The man breathes out into the woman’s mouth, and she sucks in, filling her lungs. Then she blows back into the mouth of the man who

takes his breath from hers. The piece, called Death Self, lasts seventeen minutes and ends when both artists collapse on the floor. Stunned, the

audience is silent, and as the man and woman are revived with oxygen, I’m mesmerized by their chests, expanding and collapsing like seismic

waves. This silence carries, and with nothing to say I drink alone at the bar during the reception. A couple bickers in the gallery restroom, so

I sneak out back and piss on the building. Here, I see a cat on the brick wall in the alley, its eyes round mirrors in the darkness. It stares at

me. I stare back.

The math teacher I’m subbing for is on maternity leave. In the spirit of geometry, the class estimates her circumference. On the back of a

student quiz, I find a doodle titled The Ever Dilating Vagina, an expansive black hole between two spread legs. It has fangs and looks

understandably irate. Later in the faculty lounge, I envision myself desperately begging this vagina for mercy and distractedly drop a pot of

hot coffee at a science teacher’s feet.

At my next performance group meeting, our director warns us he is inspired. The couple from the Death Self piece stand arm and arm

in the middle of our circle. On my lap are Euclid: The Father of Geometry and a cup of stale coffee bleeding a ring on my jeans. The male

artist snatches this book and holds it high for all to see.

“Okay. Think like mathematicians,” he demands.“This group is a circle,” he says and pivots at the center of our chairs, “but if you two here,”

he gestures for these people to stand, “move, step back, and break the curving line, this group is not what is was before because this is not a circle

anymore.”

The man turns to smile at the woman. “If a shape changes, it’s destroyed. Just like air once we breathe it.”

Then he turns back to us, “Quod me nutrit, me destruit. Destruction is all relative. So is revival.”

 

It reeks of sugar in the faculty lounge. Someone has brought doughnut holes and doughnuts. I roll a hole across the counter.

“What’s the point of separating them?” the PE teacher asks me, pouring coffee into a mug.

“So we can make them whole again,” a voice answers from behind us, and I turn to see the science teacher from the other day wheeling

a plastic model skeleton. A black bowl hat sits on the skeleton’s cranium.

“This is him,” she whispers to the skull. “The guy with the pot.”

The PE teacher eyes me.

“I like your hat,” I tell the skeleton.

“He borrowed it from me,” the science teacher says, leaning between the bones and me to grab a bear claw. Again I’m apologetic, sorry

about her shoes, and ask if her feet were badly hurt. She laughs yes, third-degree coffee burns. The PE teacher interrupts, reminding me that

the things we break we replace. The science teacher tells the PE teacher he is a philosopher. By this he seems genuinely insulted and goes back

to mixing cream in his coffee.“

Is your friend joining us for any particular reason?” I ask the science teacher, fingering a plastic radius.

“Death is imminent,” she tells me.

“So it’s just my time then?”

“It appears so,” she says.

Her eyes are a wet-wood brown, like the flooded deck of ship. She brushes powdered sugar from my tie only to again smudge the powder

on her own cheek. I pretend not to watch as she licks glaze from her wedding ring and splays the skeleton’s phalanges across the top of

her sticky hand.

“There is theoretically,” I tell my students after lunch, “a point of infinite smallness. If within a boundary shapes progressively reduce

in size, shrinking from the center out, this point of smallness is no longer a limit at the center but a curving line which borders the entire

complex, creating, as it were, a circular universe, a geometrical enclosure. But if this size reduction, inevitable and contiguous as it is inside

our boundary, radiates inward from all directions at a constant rate, then the limit, the point from which all is left to disappear, that point of

smallness becomes a circle at the center of our universe.”

During my breaks I go see the science teacher. Today she’s covered a double helix with glow-in-the-dark stars. The lights are off, the

space dark, and she swivels the helix through her classroom, fluid as nebula between desks and students. In geometry the double helix consists

of two congruent lines both on the same axis but translating appositionally along it. She tosses luminous base pair nucleic acids into the darkness.

A piece of DNA lands in my lap.

When the science teacher learns that I am a performance artist, she invites me to meet her husband, a professor of contemporary art at the

university. I sit in the back of their jeep as we drive to a pub in the college district. Strung white light bulbs separate tree trunks from blackness.

