The Drop That Wouldn't Fall

The back room of the pet store hummed in a pitch Soren felt more than heard. It pressed on the soft spot behind his jaw, a sound too high to be a sound, the way a finger hovering near your ear feels like pressure before it ever touches.

He was supposed to be scrubbing the spare tanks. Mr. Okafor paid him in fish food and the occasional snail, and Mr. Okafor was up front arguing on the phone with someone about a shipment of guppies that had arrived as mollies.

The humming came from a gray box on the shelf, the size of a tissue packet, with a tiny silver dish on top. The label said ALGAE CLEAR. PIEZO ULTRASONIC. Soren had switched it on to see what it did. It did, as far as he could tell, nothing. No light. No spinning. Just that thick invisible pressure leaning against his teeth.

He leaned over the little dish, sponge dripping in his hand, and a drop of tank water fell off the sponge.

It did not land.

It stopped. In the air. A bead of water the size of a pea, hanging a thumb's width above the silver dish, trembling like it was scared to move.

Soren did not breathe. The drop did, though. It shivered. It flattened a little at the top and bulged at the middle, then went round again, wobbling in place as if it were being held in an invisible fist that kept gently squeezing and letting go.

He brought his face down level with it. The drop caught the ceiling light and bent it. A whole upside-down room curved inside that bead of water, the shelves, the tanks, his own enormous eye.

Very slowly, he reached one finger toward it.

The pressure on his finger changed before he touched anything. He could feel it, faint bands of push and not-push, like running his hand over a washboard made of nothing. He moved his fingertip up. The feeling got stronger. He moved it down. It went soft. There were layers in the air above the dish. Stacked. Like floors in a building made of pressure.

The drop was sitting on one of those floors.

Soren pulled his hand back and crouched until his nose was nearly at the level of the silver dish, and he understood that the dish was not the thing holding the water. The air was. Something above the dish was pushing down just as hard as something below was pushing up, and the drop was caught in the seam between, in the one thin place where the pushing canceled out.

He needed to see if he was right. He always needed to see.

He wet the sponge again and squeezed. A second drop fell.

It stopped too. Below the first one. Lower in the stack, on a different floor, the two beads hanging one above the other with a gap of clear air between them, both shivering at the same speed, like twins.

Two floors. Maybe more. He squeezed a third drop and it joined the column, three beads of tank water stacked in the air over a five-dollar algae cleaner, none of them touching anything, none of them touching each other, all of them trembling in the same invisible building.

Soren's hand went to his back pocket for his notebook. He drew three small circles in a vertical line. Beside them his pencil pressed hard enough to dent the page, marking the gaps. He did not write anything down yet. He just looked.

The sound was doing this. The sound he couldn't quite hear. It was bouncing off the silver dish and coming straight back up into itself, and where it met itself going the other way, it stood still. A wave that came back into its own footprints and stopped traveling and just stood there, vibrating in place, building floors out of the air.

And the drops had found the quiet floors. The places where the standing wave pushed equally from both sides. The places where nothing won.

He thought about how high that sound was. Too high for him. There was a whole staircase of pressure stacked in this air, and his ears couldn't climb a single step of it. The room was full of floors he would never feel and a dog walking past the front door could probably hear every one of them ringing.

That was the part that got him. Not that the water floated. That the water floated in a structure that was completely there, completely real, holding actual weight, and almost nobody in the world could sense it. You had to be the kind of creature that noticed pressure too high to be a noise. You had to lean in close to a thing that seemed to be doing nothing.

Mr. Okafor's voice rose up front, still about the guppies.

Soren reached out and turned the gray box off.

The humming stopped. The pressure left his jaw all at once. And the three beads of water, with nothing holding them anymore, with all their invisible floors gone in the same instant, fell. Three small wet taps on the silver dish, one, two, three, so close together they were almost one sound.

He turned it back on.

He squeezed the sponge and watched the next drop stop in the air, exactly where the last one had, on a floor he could not see but could now find with his eyes shut, just by listening to the pressure behind his teeth.

He held his finger near the column and felt the bands again, push, soft, push, soft, the staircase nobody had built standing right there in the back room of a pet store.

Soren leaned in until the floating drop filled his whole eye, the upside-down room curved bright inside it, and around it the air went on holding its silent floors, one stacked on the next, climbing higher than any sound he would ever hear.