Gravity Is the Thing Read online

  The men in the room listened quietly.

  After a pause, Pete Aldridge instructed Wilbur: ‘Carry on then.’

  Wilbur cleared his throat and told us that Bravo Zulu means ‘well done’, and Foxtrot Oscar means ‘no!’ or ‘eff off’.

  But then he glanced up from his notes and said, ‘Pilots in Australia don’t actually use those expressions. I think my parents got them from a book.’

  10.

  I carried on seeking out wisdom.

  For example, I learned about chakras, the art of face-reading, and Tantric sex.

  Tantric sex came up when I had brunch with an old school friend, Mish Choo, at Thelma & Louise, the café at the Neutral Bay ferry wharf.

  Mish and her husband had just completed a Tantric sex retreat. It had changed her life. A revelation.

  ‘Did your husband like it too?’ I asked.

  ‘Not sure. Who cares?’ Dreamily, she twirled spaghetti around her fork. She was always absent-minded at school, too.

  11.

  I was excited when we did the next Sensory Development session at Flight School because I’d missed the first one. Sense of smell was a companion class, Wilbur told us, to the one on taste. He had set out a line of small, covered bowls, and he handed around blindfolds.

  ‘We are going to identify these smells,’ he said.

  Niall informed us, in his quiet, low voice, that he had no sense of smell.

  Everyone was interested, and I was startled. Also jealous. Here was a personal aspect of Niall that should have been shared with me first, maybe in bed, if we ever got into a bed.

  ‘I remember you saying that on the first weekend,’ Wilbur said, and now I felt ashamed. I should have remembered myself. I’d been too busy scoping the room for other men.

  Wilbur had considered eliminating Niall from this course, he told us: sensory capacity was an integral element of flight.

  ‘But if you’re missing a particular sense, doesn’t that make your other senses stronger?’ Frangipani demanded, and Wilbur said, ‘Exactly why I kept him.’

  ‘Appreciate it,’ Niall said, his voice faintly ironic.

  ‘How’d you make that first decision anyway?’ Antony asked. ‘The chosen ones?’

  There was a frisson. Everyone turned to Wilbur.

  I’d never wanted to ask this, afraid it would (a) sound like I wanted praise—you were chosen because of your beauty! Your talent! Because I saw magical potential in you!—or (b) lead to Wilbur saying he’d chosen the most gullible, the fools.

  ‘My parents’ instructions are highly detailed on most things,’ Wilbur said, ‘but on that, they were vague. Anyway, the sense of smell and taste are intricately linked, but Niall seemed—’

  ‘Eh,’ Pete Aldridge said. ‘Answer the man’s question.’

  Wilbur sighed. ‘The instructions said to choose the people who most needed to fly. I was supposed to be able to tell this by watching how you approached the activities.’

  ‘So if we were useless at the three-legged race,’ Nicole said, ‘that meant we belonged in the sky?’

  ‘Ha,’ Wilbur said. ‘No. I took it to mean the people who seemed sad. Anyway, Niall did well in the tasting sessions, and—’

  ‘I’m not sad!’ Frangipani cried out. ‘I’m a very happy person!’

  ‘Me too,’ Antony put in, surprised.

  Faces were surprised or bewildered; personally, I felt hostile, exposed. Yet also I felt the exquisite despair of recognition. Of course I am sad. How did Wilbur know this?

  ‘That’s a technique used by a lot of cults,’ Nicole said thoughtfully. ‘You tell people you can see they’ve been hurt, and they feel acknowledged and cry and join your cult.’

  Now I felt foolish.

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ Wilbur murmured. ‘I’m sure I got it wrong. I was sad myself that weekend, so I probably projected that randomly—or I just chose the people I liked. Niall, have you ever had a sense of smell?’

  Niall said he remembered the smell of seaweed from a beach trip when he was four, but that was all.

  After that, the lesson had an element of strangeness because we were conscious of Niall. I think we felt pride each time we recognised a scent—look! look what I can do, Niall, and you can’t!—at the same time as conscious that this was brazenly ableist of us.

  A few times people said, ‘You must be able to smell this one! Here, try it.’

