The Very Curve of the Earth
by Quinn Tyler Jackson

On the bottle it had read Drink me! and when she did, Farrah Donahue grew to be forty feet tall. She towered above everyone else and from her new vantage point could see the very curve of the Earth. Were she to stand on top of the highest building of the University of Cambridge, she could surely have seen clear across to Ireland. Thirteen yards down, asleep in her bed, was Anders Byrne, her lover and Ph.D. advisor. She could hardly see him from where her eyes were, but he was there, in perfect order. She started to sit, with her back against the wall, nearly crushing it to pieces, so that she could get a better view of his face. From about eight yards away, the outline of his features became clearer.

It had been nearly two years since the death of her boyfriend, Jim Pinot. She was barely the height of a mouse then, studying economics instead of mathematics, and had to scurry about or be stepped on. That was the distant past. She'd made it into candidacy in the Cambridge department of mathematics with such ease. They couldn't deny her entry, even without a master's degree, for fear she would trounce on them, crushing their bones to dust. A forty foot tall woman had a mind about three hundred and fifty two times the volume of their puny brains.

Someone like Clark Kilkenny, the history major, might say about seven times the volume, but he would be wrong. Sure, she was about seven times the height of a mere five foot eight, but that was not how volume worked. If the three dimensions of a cube were all doubled, the volume was eight times as great. Mathematicians, even the puny ones, knew that. Clark Kilkenny knew nothing of mathematics. That was why a flea, brought to the size of a horse, could not jump to the moon. Its mass would increase exponentially with each doubling in size, but the strength of its limbs, being a function of their cross section, would not increase as quickly, and the flea eventually would never be able to jump at all. Not one yard. Nowhere.

The bottle that read Drink me! solved that problem, though. It not only made her forty feet tall, it strengthened her bones until they were harder than titanium steel and powered the muscles on her limbs beyond simple biology, physics, and mathematics. The department head, having read Carroll's works, like any good mathematician had - even if just to see how Charles Dodgson had become Lewis Carroll - knew all this, and knew not to mess with her. They let her in and had assigned the man she loved as her advisor. Any trouble from them and she would push them down like so many rows of cards.

Just before Anders would awake, she shrank back down to his size, so not to frighten the man she loved. He would learn her secret soon enough, when she was ready to reveal it to him. For now, he would have her at her imaginable five foot eight. Again able to get on the bed, she lay down and closed her eyes, waiting for the outside noise to arouse him to the land of the awake.

He eventually turned and whispered her name.

She blew her hair from her eyes in a quick puff, smiled, and replied, "Yes?"

"I thought you were asleep."

"Just resting my eyes," she said. She ran her hand along his side, down to his hip. He was strong. "So how does it feel to be a fool?" she asked.

"You know I've never slept with anyone other than Joan. Ever. Not before, and not since."

"That's noble," Farrah replied. Her hand now cupped his right buttock. "But that's the past. Never-befores mean little to the from-now-ons."

"I don't want you to quit your studies at Cambridge over this," he said.

Quit? She would not quit! She would trample them all to powder before any such thing could ever happen! "It doesn't have to get any more complicated than it already is," she said. She began pulling him toward her. She wanted him inside her again. She had had four lovers other than him in her life, but none so passionate as he had been the night before. "Nobody has to know." Or I'll crush them, she added to herself.

"It's fucking unethical." He was now pressed against her, but did not pull away.

"Fucking ethics. The ethics of fucking." She kissed the bridge of his nose and slid her left leg over his right leg. She was wet for him. "Who cares?"

"I care about ethics."

"Sure, and so do I, in the larger sense," she replied. She moved her hips so that his hardness was ready to enter her. Just one movement and he would be inside. "But feel how good that feels down there? There are parts of us that don't care. That's pretty clear." She pushed down until he was inside her, and moaned when he was. Drink me! she wanted to holler.

"Not everything that glitters is gold."

Cliches! She pulled away, and then moved down again. Anders responded by gasping. He sounded completely lost in what she was doing to him, and probably didn't suspect that he was the one who was actually in control, not she. "It's not like you're heading my committee for a year out of what, three, makes a damned bit of difference in the larger picture of my doctoral studies." She moved up and down again. Pure joy!

