The Weight of Everything

Moe here. Forty-six years old, adjunct geology at a satellite campus in Perth that mostly teaches mud logs to kids who wanted petroleum money and got renewables instead. Gladys is my girlfriend. She's forty-three. We met three years ago in a night class, started dating that same winter, and we've never broken up once. Not even a bad week.

We're in Broome. Her friend Kendra owns a house out past the town edge, and Kendra is away, so we have the place. Kendra used to do something with telescopes. She built a lunar simulation chamber in her old swimming pool, drained it, painted the inside charcoal, dumped sand everywhere, and then the grant died and she just... left it there.

The clock tower in town has been playing the wrong jingle all week. It's supposed to chime the hour. Instead it plays this ice-cream-truck tune, tinny and looping, and nobody's fixed it. You can hear it from the yard at night. It's the least lunar sound in the world.

Gladys stood at the edge of the drained pool at dusk and looked down at me.

"You first," she said.

"It's a ladder, not a trapdoor."

"I know what it is. You first anyway."

So I went down. Rungs welded to the concrete, still solid. The chamber door was propped open at the far end of the pool, this heavy dome thing on hinges, and inside there was one dim lamp and sand spread over the old pool floor. It smelled like dust and cold paint. It was, honestly, a decent fake moon.

She came down behind me. Slower. Her sandals in one hand.

"Careful on the fourth rung," I said. "It wobbles."

"It doesn't wobble. You wobble."

Fair. I do have the knees of a man who sits at a desk explaining craters to nineteen-year-olds.

She crossed the sand barefoot and stood in the middle of the chamber. The lamp caught her from one side. She was holding something. I hadn't seen her pick it up. A brass thing, heavy, round-bottomed, with a handle and a valve wheel. I knew what it was before she said it.

"Is that the steam whistle off a ship?"

"Kendra had it on the ledge. There's a whole box of nautical junk out here," she said. "She was going to use it as a sound prop. Like, play a recording of it during the simulation. For the astronauts."

"There were no astronauts, Gladys. There was a grant and a spreadsheet."

"There was a vision, Moe."

She turned it in her hands. Thumb over the valve wheel, around and around. Not winding anything. Just turning it.

I've known this woman for three years. I know her tell when she's about to return something at a shop. I know her tell when she's about to cry at a movie. This was neither of those. This was a third thing I didn't have a file for.

"So," I said. "We came out here to look at a fake moon."

"We came out here so I could say something."

The clock tower went off. Eight o'clock, ice-cream jingle, drifting in over the sand and through the open dome door. It should have ruined the mood. It sort of made it, if I'm honest. Like the moon was sponsored by a Popsicle company.

"Okay," I said. "Say it."

She kept turning the whistle plug. Around. Around.

"I've never said this to anyone. Not to you, not to anyone before you either. And I need you to not make a face."

"I have one face."

"You have six faces and one of them is the polite one and I will walk out of this sand pit if you use it."

"Noted. No polite face!"

She took a breath. Put the whistle plug down on the ledge and picked it up again. Put it down again. Left it.

"You know how you're... you're bigger than me," she said.

"I'm a meter taller, basically."

"You're not. Don't do the bit."

"Sorry."

"You're bigger. Broad. And you know I like that, I've said that much. I sit next to you on the couch and you're like a wall with a heartbeat and it's nice. That's the part I've said out loud. That's the safe part."

The lamp buzzed. Somewhere outside a gecko did its clicking thing.

"But there's more," she said. Her voice had gone low. Not sultry-low. Nervous-low. "There's a whole... there's more and it's not the safe part and I've been carrying it around since we met like a rock in my shoe."

I sat down on the ledge next to her. Sand got in everything immediately. That pool will never stop being a pool.

"Hey. Whatever it is!"

"That's the polite face."

"Sorry. Go on."

She looked at the far wall of the chamber. Charcoal paint, badly done, streaks where Kendra's roller must have died.

"I want to feel small next to you," she said. "Like, actually small. Not, oh isn't it cute, he reaches the top shelf. I want to be dwarfed. I want you to loom. I want to feel the whole... the whole weight and size of you and have it be the point. The whole point. I want to be underneath you and feel like you could cover me entirely and that's the... that's the thing. That's the thing that's been in the shoe."