  All his life, Niall told us, people had been saying, ‘No, seriously, smell this,’ as if they could somehow crack open his olfactory nerves.

  ‘I guess people don’t play super loud music for deaf people and say you must be able to hear this,’ Wilbur pointed out.

  We identified various scents—cinnamon, chocolate, vanilla, rosemary, whisky, sage, onion, coffee. Pete Aldridge and Frangipani were the best of the group, both correctly identifying wood shavings, ice cubes, celery, black tea and turmeric.

  Wilbur told us we should walk up and down the corridors at the supermarket, stopping to smell every product. We should eat food that looks like itself, so that our brain connects the food and its fragrance. We should drink water regularly, blow our noses, use saline spray, and eat lentils, oysters and pecans.

  Walking down the street after the flight class, I told Niall about a poem I’d once read, which was addressed to a man without a sense of smell. I felt shy telling him this, and forward. I offered to find the poem for him and he said, ‘Sure.’ But an expression crossed his face: surprise, amusement, maybe disappointment. Or none of those. I didn’t know.

  At home, when I found the poem online, it seemed to speak a language that Niall himself would not comprehend. It was written for a particular man with no sense of smell, I realised, and Niall was not that man. More, the poem was contained within a moment in a Chapters bookshop, on a snowy day in Montreal that, at the time, had seemed immense, a moment-stopping time, but which was just a speck riding an updraft.

  Also, on this reading, I did not understand how the poet had managed to sniff the nape of her own neck.

  12.

  Eventually, I invited Niall to have dinner at my place and meet Oscar.

  He arrived at the door with a severed hand.

  It turned out that Niall’s older brother Patrick was in town for a quick visit—this Patrick, also a property developer, lived in Brisbane—and the two of them had been to the Paddington Markets that day. Patrick had suggested that a severed hand made of rubber would be a fun thing to bring to Niall’s first meeting with Oscar.

  I had time for a few thoughts: You didn’t tell me your brother was in town! And: You haven’t suggested that I meet your brother! But: At least you told your brother about me, prompting him to consider what might amuse a four-year-old.

  Niall was wearing this rubbery, gruesome, withered hand over his own hand, like a glove.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked, stepping through the door. He looked nervous. ‘Will he like it?’

  ‘Well,’ I began, but Oscar was in the hallway staring up at Niall.

  ‘Hey, buddy,’ Niall said, holding out the rubber hand. It looked pretty real, emerging from his sleeve like that. ‘Want to shake my hand?’

  Oscar turned to me in frank alarm, so I grinned at him, and I shook Niall’s rubber hand and made a show of saying, ‘Ew! Yuk! Gross!’ to indicate that it was all a joke, a game. Oscar relaxed and also laughed. He reached out and shook the hand, imitating me: ‘Ew! Gross!’ and so on.

  This is great! I thought. This is going well! Then the toy came away and now Oscar was holding a severed hand.

  Oh, the expression on Oscar’s face. The blank dismay, the horror.

  ‘It’s not his real hand,’ I said quickly, realising.

  ‘It’s not my real hand, buddy!’ Niall crouched down on his knees, holding out his own hands. ‘Look! These are my real hands! This one’s just a joke hand!’

  Oscar was quiet, looking from the rubber hand to the real one, back and forth.

  We had pizza
for dinner and ice-cream for dessert, and Oscar, at my prompting, showed Niall various toys. Niall admired them, and revealed to Oscar some inbuilt spinning mechanism in a toy car that he hadn’t known about.

  Afterwards, when Niall drove away, Oscar and I spent a long time discussing the severed hand. How Oscar never wanted to see that hand again. Never. How it was a silly thing, a very silly thing, how it was stupid, what its point was exactly, that there was no point to it, why that man had brought it along, and why that man (‘Niall,’ I said) had even bought it in the first place and so on.

  It was a terrible shock we had inflicted upon a small boy, I saw. He believed he had broken off a man’s hand.

  Of course, this also meant that, in Oscar’s eyes, we’d been standing in a doorway jeering at a stranger’s hand. We’d been saying, ‘Gross! Ew!’ as we shook an actual hand, a deformed, withered, diseased, broken hand.