She moved a few more times before Anders replied, "Are we going to let our loins rationalize us out of the truth of this?"

"Just shut up and fuck me, you complicated, cliche-spouting beast," she said, putting her right index finger over his lips. The next thrust was Anders' own.

"There's something I've been wondering," Anders said as he buttoned his shirt. "Why didn't you tell me you knew so much about my doctoral work?"

"I had a lot of time to look into it after I left the University of Washington and decided on where I would take my graduate studies," Farrah replied. "After all, it's not like I was busy doing anything else, what with your not phoning me ever."

He laughed and tucked in his shirt. She knew it wasn't a sadistic laugh, even though the months of no contact had hurt her. Anders didn't know how to respond to some things the way he should, and she forgave him for it.

"When I realized that your work followed the department head's at Cambridge, like a good mathematician, I put two and two together, and applied to Cambridge."

He sat on the edge of the bed. "A wise move. Well, it would have been wise if...."

"If you hadn't shown up at Cambridge?" she asked.

"Yes. I had no idea Caldwell would assign you to me. No idea at all. It's not normal for a guest lecturer to be assigned as someone's advisor. Too many coincidences all fell into place for us to be together."

"Lucky circumstance," she replied.

He walked to the door of the bedroom, ready to leave. "There's no luck in this world," he said. "What there is, is judgment. Good and bad judgment, but no luck."

"Will I see you for lunch?" She pulled the sheets up to her chin.

"Yes, I'll come by at lunch," he said. "I have some things to do at the library, but afterwards, I'll pick you up and we'll go out, OK?" He opened the bedroom door.

"Perfect," she said as he left.

When she heard the front door close, she was again forty feet tall, almost crushing the bed. The sheets now barely covered her left breast. Nothing and no one could touch her now. She was absolutely huge.

When the phone rang, she had to come back to everyone else's size to make her way to the kitchen to answer it.

"Clark, I told you last night when you called that I want nothing to do with you."

"I just want some proper closure, Farrah, that's all," Clark Kilkenny insisted. "You do know I didn't call after the time we had together because I was hired the next day for a new job, and have been very busy, don't you? I wasn't just screwing you and leaving you to dry in the wind, you know."

"It's not that," Farrah insisted. "You were a perfect gentleman, and I know you had an interview the next day. If it took you two weeks to call me again, I understand that. We're adults. We have our own lives."

After a long pause, Clark asked, "Then what happened?"

She didn't want to lie to Clark. He didn't deserve to be lied to. "I told you last night I'm in another relationship. I wasn't in it two weeks ago, if you're wondering, but I am now."

"Anyone I know? Please say no, and you and I can just part as friends."

"Nobody you know. Nobody you know at all."

"Then so be it."

"Listen, I'm sorry about all of this, Clark, and I'm sorry I swore at you last night, OK? It's just that you called at a bad time."

"I understand," he sighed.

After hanging up the phone, Farrah walked to the front door and locked it, since Anders had left it unlocked. He didn't have a key. She would have to remedy that. Not knowing if the phone would ring again, she stayed five foot eight, just in case. Coming down from that height again and again for the little chores of life was unnerving; better to stay small for as long as possible than constantly be shrinking for the phone.

She went to her desk in the living room, checked her email, and, finding none, started searching the Internet for papers to review from the mathematics abstract database. As she reviewed the papers, she jotted equations in her pad. The clock on the computer moved too slowly for her liking. Time always moved too slowly when she wasn't forty feet tall.

"I've never much liked oysters," Farrah said when Anders offered her a bite of one of his.

"Oh? They're delicious," he replied before eating another.

"I suppose Lewis Carroll turned me off oysters when I was a child," she explained.

"Lewis Carroll?"

"Didn't you ever read Through the Looking Glass?"

"Oh, you mean 'The Walrus and the Carpenter,'" he said after a long silence.

"Yes."

"'The time has come,' the Walrus said, 'to talk of many things - of shoes and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages - and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot - and whether pigs have wings,'" Anders quoted from the poem. "Yes, I loved those books."

"More than just books!" Farrah declared. "'O Oysters,' said the Carpenter, 'You had a pleasant run! Shall we be trotting home again?' But answer came there none - and this was scarcely odd, because they'd eaten every one. We must look forty feet tall to an oyster."

