Tension is the internal force on a material being pulled apart. Rope, chain, and wire are strong. Compression is the strength of a material pushed together. Stone, gritted lime, fired clay are strong. Shear is a force, applied in different directions, like cutting, ripping, tearing. Laminates, composites, wood are strong against the grain and weak along it. Torsion is force applied by twisting. Honestly, torsion is a bitch. There's not much out there that holds up under torsion. Steel sure, but steel is good at everything except how damn heavy it is.
Bruce's first love had been the bridge. Not 'A' bridge, or 'THE' bridge, but the 'BRIDGE'. Concrete, reinforced with steel rebar, plated with tar asphalt, raised on painted steel pylons. Horse-tail hair and flax rope, plank wood, undulating, frightful, trustworthy. Iron-cut granite, river basalt, quarry sand and ash lime mortar arching, precarious and methuselahn. Steel! Steel! Wire, knit and graceful, suspended and windrocked. Living trees, cultivated with intergenerational patience to grip across chasms. After all, what is a bridge? Certainly not the stuff it's made from. Certainly not the shape it takes. No, a bridge is a thing which is defined by its purpose, and its purpose is defined by the negative space it reaches across.
There are five rows of long-tables, rubber-composite white. Raw concrete walls on three sides, painted a hearty tapioca. A naked brick fourth, set generously with windows. Off-white raky biscuits square out the drop ceiling above. Twenty three orange bakelite chairs full of graceful curves, two brown polymer reinforcements bearing abrupt creases. Four, five, five, three seated students, one empty row.
Nuo Huo is second row, inside left. She carries a snapping plastic case for her pens, multi-colored gel-rolling bright. Some are glittery; these her favorites.
Her skin is the color of his racing heart. Her hair drapes with the elegance of his stolen breath. Bruce loves her soft focused intensity, her no-nonsense questions. Her middling exam scores, redeemed by meticulous, laborious home work. She draws little animal cartoon characters on the margins of her notes with gleeful ferocity. She covers her mouth when she laughs.
The plurality of the class membership receive no description here. Each is a person to them self, as colorful and virtuous as the others (except Kevin, but that is irrelevant). Bruce sees none of them, not to the depth of focus they deserve. After all, that's the nature of a young man in matters of the heart. They've got a passion hot, mysterious, and blindingly stupid.
----------------------------------------
It's lunch time and Nuo Hu is in love with the Teaching Assistant. Tall, dark hair and a fierce wit. Impeccable, small lettering on the whiteboard from piano-graceful fingers. A young man of many sweaters, and one battered leather valise. It's peppered in colorful, scandalous stickers for musical troupes long since disbanded. Arnold Wojcik is model citizen on paper - on a first name basis with the chair of the department, star assistant to a prominent research group. Teaches two undergraduate sessions, top three in Graduate GPA.
Of course, his collegial relationship with the Professors has more to do with his attendance of the department's legendary biweekly poker game and a ruthlessly cunning attention to writing all his research group's grant proposals. In front of the classroom he takes one breath and compels his students like a schoolmaster out of the 19th century. On the next he conspires foul-mouthed, acerbic and irreverent with his charges. Arnold is everything Nuo's mother would and would not approve of, ferociously in either direction. He is rebel and tyrant at once.
But the truth is, Nuo loves him for the simplest and primate stupid of reasons. For a full hour, three times a week, he is the center of attention for a room of near-twenty her peers.
----------------------------------------
"Hey Nuo," Bruce begins. Nuo pages through sheaves of the latest homework assignment, her lunch tray floating incrementally adrift as she loses track of it amongst problem sets.
"How did you get that for problem three?" She frowns. Bruce has a bad habit of taking shortcuts when solving difficult problems. They are invariably clever, but poorly documented and rarely follow the class-prescribed method. She wishes he would follow instructions more closely, but likes studying with Bruce all the same. He is courteous and loyal, never picks fights, and he really is better with the exams. Plus - well, Arnold seemed to like Bruce. She noticed there were favorites, and she liked to imagine she might be one too.
"Oh if you pop this to the other side and integrate them both, this parameter can get factored out now," Bruce indicates, leaning over the cafeteria table and trying not to smudge Nuo's delicate pen-work.
"Whaaaat."
"Yea it's the same thing we learned in Calculus."
"But I thought it breaks at zero."
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
"But it isn't at zero though, right?"
"Huh."
"Hey Nuo," Bruce tries once again.
"What's up?" Nuo adjusts a periwinkle wool knit hat to get hair out of her face and away from the table.
"Do you want to go to a party on Friday?"
"Uh," Nuo freezes up. No, absolutely not. Parties are irresponsible. She has homework. What would people think if they saw her?
No.
Well.
Maybe.
Actually – so what if they did?
Why was it their business what to think of her?
What does she need to be responsible for?
Homework could wait one night, right?
Nuo unloosens, sees Bruce starting to fray a smidge in composure.
