The Laws of Motion

1

It was a hard hit, full front, and I got the worst part of it because he’s hefty, dense, taller than you’d think, and more striking. It was like running into a man-size boulder. The recoil slammed me against the stone wall, crushing my shoulder. He tilted backward and then pounced back quickly to his vertical. “It’s Philip Glass,” I thought, and, with that, time began to flow forward again at normal pace.

We faced each other.

“See this right here,” he said, his right hand pointed to his cheek, fingertips bunched like that typical Italian gesture.

“I prefer to think it isn’t cancer,” he said. His fingers opened, and I saw the hole. It looked like an entry wound.

I touched my own cheekbone like in front of a mirror. Swollen, scraped skin, a little sticky, watery ooze, no blood to speak of.

“My fault,” he said, “I was looking at the plants.”

His hand made a vortex in the air and pointed at the tomatoes glistening red on the slope under the killer sun.

“You need to look where you’re going,” he said.

It happened right outside the villa, on the stone-and-mortar walk-way carved out of the cliff, overlooking the sea. Francis of Assisi once walked that path, sat down on a small rock, took off his sandals, pressed his feet down on the warm stone, squinting under that light, and had a drink of water, so said the plaque nailed to the holy rock. To be clear, I was looking in the right direction, but I turned my head to see if the guard was still chasing me, and that’s when the crash happened, in front of the rock where Francis once sat to rest his feet.

Suddenly, daylight fireworks began to pop in the sky. Red, white, and green smoke puffs were bursting high above the village — Castiglione or Atrani, one of the two — down by the shore. They broke apart and drifted with the wind before vanishing in the lapis lazuli sky. The dark, green sea glimmered below, the staccato clap of the explosions rebounding almost visibly against the rocky cliffs.

“It’s a wedding,” he said, “an Italian wedding.” It was a reasonable guess, since we were in Italy.

The hole on his face was neither a figure of speech nor imaginary. It was real, big enough for me to see his pink tongue agitate within the darkness in his mouth as he spoke.

“They like to make a fuss, don’t they. Italian weddings are always a big deal. ”

Another round of fireworks. This time the smoke suspended in midair was bridal white and then dissolved in wispy, thread-like spirals. Another wave of echoes, a clattering in the ravines around us.

“They come to this place to get married, did you know? Some come from far away. They come for the views, I mean look at this setting, it makes sense. They’ll never forget it, for better or for worse,” he said.

The hole on his cheek looked like a tiny red second mouth, and for an instant it seemed that his voice was coming through it, not through the opening between his ashen lips.

He saw me gawking and said, “The hole was there before the crash, so please don’t look so worried.”

Philip Glass acted like a gentleman: small talk about cancer and Italian weddings, his insistence that he was already wounded by the time we crashed. An artist’s courtesy, elegant and credible. We both knew the fault was mine. You just don’t look back when you’re running. His only fault was being so solid, so massive, so alluring to a body like mine, nothingness in motion.

“It doesn’t hurt, but it feels strange. Look at it, doesn’t it to you,” he said.

It did. A woman I used to know who looked at cancer cells for a living once told me: “One glance and you know it’s bad. The rest is crap, idle motions, bureaucracy. It’s cancer, it...