Her husband’s grip is large and warm, and he grabs my hand every time I impress him. After dinner we stroll down the historic brick walk, eating

ice cream while the science teacher window shops and her husband asks about my art. I feel like their son.

“We’re walking up a wall,” her husband says and bends in the road, fingering red bricks. The bricks divide each other into equal lengths,

edge after edge replicating and shrinking toward a horizon distinguished only in distant headlights. We walk to this vanishing point, far from the

street noise and twinkling trees. Here the sky is a wide matrix of minerals, and I look everywhere. So does she. And then she looks at me,

grinning astronomically for the entire universe, her teeth white-hot lava in her purple mouth. The sweetness of vanilla. Tiny bean seeds like

black stars in her gums.

At home in bed I think of her mouth and come hard in my hands, the seeds ripping through me like glow-in-the-dark stars.

 

I’m discussing celestial navigation when the fire bell rings. The classrooms empty and lines move toward a large parking lot beyond

the gymnasium. I hold back once my class passes the science teacher’s door, and I push it open, charged to be alone in her space. In the

years of exploration, sailors crossing the featureless ocean used nautical almanacs, maps of star and planet positions, to measure angles

between the horizon and their chosen point in the heavens. As soon as the door closes behind me, I see my guiding planet and slowly gravitate

toward it. Her chair is empty. On its back is her sweater, a dark hair clinging at the collar. I hesitate, then bend to smell her on the cloth. I

pluck the hair and wrap it round my finger until the skin bulges in white pockets of bloodless flesh. I lift a portrait of the science teacher’s husband

from her desk, expecting to see my own face reflected on the glass. But there is only glare, the sun burning behind me in the expansive window of

her classroom.

My favorite lesson is dimension. The blue of 1492 is construction paper patterned into waves. It’s not about geography or even history.

It’s simple geometric theory. I’ve tied a white bed sheet out for a sail.

“Columbus was a mathematical genius,” I tell the students. “Nothing is flat. Not this wall,” I run my hand along the smooth surface, “and not

this paper.” I tear a piece of paper and hold it high for all to see. “Three dimensional space is the only true thing about the world. Pythagoreans,

Plato, Aristotle, they all knew it. And that’s how Columbus, on his way to China, came to stumble upon an entire continent.”

“But he didn’t even find what he was looking for,” a student interrupts.

“He discovered the New World.”

“But it wasn’t India,” the student presses.

“It was to him.”

 

The day the first snow falls, the science teacher and I eat lunch in her classroom. Holidays are coming so I ask if she’s traveling.

Only her husband is, overseas to Paris for an art convention, no money for her ticket. Looking disappointed is almost impossible.

“I want to buy you shoes,” I say, invigorated with the news.

“What?”

“You promised you’d let me. Just pretend it’s Secret Santa.”

“Except I’ll know it’s you,” she says, looking toward the enormous, white window.

“Right,” I say. “Just Santa then.”

“Fine,” she sighs. “But I’m going with you. I don’t want anyone knowing my shoe size. And don’t think I’m sitting on your lap.”

A tightness straps me once she says this, and I fatten with blood. Her burgundy eyes: red bricks floating in baths of ice cream.

Fragile snow falls to pieces at her back, and her body so still against the moving weather seems plucked from a solid world into a

crumbling one. She exhales forcefully and grins awkwardly, disappearing to the door. I’m sure she’s left when the light goes out.

I’m in a snow globe now where bruise-grey light casts silver shadows. From behind me she places something on my head, her

belt buckle digging in my lower neck. As her voice fades away in the shrinking snow globe, I realize it’s the black bowl hat her

skeleton wears.

“It’s not red or white, St. Nick, but it’ll have to do.”

 

That same afternoon I sit in on her class.

“The pupil,” the science teacher tells her students, “is a perfect circle at the center of the eye’s iris. It dilates in

accordance to light, focusing uniquely on its subject until that subject is perfectly fixed, and then everything else, everything

in view that is not this fixed thing, reduces to background.”

I think how loneliness works the exact same way.

“It’s a safety mechanism,” she says and looks at me through a sea of students. “Only so much light can be absorbed.”

 

We ride an escalator to the store’s shoe department. Rows of chairs and bright boxes form right angels across the room.

