Momentum
by Dave Parker

Sliding across the pavement on my ass at forty five miles per hour, I can feel the friction, 14th Street turning white hot under my jeans and boots and leather jacket. The motorcycle slides beside me - the cry of metal versus blacktop, the smell of burnt rubber. Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, I think as the white stripes of the traffic lanes go swoosh . . . swoosh . . . beneath me, and traffic swerves in every direction. My head floods with shock and adrenaline, so strange and lucid: each moment, each car, each flash of chrome in sunlight passes by with crisp precision as I gaze out the visor of my helmet.

The motorcycle drifts left, out of reach. I stretch my arms and legs wide open, boots scraping the dry pavement. Watching the shining black and chrome hull of the bike, I wonder how something so strange can happen so fast. Only minutes ago, I was lying in bed. Only hours ago this whole dream began, these bodies set in motion.

At the Asylum, I pour drinks. Drinks. More drinks. Thursday, and a local hardcore band called Implosion plays on the low stage at the back of the club. I weave back and forth behind the bar, reaching for shimmering bottles of clear and gold and brown liquors, pouring cups of beer, and moving with the momentum of the music. Trixie squeezes up to the bar with some of her friends. Trixie smiles and tilts her head, her brown hair falling over her shoulders. Pink bra straps peek out from the edges of a tight white tank top. "Hi, Jamie," she says in a singsong voice.

"Hi, Trixie," I say in a singsong voice.

"Can I have a cosmopolitan?"

"Hell no. Are you sure you have the right bar?"

"Yes," Trixie says. "I can tell by the asshole bartenders."

"Hmm," and I pull Trixie's favorite vodka off the shelf. She's the only person I know who can get away with drinking cosmopolitans in this club. Barely old enough to get in here, and she sways around with her pretty hair and her designer jeans, with a cranberry-colored drink in a long stemmed glass, moving through black-clad throngs of couriers, bikers, and punks. If anyone sneers at her she'll throw the whole glass in their face. I've seen her pulled out of three fist fights. She covers the scar on her bottom lip with pink lipstick.

Later that evening, just before close, I slide one last drink to her, and she says, "Is that a new tattoo?"

"Yes," I say, showing her my forearm - a black sun with a tight ring of swirling rays around it.

"It's beautiful," she says.

Trixie sips her drink and looks at me over the edge of her glass, her dark eyes shining in the backlight of the bar. Her lips curl at the edges when she lowers her drink. She holds the stem with pink-tipped fingers. The room moves slightly, some shift in the momentum, as I watch her draw me in with that look.

Jeans disintegrate on the surface of the road. Skin burns, peels back layer upon layer until there is no skin, thousands upon thousands of nerve endings being burned alive on pavement. I could collapse my body and start rolling, but it's too fast still - I'd thrash myself to pieces, break every bone in my body. Keep loose, keep sliding, swoosh . . . swoosh . . . and the road ahead of me begins to look like a tunnel, like I'm traveling through the long blur of a carnival ride.

In the hallway of my apartment, I unbutton Trixie's jeans while she puts her hands under my shirt and touches my chest. She pushes my shirt up and kisses my nipples, soft lingering kisses. I touch her hair, and she traces circles on my skin with her tongue.

She pushes my shirt off over my head, and I ease her jeans down over her hips. She kicks the pants away and leans into me again with her mouth to my mouth, and my hands traveled down the length of her back, and I hook my fingers into the waist of her panties. I pull her close, and she rises up, her body pressing tight to my body.

My head fills with a jarring sound as my motorcycle connects with a moving car in the oncoming lane. The terrible grind of metal on metal, and the chrome exhaust pipe bursts into the air as the bike flips up and spins - a broken glittering comet of black metal and chrome and rubber, leaving a trail of gasoline and oil and debris in its wake.

"It's called inertia," Trixie says. "Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, until acted upon by some other force."

From bed, we watch the first grey light of dawn fill the windowpanes. Trixie traces long lazy lines on my chest with her fingertips. "Bodies at rest," she says, her leg lying on top of my leg, "tend to stay at rest."

