The February Featured Story is by Sandhya Falls

Please feel free to email Sandhya at: tsnm278@yahoo.com

ERASURE

by Sandhya Falls

She sits in her hotel room rehearsing. It has to go perfectly. Her blue and brown tweed skirt suit has been pressed to perfection. Her hair has been styled and restyled, her heels are just the right height, the eyeglasses are new, meant to convey a very particular message. The message is: I belong.

She tries it out. “I am honored to be here,” she says.

“I am honored to be here,” she says again, in a higher pitch. Shaking her head, she tries again.

“It is such an honor to be here.” Ah, there. Perfect. She scribbles on her notes, her sweaty palm smearing the ink.

She goes to the mini-bar. To drink or not to drink? She stands in front of it, looking, deliberating. Will it make her sharper? Will it dull her senses? She closes the mini-bar. Not worth the risk.

Time. Time passes at an excruciatingly slow pace. Each second has been pulled tight, a piece of taffy almost to its breaking point, but it does not break, will not pass. It quivers there on a knife edge, taunting her. She squeezes her eyes shut, wills it to pass with every ounce of willpower within her. And there it goes – TICK TOCK! Onto the next second, pulled tight… tighter… tightest…
Waiting is exhausting.

She lies down on the bed, then shoots upright. Runs to the mirror, checks her hair, is it flat in the back? Is it still worthy of her audience? Oh, why did I lie down, and on and on she goes. Her head spins in circles and she is reminded, inauspiciously, of the girl from The Exorcist.

And finally – time has oozed and quivered and seeped into 10 o’clock. She gathers up her purse, her folder, her notes, herself. She stops in front of the mirror one last time to check. Presentable. I wish I’d waxed my eyebrows, she frets. Well, too late now.

The taxi drive to the university is extremely fast. Red lights, green lights, walk signs, store signs; they all streak past her like colorful ribbons. “Good luck, sweetie,” the jolly cabbie calls, as she steps out and into a puddle. Great.

Ignoring the clammy cold as it wraps itself securely around her foot, she walks quickly into the lobby. There is someone there to greet her. It is the same someone they post to greet presenters at every university, workshop and conference. The greeter is a tall, white, middle-aged lady with ashy blond hair, and is wearing an ill-fitting suit in purple or red. At more informal events, she will be wearing a long linen dress. Her name tag reads Joan or Mary or Linda.

Joan or Mary or Linda holds out her hand. “We’re so glad you could come!” she gushes. “The great Nethra Joshi, winner of the Fields Medal in Mathematics. Such a victory for women everywhere.”

“Yes, well,” says Nethra, who was taught by her parents as a little girl that saying ‘thank you’ in response to a compliment is akin to boasting. “It was an easy year for the prize.” She looks down at her hand, clasped in this woman’s. It looks like a small brown egg being swallowed by the white mouth of a predator. She gulps and withdraws it.

The woman smiles, flashing a set of yellowing teeth. “I’m Linda Pearson, and I’ll be your escort today. Why don’t you go into the auditorium?” she asks, gesturing towards double doors to her left. “The other speakers are in there. There’s a little food table – help yourself,” she says, already turning away to attend to something else.

Nethra smoothes her hair down and walks into the cold auditorium. There is a minuscule food table, as Linda had said there would be, and two people hovering around it. On Nethra’s immediate left is a rather tall, salt-and-pepper haired man wearing a glossy three-piece-suit. He’s eating cheese and crackers, and seems to be waxing eloquent on a book he’s written. To his left is a rather small, impeccably dressed Asian woman, who looks as if she’d give her right arm to be anywhere but here. Nethra warms to her immediately.

She clears her throat, and goes to stand by the tall man. After a moment of the Asian woman looking pointedly past him and smiling at Nethra, he stops and turns around to see who could possibly be more interesting than him. Nethra smiles tentatively. “Hi,” she says. “My name is Nethra Joshi. I’m a mathematician and one of the speakers today.”

The tall man offers her his right hand with the air of someone conferring a great favor. “William Turner,” he says haughtily, as if she should know immediately who he is. The Asian woman shakes Nethra’s hand next. “I’m Su Arnold,” she says. “I’m a speaker, too, and a microbiologist.” Su’s hand is small and cold, and Nethra shivers under her neatly pressed tweed suit.

Time passes quickly, too quickly. How did that happen? Suddenly Nethra is on the stage. She is sitting with Su, and it seems William Turner is wrapping up a long speech about his book, which may or may not be about bees. A fog of uncertainty swirls around Nethra’s head, and she is unsure of how she has landed on the stage. Wasn’t she just introducing herself to William Turner and Su Arnold? How did she get from there to here? And why can’t she remember any of it?

