The Pleasure of Falling
By Jacqueline Vogtman

The first time Gillian meets John, she notices how unusually large his head is but convinces herself that it must be an illusion created by his hair, which is wild, a lion’s mane of thick curls that frizz around his head like a halo. He stands in the pot-holed driveway of her parents’ house to pick her up for their blind date, and Gillian does feel blind, walking out to meet him in the dark, his figure a shadow blending with summer trees.

His car is an orange Volkswagen Bug that smells like gasoline and gleams in the night like a lit pumpkin. Gillian nods to John’s shadow, says hello. He nods his massive head in response. She climbs into the passenger’s seat, John folds his long body into the driver’s side, and then the car rolls backwards, bumping down the long hill of the driveway. When they get out to the country road, John’s profile is still in shadow beside her.

Gillian finally gets a good look at John’s face when they arrive at the diner in town. He sits across from her in the cracked-pleather booth, looks into her face for a blink of a moment, then back down at his hands, which, in contrast with his head, seem unusually small. Gillian and John don’t speak, exchange smiles tiny and sharp as fish-bones. In all her sixteen years, she never dreamed her first date would be filled with painful stabs of glances and long looks into paper placemats advertising auto repair and cosmetic surgery and dental work, advertisements for fixing broken things.

The waitress comes by, blue under-eyes and big hair. John orders plain toast and milk. Gillian orders a strawberry milkshake with rainbow sprinkles. When the waitress brings it to them, she gives Gillian the toast and milk and John the milkshake. After she leaves, John and Gillian exchange shy smiles as they exchange orders, and though their hands don’t brush, though they don’t touch at all in the diner or later that night, still, Gillian considers the moment meaningful.

They ask each other questions between sips of their drinks: he asks her about school, she asks him about work. He tells her he’s only working at his dad’s shoe-repair shop until he can save up enough money for college. He says he reads Spinoza when no customers are there. Gillian nods, though she has no idea who Spinoza is, conjures up images of spiders and webs. John asks her if she’s a senior, like his brother, who set them up on this date. She says no. As they speak, Gillian feels fuzzy, happy, existing a little outside of her body like the halo of John’s hair.

When he drops her off at home, she wants to touch that hair, wants to run her fingers through it and see what she finds—twigs, paper airplanes, broken glass, a bird’s nest, twitching eggs—but she doesn’t have the nerve, won’t have the nerve until they’ve been dating another month, when they first kiss. More than his hair, though, Gillian wants to touch the inside of his skull, dig into the soil of his silence. But this, too, she doesn’t have the nerve to do.

When Gillian is done with high school, she and John leave their mountain homes to study together in the level streets of a Midwestern college town where the houses resemble tissue boxes. In their first years there, Gillian becomes concerned about John, about the ballooning of his head and whittling down of his body, but she notices it only when she sees John from a distance. His dorm room is in the building directly across from hers, and some nights she looks up to see his room light blink on in the dusk, sees his shadowy figure putting books back in their proper places on his shelf. As she watches him, it strikes her that his head is bigger than it was when they first met, abnormally large now rather than just unusually large. It looks like an overfilled helium balloon, his body a wet, skinny string beneath it. She imagines she’s looking at a stranger, and then he really does look strange, an alien, a sideshow freak. In those moments her heart pounds, filled with worry.

But when he comes over to her room, greets her in the doorway with a shy smile, lies beside her on her tiny bed, she stops worrying. She looks into his face; it’s becoming more familiar than her own. In drawing class, she copies pictures of men’s and women’s faces from magazines, tries to draw real-life models who stand nude on the pedestal—but they all end up resembling John in some way, have the hill of his nose, the curve of his lips. She shows these pictures to him and sometimes he reddens at the likeness, but most of the time he nods his heavy head once, then turns back to his book—Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, names that become increasingly difficult for Gillian to pronounce.

John is older than most of the college students, teenagers who’ve never seen mountains or sea. When he and Gillian walk the swept walkways of campus, groups of students stare at John, sometimes point, sometimes laugh behind their hands. Gillian thinks John doesn’t notice, until one day when he rolls his saucer-sized eyes and looks over at the trees. It’s the end of their sophomore year, and Gillian’s absorbing the vivid, almost supernatural green of the spring leaves.

John mutters, Don’t they have anything better to look at?

Gillian doesn’t know how to respond. They walk on, turn down a side path to the cafeteria that not many other students take because of geese droppings. Gillian and John take this path because they like to be left alone, but Gillian isn’t sure if that’s true, if she really enjoys solitude, or if it’s just another something of John’s that she’s adopted as her own. She grabs his hand. It’s smaller than she remembers, limp, and it slips out of her hand like a fish.

