TROTH

IT WAS A WORLD EXACTLY LIKE OURS, WITH THREE DIFFERENCES.

First, short went first. When two people crossed paths, the taller gave the right of way. Same if they reached a door at the same time. Or bumped into each other.

The rule was simple. Even children learned "sky hangs, earth moves" and fumbled past each other in reverse height order. The rule was logical. A taller person could better view and anticipate a crossing situation, then make up lost time with longer strides. With time the rule became custom. It reigned in all cultures, including those where in this world ladies go first, and where the reverse is true, and where age bestows priority, and where strangers' shoulder caps are things for sudden nuzzling because no convention adheres.

The time saved in any given encounter was small. Multiplied across the other world's bus stops and vestibules and elevators, it saved days and months. It happens that nine lurching dances of uncertainty in a hallway contain enough moments for a breakthrough in the arts or sciences.

The other world was globalizing as relentlessly as ours. The rule accomplished there what the jagged heap of customs in our world cannot. Take for instance the Walloon, the Yemenite, and the Aleutian Islander who converge on the same entrance to the duty-free shop in Charles de Gaulle's Terminal 2A — the narrow entrance, the one to the side. In our world they are destined each to lose three seconds picking at the floor with sheepish feet and blinking. Four, if a mixed-gender assortment. In the other world they moved around each other like breezes in a courtyard.

There was another benefit. Persons equipped to navigate physical encounters with ease and poise, even without common language, could not help but feel better about almost everything. There was nourishment in repeatedly confronting a problem, one so fleshy and immediate, and solving it instantly. A steady drip of these small but sure successes made people think of their souls as places where good things happened, rather than sticks that chafed against life's corners.

The other world, in sum, was more accomplished, more fulfilled. It was a better world.

He shows up late. The groom strolls over and thanks him for arriving before the couple's first child. They join the other groomsmen.

At the front a priest speaks instructions to the church's ceiling.

Across the nave stand the bridesmaids. They loom around the bride. She is a tiny woman with nervous looks and perfume that wears like a shriek. Except when speaking, she offers her friends only the sides of her head.

When it comes time to rehearse the procession, both groups filter into the nave and make their way back toward the entrance.

He first sees her when she stops. This bridesmaid has paused to let a short groomsman pass. She waits with her head at a kind tilt. She resembles someone hoping everything will turn out all right.

She first sees him when the rehearsal is over. He is waiting to use the restroom off the narthex, yawning.

Second, people had two hearts. Each. One heart took the same place in the body as yours or mine. Were one a doctor, or a fitness trainer anxious to suggest erudition, or the kind of person who has attended an auction of ancient maps, one called it the upper heart. Otherwise it was known as the high heart. Like hearts in this world, the high heart enjoyed the shelter of a rib cage. The low heart, and there will be no surprise in this, sat lower in the abdomen. It also had four chambers, but was smaller. It wore the liver like a sun hat.

A second heart was the fruit of evolution. In the state of nature, torpor is death. In the other world, too many early humans had fallen asleep after meals, their blood wicked away from brains by working stomachs. Too many had woken up bleary and confused, under trees, outside caves, aware for a weird instant that their heads had turned into agonies and these agonies had a color and this color was specific but oddly indefinite, either stabbing red or crushing black. Too many survived just short of realizing that ravaging jaws meant both.

A stray mutation changed everything. After a large meal the low heart could dedicate itself to the viscera. This freed the high heart to keep the brain alert as an indignant bird. The evolutionary advantage was significant. The two-hearted were better nourished for not having to choose between eating well and staying safe. They were less vulnerable to attack, and so lived longer, and so procreated often and saw their offspring through adolescence.

The two-hearted quickly established themselves as the dominant line. The one-hearted fought off sleep but not extinction.

Popular myth doted over the two hearts. Many believed the caged heart an animal, lurching against its bars, responsible for the passions: fury, revulsion, brutality, righteousness, elation. The low heart, on the other hand, was a jewel that needed plushness and velvetry to protect it. So it glinted quietly: pride, regret, resentment, sympathy, contentment. In certain traditions the high heart stoked new love, while out of the low one leached the serene affection of couples with grown children and a preference for sitting side by side while dining. In others the low heart discharged prudent love, the kind that revels in cheerful, circumspect, adequately insured spouses, while the high heart craved velocity and calamity and ex-convicts with darling white teeth.

It was generally accepted that the high heart, from its vantage, gazed into the future, while the low heart mired itself in the past.

People in the other world lived longer. They were more awake to life as they lived it. It was a better world.

The hotel room is warm. She likes this. Maybe it will incubate boldness in her.

She sits cross-legged, shoes off. The panty-hosed toe of the suspended foot dips like a bashful eyelash.

He sits on the end of the bed, bow tie loosened. He watches her face. She takes him in with glances.

You seem like a calm person, she says. The way she holds the wineglass exposes as much web between fingers as possible.

I am a calm person, he says.

Really? You don't let anything get to you.

Not usually.

She puts down her wine and leans over.

Let's see. She places a hand on his high heart. So slow.

I exercise.

What about this one? she says, slipping her hand down to his low heart. This one doesn't lie.

He man-giggles, chuffing twice through his nose with his mouth closed.

It lies less, he says.

I know something that doesn't lie, she says. Her hand waits a sly moment.

Yes, he thinks, but it spits when it talks. You're beautiful, he says.

Third, there was troth. There existed in every language a word that meant both, except for three things, not two. In English the term was troth. In Spanish it was trambos. In Tuvan, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.].

It was a small thing. Thrice...