"Everyone knows that," I say. "Tell me one that I don't know."

"Okay," she says, running a finger over the black sun on my arm. "Do you know singularity?"

"What's that?"

"When a sun collapses, it makes a black hole. Singularity is the very middle, where everything gets crushed into infinity."

"Remind me not to go into one of those."

"You wouldn't know if you did," says Trixie. "There's an event horizon - that's the surface of a black hole -- and you could walk right through it without realizing it."

"Then what happens?" I say.

"To me, it would look like you vanished without a trace. For you - you'd be on some kind of wild ride."

She explains the physics of outer space, the forces that suck entire universes into black holes, and her voice glows in my head. Her fingers, hypnotic, trace circles on my skin. My sense of time comes unhinged, and I want this morning to keep going, to stretch out indefinitely like some theory of relativity. I want to be marooned on an island with this girl, this girl with the scar on her lip, this girl that I've made a thousand pink cocktails for.

"Who are you?" I say. "And what planet do you come from?

"I'm Trixie," she says. "From planet Earth."

Drift into the oncoming traffic lane - cars veer out of the way, tires screech. Leather and jeans are ruined, and I hear the sound of my elbow on the surface of the road - the sound of bone grinding on pavement. My body tears away piece by piece, but the pain feels removed now, distant, like this is all happening to a body that I am only visiting. The event horizon, I think. I have stepped through.

I wake first, some time in the morning and find that she has pulled the shades down. Trixie lies on top of the sheets with her back to me. She is slender and pale and curved, long hair snaking away like contours in a moonscape. I wrap my arm around her, touch her stomach with my hand, and she makes soft half-waking noises. She puts her hand on my hand, and I press closer. I'm hard, and I rub against her gently from behind. My hand drifts down from her stomach, slowly over smooth pale skin, until my fingers slide between her legs. She shifts slightly, thighs apart, so I can touch her.

My body trembles now, spasms, and I feel like I'm being squeezed, shot down this tunnel of a road. Above me, dizzy glimpses of blue sky, high rises, maple trees. A swallow hangs motionless on a breeze. The taste of bile rises in my throat, hot and bitter, as a new pain surfaces from someplace deep, someplace I don't know of yet.

"Have you ever had those honey buns," Trixie says, "that they make at Lulu's Bakery?" Early afternoon, and we lie in bed still. The stereo plays an old David Bowie album while we drink tall glasses of soda water with crushed limes and I watch Trixie's painted toenails as she rubs her foot against mine.

"Yes," I say. "They have brilliant coffee too."

"I would kill for a honey bun right now."

"What if I said I could have a hot Lulu's honey bun in this bed in less than twenty minutes?"

"I'd say you were crazy," Trixie says. "Lulu's is all the way down by the Arena."

"I have a motorcycle."

"Does it fly?"

"It's pretty fast."

Trixie sinks back on the pillow and looks over at me with those eyes and that mouth and those breasts. "If you can get a honey bun into this bed," she says, "in less than twenty minutes, I'll do things for you that you've only dreamt of."

"You'll be my girl Friday?"

"I'll be your girl all right."

Flying over the road, all blood and blacktop and a roar like fire in my ears, I think, for a split second, of that cool dim island where Trixie waits in bed for me to return. My flesh tears away, and I think of my body merging into Trixie's. I was supple, strong, filling her, watching her twist beneath me, feeling her wrap her legs tightly around me.

Now things snap inside me, tendons and muscles and joints giving out, severing, recoiling. I'm controlled by the pull and burn of inertia. I gaze down the long tunnel of 14th Street at the car that is coming right at me - a wine-colored sedan, with a low fiberglass fender - and it cannot possibly swerve in time. The driver sees me too late, spins the steering wheel frantically. One last traffic line goes past, swoosh . . .

There it is, I think, looking at the darkness beneath and behind that low fender. The center of the black hole, pulling me in, deep and fast.