It’d be great to just get out of my body, John says. To just be pure thought. Wouldn’t it?

Gillian looks down at her shoes, dirty from months of walking this path.

I don’t know. I kinda like it here.

She takes his hand again, and though he doesn’t squeeze back, he doesn’t let go either, until they see the glow of the cafeteria filter through branches, hear the din of strangers’ laughter.

Their final year of college, Gillian asks John to pose nude for an art project. He refuses until she convinces him that only her professor will see it. Anyway, she reasons, she doesn’t know any other man—or woman—well enough to ask to pose for her. She has only John, and the knowledge of that fact floats in his eyes when he agrees.

As he undresses on the other side of her room, Gillian realizes that this is the first time in their six years together that she’s seen him naked. They make love rarely, always in the dark, with their eyes closed. Certainly she’s never seen him like this: across the room, the whole of his body, stripped, pale and veiny like a plucked chicken.

But what really shocks her as he stands there is how small and thin his body is, how large his head is. His body looks like a sickly ten-year-old child’s. And his head—Gillian looks around the room to have something to compare it to—is bigger than Bob Dylan’s in the larger-than-life poster on her wall. John’s oddity is so striking that Gillian throws out her first sketch, realizing that she must distort her perception of John so that her drawing better resembles the proportions of a normal human being. She throws out the second sketch, frustrated.

She asks John, Would you mind sitting down?

I thought you wanted me standing.

But he obeys, sits on the bed, crosses his legs so she can no longer see his penis. Now his body looks like that of a pre-pubescent girl.

Actually, I might just do a portrait of your face.

Okay, John says, but he stays in the same pose, and Gillian waits for him to move. He doesn’t.

So, you can put your clothes on, she tells him. I mean, you should.

John blushes, and Gillian wonders if her revulsion to his body has leaked out in the tone of her voice. He stands up to put on his clothes, again his body a boy’s. She wonders if this was exactly how his body looked when he was a child, before she knew he existed, when they were both lonely kids reading in their bedrooms while other kids played outside in fading light. Before he pulls on his pants, she walks up and embraces him, feeling the cool of his skin through her clothes. She considers picking him up and laying him on the bed—it’d be so easy, he’d be so light—but she decides against it. They fall down on the mattress together.

Later that night, lying in bed, John tells Gillian he’s been depressed, that every time he reads a book he wishes he could exist in the book’s world, not in this one. Then he apologizes for how ugly his body is, and when Gillian tells him it’s not, he smiles, his large teeth flashing in the dark.

I know it is. I hate my body. Everything it needs, all its disgusting functions.

Jillian opens her mouth, but no words come out, just a sad cooing.

John sighs, buries his face in her breasts, his mumbles muffled by skin.

He looks up at her, repeats:

I just want to get out of my body.

It isn’t the first time he’s said such a thing. Years ago, she took it as an insult to their relationship; she’d say, If you want to get out of this life so badly then I must not make you very happy.

Now she just nods, smoothes his hair. She knows there’s no point in arguing. No matter how much he wishes to get out of his body, she knows it won’t come true. She’s old enough, finally, to know that people very rarely get what they want in life.

After they graduate, John and Gillian move together into a small apartment in the town down below the mountain streets where they both grew up. Gillian teaches art to children, finger painting and making paper maché all day. John works in a library, shelving books, reading them. He reads books she’s never heard of. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Berlin Alexanderplatz. Ecce Homo. Finnegans Wake. He quotes them to her, and sometimes during conversations she doesn’t know if he’s speaking to her with his own words or an author’s. The ineluctable modality of the visible, he says. What? she asks, wondering if he’s speaking a foreign language.

John’s body shrinks, becomes scarily thin. Gillian wonders if his head is really increasing in size, or if it just looks bigger because his body is smaller. She asks him one day if she can measure his head, but he seems offended and storms into the bedroom, slamming the door.

She wonders if cooking heartier meals might help. But as soon as John gets home from work, he retires to their bedroom where he reads and reads and Gillian can’t get him to come to dinner. When she asks him what he wants to eat, he sometimes says he’s not hungry, or when he’s in a worse mood he mutters, Life is disgusting, which confuses her, since she isn’t sure if he’s referring to the Life cereal in their cupboard or to life in a general sense.