  I tried to raise this subject but it only confused him, and we returned to why that man brought a rubber hand along tonight, no, but why.

  13.

  The next flying class after Niall’s visit was Meditation again.

  There is a reason I remember this class in vivid detail, but I’m embarrassed to say it.

  Wilbur had acquired scented candles and they flickered, the scent of wild fig and cassis weaving around us. (I knew it was wild fig and cassis from reading the label.) I turned to Niall and studied his face for signs of the absence of scent. I felt unaccountably sad that he was missing out on this fragrance, and I wanted to talk about it, to write a poem for him, to uncover what dimension of experience he was missing. At the same time, I wanted to explore what added dimension there might be for Niall, the same way that blindness and deafness open alternative spaces.

  Wilbur was quiet that night, speaking only for long enough to issue instructions, and we found ourselves briskly moved from the windows—where nobody spotted any flight waves—to our mats on the floor.

  I had become accustomed to spending our Meditation sessions in the sky. Wilbur would have us close our eyes and send us soaring, varying the terrain below, and taking us on occasional detours—around volcanic peaks, say. He had the sort of voice that moved around the room at a different level to other voices; a compelling voice. You believed it.

  However, on this night, he asked us to fly through the centuries, and land in the hills surrounding Florence.

  Unexpected!

  Here, Wilbur said, we would find Leonardo da Vinci studying birds.

  ‘Leonardo has the secret to everything,’ Antony said, ‘locked into a code.’

  ‘It’s all the Fibonacci sequence,’ Pete Aldridge informed us.

  ‘What’s Fibonacci?’ Nicole asked.

  ‘You don’t know who Fibonacci is!’ Frangipani exclaimed. ‘Have you been living under a rock?’

  Pete Aldridge chuckled and began to talk about the golden ratio, the golden spiral, how you find it in leaves, beehives, pineapples, sunflowers, in the eyes, fin and tail of a dolphin, in pine cones, shells, spiral galaxies, hurricanes.

  ‘And in the uterus,’ Frangipani added.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pete Aldridge, not missing a beat. They nodded at each other with mutual respect.

  ‘I still don’t get it,’ Nicole whispered to me, and we both giggled.

  Again, Wilbur was silent. There was a lengthy pause. The candlelight swayed. In a distant apartment, a toilet flushed.

  ‘Breathe in,’ Wilbur said. ‘Be aware of your breath. Breathe out. Focus your awareness on your arms. Focus your awareness on your toes. Focus your awareness on Leonardo da Vinci, standing on a hill outside of Florence, locking all the secrets into codes, and studying birds.’

  After that, Wilbur used an almost everyday voice, just as compelling, to describe Leonardo’s fascination with flight, the intensity of his quest for flight. How Leonardo da Vinci studied proportion, physics, symmetry, the flight of birds, insects and flying fish, even the gallop of horses.

  Leonardo studied the geometry of flight, the dynamics of the human body, the use of the wind. He considered parachutes, fans and kites.

  Now Wilbur roamed off-topic and talked about Hindu mythology, Sufism, yogic levitation and transcendental meditation. I think, based on the sound of his breathing, that Pete Aldridge fell asleep.

  But Wilbur carried on. He told the story of St Joseph of Cupertino who, in the seventeenth century, was famous for having flown through the air, overcome by rapture, at least seventy times. He flew up to an olive tree and hovered there a good half-hour! In the eighteenth century, St Gerard Majella flew like a bird, or was carried like a feather, over three-quarters of a mile.

  Next Wilbur referred, vaguely, to the infinite possibilities of alchemy, and how compatible alchemical ideas are with quantum physics. Many mystics believe that we only need to access our core, he said, the centre of our being, let it merge with the universe. In such a way, we will step out of limitations like gravity.

  At last he circled back to Leonardo da Vinci.

  ‘Leonardo designed many flying machines,’ he told us, ‘but he always returned to the idea of the centre.’

  There was a pause. A door slamming somewhere down the corridor.

  ‘He saw us as having a central point. A central pole, a centre soul. The force behind movement is in the bones and the nerves, he wrote, however, motion comes from the spirit, the centre and soul of everything.’

