(One small man, one large universe, one lousy Christmas for both)
Andy shifted on the low-pitched couch as he closed the thick paperback. Seven hundred pages in three days was pretty remarkable for his manic work schedule, but this had been A BOOK … it had simply kidnapped him. He dropped the fat thing behind the ashtray on the end-table. He yawned and began to stretch.
His arms slowly creaked toward the sky, canting outwards at off-center angles like the crippled arms of some junkyard clock. His shoulders wriggled upwards one at a time, as if to deny Gravity, as if to talk the tension into sliding down and off his back. At the apogee of his stretch, his fingers spread and contracted, extracting Lilliputian creaks.
All these pops and snaps began to irritate Gravity.
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Leaving his right hand up, Andy retracted his left hand and planted it across his left cheek, just slightly pressing into that bracelet of bone that protected his eye. He rubbed, tentatively, as if trying to locate an elusive switch.
Gravity sneered and grabbed a beer.
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Andy slid that hand down and across his face, coming to rest at the terminal of his neck. There he clasped the fingers of his right hand in an inverted perversion of the “Praying Hands” that rode atop so many TV consoles in his past. Ten fingers met and joined, creaking and popping in delicious readjustment.
Gravity began to get an idea, and a grin broke out on Its face.
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Andy’s eyes rolled back in his head like a shark’s eyes, and he held this pose religiously for a few seconds. Then he snapped his head forward and slung his hands down, smacking the tops of his thighs. He hunched forward and rose, like a crusty rusted car jack, pushing himself out of the couch, which answered with creaks of its own.
Gravity, muttering, opened another beer.
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Once erect, Andy clenched his fists and drove them forward and beyond each other, locking himself in an intense embrace with no one. Andy grabbed his shoulders and twisted violently left, then right, calling up cackles from the flat bones up and down his back.
Gravity, feeling the beers, began humming a little tune, something It had overheard in Pisa, Italy.
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Andy drew in his breath and leaned forward from the hips, his arms loosely waving above the ground. He hung there, unmoving.
Gravity watched this seemingly unwound robot, arms waving as if in some unseen wind. Gravity belched.
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After some time, Andy, the reviving machine, lurched upright and concluded his ritual. He placed his left hand in his back pocket and with his right, adjusted his crotch with all the intimacy of an Italian waiter.
Gravity, anticipating, rubbed Its hands together and flicked a well-used switch.
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Now fully alert, Andy began to walk toward the counter and back to business. He paused slightly to stoop to his right and pry the paperback off the syrupy surface of the coffee-stained table.
Gravity licked Its lips.
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This slight off-centered stooping caused Andy’s knee to pop audibly. Grimacing, he dropped his left hand in a protective grip.
Gravity grinned.
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In the close space between the wall and the counter, Andy’s rapidly dropping left shoulder met the firm wooden corner of the counter, causing him to dribble the book onto the floor at his feet. Lurching away from the counter, his foot caught in the carpet where it had been laterally cut to allow for “safe” routing of the cords to his electric piano.
Completely out of control, Andy stumbled and fell forward.
Gravity’s eyes bulged and beer exploded from Its mouth in a desperate attempt to get out of the way of an erupting laugh.
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A noise like a chubby man choking escaped Andy’s surprised face as he tumbled forward into the edge of the piano, upending a two-day-old glass of whiskey and a sheath of papers which hid an insanely filled ashtray.
Andy’s next mistake was an explosive eviction of air, unfortunately in the proximity of the newly-fermented and migrating cigarette ashes. They spewed skyward in a matted scuddy cloud. A mawkish and adhesive gray pate’ found his eyes, his nose, his mouth, and stuck like dusky rouge to his cheeks.
Gravity, moaning in glee, made a mental note to cancel Its cable subscription, considering that It could watch stuff like this for free.
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Grasping blindly, Andy’s right hand wildly arced, finally gripping the smooth surface of a two-inch dowel. The dowel ran six feet straight up from the carpet to sustain an 80-pound speaker, which Andy had decided sounded much better from up there.
Gravity watched, knowing full well that pulling on a dowel will loosen any lone nail that holds it onto a speaker’s shelf.
Then Gravity took over.
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Eighty pounds of horrid reality caromed off the wall and erupted in loud shudders of destruction, taking up residence within the guts of the piano cabinet. The poor Fender keyboard shrieked out a discordant death-knell at the intrusive speaker, which tilted crazily upwards, still belting out Oscar Peterson’s jazz riffs.
Gravity, like Physics, hates jazz.
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The sound of the collision sent Andy shooting backwards and away from the soul-wrenching clamor.
Gravity reached over and set Its VCR on ‘RECORD.’ It popped another beer.
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Muttering and rubbing his eyes and spitting out little remnants of ash cocktail, Andy landed his foot squarely on the now-damp cover of that wonderful paperback, and he skated in reverse toward a large planter next to the couch. When his elbow hit the stout trunk of the plant, he spun to his left, slamming his hip into that seemingly omnipresent counter-top corner.
Gravity clutched Its side in a painful stitch of laughter.
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Clutching wildly at his own side, Andy pounced backward like a threatened cat and hit the back of his knees against the end-table.
Gravity howled.
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Andy’s feet shot into the air, the paperback still glued to his foot. Over the sloppy surface of the table slid this now highly animated “robot,” his butt like a broom, sweeping piles of magazines, near-empty cigarette packs, disposable lighters and a phone into the folds of the couch.
Gravity hooted and opened another beer.
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Falling backwards, lengthwise, across both cushions, Andy’s legs were again propelled skyward, freeing the soot-covered paperback to arc with a plop into his lap.
A cloud of noxious smells circled and settled in and around Andy’s collapsing universe, like illusory snowfall swirling inside a small mantle-top Christmas decoration; just a tiny human locked in a seamless glass bubble’s blizzard of olfactory dandruff.
Gravity reached for the phone.
-~-~-~-~-~-
Andy, stunned, lay very still.
As he attempted to regain some shard of motor and sensory control, his compact disc player, having by now collected a fair-sized set of settling cigarette ashes, began to repeat a single note, repeating and repeating and repeating.
Gravity, snickering, thanked Inertia and hung up the phone.
-~-~-~-~-~-
Andy sighed. Sitting on the damp couch, he stared at the damp paperback in his damp lap. His eyes slowly began to narrow. Then, deliberately, Andy got up, grabbed the fat thing and fished a lighter out of the couch. He headed for the fireplace, his lips slightly curled in a tight grin of pure purpose.
Andy never read another book again.
-~-~-~-~-~-
“Merry Christmas,” sneered Gravity. Chuckling, It put the small Christmas decoration back on Its mantle and watched the illusory snowfall settle. Feeling very pleased with Itself, Gravity reached up and It began to stretch, Its arms slowly creaking toward the sky, canting outwards at off-center angles like the crippled arms of some junkyard clock…
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