Distance

by A.J. Kirby

Let me measure the distance between us. Let me evaluate this vastness of space and time like an oceanographer. Let me map out the wax and wane of our separation. You know that I work with figures, solid truths, but what equation could describe how we have drifted apart? What compass could express my yearning to be close to you again?

I could count the revolutions of the trundle wheel, but there would be so many clicks it would be like trying to calculate the number of random finger-snaps by a whole football stadium of Fonzies. I could fire off a depth charge, deep under the surface of us; see a three-dimensional rendering of the yawning chasm which slices through our hearts, but I couldn’t bridge that gap. Now, even when I am with you, we are not together.

You hate these uncomfortable weekends. You must have come to think of them as prison-time in recompense for a crime which you did not commit. Like the Count of Monte Cristo you imagine a daring escape, but can’t quite bear to punish you gaoler so. Remember how I used to read you that text? Remember how excitement curled around you like a cat’s tail?
How can I impress you now? How can I travel that well-worn path into your good books once more; do I need to beg? Maybe I should. Maybe you’d be satisfied with my grovelling. It would give you that sense that everything was right and natural in the world again.

And so, when I come to you, I’m Sting’s Englishman in New York. I’m alone and alien and, dare I say it, a little apathetic in my arthritic attempts at a connection. Perhaps I too have given up. You’re a hard-faced urban sophisticate that I can’t hope to compete with these days. You’re always name-dropping, dwarfing my petty little efforts to interest you. You’re a collator of foot-notes; always ready to reference some of the real celestial bodies that populate your life nowadays. I hardly even recognise you.

It goes on and on. You’ll say: ‘Oh, I saw blah, blah in the deli. We did lunch.’ And I’ll scratch at my beard and rack my brains as to where I might have heard that name before; which in-flight magazine might have featured that particular star? As I’m doing this, you’ll perform that exaggerated rolling of your eyes that was once the bane of my life. It pains me to see you looking so tired, so worldly. You were never worldly; I always used to feel that if I wasn’t holding you so tightly, you’d float off into the air, never to be seen again.

‘You don’t know who I’m talking about, do you?’ you’ll sigh. Your disgruntled breath will be thick and foggy in the cold air.

Inside, I’ll be screaming. I don’t do lunch like you do. It’s too much of a leap for me. The only things I do are these eternal flights; this crazy-ass acquisition of air-miles and bags under my eyes. I do not do things like lunch. Lunch is something that just happens, like breathing.
So, we’ll sit in silence for a while, and you’ll think about art and I’ll think about science. Maybe I’ll lightly touch your knee or reach out for your gloved hand. We’re both aware that time is trudging relentlessly onwards and it is our duty to make of that time what we will. And we do try, don’t we? We try to keep up appearances in the best English tradition. I hand you your lean sandwich and tuck in to my own now-cold grease-burger. We huddle into the bench and try to find things that we can talk about. We remark that all things are ‘nice’, that the air here at Harlem Meer is somehow cleaner than in the rest of New York.

You look as though you have been crying out for some good old-fashioned fresh air. It puts the colour back in your cheeks; makes you look more natural somehow and not so grey and urban. It softens the features of your face and brings that dancing light back to your eyes.

‘I’m going away in the summer,’ you say, suddenly. Your voice is pitched somewhere in the mid-Atlantic now, and seems coldly unfamiliar. ‘California State let me in despite what happened in the fall.’

‘It’ll be on account of your connection to the famous Dr. Grey,’ I joke, trying to play down my agony at the thought of even more distance being placed between us.

You don’t laugh though; you’re all-business. ‘I’m not doing physics, Roger,’ you say. I hate it when you call me Roger; it seems so impersonal. I hate it almost as much as the fact that you’ve now adopted the American spelling of your name, replacing the ‘e’ with an ‘a’.

‘Don’t go,’ I whisper.

‘I have to go,’ you say. ‘I’m meeting someone.’

You’re bored of me. I know that. It’s a matter of scale, I think. I can’t get my head around America or the new you that inhabits it. It feels as large as the solar system to me. Why can’t you understand how distances make me feel?

‘I’ll walk with you,’ I say.

You just nod your head. But you don’t move. It is as though there is something more that you want to say. I know that feeling only too well, and so I sit in silence and let you compose yourself. In the silence, I become aware of a lonely bird singing its sad lament in a nearby cypress tree. Maybe he’s trying to tell me something about loss. Maybe he’s asking: ‘how far is too far?’

‘See that bird in the tree?’ I ask. I’ve given you ample opportunity to speak, but you just can’t find the words, can you? Well, let me do it for you. ‘Imagine that bird has a tiny flea riding in the feathers. If this bench is the sun, that flea is Mercury.’

