The Night of the Comet (40 page)

The shutters were open and they could see a band of sky through the parted ceiling of the dome. They climbed a flight of metal stairs to a platform and then stepped up under the enormous bowl-shaped mirror
of the telescope while Dr. Greenstein spoke about its design. He pointed out to Alan the mirror support mechanisms and the small springs he’d installed to preserve the alignment of the panes. “What is that, a spring gauge?” Alan asked, curious. “A fish weight scale,” Greenstein said. “I found a bunch of them at a tackle shop down in Long Beach. They work perfectly.” “Huh. What do you know about that. Honey, come look at this.”

Two men in lab coats passed carrying important-looking equipment. “Oh, good. You’re in luck,” Dr. Greenstein said. They’d been taking exposures of a white dwarf that night, but just now they were changing the plate. Did Alan want to go up to the cage? The prime focus cage?

This, Alan knew, was a rare invitation. Only well-vetted researchers were normally allowed to go up inside the telescope. But it was a slow night, the professor said, and after all—here he winked at them—it was Alan’s honeymoon.

“Give you something to remember,” Greenstein said. “Something you can tell your kids about.”

And so, while Lydia waited on the floor below, Alan rode with Dr. Greenstein in an open elevator up along the side of the dome. He followed the professor across a short catwalk and then down into a metal capsule suspended above the telescope’s mirror. There was barely enough room for three or four men to crowd shoulder to shoulder around a steel tube that came up through the middle of the grated floor. Engines groaned and the giant telescope began to move. Holding on to the side of the cage, Alan tried not to show his excitement, but he felt like a boy on a carnival ride.

Below, Lydia crossed her arms and watched the machinery tilt into place. It looked very serious and impressive to her. She didn’t especially mind being left behind for the moment; the men were doing science, talking about things she couldn’t have possibly understood. Besides, she recognized that this was Alan’s adventure now, and so she was content to stand on the sidelines and cheer him on.

As she waited, something made her think about the swallows back at Capistrano, how they returned to the same place at the same time every year. How did they know how to do that? she wondered. Maybe
she would ask Alan about it later; he might be able to tell her. Those tiny birds, flying thousands of miles over land and sea, mountains and valleys—it didn’t seem possible. She pictured them in dark, cloudlike swarms, the Earth far below, the stars above, beating their little wings determinedly through the night. The guide had laughed when she called it a miracle, but really, what else could you call something like that?

Inside the focus cage, Dr. Greenstein was showing Alan where the photographic plate screwed into place. They’d been using a spectrograph designed by Dr. Page for nebular work, he explained, a really fine instrument with a 390-millimeter dispersion. The engines quieted to a low hum as the telescope locked into tracking mode. Dr. Greenstein bent to an eyepiece angling out of the side of the tube. He adjusted some knobs and then scooted to one side.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Have a look.”

Alan held his breath as he bent to the eyepiece. Dr. Greenstein stood at his shoulder describing what he was seeing.

“I love this star. It’s one of Luyten’s white dwarfs. We found some really pronounced hydrogen lines, very broad and shallow. I mean, they’re so obvious, you can’t miss them. Kuiper classified the spectrum as ‘continuous,’ but he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Okay, to be fair, we’ve got a better telescope. But anyway, what we’re finding is that there’s a rough correlation between spectral class and color index—which is no great surprise, really, given that the DA-zero-two stars, as we’ve always known, are bluer than the DA-three-seven stars.”

Alan hardly knew what Dr. Greenstein was talking about. But it didn’t matter. He was lost in his own wonder at what he was seeing. The doors of heaven had opened to show him this star, this white dwarf, a small dot of light couched in a luminous blue halo. It was, he knew, a star in the last stage of its life. How appropriate, how beautiful, he thought, that it should die this way, reduced to the pure white core of its being.

“How far?” Alan whispered.

“About seven thousand light-years, give or take.”

“How old?”

“Hard to say. Maybe ten billion years?”

Ten billion years. Good god. He might’ve been peering down a tunnel into the past, billions of years before any of this—he, the telescope, Dr. Greenstein, the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, the planets—even existed.