"Sure!" She chirps. After all, isn't university where you're supposed to reinvent yourself? Yes, reservation is molting-shell, hung too long stuck to the one outgrown it.
----------------------------------------
Trying to hide a shaking excitement, Bruce asks for her phone number. In case they get lost, right? He collects it like a treasure. Sitting in his contact list next to her school email, it feels heavier than its predecessor. More real.
Friday Night
Way off on Constance Lane (the cul-de-sac)
a hush hollow of elms the thrum of bass
hooch-blushed and whooping revel jostling space
dim lit the beer and bongs and bric a brac
off white carpet war-torn by kegs, by shoes
he reaches for her hand, her touch, a dance
a throng loose-synched they bounce, exult. His chance!
they scream together with Police and Whos
a smile not meant for him blooms bracing full
the late arrival! Lopes - grain liquor gifts
in hand. She leaps to press against his wool
the boy left back, as she by rival lifts
a-struck, he fades for both their sakes
with ethanol to mend the heart that breaks.
----------------------------------------
Barking, chirping shrieks claw out into the open seas just outside of Blue.
Everything had been going wrong, and somehow managed to be worse. The safe-house is compromised, his co-conspirators likely detained. He's never swam so fast in his life, panicked and gulping water. Gloom and dark keep him company, though he can see the edge to it.
A clearer ray of color means pursuit, capture. He steers deeper into the city's billowing waste plume. His eyes burn, water. A thin ugly film of algae and worse builds on his skin and face. Further! Faster! If Ossanchor is nearby it could serve as a refuge; briefly. Only the frontier tunnels would really be safe.
A fibrous satchel thumps his side, chokes his throat, pulls against his course. Clumsily he stops stroking and claws at the cord-looped binding, unable to maintain the tempo of his kick. Too much carried, not nearly enough saved. Ah! He finds his intention, a clear lacquer globe. Its lid bound round four times with sealing rubbery thread, a pooled double-dram of water sloshing inside.
It's not the liquid he needs. Fingers shake as the seal is unwound. He must be careful not to use the whole bottle. Cracks the lid just enough and a spray of tiny bubbles escape, darting wisps. They tease each other, vortices coupling paired dancers. But they hang for a moment uncertain in the gloom, a shuddering potential. His phosphors twinkle with restrained excitement, fingers curl in among the bubbles, lips purse, eyes narrow, secondary lids pull thin.
And then he chooses which way is up.
Lurching force pulls at him unevenly, he feels it down to his tendons, it wrenches at his stomach. The bubbles no longer hesitate, they stampede.
Roiling, joining, turbulent. They carry shooting along the plume, and with them a lance of current. He is flung along with it, half-deaf with the roar, hooting and laughing. The undertow forms a dozen yards out, a ragged torus rolling backwards. Like a hammer it buffets pursuers and plume, a dimming shockwave whose ghost will reach all the way to the delicate spires of Blue.
It hardly matters if he swims now but he tries, spinning swiping scooping.
Still choking on filth, tumbling. An exuberant misery, the smile of a man who's neck met noose and the wrong one snapped. For the first time in a cycle _|:____|_|____||_:______:|_____|___ plans for tomorrow.
----------------------------------------
She'd texted Arnold. Damn.
Half a hundred petty thoughts, conspiracies and deceptions filter their way into Bruce's mental waste bin over the three weeks it takes him to mend.
Arnold's behavior was clearly inappropriate. By the letter of the law, he should be challenged! Thrown to the wolves! Fed to administrative penal committees! But – even in his weakest cruelest moments he knows Nuo would never be his. Life is messy, and his friend is happy.
Bruce closes out the semester with strong final marks, and submerges into new club memberships; competitive video games and frisbee-football. He drifts apart from Nuo, or really she has captured into a closed orbit, a dancing pair that pulls closer and faster toward the sun. He refuses to feel sorry for himself, and places his rsvp when Nuo invites him along just after finals. Arnold's end of the semester party is a raucous, stylish affair – compared, of course, to the tastes of a poor undergraduate. There are costumes, and mixed drinks; all of which are built on obtuse, guarded inside jokes. He does not belong here, but finds he is welcome anyway. He learns the secret drinking games of the graduate students and upperclassmen, scandalous rumors about his professor's personal lives, and byzantine circumlocutions of the curriculum requirements.
It is fun. He has fun. Winter festival passes at home, in the company of family and a handful of returning school friends.
Nuo Hu does not return to school the following semester. She does not respond to the text Bruce sends. To the second. It would be inappropriate to send a third. Arnold is still here. He teaches the same introductory class, carries the same leather case, wears those same sweaters. But he is diminished, lighter and dimmer. They have broken up. She is not coming back this year. This is the fullness of the explanation Bruce receives.
What can he do? He redoubles his studies. He becomes a terror on the frisbee field, ruthless with a set of joysticks. He starts looking for an apartment off campus for next fall.