He smiled across the table and ate another oyster. "You know, this morning, as I sat in the library, I had a crisis of faith."

"Crisis of faith?"

"Faith in myself and what I'm capable of," he explained. "I'm really not sure I shouldn't back out of this with the department head. I should tell him I can't be your committee head."

Farrah reached into her purse and pulled out a small notepad. She handed the pad to Anders. "Do you know what those are?"

Anders looked through the notepad. "It looks like-"

"-the secret to being forty feet tall," she interrupted him.

"I was going to say that it looks like some new proofs, but I don't know what theorems they're supposed to be proving." Anders stared at one of the pages for a long time, before saying, "This is yet another augmentation of one of my proofs, from a paper that was just published. How did you find it? I can tell that, but only after staring at it for a while. You've taken this one far beyond-"

"-the secret to being forty feet tall," she repeated.

"I don't understand," he replied, pushing the pad back to her.

She ate a piece of tomato from her salad and said, "Listen, I understand that you're confused about this relationship. The fact is, you won't be involved in my committee for the whole term. Nothing you can do in the next year is going to change the overall picture. So why are you so worried about it? Remember when you gave Goldsmith my undergraduate term paper to mark, so you could be sure you weren't giving me too high a mark because of our friendship back at U of W?"

"Yes."

"What did I say then?"

"That you appreciated-"

"-because I didn't want to succeed based upon anything but my own ability. You can see from these proofs, even though they're simple modifications, that I have my own ideas about where my dissertation is going to go. I'm forty feet tall, Anders - because those proofs make me forty feet tall, not what's between my legs - and I don't have to stand on your shoulders to be forty-six feet tall, to prove anything to anyone. You know that." She turned her fork in the salad.

"I've never met such a cocksure woman in mathematics," he said, smiling.

"And I've never met anyone with such an acute sense of ethics where they don't really belong," she added. "Men are so damned ridiculous. Do you think I could live with myself if I had to get everything by fucking or sucking it out of a man? Is that what men reduce women to?" She speared a radish slice with her fork and quickly ate it. "I don't know if Joan got through the fifteen years you were together by counting on you to be the tall one, Anders, but frankly, I can be tall on my own merits. I'm in a relationship with you for companionship with someone I care for greatly, not to get special consideration I don't deserve."

"Well, I'm sorry..."

"Don't be sorry," she said. "Just don't go around flaunting your sense of scrupulosity, trying to make yourself into some kind of Paladin of King Caldwell's Court. Stop trying to come out like looking like you're fasting."

"Fasting?"

"Oh, come on. You were in seminary. You must have learned, years ago, about not going around having the appearance of someone who is fasting just so others will think how pious you are," she explained.

"Ah, yes, you mean Matthew 6:16. 'Moreover when you fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast.'"

"Exactly. Knew your training would kick in eventually. You slept with me because you like me, and vice versa. You put a lot of thought into it, and so did I. I'm the first woman you've had since your wife's death, and, not counting Clark Kilkenny, the vengeance fuck, you're the first person since Jim's death I've considered getting serious with or about."

"I'm flattered," he said.

"Stop with the morality play, and get on with dealing with me as your equal, not some desperate graduate student in need of an unethical edge." She smiled widely so that he would know she was not angry with him in any way. When he smiled back, she knew he understood.

"You're a remarkable young woman, Farrah," he said, reaching his hand over to hold hers.

"None of that 'young woman' bullshit, either. I'm twenty-four, you're thirty-seven, it's not like you're old enough to be my father, Anders," she hissed. "Men! They live in such fantasy worlds!"

"I tell you what," Anders said, pushing his now empty plate away. "If you agree you won't spank me any more, I'll agree to not talk about ethics ever again."

"That, and you never order oysters again in my presence," she said, winking.

"Deal!" he conceded. He reached for the pad with the proofs on it and examined it again. "How is it that I missed your brilliance in this stuff when you were in my class back at U of W? I mean, I knew you were smart, but these are amazing."

She tried to think of a way to explain. "Well, the course had its expectations of me. When I wrote the first paper, it wasn't all that good because I wasn't very interested in the topic and chose it carelessly. When I wrote the second, it was a bit better."