John’s physical changes are most apparent when they lie in bed together. Their bodies no longer match up. The first time they ever laid together his body was longer than hers. Then in college their bodies were the same size, their legs the same length, their torsos touching nipple to nipple, their toes’ cold tips brushing, even though his head was still so big that he’d have to bend down to kiss her. Now she notices her body is longer than his; she can sometimes feel his toenails against her shins, his few chest hairs tickling her belly. But because his head has grown so large, when they wake in the morning she still stares straight into his eyes, so big she could put her fists in the sockets, though would never do such a thing because those eyes are the color of chamomile.

But what worries Gillian most are the changes she senses under the surface, the sadness, the distance. He no longer strokes her face at night, explaining the source of his day’s silence; he doesn’t even tell her about what he’s reading. No, now when they lie in bed together he gazes out the window at the changing phases of the moon, and when she touches him, he doesn’t respond, as if she’s touching a dead body.

She starts to feel lonely, even when they’re together in the apartment. She sometimes leaves, drives up the mountain to visit her parents, where she’s comforted by her father, who rests on the couch like a bear, mayonnaise on his whiskers, and by her mother, who bakes lumpy cookies that smell better than they taste. She begins to wonder if she did the right thing moving in with John. She wonders if she’d be happier living at home with them. Driving back down to town, to John, she passes men coming home from construction sites and coal mines, and though she knows their lives are hard, she envies them, envies what she believes is their contentment with their bodies, with the materiality of life.

One day, when Gillian returns home late from work, she stops short in the doorway, frozen by fear. She sees John reading in the living room, his body so tiny and his plaid pants blending so well with the upholstery that it looks like he’s bodiless, his head floating above the couch. As she moves closer the illusion fades, and she laughs. John looks up from his book.

What? What’s so funny?

Nothing’s funny, she says. I was just scared for a minute.

Of what?

Gillian walks into the kitchen, calls back as casually as possible:

Nothing. Just your head, that’s all.

John joins her in the kitchen. He says nothing, but looks at her, his eyes wide, sad.

Finally he asks, What’s wrong with my head?

Gillian takes eggs out of the fridge, cracks one in a bowl before answering.

I don’t know, John. But maybe you should see a doctor.

John snorts, looks skeptical. How easy to read emotions in a face so big, eyes so large.

A doctor? You’re kidding. There’s nothing wrong with me. You just think I’m ugly. You’re not attracted to me anymore.

No, that’s not true. That’s not fair—

John’s voice cracks as he cuts her off. I look like a freak, right? Well, I don’t care. I wish I wasn’t even visible.

Gillian looks down into the bowl of eggs, fights the urge to laugh, but instead starts crying when she looks back up at John.

John, I’m leaving tonight. I’m going home to my parents. I’m happier there.

He freezes, tiny hands in the air, big mouth open. Gillian looks into the darkness of that mouth and knows she is clueless to what is inside him, will always be clueless.

She wants to hold him but is afraid. His body seems so delicate that even a touch of her fingertips would break him into pieces. John’s face unfreezes, and he stares at her, his eyes as big as fists, slowly loosening and opening, showing their lines, their past and future. Gillian doesn’t want to watch, is afraid of how big his tears might end up being. She runs into their bedroom, packs her bags, and leaves.

It’s nearly a month before Gillian hears from John again. He writes her a letter, inviting her to his brother’s wedding, to be held the following month in his parents’ large backyard, on another mountain street not too far from the street her parents live. John’s formality saddens Gillian—It would be my pleasure to invite you, he writes. Her mother encourages her to go, and she writes back to John, saying she will. She spends the next few weeks anticipating, wondering if he’s changed, and in what way. The night before the wedding, she dreams that he is the size and shape of an egg, all head, almost resembling his old VW Bug. When she wakes, she can’t shake the dream—its possibility seems too real.

On the day of the wedding she dresses carefully—a red dress, red high heels, her hair down. She does all this with only the vague awareness that she is trying to impress John—she tells her mother, no, she doesn’t want to get back together with him. But before Gillian leaves, her mother gives her a knowing smile and clips a charm bracelet around her wrist for good luck. The charms dangling from the bracelet are miniature seashells and sandcastles and water-pails. Gillian runs her fingertips over them, their tinkling like distant wind-chimes, before she gets out of her car at John’s parents’ house.

It’s early fall; cool air rushes between Gillian’s bare legs. She pauses at the top of the driveway, listening to the violinists warm up. It’s sunset, and before Gillian walks down the steep grassy hill to the level lawn where the guests are starting to take their seats, she stares at the mountains, the melting colors of the sky. This is all she ever wanted from John: a simple, silent appreciation of physical beauty. An acknowledgement that life was worth enjoying, that beauty was not always purposeful—that there was purposeless beauty, like this sunset, beauty that was real and existed for its own sake. Gillian turns back to her car. She knows John will never make that acknowledgement.

