Free The Constant Heart by Craig Nova

in the hall, in that glare of the polished linoleum, and as the odor of the wax the custodian used came to me like order itself, Em walked away from the wall, where she had been leaning, one high-heeled boot against it. She had changed while I was in there getting grilled, and she wore her most spangly flapper outfit, one that had a pleated skirt. Inside the pleats were colors, and when she walked the skirt swayed, and the pleats opened so that the colors showed, from red to blue, just like the spectrum. Her dress was like something made from a picture of a star being born.
    â€œSo,” said Em. “How did you do?”

    â€œI wasn’t too hard on them,” I said.
    â€œOh,” she said. “Well, glad to hear it. And you know what I’m going to do. I’m going to take you out to a sushi place in San Francisco that serves fugu.”
    â€œWhat’s that?” I said.
    â€œThe poisonous fish. Tasty if done right,” she said. “And one other thing. Just so you your head doesn’t get too swollen.”
    â€œWhat’s that?” I said.
    â€œThere’s no tribe called the Adimi. No one puts his hands behind his head that way. I thought you needed a little placebo. Worked like a charm, didn’t it? There’s more to science than math and stars.”
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    AFTER BERKELEY, I came back east and bought a house not too far from my father’s. Not close enough, thank god, to hear that buzzing from the power lines, but still in that first habitable ring outside of Danville. About five miles away. It seemed that the town was a hydrogen atom and the haze of the electron, those fields left over from failed farms, were where we were condemned to live, in houses, in my case, that were built with lousy sheet rock from China that was applied to studs put up with nail guns (I could almost hear, on sleepless nights, the slight squeak of these nails as they worked their way out of the walls of my house). The house, of course, looked good. For a while. Then the cracks started to show.
    Dieckmann’s letter of recommendation to the school that hired me implied that if I stayed with the work he had suggested, some of which might reveal the correct value of the Constant, so as to describe how fast the universe is accelerating,
I could win the prize, too. What he meant, of course, is that I could look into biggest mystery there is. What is driving the universe so that some things, as large as galaxies, can seem to disappear? How did distortions in gravity affect such an occurrence?
    Gloria, of course, stayed in California, and we saw each other once a month, or once every two months, when one of us took the red-eye to spend a little time together. We both knew this was not a solution, not really, and while we both were desperate for one, we didn’t know what else to do. So we took the red-eye and hoped for the best.
    A thin reed, let me tell you, if there ever was one.
    The danger, the emotional danger, was like living with a poisonous snake in the room. How long could we survive before the thing struck? The distance and the impossibility we faced seemed clear to me one morning after a visit from her, when I cleaned up the bedroom where she had dumped out her duffel bag and I found some sand, which she said had gotten into it from going to Zuma Beach. The sand glittered on the floor like stars. I sat with the stuff in my hands. Did it smell of her suntan lotion? I couldn’t tell.

I KNEW TIME WAS passing by the way things changed. They ripped down the women’s jail, and they had to do it with jackhammers, since it was all concrete and steel. I drove by when the men took it down, floor by floor, as though all the pent-up desire and fury, so neatly stored in the building, came out now in the sound of steel smashing concrete. Somehow, when I was just far enough away, it sounded like loneliness itself. The library was still open, but two years after I came back Mrs.