Alan lifted his face from the eyepiece, staggered by the thought. He looked up through the crack in the ceiling at the star-filled sky, dizzy with a sense of the vast expanse of time and space within which he stood. His position in the universe felt so, so … 
tenuous
. So unlikely. So very, very fortunate.

He looked down over the edge of the cage. His wife, standing eighty feet below on the concrete floor, smiled and waved up to him. What more could a man ever want than this? And with tears starting to his eyes, he thought: I could die now and be perfectly happy.

MIDNIGHT,
I was awakened by a stirring in the house.

I sat up in bed to listen. The night was quiet; the Moon shone in at my window. I heard a rattling noise outside at the garage shed, and got up and went to the top of the stairs. As I did so, I was seized by the peculiar sensation that I’d done this before, sometime once long, long ago.

“Dad?”

But his bedroom door was ajar and the house was empty, as I knew it would be. There was the tilting Christmas tree in the corner, the TV set, the couch, the rug, the chairs. My broken telescope, the pieces that were left of it, sat on the floor near the back door.
Light and elevation
, I thought.
Light and elevation
. I paused just long enough to pick up the phone in the living room and dial a number.

I asked Megan if she’d seen our father. Was he there with them? No? I told her where to meet me and to hurry. “Something’s wrong. Something terrible is happening.”

Outside was cold; I hadn’t stopped to put on a coat over my pajamas,
and I could see my breath rising in front of my face. Up above, stars and a bright wedge of moon. I jogged out of our driveway and down the street. A breeze stirred the trees, and a dog barked from a nearby backyard. Here and there a neighbor’s house was still blacked out, with the curtains drawn and the lights off. Some still had sheets of newspaper taped up behind their windows, giving them a ruined, desolate air. The streetlights, though, those were back on, and as I ran below them I passed from light to dark and light to dark again.

I came out of the neighborhood at the end of the block and turned right toward town. There were no cars at this hour on Franklin Street; there was no sign of life anywhere. The street, with its cement sidewalk, the drainage ditch along the side of the road, the overgrown weeds, the dark trees—the street looked strange, at once very familiar but also foreign, as though it were a street I’d visited once in a dream, and now I was running down the same street in what was either real life or, quite possibly, another dream. The wind rustled the leaves of the trees, and I looked up to check that everything was where it was supposed to be, that the stars and planets were all still in place.

Up ahead, the blue-green tank of the water tower rose on its four spindly legs above the trees like some alien spaceship that had landed at the edge of our town. I was still some distance from it, half a football field away, when I spotted the wooden stepladder from our garage toppled on the ground below it. That’s when I looked up and saw—

But I knew he’d be there. He was wearing his black Sears McGregor raincoat over his blue-striped pajamas, his coattails flapping behind him as he scaled the tower. His bony white ankles flashed above his shoes. His elbows jutted out, his head was twisted to one side, his glasses hanging at the end of his nose. I halted in the road to watch, hugging myself as I stepped from one foot to the other. I still didn’t quite believe what I was seeing, although at the same time, I knew exactly what was happening.

When my father reached the top of the tower leg, he disappeared under the belly of the tank and reappeared seconds later standing on the catwalk. He steadied himself with a hand on the railing and began walking carefully to the left. At the hip of the tank, he stopped, turned, and looked directly at me.

“Hey!” I shouted, and jerked a hand up to signal to him.

But he quickly began moving again, looking back from time to time over his shoulder as he circled around to the dark side of the tower.

I stepped to the left, tracking his orbit from the street. When I caught sight of him again he was no longer standing on the catwalk but was hanging on the outside of it. He had somehow crawled under or over the railing so that he was now balanced with his toes on the edge of the catwalk, gripping the handrail and leaning in awkwardly toward the water tank.

All at once he threw out his right arm and leg, flipped around, and grabbed the rail behind his back so that he was facing the air with his heels hooked on the edge of the catwalk. I gasped; at the same time, my father made a small exclamation, as if he was pleased and a little surprised at having been able to execute this tricky maneuver: “Ha!”

