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Chapters (18)
  1. Cover Page
  2. Praise for Subtraction
  3. SUBTRACTION
  4. Also by Mary Robison
  5. Title Page
  6. Copyright
  7. Dedication
  8. Coco Plumoso
  9. The Church of Sun and Flowers
  10. Yellow Note, Blue Note
  11. Raf’s America
  12. Tunnel of Air
  13. In the Cyclotron
  14. Beat Like a Heart
  15. The Snow
  16. Care
  17. Matter
  18. About the Author

It was midnight. The Ole Mossy stuff I heard Raf saying was the last I heard from him before he fell off the earth.

Tunnel of Air

ALONE AT THE HOUSE with things Raf had gathered—bookshelves, two braided rugs, a cracked bust of Eurydice, other oddments—I huddled in a chair, my eyes fixed on the corner, a globe there.

For dawn there had been angry clouds, startling winds, a tropical storm coming from Corpus. A frog quacked. The cicadas made a constant sound—it didn’t go anywhere or do anything; it did not beat like a heart. More than being hot and tired and scared about Raf, the sound made me miss my parents, miss boredom, miss TV.

“I hate him,” I told the globe, but that felt a lot like hating myself.

I counted to a thousand, counted back, thousands of times.

I kept picturing Raf on top of some twenty-year-old.

Around noon, I called Brookline hoping his drunkenness had put him on a plane and taken him home. In my ear was the tiny rattling of that phone’s ring. I hung up and redialed, hung up, redialed. I ate a pretzel, dialed again.

I called my mother—not answering—and now my father, in Providence. I told him that Raf had vanished.

“Big deal,” Mario said.

I read from my notebook something I’d got from Barny, the physicist. “What keeps quarks together are gluons, a kind of quanta, that’re not real particles.”

When the Palm was open, I walked there and sat; sat watching a stain on the boards of the dance floor.

I remembered that before Cameroon, Raf had said, “Don’t make pictures in your head, Paige. You can’t guess how I am with her. You’d be wrong.”

Walking home, the brown clouds took on animal shapes and started marching. Female voices sounded a chantlike hymn from the Desglaises church. The air burned to breathe. I’d been awake for so long I was logy, drunklike.

There were lashes of wind suddenly, and trees plunging, crooked lines of rain. I slugged along, bent, the wind cutting down on me; light-headed from sleeplessness and the heat, and from the rain, stinging.

Life would go like this, I knew—days, weeks, a month, two.