  Another pause. ‘Leonardo was moving slowly, inexorably, towards the central truth,’ Wilbur said. ‘When our soul is ready, we can fly.’

  There was a long silence. I think Nicole was also fast asleep.

  Now I will tell you the reason I remember this class so particularly.

  For a moment, I believed. Right into the centre of my heart, into my centre, came a thought that took my breath: It’s true that we can fly.

  14.

  Two things happened the day after that class.

  One was that I saw Wilbur walking into my local Woolworths in Neutral Bay. He was with a woman in a turquoise jacket, her dark hair pulled into a ponytail, sunglasses propped onto her head.

  I was leaving by one set of sliding doors, distracted by the shopping bags looped over my wrists, and by Oscar, who was rifling through the bags, trying to find the tray of sushi I’d bought, so I only caught a glimpse. They were stepping through the other sliding doors, their faces close, talking.

  It was disconcerting. Wilbur belonged across the Harbour Bridge, in his flat in Newtown, taking his class to the sky! Not here, shopping for groceries with a stylish woman!

  I flicked a finger hard against my thumb, flicking away the residue of last night’s belief in flight.

  The other thing was that my mother telephoned to say she and Xuang were coming down to Sydney to house-sit for her friend Trish in Crows Nest again. They were bringing Xuang’s Newfoundland, Bartholomew. Should they take Oscar for a sleepover that weekend?

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and almost shouted, ‘Yes! Yes, you shall!’

  I’d been reading the Tantric sex book that Mish Choo had recommended. It was very encouraging. It seemed to think that sex could be brilliant, more brilliant than you ever imagined, and also that men were the positive charge and women the negative. I believe these were battery metaphors.

  I was troubled, from a feminist perspective, because the book seemed keen on the woman being passive and the man active (how did same-sex Tantric sex work?). My most intense feminist phase had been at university, when I became conscious of discourses of pursuit and of white/black, male/female, active/passive, dominant/submissive dichotomies and so forth.

  Back then, I carried my feminist framework everywhere, pressing it onto situations, movies, books, conversations, everything. It always fitted perfectly, but I grew tired of carrying it and threw it in my backpack.

  Now I don’t need to get it out, I just know it fits. I can still call up the language. I can even differentiate between first-, second-, whatever-wave feminism, and can acknowledge my lim
itations, my privileges, as a straight, white woman. Anyway, I was pretty sure that this Tantric sex book was problematic.

  On the other hand, if a man wanted to make active love to me, while I relaxed and experienced astonishing pleasure? Well. That sounded fine.

  15.

  Niall said he’d make dinner at his place.

  He seemed not quite to grasp the enormity of this child-free weekend. I mean, he used contractions and full stops—‘I’ll make dinner.’ Not: ‘I will make dinner!’ I myself was giddy, overwhelmed by possibilities! We should fly to Paris! No. Too far. We should have a Romantic Weekend Getaway in the Blue Mountains, the Hunter Valley, the sylvan South Coast!

  But he said he’d make dinner at his place. ‘You can help me paint,’ he suggested, and my heart slumped like a sandbag.

  ‘I’m kidding,’ he said into my silence.

  16.

  On Friday afternoon, I got Jennie’s Deluxe Facial Special, including eyebrow shaping and eyelash tinting.

  Beauty might be truth but I was not a Grecian urn; I was a woman and I wanted to feel pretty.

  When I closed my eyes, Jennie was a shadow moving around me, chewing gum as quietly as she could. ‘There’s a lot of congestion around your forehead here,’ she said.

  ‘You mean in my celestial zone?’ I asked. ‘That’s also my brow chakra and my third eye.’

  I opened my (regular) eyes and she was shining a torch onto my face, frowning. ‘You need to pay attention to your T-zone.’

  She got to work digging out my blackheads.

  17.

  Later, while I was bringing banana bread to a table, quietly conscious that my face radiated with fresh new beauty, it occurred to me that my approach to self-help was flawed. I’d focused on universal guidelines, but it’s also split into categories: How to Be Beautiful, Healthy, Raise Children, Get Rich, Own a Home-Without-Clutter!