"The highest mark in the class, not just better," Anders reminded her.

"But it was along the topics we'd been assigned. I had no freedom except within certain set boundaries. These proofs, however, are what really interests me. I can run with them in any direction I please, as long as they hold true."

"It would have taken me a year to fill this pad." He handed it back to her. "Keep it in a safe place."

"Well, you didn't have the benefit of having your own dissertation and papers to work from as a guideline. My work is derivative right now, and so, comes more quickly. I'm sure they'll come less easily when it comes time to leave the comfort of augmenting yours and start offering some that are one hundred percent mine. You practically invented the New Provability, so of course it took you longer to iron out."

Anders brushed some crumbs from his legs and stood. "Derivative? Some of those proofs are light years ahead of my work. Hardly recognizable. A journal editor, seeing these, would not think of me one whit. You're too modest."

It was easy to be modest when she was five foot eight. She could see that she didn't have to be forty feet tall around Anders. He accepted her for what she was, and there was no need for anything more, and she loved him for it.

Soon, they were outside on the sidewalk, heading for his car. After he drove her to her apartment, he said he had some things to do at his office before returning to his cousin Gillian and her husband's house, where he was renting a room. She started for the front door of the apartment building. Clark Kilkenny was sitting on a low embankment near the front garden.

"Was that him, then?" he asked.

"Yes," she replied.

"Handsome old fellow," Clark jabbed.

"Any reason in particular you're here?" she asked.

"When I was here, I lost a gold cufflink. I forgot to bring it up. Would you mind terribly looking for it in your bedroom? I'll wait here," he offered.

"Oh, you can come upstairs. I found it last week." She opened the front door and waved him in.

Once at her apartment door, she bid him to stay in as she went into the kitchen to dig through the cup of elastic bands, paperclips, and other small items. She found the cufflink Clark had forgotten and took it to him at the door.

"Thanks," he said.

"What I can't figure out is how you forgot a cufflink when you were wearing a windbreaker and short sleeved tee-shirt that night," she observed.

"Oh, well, normally I wear jacket, sleeves with cuffs on a date," he said, "but I came over in a hurry that night, and forgot to put on my sleeves."

"That doesn't make a damned bit of sense."

"I always have the links with me in my pocket, just in case I want to forget one so I have an excuse for a return visit," he admitted.

"Just a hint on that," she said. "Cufflinks are as out of date as saying things like twenty-three skidoo."

"Note to self: forget contact lens from now on...."

She closed the door without saying goodbye. She only had to be five foot eight to be seven times taller than the likes of Clark Kilkenny. "Bye bye, Clark," she said through the closed door.

His dormouse voice squeaked under the door, "B'bye, Farrah."

The heat of the soapy bath water soaked into her limbs and she was content. Her eyes were closed, and on the inside of the lids, she scrawled functions and equations as if on a slate. When would equations come that were entirely her own? As her mental chalk drew Greek and Hebrew symbols from end to end of the board, she saw it. At first, it was a small speck of light, hardly noticeable at all. A dot multiplication. It slowly grew until it covered half the proof, and she then saw it was a hare, dressed for dinner. She did not know how she knew, but she knew it wanted to follow her. She drew closer in her mind to it. Where did it want to go? It was waving its paw now, clearly beckoning her. She took another step forward. Curiouser and curiouser! And then it was gone, as quickly as it had appeared. The equations were all erased with a sudden swish of the chamois cloth of a ringing phone.

"Damn!" she shouted so that it echoed through the small bathroom. It might be Anders! She stepped out of the bath, pouring water everywhere, and ran naked to the kitchen to pick it up. "Hello?" she said, halfway through the fifth ring.

"Can I come over tonight?" Anders asked.

"Of course," she said. Puddles formed under her on the linoleum floor of the kitchen.

After the call, she returned to the bath, but the hare did not return. What had it wanted her to see? A proof of her own? She would never know, and just let the bath water wash her concern about the matter into nothingness.

"I had a fight with my cousin today," Anders admitted before sipping some more of the wine he had brought with him.

"Yes?"

"She asked me where I was last night, if you can believe such a thing." He closed his eyes and rubbed them with his hand. "I don't know why, but I snapped at her and said it was none of her business."

Farrah laughed as she poured herself a second glass of wine.