But the abrupt motion had jarred his glasses from his nose. We both watched them fall end over end through the air. There was a faint cracking sound as they landed on the sidewalk below the tower.

When I looked back up, he was staring out at the night sky. For a moment we were both perfectly still, my father watching the sky, me watching him. An unnatural charge began to fill the air, an electric premonition that raised the hairs on my arms. I wanted to cry out a warning, I wanted to do something, but I couldn’t move or speak, struck dumb by the awful knowledge of what was about to happen.

My father leaned out from the railing and lifted his head, like he was trying to touch his face to the sky. He stretched out his arms behind him, opened his mouth wide, and squatted. Just then the wind stirred, lifting his black raincoat behind him, and for one breathless instant he appeared not to fall, but to float up into the air, hanging as if suspended between earth and sky, between the past and future, between wish and reality, between all that we want and all that we can’t have.…

“No!” I screamed. “No! Don’t!”

I ran across the grass and stopped directly below him, shouting and waving my arms, trying to rouse him from whatever nightmare he was
trapped in. He leaned out from the rail, a hundred feet over my head, and looked down at me.

“Get away! Go home!”

He swung around so that he was facing the tower again. Then, hanging on to the rail, he began sidling around to the back of the tank. I followed him below. When I ran into some bushes, I pushed through them and kept going, me shouting up for him to stop, he shouting down for me to get away, go home, leave him alone.

When I came around to the wooden stepladder on the ground, I grabbed it and propped it against the nearby leg. It was a difficult stretch from the stepladder to the ladder on the side of the leg, and then the metal rungs were awkwardly spaced and hard to climb. The tower was much higher than I’d thought, too; I stopped once to look down and saw that I was only halfway to the top. I kept climbing, shivering in my slippers and pajamas and trying to keep an eye on my father, who was watching from the rail, hollering at me to go back down, it wasn’t safe.

By the time I reached the top, he’d crawled back under the rail and was crouched on the catwalk. He watched just long enough to see that I made it up okay, and then he ducked out of sight around the side of the tank.

“Hey—!”

I pulled myself to my feet and jogged around the catwalk after my father, keeping one hand on the rail. The tower felt as if it was swaying in the wind; the platform seemed to float above the town spread out below—the lights along Franklin Street, the red sign of the drugstore, the dark trees of the square, the black patches of swamp and sugarcane fields beyond.

I found my father at the back of the tower, starting to climb yet another ladder that ascended the curved belly of the tank.

“Jesus. What the hell—”

I grabbed at his pants. He tried to kick me away, and so I hugged him around both legs, pinning him to the ladder. He looked down at me with a sickly, guilty expression as he groped for the rungs above his head.

“You think this is a joke? You think I’m kidding around?” he said.

“I don’t think it’s a joke.”

“Let go of me, damn it!”

“I’m not letting go.”

“We’ll both fall.”

“Fine, we’ll both fall then. That’d be good.”

“I’m warning you—”

I gave a heave and pulled him away from the ladder. We teetered on the catwalk for one heart-stopping second before collapsing together onto the metal grating. Then he got to his hands and knees and began to crawl to the edge of the catwalk.

“Jesus Christ. What the hell’s wrong with you?” I grabbed his leg, dragged him back, and threw myself on top of him. We lay there belly to belly, our heads pressed together, panting into each other’s ears. I could smell his aftershave, his hair oil, his body odor—all scents as familiar to me as my own bed.

“Where do you think you’re going, huh?” I kept saying into his ear. “Where do you think you’re going? You’re not going anywhere. I’m not letting you. You’re staying right here, damn it. Right here.”

After some time, after he’d calmed, I rolled off my father and lay on my back beside him, holding on to his shirt with one hand just in case. We both rested there, recovering. The red warning light pulsed on and off above our heads. A light breeze blew. All around, stars shone in ridiculous profusion, like someone had taken handfuls of diamonds and scattered them across the heavens. And close—so close I might have reached out, plucked one from the sky, and put it in my pocket. Beside me, my father let out a long, heavy sigh, as though he were resigning himself at last to a life on Earth.