Lost In Place (31 page)

Dad switched the channel, only to get coverage of a Christian youth rally to welcome the pope. The vein on his forehead looked ready to blow. “
This
guy!
This
is the guy who
only now
admits that Galileo was right, four
hundred years after everybody else gets it straight. Yet he insists that there is
no question
that God thinks birth control is a bad idea. What is the
matter
with people?”

“Oh, Dad,” I said, knowing it wasn’t really a question but falling for the bait anyway. “Lots of people find it comforting to think there’s a Plan, and a Planner who cares. Why should people like us spoil it for them?”

“Well, sure it’s comforting, but that doesn’t mean they should believe it! I mean, if some people want to believe the Bible, or tarot cards, or those pathetic hustlers in the infomercials for Dial-a-Psychic, fine, but at least let ’em keep it in the privacy of their homes. Why does it have to make the news? If I wanted fairy tales, I’d get the Fairy Tale Channel. This is CNN, dammit. Why don’t they have anything on about Jupiter? The event of the century is about to happen and I have to watch a man who thinks he’s qualified to speak for God ride around in a motorized, bulletproof soap bubble with a dumb hat on. Bullshit!”

I tend to agree with Dad on these matters, but my sense of shame forces me to tone it down; it would be a little cheeky for a guy who used to wear a baldhead wig to make fun of the pope’s hat.

The hours crept by. We started driving right after dinner and got to the top of Mount Wilson just as Jupiter and Venus became visible in the evening sky. There were no clouds, fortunately. We set up Dad’s telescope and had a look. There was nothing on the surface of Jupiter that either of us could see.

“I knew it,” Dad said, nodding.

“It’s still early.”

We looked for several of our old summer favorites like the Lagoon and Ring nebulas, but the moonlight drowned
them out. We had to be satisfied wandering through the thick parts of the Milky Way, marveling at the incomprehensible number of stars in our local arm of our spiral galaxy. If we could somehow view the whole galaxy at once, we would see more than four hundred billion of them. And the distances! If we could build a rocket that traveled a million miles an hour, it would still take us three thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri, the star closest to us. And the other stars? If a group of people could travel at the speed of light—a million miles every five seconds—they would have to celebrate thirty thousand birthdays together before reaching the center of our own galaxy. What about the other galaxies? There are at least a hundred billion of them out there; imagine how long it would take to put together even a modest tour.

Those of us attracted to astronomy look at the stars because we can’t help it; when we look at the night sky we are reminded that we are staring into the unknown, and that bothers us, leaves us feeling anxious and incomplete. We feel compelled to try, by gazing through our telescopes, to make the unknown known, to bring it into the realm of the familiar. We know that the astronauts and cosmonauts who have actually seen with their own eyes the earth from space all agree on one thing: concepts such as the brotherhood of humanity, the interdependence of all life and the fragility of our planet suddenly became much more real for them than they had been before. For them, this island earth went from being an intellectual experience to a personal one.

Astronomers would like to make the universe a personal experience, even though they know it cannot be done. To hope that any of us could experience the emptiness beyond the farthest galaxies, not to mention what
might lie in universes entirely separate from our own—or, for that matter, the worlds hidden within each subatomic particle—is unrealistic given the very real limitations of time and space and our own senses.

Yet we keep looking through our telescopes and microscopes. Why, if we know we cannot be satisfied? Perhaps this question is related to the one I put to my father: How do we live if we know we must die? Why bother with any of this, since none of it will matter when the sun burns up and the earth turns into a cold cinder? Why bother with anything?

The provisional answer to this question is: Because bothering is still the best game in town. I would even argue that for human beings, bothering is the
only
game in town. Stephen Hawking, the physicist, was asked if he thought everything in the universe, including our thoughts, behavior and sense of free will, was determined by the fundamental laws of physics. Yes, he answered; the universe is determined, but the equations are so staggeringly complex that no one can ever hope to solve them. He wrote:

If this is true, then the theory of natural selection would explain why so many of us do care, why so many of us find that the struggle to understand ourselves and the world is worthwhile: because over many generations, we have been bred to be insatiably curious. Those of our ancestors who gave a damn and learned to understand the world a little better survived to reproduce more often than the ones who didn’t. So here we are: people who are genetically designed to wonder how things work, born into a world far too complex and far too chaotic to ever be completely understood.

Half an hour passed before Dad and I pointed the telescope at Jupiter again. This time we both thought we saw something coming into view on one of the edges, but we couldn’t be sure. The minutes crawled by. As Jupiter turned on its axis, the far edge of the planet slowly came more clearly into view, and sure enough, there was a round, dark spot on the surface that hadn’t been there before. We were exhilarated.

