First: A body in motion will stay in motion, and a body at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an external force.
He sits across from Tabitha on the metro, not next to her, since she purposely chose the seats farthest from the door. This is their last night in Prague, the fourth evening in a row she’s worn her new red dress, and she’s got her so-help-me-god look on her face. But they are headed toward the Vltava River, and he was given leeway: it just has to be sometime during their four days here. On the Charles Bridge. Preferably at night. On one knee and close enough to witnesses so they can ooh and aah and take their picture. Tabitha’s grandparents got engaged in Prague, and she insisted on this trip since they were married forty-two years, until death did them part.
In the six years he’s known her, Tabitha has always been a list maker, but since she started taking antidepressants eighteen months ago, she has come to believe that fulfillment is simply a matter of planning and organization. Control those and you control your destiny. Case in point: the ring in his pocket is in an ochre yellow box that she went out of her way to find. Red and yellow have become their official couple colors. These are also the colors in their living room and kitchen and entryway, and, as per Tabitha’s vacation photography strategy, he keeps the camera at the ready, poised to snap a kid’s yellow windbreaker or red teacup or, the jackpot, both colors in the same frame, anything they can later hang on the wall. Because he is a cameraman by trade, this duty falls to him, even though his area of expertise is action sequences, fleeting pucks and balls and breakaways, not things that just sit there. He’s made a sort of game out of the quest, but so far Tabitha hasn’t been pleased with his findings: a banana peel next to a trash can, a KFC sign, the red-tile roofs, which held so much promise for Tabitha but which are not the right shade of red—she brought paint swatches. The photograph they are headed for will be blown up to eleven-by-fourteen, black and white with the red dress and yellow box isolated out. The only question is how many passersby Tabitha will have take their picture until she gets the right shot.
The metro doors begin to close and he’s glad for the intrusion of three teenage boys who slip into the car at the last second. They chest bump one another, sloppy and violent, whooping and yelling in Czech. There is no ignoring their haunted agitation, meth heads, probably, though Tabitha averts her gaze. The train leaves the station, and as it reaches top speed, the boys begin trying to pry the doors apart, one with fingernails chewed down below the nail bed.
He chuckles along with other passengers, some of whom shake their heads at the impossible gesture. But the train quickly falls silent when the boys manage a crack and then, with their chemically-induced superhuman strength—how else to explain it?—do indeed push the doors apart. The few standing passengers lunge for the remaining seats like a game of musical chairs and everyone braces for the inevitable emergency brake. Tabitha digs her heels into the floor, as if to avoid being sucked out an airplane door mid-flight. Seconds pass, stale air rushes into the metro car, but no alarm sounds and the train maintains its speed. People glance around warily.
The boys do not seem surprised by their accomplishment and one, wearing frayed jeans and a white T-shirt, sticks his head out the door like a retriever enjoying the breeze out a backseat window. He’s done this before. He begins yelling obscenities, mostly in accented English. Piss you, fuck bowl, he repeats.
Tabitha used to roll down her car window and shout like that into the boredom of country roads, things like I’m coming for you, Horizon and Your Big Dipper’s overrated, Sky. They met when he transferred to her college. She was one of the few people who noticed him, and dates with her could involve skinny dipping or spinning doughnuts in an empty, icy parking lot just as easily as they could a movie. It was all he needed to love her.
They aren’t unhappy. And that’s quite a lot these days, isn’t it? But what he can’t decide is if he’s bothered last night was the first time in three months they’ve had sex. Tabitha’s Paxil numbs her libido, and he’s not the sort who can just let himself go anyway. Not like Tabitha before the medicine.
Meth-boy leans half his body into the rushing entrails of the subway tunnel and fist-pumps the air for emphasis. The train falls silent; some passengers close their eyes against the inevitable horror since he’s only holding on with one arm. Every so often a jutting light or sign rushes past.
Tabitha fixes him with a tight pout and raised eyebrows, perhaps waiting for acknowledgement that she was right to choose these seats away from the door. She’s been trying for years to break him of his caution, born freshman year in Physics 101 when he sat brazenly, stupidly, in the middle of the lecture hall—dead center you might call it—trying to maneuver his straw quietly around ice in his cup while the professor talked about escape velocities, not even scared when the gunman appeared by the chalkboard and shouted Happy death day assholes because the student had painful-looking acne, and surely evil and acne didn’t mix.
Tabitha’s forgotten that she’s the reason they are in Prague at all, the first trip they’ve taken that’s longer than a weekend. He doesn’t like unfamiliar surroundings, having to constantly scout exit strategies. Never mind Prague’s castles and dark, narrow streets that weren’t meant for escape. There’s a reason they called it the Iron Curtain.
