Like the lips of a perch pumping for oxygen, so do the toes of her pale-fleshed foot pucker forth from their comforting covers, pointing the path for a naked sole to protrude from textile protection—abandon cocoon of lavender womb, dare test “real life out there.”
Callie removes her sleep mask but keeps eyes closed. Delicately she clears her throat.
“If only my toes could see! My daily lament, a recurring complaint of a woman amazed she gets out of bed at all—mystified by the occult science! Did wakeful Mr. Darwin know how it finally works? Evolved? I envy early Eve, and earlier Adam, ‘sleeping in’ on workdays. But did that pair have ‘work days?’ Did Eve get up at all? To do what? Did Adam command ‘Go weed that garden’?”
“If only there were eyes on my toes: Little lenses below, personal periscopes, two or three tiny web-cams slipping secretly out to scan: what’s looming in wait out there? Then routing data, images and sounds, to the CEB (Chief Executive Brain) for decision-making. Before eyes on face open, blankets on bed get thrown, visionary toes below throw CEB the options. ‘Warm room cheerful with sunlight, sky outside seems brightly blue. Go ahead! Callie, attempt your escape! Gratefully rejoice! Gracefully re-join!’ Or, alternatively: ‘Chilly room shadowed by ghosts, awkward clouds clogging the city. Remain buried, burrow in blanket, conserve energy. Retreat. Today remains a drowsy dream.’ Or…”
Her thoughts are starting to move, thermal units of brain-built energy devoted to a theme: inertia.
“A body at rest… such as mine… tends to stay at rest… no credible question about that—axiom instead of a theorem—until acted upon by an outside force. What is that outside force? ‘God?’ How abstract! Wrapping reasoning around that explanation requires gobs of imagination! A body in motion, which—I suppose—is what I want mine to be, tends to stay in motion until acted upon—by what? The truth is I enjoy being in motion, though only after I am already in motion. Motion—emotion too—is evidence I stay alive. Would controlling a force that initiates my (e-) motion resolve a morning mourning mooning swooning personal perplexity?”
An equal truth, however, is that some of her most enjoyable experiences have been spent not in motion—spent at rest, still in bed, in a partial trance while the local listener-supported radio station exhaled outer-space music all-but-inaudibly in the invisible background. And indeed, on such occasions, Callie affirms the right to recover her mask and re-cover her eyes.
“Falling in, out of, around light sleep, soft sound a-weaving, in delicate dreams I’m a see-through angel: floating through time, over space, no inhibiting resistance from weight, no shackling laws of gravity, church, state… needing nothing but invisible wings to guide an often-cursing consciousness should it decide to shift course toward a higher plane.”
However, comparing herself to an un-angelic bear in hibernation, un-winged and heavy-shouldered, might provide a more realistic model of her morning mourning situation. How is Callie like the bear? How different? Is she ursa major? Or merely minor?
“A bear awakens in spring with an overwhelming awareness that its slouching belly is a pouch so empty that the natural order of things will be horribly altered—planets turn purple, waves ignore moons, snowflakes go red—unless the sleepy beast hauls heavy buttocks from cruddy cave, dirty den, ice-lined lair (whatever domestic domicile) and begins regenerative business: gobble berries, suck honey, gnaw roots, chew shoots, lust after food-fuel. But what, exactly, is it that can motivate me—animate me, allow me—to loco-mote this reluctant body, to successfully boss it out of bed? If Adam disappears, will Eve leave her bed? Oh yes, I want to know. Yeah, it always happens. Sooner or later. On the most banal of days, one instant I’m anchored in bed, but next instant my body is moving, rolling slowly toward the water-bed edge of my fashionable mattress, toes twitching, then searching, then finally touching the wooden floor, as though the earth’s magic gravity is now strongest where it intersects the top of that firm floor with the bottom of this soft (but still solid) bed. So my trunk starts straightening, magnetically aligning, and with my body about-to-be vertical I feel ready to start striding across this thirteenth floor—see what luck might lie in store.”
It has frequently scared her to acknowledge it is happening again, that with no reason equal to that which moves her grizzly out of a cave and into the eternal search for a honey tree, Chief Executive Brain—Callie’s “inside force?”—has secreted some molecule of chemical, flipped some microcosmic switch, sent a tiny jet of synaptic electricity to some muscle in her calf or hip, has somehow through the grace of “God” (or some reasonable facsimile thereof) urged her not to lie and atrophy in this warm womb of fabric, but to get on with it—respond to another kind of gravity, that of her social situation, and get busy being born, be waked, grow up, live, for Pete’s sake! Well, for someone’s sake…
“But who’s in charge? My fears are the simple anxieties of not knowing. Is it, after all, quite simply and complexly, the philosophic conundrum, the ancient paradox, the famous oxymoronic miracle of mere free will? How is the instant selected? Why get up now and not one second from now? Why didn’t I get up a second ago? What’s the stick that stokes a stroke, cues the break, moves the balls, starts the game? Come now, everybody in the pool… table! Come on in now, the … felt… feels…fine…”
Whatever it is, it happens again: the human perch starts splashing over the side of a wide water-bed into the weary world of solid here and now.