The Long Way Around

The gondola stopped with a lurch and then a silence so complete that Maya could hear the fog.

Not really the fog. The cable, ticking as it cooled. Somewhere below, a small motor still running, patient and stupid, turning something that had nowhere to go. She pressed her cheek to the cold window and looked down through the gray.

There. A baggage carousel at the base station, the kind that carried ski tags on a loop of black rubber belt. But this belt had been mended wrong. Someone had spliced it with a wide strip of silver tape, and the tape had a twist in it, a lazy half-turn where the two ends met.

One yellow tag rode the belt. Around and under, up and over, around again.

"Twenty minutes," a voice crackled from the little speaker. A tired man. "Power's rerouting. Sit tight."

Maya sat tight. She watched the tag.

The belt was long and the fog thickened it into something dreamlike, but the tag kept its rhythm, and after a while her eyes stopped seeing rubber and started seeing the tag's whole journey, the way you stop hearing individual raindrops and start hearing rain.

The tag rode along the top. It slid down the far end, around the roller, and came back along the bottom, upside down, its printed side pressed toward the floor.

So far, ordinary. Top, then bottom. A belt has a top and a bottom.

Except.

The tag came around again and it was on top again, printed side up, and Maya's stomach did something small and cold. Because it had not flipped. Nothing had flipped it. It had gone down as bottom and come back up as top without anyone turning it over.

She breathed on the glass and wiped it and counted.

Lap one: printed side up on the top stretch.

Lap two: printed side down on the top stretch.

Lap three: printed side up again.

Two laps to come home. That was the wrong number. A belt should take you home in one. Around and you are back. But this belt made you go around twice, once as yourself and once as your own underside, before it let you be yourself again in the same place.

The silver tape. The lazy half-turn where the ends met.

Maya put her finger up to the window and traced the belt in the air, following the tag, and she felt the twist enter her fingertip like a small electric thing. Her hand wanted to turn over. On the far roller her wrist rolled, printed side down, and on the near roller it rolled back, and she had drawn a shape in the air that had brought her palm up, then down, then up, and never once had her finger lifted or crossed an edge.

The fog pressed on the glass.

Because here was the thing that made the cold spread up her arms. She looked for the edge of the belt. A belt has two edges, left and right, two long rubber rims you could run a fingernail along. She found the left rim on the top stretch and followed it with her eyes, down to the far roller, around, and along the bottom, and it did not stay the left rim. Where the tape twisted, the left rim became the right rim. She followed the right rim back along the top and it slid down and around and became the left rim again.

One edge. The whole belt had one edge. She had watched the two edges turn out to be the same edge wearing two names.

And if the two edges were one edge, then the top and the bottom.

Maya went very still and let it come.

The top of the belt and the bottom of the belt were one surface. That was why the tag came home upside down. There was no upside down. There was no bottom for it to be trapped on. There was one side, and the tag was walking all of it, patiently, the whole enormous single face of the thing, and calling half of the journey the top and half of it the bottom was just a story people told because they had never followed the whole way around.

The yellow tag slid down the far roller into the fog and she lost it, and she found she was holding her breath waiting for it, and when it climbed back into view her whole chest went loose.

Same tag. Same face. It had gone away into the gray as the underside and it came back the top, and it had never crossed an edge to do it, because there was no other edge to cross. It had simply kept going, and going was enough.

Maya thought about all the times a teacher had drawn a line and said this side, that side, as if a thing always had to have two of everything. As if you were always either on the top or the bottom, in or out, one of the ones who fit or one of the ones who didn't. She had spent a lot of hours certain she was on the wrong side of some line.

But you could build a thing, with one twist and a piece of silver tape, where the wrong side and the right side were the same side, and you only found that out by refusing to stop halfway. Her breath fogged the window again. She did not wipe it this time. She scratched a line into the mist with her fingernail, all the way around an imaginary belt, and made herself keep the line unbroken where the twist would be, and her fingertip came back to where it started from the opposite direction, and the line closed.

The speaker crackled. "Power's back. Here we go."

The gondola shuddered and began to climb. Below her the belt kept turning in the fog, and the little motor kept running, patient and stupid and, she understood now, not stupid at all.

The yellow tag went down into the gray and up out of it and down again, and Maya pressed her face to the glass and followed it around, and around, and could not find the place where it had ever been on the wrong side of anything.