He had to sit down for a minute to sort out what he was experiencing.
He realized that if he had seen this exact scene on a poster in a travel agency over the caption “Bike through an ancient land,” he would have been overwhelmed with desire, he would have yearned for that bicycle to be his, for that trip to be his. And what struck him now was that his principal feeling was still yearning. The paradoxical thought underlying his appreciation of how beautiful it all was, was still I wish I could be there. It occurred to him that beauty, maybe, is always a thing you can only see from the outside. And he has wondered ever since if the key to a happy life is to learn ever more deeply to be satisfied with standing off to the side, perceiving the beauty that is separate from you, but nearly everywhere.
His eggplant arrives, along with one of those metallic-green canisters of grated parmesan cheese (Kraft) and a smaller red-capped vial of pepper flakes (McCormick). It’s not particularly good, with the usual watery “red sauce” of cheap restaurants, devoid of discernible herbs, but it’s edible, and it would be unfair to condemn Leslie’s Cafe for serving him indifferent food when its cuisine had nothing to do with the reason he chose it. When the waitress returns to refill his water glass and asks him how he’s finding everything, he says, “Fine,” and means it.
As he eats, he studies the outdoor wooden deck on the other side of the sliding glass doors. It sags so much in the far left corner he wonders if it’s structurally stable. Judging from the arrayed tables and chairs under winter tarps, he assumes it’s still open in the warmer weather. Since it abuts the inlet, it’s probably the only tourist draw this shabby place has. He remembers reading in the local paper that the five-mile waterfront recreation trail, which the city has been piecing together from municipal and private land for years, was complete except for these few feet right here. The owner of Leslie’s Cafe (Leslie, presumably) adamantly refused to sell, or to allow a public right of way, saying the business wouldn’t survive the loss of the inlet frontage. Mark has seen letters in the paper decrying the owner, citing the rundown nature of the property and calling for the city to take the land through eminent domain. Mark gazes at the quasi-wreck of the deck, glances around the near-empty room. He disagrees with the letter writers. It has been the woman’s (the man’s?) property for many years. Leslie, he assumes, pays taxes, and has every right to serve soggy eggplant and mountainous platters of french fries to eccentric lone diners, with or without dogs.
The waitress pops through the swinging kitchen door and Mark glimpses behind her a perspiring man in a white shirt with a big belly, darkly grizzled. Perhaps the stubborn citizen himself. Good luck to him.
“Can I get you anything for dessert?”
“No, thank you.”
She scribbles on her pad, rips, smacks the slip down. “You can pay at the register.” Her name tag says “Fiona.” She smells like vanilla and frying oil. Her hands and forearms are long and sinewy. Her nails are unpainted, well cared for. She trots back into the kitchen, tray under arm.
He puts the tip on the table, threads through the room’s empty chairs. Two of the four beer drinkers—men in their forties, reddened by sun and maybe drink—follow him with impassive eyes. (Who’s that loon?) He stands at the empty register for a minute until one of the men behind him yells, “Fiona!” and she comes back out of the kitchen to ring him up. “Thank you,” he murmurs over his shoulder. They rumble a chuckle at him.
Outside, warmer air has blown in in gusts, scattering small branches on the pavement. He returns to his car, thinking about the tilting deck, and thus gravity again. Almost all the covers of the science fiction paperbacks of his youth had as their implicit theme the conquering of gravity. Their artwork depicted impossibly high and fragile towers, cantilevered platforms that would collapse without some anti-gravity field, ramps that rose and curved for glorious miles without supports. From glimpses he’s had of more recent movies, he’d say the impulse is still strong. He saw part of a movie that seemed to want to be taken as serious science—a sequence about time dilation in a strong gravity field was at least minimally plausible—but then the hero went to a planet where huge rafts of rock hung in the sky like clouds. Nearly everyone, it’s said, has dreams in which they can fly. Does some large fraction of all sci-fi stem simply from this? Those finned rockets taking off hourly from spaceports as easily as ships sailing from harbor, as though Earth’s gravity well were some piddling thing. In reality, the enormous energy expense of countering Earth’s gravity is at least as much of a limitation on space travel as the enormous distance between stars. Do people like to climb mountains because, when they look from the summits, they see what birds see? Or thrill looking into the Grand Canyon because the sheer rock walls seem to defy gravity? Mark read somewhere that in fancy restaurants the plating is all about getting the food to stand up improbably high.
Of course, Earth would not have an atmosphere without gravity. Earth would not exist. Without gravity, the universe would be an expanding formless region of hydrogen and helium atoms, salted with lithium. Mark wonders if defying gravity feels to humans like defying aging, defying death. (His increasingly saggy butt, his greater difficulty loping up three flights of stairs.) Maybe it’s no coincidence that angels are imagined to float in the clouds. In Mark’s dreams, in fact,
