Negative Space by Gillian Linden

Author:Gillian Linden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2024-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

I went to room 714, designated as a place students could congregate during their free periods. Once a week I had to chaperone it, which was light work. Full-time teachers had more duties, and from my point of view, worse duties. They might oversee the student cafeteria, or help students with homework. Often my duty amounted to sitting in 714 alone. Pigeons liked to gather outside one of the windows, and it had posters of outer space, a chalkboard instead of a whiteboard. There was a model of the solar system—called, I had learned, an orrery—on the desk. The orrery was brass and it miraculously worked, turning at a steady pace when I switched it on. I found it gently hypnotic, the planets gliding along their miniature orbits, and it was always helpful to be reminded of the enormity of the universe. One day in 714 I’d googled whether space was limitless and discovered that this was an unsettled question, and had to do with whether the universe was shaped like a donut or something else—a plane, a sphere. I told this to Jane and Lewis, who looked at me impassively.

Jane said, “If it’s a donut, what’s in the hole in the center?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What’s—”

“No,” I said. “I have to read more before we can discuss this.”

“Let’s just find a video,” she said.

When students did congregate in 714, I saw my primary role as guarding the orrery; I wouldn’t let them use it in their games. Other teachers must have imposed similar rules when they monitored this room, otherwise it almost certainly would have broken, and I had a sense of fellowship with these teachers, helped by the fact that I didn’t know which ones they were.

Some children came in, three girls and a boy, a group who had visited 714 on and off all year. They were older than Jane, but not much; they still had chirpy voices, and their shoulders and wrists, too, made me think of birds. A girl in a thin yellow dress came over to the desk and distractedly touched Jupiter.

“Hello,” I said. “You can look at it but not play with it.”

“I know,” she said.

“Let’s play family,” the smallest one said, and they settled into their usual game, with the same small girl playing the mother. “Leave me alone,” she shouted. “Just leave me alone!”

One morning over breakfast Lewis had said to me, “I did have a bad dream last night.”

“What was it?” I’d asked.

He didn’t want to talk about it, but after I crouched next to him and told him to just whisper it, and told Jane to leave the room—“I don’t even care,” she said—he said, “You were sinking into the living room floor.”

Picturing this was unsettling.

Jane reappeared at the breakfast table. “Wait. What happened?”

“I was watching Mama,” Lewis said. “And Mama said, Go away. I need privacy to sink.”

“OK,” the small girl said from the corner of 714. “Now get in the bath.”

I moved some books around and looked at them, drawing attention to myself so no one would consider undressing.

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