Perspiration forms on her upper lip, and she raises her hand to wipe it away surreptitiously. She looks out into the audience, but the stage lights make it impossible to see anything. It looks like William Turner is addressing a large, dark cavern of nothingness. 

And now he’s in his seat, and a short, balding man is introducing Nethra as one of the brightest minds in mathematics. He pronounced my name wrong, Nethra thinks obscurely, as she gets up, clutching her notes, and goes to the podium.

The spotlight is on her now, and she blinks and squints, hoping she doesn’t look like a complete amateur. Her hands are dripping wet, and she can feel an ice cold finger of sweat trailing its way lazily down her back. She adjusts the microphone to her height, clears her throat and looks out into the cavern. I wish I could see just one face, she thinks, just one face and it wouldn’t be quite so scary.

“It’s such an honor to be here,” she begins, hoping the quavering in her voice will go away soon. “Of all the universities that extended me an invitation to speak, I accepted only yours because I am proud to be able to list myself as one of your alumnae.”

A polite smattering of applause. Emboldened, she looks down at her notes. “Since winning the Fields Medal, I’ve been asked numerous times what it feels like to be the first woman to have won it. To be completely honest, I feel a sort of ambivalence. On the one hand, it feels wonderful to be here, to be the one to hold the torch for the rest of the women mathematicians to follow. However, I’m also saddened that it has taken so many years for us to get to where we are now.”

Feeling a strange tingling in her feet, Nethra shifts them awkwardly behind the podium. “Mathematics has always been considered –” Nethra breaks off as she looks down at her feet, thinking, Why the hell are they tingling, please don’t fall asleep on me now, and her thoughts screech to a halt right there.

For a moment she cannot believe what she is seeing. Her brain simply refuses to compute that, where only a minute ago were her perfectly normal size seven feet, there is now nothing. She blinks, shakes her head slowly, blinks again, impervious to the muted murmur that is traveling in waves through her audience. And yet – no feet. Her ankles simply end in thin air, and it appears as if she is floating. Floating!

This is ridiculous, Nethra thinks. I must be hallucinating because I’m under so much stress from the speech. Or perhaps it’s a trick of the lighting. Pull yourself together! Look up, look at the audience. God, what must they be thinking? And the president of the university?

She is suddenly, thrillingly aware that the crowd is talking animatedly amongst themselves, wondering what this strange little Indian woman is doing, glancing down at some unknown spot behind the podium, interrupting her own keynote speech.

She clears her throat. “Excuse me,” she says, pasting a bright smile onto her face. “As I was saying, mathematics has always been considered a man’s game. Women mathematicians were unheard of until recently, and even then –“
Her calves have started to tingle. She gulps once, twice. “Even then”, she continues, without daring to look down, “even then…”

The tingling is worse. She can barely hear herself talk, let alone think. It feels like a thousand ants have decided to trudge up and down her calves, merrily marching away without a thought to her plight.

In spite of herself, she looks down. Her calves are gone. It looks like her knees are suspended in air, like some kind of mad magician’s trick. Tears spring to her eyes. Get a hold of yourself, Nethra, come on now! Now is not the time to lose it, for heaven’s sake!

With a Herculean effort, she trudges on with her speech, dragging her mind to her notes, only her notes. Nothing exists beyond this speech, beyond this audience, she tells herself. There is nothing else to worry about right now.

But by the middle of her speech, her legs have disappeared completely. She is just a head, a torso, and floating, gesturing hands. Her audience is blissfully unaware of the black magic taking place behind the podium. But what about William Turner and Su Arnold? she thinks, panic tinging her throat with bile. She turns to look at them, and while they are looking at her strangely because she’s stopped speaking, they do not seem overly alarmed. Do they not see? Nethra wonders wildly. Do they not see me disappearing slowly?

She turns back to the podium and mumbles her way through the rest of the speech, humiliation and fear burning twin holes in her mind. There is a kind of halting applause at the end, accompanied by a hushed silence.

Nethra floats back to her chair, a head and two arms. Nobody notices.

She sits perched at the edge of her chair as Su Arnold takes the stage, thinking, The chair squeaked when I sat down so I know I’m here, I’m here, I must be here. She feels a laugh bubbling up to her lips and clamps them shut tightly.

She is suddenly very, very cold. She rubs her tingling hands together for warmth. She thinks, It’s okay, it’s all going to be all right, Nethra. Just get through this and you can go home.

At the end of the event, the president of the university thanks the speakers and steps back from the podium. He asks, “Where’s Nethra Joshi?”

“Who?” asks Su Arnold, looking confused.

They leave the auditorium and turn out the lights.

Sandhya Falls has been writing since she could first hold a pencil. She enjoys crafting stories in the speculative fiction genre, probably because of her innate weirdness. She lives in Charleston, SC with her husband, son, daughter, dog, and cat.