Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joseph Cardinale grew up in Jamesport, New York. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst MFA program, he lives in Honolulu. His fiction has appeared in New York Tyrant and Denver Quarterly.

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the size of the universe

FC2

Contents

The Singularity......................................1The Great Disappointment.............................15Art in Heaven........................................52Action at a Distance.................................68May I Not Seem to Have Lived.........................92Proportions for the Human Figure.....................106

Chapter One

It began as a game. I was the hider and Sister had to hunt for me. I was not allowed off the field was the first rule, and the second rule was that if I was still hidden at eight o'clock, when Father wanted me to get ready for bed, I would have to come out from wherever I was, the winner. That gave her half an hour of hunting time, minus the five minutes I had to find a hiding place, plus however much extra time we saved if we cleaned the kitchen table and washed the dinner dishes fast enough. I wore a headband and a camouflaged shirt, dark sneakers that she had laced tight for me to run faster if I had to run. I had a wristwatch that counted to the tenths of seconds. I had to hide and hold still watching the seconds turn until the alarm that Sister had set inside the watch went off at eight o'clock or until she found me (she always found me) spread flat in the tall weeds or kneeling in the spider-webbed corner of the bicycle shed or hugging the trunk of a pine tree, trying not to breathe too loudly through a stuffed nose. No matter how often we played this game and no matter where I thought to hide from her, she always found me within five minutes of giving the ready-or-not warning from the porch, and she always spared me a moment, after she shined the flashlight at me, to dash wild and red-faced through the field in screaming laughter, searching out a second and third and sometimes a fourth hiding place before I fell down in the grass defeated and silent and lost. And then she would tag me and walk me back inside the house to help me into my pajamas and tuck me into bed and check for deer ticks in my ears and hair. That was how our games had always gone and that was how this game was about to go tonight if she ever finished washing the dishes. I was going to win this one. I stood behind her in the kitchen, watching her wash and towel the glasses and dishes from the sink and stand them next to one another in the cabinet.

"How many stars are there?" I asked.

"Too many to count," she said.

"I counted them once."

"Did you sponge the table yet?"

"I got to forty-four."

"You can't see every star."

"I could."

"Some of them are too far to see."

"How far?" I asked.

"Infinity," she said. "Clean the table."

I took the sponge from her. I sponged the table clean, pushing the crumbs into my palm and emptying them into the trash bin as she had taught me to do, and then I went back to the sink to see if she was finished with the dishes. I was about to ask her how long infinity would take to walk when the phone rang and she turned the faucet off and dried her hands in time to rush the receiver up on the fourth ring. A friend of hers was on the other end; I knew from how her face lightened and her voice turned higher after she said hello. Her nights lasted longer than mine. Sometimes in bed I would awaken to hear her closing her bedroom door across the hall and turning her radio on high enough for the sound to reach me through the walls, and I could never tell, in those moments how much time still had to pass before the morning would begin again. I listened to her talk to her friend for a while before I opened the back door and told her to come on-we were running out of time. She kept the phone against her shoulder and walked to the door, where she knelt and took my wrist to make sure the alarm in the watch was set to go off. I closed my eyes when she kissed my forehead. When I opened them, she backed up with her palm out and mouthed the words Ready. Set. Go.

I knew where to go. Before she shut the door behind me I bounded down the porch steps and through the weeds toward the gigantic maple I had already practiced climbing into when Sister was in her room with her homework that afternoon. It stood high in the center of the field spreading black branches over the grass where just a few days ago I had helped Father turn his sailboat upside down and tarp the bottom for the coming winter. I just had to step on the leaf-covered tarp we tied over the hull to get high enough to reach the lowest branch with both hands. To pull myself with both hands from where I stood on the boat and onto the lowest branch-that was the hardest part I had practiced in the afternoon. That was the part where I had to remember that my body was mine to move where I wanted. I was a living person.

The maple was dying. Sister had said so after one of our games at the beginning of the summer as I lay in the grass under the tree catching my breath for the walk back to bed. She had pointed at the base of a branch where the bark bulged out in the evening light like a balloon grew underneath. Infected was a word she used. And then she had noticed round black spots on the leaves fallen out. She had placed her palm on the trunk and bent her neck to see higher as I watched from the grass.

"What do trees do all day?" I asked.

"They grow."

"I never see them grow."

"You have to watch close," she said.

"I am watching," I said. "It's the same size."

Up on the lowest branch I paused against the trunk. I could take two different paths when I planted one foot where the trunk forked and pulled forward. The path I pulled went higher and to the left and higher and to the left until I nested in a snare of stunted branches and orange leaves at the end of a strong limb stretched out over the bottom-up sailboat. Held among the branches and holding still I saw past the trees and the lawn to the light from the kitchen Sister talked on the phone in. I heard her talking.

The second-hand was starting a circle around the wristwatch. At the end of the circle she would have to come for me.

Once I had sleepwalked into her bedroom at night. She remembered for me in the morning. She said she was just about to turn her light off when I walked through her door and sat down at her desk. At the window behind her desk, she said, I watched the wind rain against the glass for a while. Then I had taken her Earth Science textbook from the bookshelf and looked through it until a red leaf she had pressed between two pages drifted out and down to the floor. I let the book go to the floor after the leaf and then pulled open the top drawer of her desk and began picking through the papers and cassettes and coins and notebooks. She walked behind me. "Samuel," she said. She roped her arms around mine so I was stuck. "Calm down." Her grip tightened until she turned me around and asked what I was looking for. I looked at the leaf on the floor.

"The circle," I said.

"What?"

"I can't get out."

"What do you mean?"

"It keeps getting longer."

"Samuel," she said. "Look at me."

"I have to find the circle."

"Look at me, Samuel," she said. "It's not in there."

She looked for me in the eyes. I wasn't there, she said, and so she hugged me for a while and then walked me back to her bed across from the window and set me down on the mattress as she did whenever she tucked me into sleep for the night. Her trick for talking me to...