(Inspired by Thomas Pynchon's "Entropy")
From her position in the sink, the cacophony of noise from the lease-breaking party resonated like a grand opus. Not Stravinsky or Prokofiev. Maybe Dostoyevsky. Alice tilted her head to the side and the ocean roar from the drain broke her concentration. Too much ocean, she thought. In Lisbon, she’d met Marques then flew home alone. In Brasilia and Johannesburg she’d done the same. In Amsterdam, she met Heidi, whose real name was Anne, made a few dollars and flew home alone. Each time not quite returning to the same home. The ocean below changed that. The thick, sterile air of the 747 changed that. Things grew closer together, less distinguishable. Towns, cities. People. Only the ocean separated everyone and never for long enough. And it was beginning to seep into them. More and more climate controlled, sterile and blue.
Meatball took Alice by the shoulders and shook. “Wha,” she said. “You don’t look too comfortable,” Meatball said. “Well,” she agreed. She stumbled to the shower, turned on the cold water and sat down cross-legged in the spray. “That’s better,” she smiled.
Maybe not enough ocean, she thought. The cold water ran over her body and they exchanged handshakes of hot for cold.
In Prague, she had thought she’d leave her boyfriend. When she returned home, his belongings were gone from their apartment.
“It’s called synchronicity, Jane,” a man Alice had just met in a bar had told her. “In the 1970s, NBC Television commissioned Lippincott and Margulies to design a new corporate symbol. After considerable expenditure and months of work involving behavioral scientists, market research, graphic designers, and God knows who else, they produced a solution, a device based on the letter N.” The man pulled a gold cross pen from his pocket and scrawled the symbol on a napkin.
“At the same time, a small radio and TV network in Nebraska came up with the same graphic solution at minimal cost and by one man.” The man handed Alice the napkin, but unimpressed by the neglected negative space, she didn’t reach to take it. “Did you know that, Jane? I conducted a study on just such phenomenon in college--”
Alice moved to sit on the drain. Our bodies are made of seventy-five percent water, and Alice felt the lack of ocean around her. In college, she’d studied the body, the human form. Sculptor. Sculpture is about negative space, what you take away. Alice no longer sculpted. She lived in the negative space. Better to be the girl with her head in the sink than the musicians without wavelengths, with tonal anorexia. Down the street, she thought there must be another soundless band incapable of copyright. Synchronicity.
“I’m drowning! I’m drowning.” Alice called from the tub.
Meatball came in and dried her off, “We all are.”
