, I felt my zipper was down. Would he smell the stains a mere foot from his nose? As we fell (in my imagination) to our grisly death—two unknowns in a trap lacking all trace of sweetness and light—I feared that yes-yes I was terrified, deathly afraid this greasy peon was going to smell my zipper was down!
"You ever let a guy go down on you?"
"Look," I said, moistening my lips with mucus my tongue unearthed along the eaves of my mouth. "I'll take off my pants and we'll drop them—I don't have a book."
There was the rustle of me undoing my belt buckle. I glanced up at the orange button and stepped out of my pants, then stopped dead. He was wrong. We were heroes. This was science. Gravity versus acceleration. Repugnance against attraction. Grab opposite bob. We were dying in the interest of pure science. Modern heroes.
What my pants exposed fitted into the gap of an otherwise perfect theory. A wad of gum was pushed aside, because we could ignore that peculiar fact. In ecstatic devotion to the advancement of mankind and all that is not womanish, I dropped my bundled pants. The brass buckle—muffled by a flop of cotton—rang on the floor like an alarm clock cut short by a hungover hand.
I came to the conclusion we were not falling.
Willie SMITH is happily married, relatively
clean, fairly sober, and a perennial office temp. He writes a lot of letters.
Favorite correspondent living: Ed St.
John, poet and librarian. Favorite correspondent departed: Jesse Bernstein, poet
and SSI recipient, suicided October, 1991.