“Wait a minute,” Dad said, coming back from the car where he had checked a packet of the information he’d sent away for from
Sky and Telescope
magazine. He looked back through the telescope. “Shit,” he said. “This isn’t it.”

The spot we were looking at was on the wrong hemisphere! We’d heard on the radio before we left the house that several of the comet fragments had hit, and had landed on the northern hemisphere as predicted. Together
we checked the packet of information; no doubt about it, the comet would strike the northern hemisphere. We looked back through the telescope. Now there were two of the dark spots, but they were on the
southern
hemisphere.

“Are you sure that couldn’t be the northern hemisphere?” I asked. The uncertainty came from the fact that reflecting telescopes show their images in reverse; when I looked at the spots they were on the top of the planet, so it
felt
as if they were on the northern hemisphere, even though I knew better.

“Nope. I know what these are,” Dad said, sighing.

“What?”

“They’re shadows. Two of Jupiter’s moons must be in front of the planet. Look how round and distinct those spots are, and how huge. There’s no way that the comet could have done that. They’re just shadows.”

We were both disappointed, but the night was still young. We searched the northern hemisphere for hours, even making sketches every fifteen minutes in case something came up that we didn’t notice immediately, but there was nothing. Both of us kept looking back at those two dark spots; what if we were wrong somehow, and they were the real thing after all? We wanted to believe this, but
wanting
something to be true isn’t the same thing as
believing
it is true. At midnight, feeling tired and realizing we had a long drive home, we gave up.

We all crave certainty, we dream of serenity, and we all want to discover our true identities. The Zen people like to ask, What was your Original Face before you were born? Who were you before your parents taught you how
to be “yourself”? Most of us tend to feel that if it could be proved, once and for all, that we shall never know the answers to those questions, and that our species was simply not designed for serenity or certainty, then our whole human enterprise—the search for meaning and understanding—would be rendered futile and pathetic. But is this really true? Doesn’t it make sense that if we were designed to search, there could be nothing more horrifying for our species than to reach an end to all these searches? Wouldn’t this make all of us incredibly bored, not to mention boring? Can anyone imagine anything duller than not having anything to wonder about? The possibility of our being forever unable to know everything all at once may be the best design feature of this whole human experiment.

When Dad and I got home from Mount Wilson, Mom and Jessica were still up.

“Did you have fun?” Mom asked.

“We didn’t see much, I’m afraid.”

“Too bad! Jessica and I watched
Tales from the Crypt
. It was so
awful
, but I kind of liked it. Do we get that channel in Tucson, Joe?”

I had left my mother, the Bach specialist, alone with my wife, who thinks that Jason from the
Friday the 13th
movies is a postmodern antihero, for a mere six hours, and look what had happened! I imagined having to do an intervention, storming her practice room and finding her watching
Hellraiser
videos instead of playing the harpsichord.

•  •  •

The next morning I got up and found my dad sitting in the living room reading the paper. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, shaking his head.

“What?”

He pointed to a photograph of Jupiter taken from the Hubble Space Telescope. “We were looking at it last night. Those spots. That was it.”

“But …?”

“It’s the new telescope. It’s a Cassegrain, not like our old Newtonian. I forgot it has a prism right in front of the eyepiece to correct for the reversed image. I’m still not used to it, I guess.”

We had been looking at the spectacle of the century all night, but without being able to enjoy it.

“That’s not all,” Dad continued. “The weather forecast for tonight is clouds.”

“Oh. Bummer.”

“You could say that.”

We stared at the pictures splashed all over the front page. There the spots were, just as we’d seen them, each of them bigger than the earth.

“Astronomers all over the world were elated and amazed,” the article raved. “Few expected it to be this spectacular.”

“This is like the eclipse in Canada all over again,” Dad said.

“No, it’s not that bad. We
did
see it, after all. We just didn’t, you know—”

“Really see it,” he interrupted.

Which was when I saw the opportunity sitting there like a plump, flightless bird. It was hardly sporting, but I couldn’t resist. “Don’t be crushed, Dad. You see, not everything
works out the way you want it to. You learn to live with it, though.”

He looked up from the paper and gave me a long, slow burn with his eyes.

“Smart-ass.”

Iron & Silk

The Laughing Sutra

The Soloist

Lost in Place

THE SOLOIST

A mesmerizing story about music, meditation, and murder,
The Soloist
is the story of a once promising cellist who finds his life radically altered while serving as a juror at a murder trial for the brutal slaying of a Buddhist monk and as the teacher to a pupil whose brilliant musicianship reminds him of his own vanished past.