"I mean, what nerve! I told her I am a grown man and don't need family looking after me like I was a boy." Anders had a childish expression on his face that was halfway between anger and guilt for being caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

"Why don't you find your own apartment?"

"Housing isn't in my budget right now," he said.

She moved a little closer to him on the couch. "You have no money?"

"Well, I own the house in Seattle outright now," he said, "since the mortgage insurance was paid off when Joan died, but that's not liquid."

"Why not have an agency rent it out while you're here in England?" she suggested.

"I'd rather it stay empty," he admitted. "I don't want strangers sleeping in the same bedroom as...."

"I understand," she agreed. She placed her hand on Anders left thigh. It wasn't a sexual touch, but one meant to offer some comfort. "I don't expect you to be 'over' that yet. I'm still not 'over' Jim. Not completely, anyway. I may never be. You may never be. That's a right and noble thing."

Anders turned and smiled his first smile of the evening. "You know what I love most about you?" he asked.

Love. Sure, he hadn't used the word in an unambiguous way, but it was the first time he'd ever used it in the same sentence with you. "What's that?"

"You are the only person who can truly understand what it's like to lose someone under the circumstances I did. You know." He leaned over and kissed the tip of her nose, his breath smelling of the wine.

"Is that all you love about me most?" she teased.

"You are like an orange," he added. "First, the peeling. Then, I discover that you are made up of so many parts, and each is just as sweet as the other. It's difficult to not love the whole orange after only taking a single bite from one wedge, because I know the rest must be as delicious."

Farrah couldn't hold in her laughter. Maybe it was the wine. Drink me! the bottle had read, and she did, and since he was drinking from it too, they were both forty feet tall now. "You missed your calling as a poet," she giggled. Normally, she was not a giggler, but the wine had taken away her restraint, and besides, nobody other than Anders would know she'd giggled.

"Anyway, Gillian and I settled our argument. Seems she was just showing concern about me, since I had been moping around the house for so long," he added. "She thought maybe I'd done something to hurt myself. I admitted I'd started seeing someone, and that calmed her fears."

She stroked his ear. "Admitted you were seeing someone, hey?" She leaned in and kissed where his sideburn would still have been if he hadn't shaved before coming over. She now existed officially in his life to someone other than Clark Kilkenny, and although she had not expected it would do so, the idea flooded her with warmth. More warmth than the hot bath had earlier in the day.

"Yes. That cheered her right up. 'Oh, wouldn't it be lovely if you fell in love and married a Brit and stayed on in England?' she said. When I told her I was seeing another American, she was a bit disappointed, but overall, she took her teeth out of my ass when I told her I was getting involved with someone again."

Farrah now kissed his chin. "It's nice to have family who cares," she said.

"Was your family supportive after Jim died?"

She leaned back into the couch, trying to find words to summarize in her mind how things had gone after Jim's death. "Well, when I dropped economics in favor of pure maths, my father was royally pissed and pulled his funding of my education," she said.

"That's awful!" Anders put his arm around her and pulled her close.

"And Jim never had any life insurance, so I declared bankruptcy." His arm felt perfect around her. She never wanted him to let go.

"So how can you pay for all this?" he asked, waving his arm to indicate the apartment.

"Besides the funding from the university, my mother helps me out. She and Dad are long since divorced, and anything she could do, once she found out I was accepted into Cambridge, was her duty to herself and to me, she says."

"All's well that ends well, then," Anders sighed, closing his eyes.

She kissed his eyelid, wondering if, on the inside, he was scrawling equations on it, trying to figure her height, girth, and depth. She was forty feet tall, but he should know that, since he was now, too, and could see the very curve of the Earth.

Copyright © 2003 Quinn Tyler Jackson
All rights reserved

About the Author

        Quinn Tyler Jackson has been writing since he was twelve. At various stages of his career, he has been an artist's apprentice, antiquarian bookseller's assistant, gas jockey, freelance editor, literary agent, stay-at-home father, and computer software and hardware consultant. Through it all, he has always written poetry and fiction and has usually, when presented with two paths, taken the one that holds the promise of enlightenment, however worn. To learn more about Mr. Jackson's writing, please visit his Homepage.

Image: "The Love of Souls," Jean Delville, 1900