As the leader moves away from the door some passengers’ shoulders relax but the relief is short-lived. Two of the boys are suddenly wrestling, knocking into one of the poles and toppling to the floor by the closed door. They tussle then roll near people’s feet, dutifully lifted as if for a vacuum. No one looks at the boys for fear of being implicated. Twice the wrestlers near the open door and the remaining boy jabs at them with his toe like some half-assed goalie.
Tabitha’s eyes widen as if to say Do something.
Second: If you exert the same force on two objects of different mass, you will get different accelerations. The effect on the smaller mass will be greater.
In the auditorium that day, he sprawled onto the floor as the gunman sprayed bullet rainbows. The petite girl two rows in front of him, slow in her reflexes, was propelled back when she was hit, and through the chairs he saw her lying in a burgeoning pool of blood. After the initial flurry, another pop-pop came from the gun every several seconds from different parts of the room, sometimes preceded by a yelp or a plea. The eerie part was how silent it became between the blasts—the loudest quiet he ever heard. He fixated on the girl’s blood, taunted by its proximity. All he had was his spilled soda darkening the concrete floor so he inched toward it, glad he’d ordered Dr. Pepper and not Sprite, but still, four telltale ice cubes jutted out of the puddle. He couldn’t push the ice away for fear of making noise, so he contorted the arm near his head to affect a believably awkward death pose and rested the heel of his hand fully on the cubes. Some of the soda wet his ear and cheek. Years later, when he recounted the experience, he told Tabitha his survival instincts overtook his thoughts. But really he replayed the girl’s acrobatic trajectory, how she cleared one whole row, swift and graceful, when the bullet hit her. She had been a perfect demonstration of Newton’s second law of motion, which they’d reviewed the second week of class. That law was the only comfort he could conjure. He had a good fifty pounds on that girl; the same shot would not send him reeling back as violently. Maybe he could survive any bullet. At times the suspense was almost unbearable as his hand, now numb, slowly, slowly sank to the floor. But pretending to be dead, he’d never felt more alive.
The boys stop wrestling without an apparent winner, each one grinning and panting, and the leader returns to leaning out the open door, this time waving his free hand like he’s trying to hail a cab. Then he swings his body back and forth over the void. Passengers wince.
With a video camera, he’d focus on the boy’s head and the blur next to it, the careless rushing, almost like water but with reckless music portending doom. Maybe he’ll be delimbed or decapitated, clean and swift, before anyone realizes what happens. Or maybe he’ll be pulled out of the car altogether amid a quick shower of sparks, body flint striking the pipes running along the tunnel, perhaps then pulled under the train. The possibilities are both thrilling and terrifying.
Third: The forces of two bodies on each other are always equal and directed in opposite directions.
He looks at Tabitha for a long moment. The doctor has deemed her regulated. When he hears that word, he envisions a heart monitor flatlining. The camera is in his hands, as it has been the whole trip, prepped for the perfect shot, even though she’ll become indifferent to these red and yellow photographs soon after returning home, just like she did cake decorating and flower arranging and card making. There’s no anguish in any of that. Every dream needs a little despair to thrive. If Tabitha is going to live by a guiding principle, she should pick one that’s been proven, something with a little friction at least. Like Newton’s third law, which is all about two bodies relating to one another. Action and reaction. That’s how to live. What is real love if not great promise mixed with a sort of prolonged fear?
He stands up, managing three photos before his flash finally registers with the boys. He takes another picture and because he’s expecting it, has time to hunch over and cradle the camera like a football when they rush him. With their momentum, the boys slam him into the back of the car. He tries to stave them off, but two manage to sweep his legs out from under him. As he falls, he sees passengers shuffling away. No one screams, not even Tabitha, though he can’t spot her in the commotion. The boys manage to roll him onto his back and for a few seconds, he’s eye to eye with the craziest one, so close he can see red lines threading through his corneas. There’s something admirable about his pure wildness, out of his mind but perfectly in his mind too, just utterly unaffected by civility.
They pull him by his feet toward the open door. With his free hand he catches a pant leg, but it’s quickly jerked away. The camera is in his other hand, held close to his body, the lens pointing toward the blank white canvas of the leader’s T-shirt, and he fumbles for the button. The first flash lands right in the boy’s eyes and he blinks and flinches. There is the delay between shots but he keeps pressing the button and elbows one boy who reaches for the camera. The next flash intensifies the boys’ resolve and they focus all their life force on dragging him into the foreground, shouting something that sounds like “Tea-scoor-vee-see-new!” over and over.
Steeling himself under their blows, he tries to find Tabitha, but the boys are blocking his view, and everything is happening too fast. All he has is the camera, and whatever happens, they will not take these images from him. He kicks and claws, waiting for Tabitha’s shot. He’ll know it when he takes it, but until then he’s consumed by only one thought: how badly, how desperately, he needs for there to be blood.