Silence. The clock tower did a half-jingle and quit, like even the clock got embarrassed.

"Say something," she said. "You're doing the face."

"I'm not doing any face. I'm processing."

"Process faster."

I laughed. I couldn't help it, and she smacked my arm for it, and I caught her hand and held it, and that was the moment I realized my answer was yes before she'd even finished the sentence. It had been yes since the fourth rung of the ladder, probably.

"Gladys. I'm not laughing at you."

"You're laughing near me."

"I'm laughing because I've been sitting on my own version of this since we met, and I thought mine was the weird one."

Her head came around. "Your version."

"Not tonight. Tonight is yours. But yes. There's a version. It's related." I pulled her hand into my lap. "You want me to loom at you. Gladys, I'm forty-six and I've spent my whole life apologizing for taking up space. You're offering me a job I was born for."

"You're not making fun?"

"I swear on the sand pit."

She let out a breath that had, I'm now sure, been in there since roughly our second date. Her shoulders came down two inches. She picked the whistle plug up again, which I think is just what her hands do when she's rebooting.

"It's not just... being under you," she said, quieter. "It's the looking up. It's you being the big thing in the room. It's wanting to be, I don't know, handled. Carefully handled. Like I'm small even though I'm a grown woman of forty-three and I can renovate a bathroom by myself."

"I know you can. You did our bathroom. I held the flashlight."

"Exactly. I held nothing tonight. You held the flashlight. That's the fantasy."

I looked around the chamber. The dome door open to the violet Broome sky. The one dim lamp. The sand. The idiot jingle starting up again somewhere over the walls.

"Kendra built a moon and never used it," I said. "And you found the one use she didn't put in the spreadsheet."

"Is that a yes?"

"That's a yes with homework. Tell me the rules. All of them. What's in, what's out, what's the thing I do that makes you feel small and the thing I'd do by accident that makes you feel small in the bad way. Because I've met you. There's a list."

"There's a list," she admitted. "It's long."

"Good. I like long."

"And you'll tell me yours. After. Your version."

"After," I said.

She put the whistle plug down for good this time and turned to face me on the ledge, cross-legged in the sand, and I watched her start sorting three years of shoe-rocks into piles, and I listened.

The moon chamber had a job after all.

She started with the list. Of course she did.

"Rule one. I say a word, everything stops. The word is 'tide.'"

"Tide," I repeated. "Okay."

"Don't use it unless you mean it. If you say tide I want you to actually stop, not slow down, not negotiate, stop. And I'll do the same for you when we get to your thing."

"Tide. Got it."

"Rule two." She counted on her fingers, sitting cross-legged in the sand like a professor of herself. "No picking me up like luggage. I know that sounds backwards, given the whole theme, but there's a way you carry the laundry and there's a way you carry a person and I can tell the difference in about half a second."

"How do you carry a person?"

"Like they're heavy. Like they matter. You'll know."

"I might not know."

"You will." She patted my knee. "Rule three is the loom. You're allowed to loom. I'm giving you permission right now, in advance, for all future looms. Standing behind me in the kitchen. Reaching over me for anything. Standing too close on purpose. All of it. In fact I'd like you to do it more in general, starting possibly years ago."

"So the last three years, when I stood close and then apologized and stepped back..."

"Every time. Every single time, Moe. I'd think, there it is, and then he'd go 'sorry, excuse me' and do a little shuffle and I'd die a little."

I put my face in my hands. "I shuffle?"

"You shuffle like a man twice your size trying to be half of it."

"That's a horrible sentence."

"It's a very accurate sentence."

The lamp buzzed. Somewhere out in the dark the jingle started up again, the ice cream song, the wrong song, doing its nightly crime. I listened to it run through its little chorus and quit.

"Okay," I said. "More rules."

"Rule four. Slow. Not gentle, exactly. Gentle is fine, but the point isn't gentle. The point is big and slow. You're enormous and you're moving like it. That's the whole... that's the engine of it. I want to feel the scale."

"The scale."

"You're a geologist. Scale should be your whole thing. Deep time. Big rocks."

"It is my whole thing. I just never thought of it applying to my forearms."

"Your forearms are absolutely part of this," she said, and then looked horrified at herself, and then laughed, and then I