There is the rich smell of leather, but something else draws the science teacher’s senses. It’s a black silk dress with

straps thin and delicate.

I wait, rearranging a display table of high heels, each pair turned in on itself like the collapsed hands of a clock. Then

she reappears, flowing like glassy black water at the dressing room door. I’ve never seen so much of her before. Looking

closely, I see the blood moving in her wrists.

“You wear a dress like this to the Eiffel Tower,” she says and then asks, “Why do all women want to see the Eiffel Tower

so badly?”

The Eiffel Tower at night, moving with lights like the blood in her wrists. Paris is dark; all of France is. She picks up the

tower and swivels with it, moving it like a double helix through the air. My identity.

“Shoes,” she says, pointing to a pair and then sinking into a chair with them, bending to untie her worn tennis shoes.

From her purse she pulls dark stockings and then peels away each white sock. Her moving hands are pain. They’re never

moving over me.

My pulse builds like a wave. Slowly I kneel before her bare feet on the hard carpet.

“Do you like the dress?” she asks me, a black shoe in her hand. A black star. I say nothing and lift a stocking from

beside her. Plates shift beneath my skin as I take her by the ankle and lay the sole of her foot on the inside of my kneeling

thigh. Gently, I find the stocking’s open mouth, rolling its lips over my fingers. Maybe my hands are cold or maybe she’s just

scared, but the science teacher stiffens as the stocking slips over the soft tips of her toes. Sheer and gossamer, I guide the

nylon forward across her foot and then upward along the calf. Higher and higher, the stocking grows tauter and stretches

around her leg, stopping inside the under curve of her knee which is hot and wet and trembling. Here, my hands stop, the

curved skin prickling. Fingernails dig in, flesh deep and porous with faults and flexures.

Past her knees, between her legs, there is a dark and narrow corridor which ends at the clean, white light of her

underwear. The cotton panties curve over her groin, and I think to myself, Nothing in this world is flat.

She shifts, my hands drop, and she bends too quickly as I turn up to see her. My head cracks against her face

like fire, and she whips back, bolting from the chair. I leave the black stars and run to catch her in the dressing room.

Her feet are the only feet, so I pull the curtain of her stall, metal rings crisp as they slide to reveal her.

All her hair has fallen to her chest, forming a wide open sea on the flesh of her back. The silk dress has fallen, too,

down around her side, and stepping toward the mirror I see a single breast in the reflection.

Beyond the curtain, beyond the dressing room, there are noises of life and people. People sitting, people tugging

on and off, people walking in new and old. And once the old is traded in for something new, there is the noise of leaving,

people headed home in the snow beyond where I can hear them. But it all reduces to background. The shoes, snow, the

cycle of interminable sadness and wear. I’ve forgotten the science teacher’s eyes and all, even my own, shapes and colors.

It’s just these circles. Subtle constellations, brown and raised, the softest flesh I’ve ever seen, and my pupils’ fix on her flush

and nimble nipple that is more the end of something than its own separate beginning.

The science teacher is holding her face, leaning on the mirror, and I can’t find her eyes, which I need to remember.

I press up to her back, and the silk snags between us like water. At this small touch her nipple stands rigid, and I run my

thumb across it. She looks up suddenly, and I’m jarred to see blood from our collision running from her nose and down her

neck. My thumb lingers, and her eyes close tightly. I do nothing else. Just watch her bleed. A red drop trickles down the

slopeof her breast and sails like a ship from the edge of the earth.

In the mirror she looks in my eyes, and I look in hers. Blow out, suck in. This space is small, but we fill it. Our chests

heaving, collapsing, and then rebuilding themselves. I think of depth perception. The curtain behind us seems so far out of

reach while asleep in some Parisian hotel her husband has never seemed closer. Our breath fogs the mirror in two round

clouds, and she touches them both with her bloody hand.

This is my performance. This is my limit of infinity. I leave her behind in the contrived space of the dressing room,

take the down escalator, and step out into the crumbling world. The stars don’t twinkle, but they give dome to the galaxy.

A line curving forever. I ride back to my house on this narrow line, the sail whipping as I try to navigate. It’s silk and black,

and for this single journey home, the dress fills and catches and finds its own direction.