But as she walks back to her car, she hears John’s voice call her name. She turns around: he’s there, on the bottom of the hill, walking up to her. Gillian wonders if it’s her perspective, but his body seems smaller and his head seems larger than ever. She’s frightened to see him any closer. Gillian waves, not sure if she’s waving hello, or goodbye, or waving him away.

John walks up the hill towards Gillian as the violinists begin playing the wedding march.

Gillian waves him back, whispers, Don’t come up! I’ll come down!

But John doesn’t hear her, keeps climbing. It’s taking him long to climb the hill, as long as the bride takes to walk down the aisle slowly. Gillian gestures for him to stop. The hill is steep, and he’s so top-heavy that it looks like he might topple over. He keeps climbing, even though she’s coming down towards him. She sees him clearer. His body is smaller, yes, but he’s gained weight in his cheeks, and she notices for the first time, as he smiles at her from halfway up the hill, how prominent his dimples are. He’s wearing a suit, and the thought crosses her mind that it must be a child’s suit.

They get close enough to whisper.

The wedding’s started, Gillian hisses. You better go back down.

He’s smiling. He looks so happy to see her, happier, in fact, than she ever remembers him.

No. I had to come see you first. Let me help you down the hill.

This gesture of gallantry—where did it come from? Gillian is flattered.

No, John, you go down first. I’m fine.

John climbs up to meet her anyway, and Gillian lets him, wants him to come get her. As he makes his way to her, his head like the daytime moon balanced on a bird-bone, she reaches out her hand to his, the charm bracelet tinkling in slow motion. But as she grasps his fingers and takes the first step to meet him, she can see him losing his balance, maybe from a loose stone under his shiny shoes, maybe from the weight of his head pulling him back down to the bottom of the hill. She leaps forward to catch him but trips, her shoe coming off, stuck in the mud, and then they are both falling, tumbling down the grassy hill, somersaulting, rolling over one another, getting grass stains on their cheeks, mud stains on their fancy clothes.

If Gillian had time to think, she would’ve thought of those dizzying days as a kid when she’d roll down hills all afternoon, getting leaves tangled in her hair. It was the closest thing to actually feeling the world spin, to actually understanding time and change, and yet it was all a child’s game—all for the pleasure of falling, of spinning, of altering one’s perception of the world, all for the desire to have the visible world blend together into a blur, not nothingness but everythingness. But Gillian doesn’t have time to think—as the music drops off note by note and the guests all turn to look, Gillian and John tumble down the hill, silent save for the sound of their bodies hitting the mud and skin hitting skin. As she falls, Gillian reaches out, trying to cradle John’s head, as if it’s a baby’s head or a baby itself.

But she can’t protect it. When they reach the bottom of the hill and stop rolling, John’s head is broken like a big egg beside her one high-heeled foot. Her dress is twisted all around her, and the trees, the bride and groom, the doves cooing in their cages, the violinists with their instruments still stiff in the air, all twist around her too. She crawls to John, crying. She looks down into the mess of his head lying open and splattered on a rock, and she rubs her hands in it, saying No, no, no. The goo of his head feels like paint, like paper maché.

And then, as Gillian is reaching inside his broken head, she feels the rock beneath it move. She wipes away the slime. It’s not a rock underneath—it’s his face, his head, not as large as before but the size of a normal man’s. The guests are standing up, calling to them. She doesn’t answer. The head blinks its wet eyes, like the face of an infant just fallen from the womb. But where’s his body? She looks around: there’s his hand, up the hill by her sunk-in high heel. She runs to grab it. There’s a leg; still rolling a little toward the guests. She crawls to get it, brings it back with her to the site of John’s head. There’s an arm, bent like a child’s rendering of a bird, over by the house, and she kicks off her remaining high heel to run and get it, brings it back to the pile of John’s body parts. She turns around: his torso is behind her, all torn cummerbund and heart still beating beneath. She grabs it, surprised by its new weight and breadth.

All these parts—they may be scattered, they may be broken, but they’re the right size now, and they’ll fit so well together with his head. Gillian knows she can put it all back together herself; she won’t need the help of these people running towards them now, screaming. In the midst of the noise, John’s head looks up at her, and she smiles down at his face, wants to kiss him, but waits. He’s silent; she’s not even sure if he can speak. She wonders what he’ll say when he can—she can’t wait to hear it.

© 2009 prickofthespindle.com