‘What are you talking about, Roger?’ you ask, getting that look on your face.

I creak up from the bench and start to measure out thirty long steps away from you. Then, and with some triumph in my voice, I spin round and face you again, shouting: ‘Venus!’

Wearily, you climb to your feet too. You trudge after me as though wearing a ball and chain attached to your feet. But when you reach me, I notice the traces of a small smile playing on your lips. You remember this, don’t you? Our little games?

‘Earth?’ you ask.

I begin this crazy long stride as though I’m in Monty Python. Unbelievably, you start to follow; bouncing along as though you’re walking on the moon. You look so foolish! It’s so long since I’ve seen you not care about what anyone would think of you…

We move out of the park; Earth is on 108th Street and Mars is only a few more giggly moon-steps from there. We walk so close that our steps fall into sync; we’re both caught up in this current of desire for things not to be as they are. We are both mapping out our reconnection. But maybe I’m mistaken; maybe I’m reading too much into things. For there is a bit of distance between Mars and Jupiter, and your pace soon begins to slacken. By the time we reach Madison Avenue - the rough approximation of where you used to get bored when we used to play Planets – you’ve stopped the giggles and got that bored look in your eyes. Back then, you used to ask me whether we were nearly there yet; ridiculously, I’d always make you ask the question in a different way, not like all the other kids ask.

By 110th Street, even I’ve given up walking like an astronaut. It’s become all about the destination rather than the journey once more. But then you do something that is completely unexpected; you surprise me. Did you actually comprehend how happy it would make me when you stoop to pick up that dime from the floor or was it pure accident? ‘This is Jupiter,’ you say, holding up the dirty coin for me to see. I beam with pleasure; how perceptive of you! If Mercury is only a flea on a bird’s back, then you are right to scale up for Jupiter. Maybe we’ll make a Scientist out of you yet… although I’m not sure if that’s what you have in mind.

Along East 110th, much further down, we also find Saturn. I finger a button on your expensive duffel coat to show the planet’s scale, but somehow you don’t seem that enamoured with the game any more. We don’t talk much as we plot a course into the nether reaches of our solar system; turning right at Frederick Douglass Circle and then right again into West 110th Street. The discovery of Uranus should have cheered you up. ‘Your anus!’ you used to screech, loving the excuse to use a dirty word with impunity. Now though, you are dangerously quiet.

Neptune is on Morningside Drive and Pluto way out on Amsterdam Avenue.

‘Pluto’s not even classed as a planet any more,’ I say, trying to inject a little more interest into things again. But you don’t even respond. Please understand, love, how small I really am. I am the tiny little Pluto, orbiting your sun. You can’t even see me. I’m ice-cold from lack of your warmth. Hell, they’ve even changed my classification now, like you changing the spelling of our name.

‘And now, Lisa, do you know where we might find the closest star to the sun?’ I ask, before answering my own question as is my wont. ‘Well, if we were keeping to the same scale as we have just walked the solar system, it would be as far away as Los Angeles. Now do you see why I don’t want you to go?’

‘Don’t talk to me like I’m still a child, dad,’ you say. ‘Los Angeles isn’t Proxima Centauri. That was just a silly little game we played years and years ago before you decided that your work was more important than your family.’

‘But don’t you see? It’s all about space,’ I shout, but already you are orbiting some new sun. A boy I’d hardly noticed before steps out of one of the proliferation of theatres and links your arm. He’s tall and broad shouldered and not at all grey. He holds you as I once did, so there’s no distance at all between you. You’ve only got eyes for each other, you and him, your Los Angeles boy.

And you never even thought to introduce me. As you float away through space and time I feel something break within me. My heartstrings have been stretched and stretched but now they have snapped. That is the distance between us, I think.


A.J Kirby is the author of three novels; The Magpie Trap (to be published in time for Christmas 2008), When Elephants walk through the Gorbals (which was third place winner in the 2008 Luke Bitmead Writers' Bursary competition from Legend Press) and Leap Year (which he is currently re-writing). His portfolio also includes the novella Perfect World and over thirty short-stories. Publication credits for his short fiction include Nemonymous 8: Cone Zero, Graveside Tales, Sein und Werden, Dog Horn Publishing, The Second Hand, Skrev Press, Underground magazine, Necrology magazine, Monkey Kettle, Golden Visions, and Champagne Shivers.

He was runner-up in the 2008 Huddersfield Literature Festival creative writing competition, and this year was also short-listed for the Cinnamon Press short fiction prize and the Mere Literary Festival prize. He is the current editor of Itchy Leeds Guide and am determined to make writing his life or his life’s work writing.