The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (31 page)

“For more than one scientist,” Manday added, looking over at Eli and lifting his eyebrows. Eli realized, suddenly, that the man meant Denise, and he found himself stiffening.

“I noticed reporters" was all that Eli could say. They had run into a few on the boat, Australian science writers who seemed absurdly happy with this assignment, not having heard, perhaps, about the mosquitoes.

Manday switched emotions abruptly, clapping his hands. “Oh yes! Dr. Swift’s comet is a celebrity, you know.”

Eli tried to smile. “And so are you, as you should be.”

“No no.” The old man bowed. A member of Eli’s thesis committee, who had thrown decades of science away for this life. Eli wondered if he should tell him, if Dr. Manday would appreciate the humor of knowing that his former student, now Dr. Spivak, had been a frightened and desperate young man once. That he had trimmed a set of data once, twenty-five years ago, for a presentation that led to a paper with Swift’s name attached, and Manday’s approval. A career founded on a youthful lie, and that no consequences ever came of it. Here was science. Yes, Manday would enjoy that; perhaps Eli would tell him later, under the falling stars. He watched the grandson as he approached, handing the parasol to Dr. Manday before he took off again toward the cage.

Jorgeson spoke up: “I was interviewed!” And then, seeing his humility act was suffering, he shrugged and fell into a nervous monologue about the corrosive effects of fame on science.

Oh dear God,
Eli thought,
we have been here before.
Once again, he was letting Jorgeson babble about some scientific minutiae with that expression of vacant pleasure while Eli, sunk inside himself, sighed over some loss. As he had three years before on Mauna Kea. As he had twenty-five years before, on that evening when Denise made Eli ask about her lover. Young brokenhearted Denise; then Denise far away; then Denise in her grave. The overlook, the volcano, the overlook again—three points in time, all exactly the same: chatter flowing around one stony regret. This was it, Eli decided as Jorgeson’s eyes bulged with enthusiasm, his skin blushing from the heat, his voice ringing off the stone; this was the loop of his life.

Eli’s hand hurt suddenly, and he lifted it to discover, all along the wall, a line of red ants on patrol, an angry thread wriggling along the cement, glowing as if spun from fire. Eli lifted his arm and the creatures were there, as well, having climbed onto him in the spirit of reconnaissance. Now they wandered aimlessly, a little gleaming galaxy of them, among the hairs and moles on his skin. He wiped them off briskly. He felt a bite, two bites. Down on the floor, he saw, they had survived the fall and were moving crazily again toward his feet. He stamped them dead.

Manday’s grandson now returned with the cage, which he carried like a heavy pail, and feathers spilled from the sides and scattered along the stones.

Jorgeson, apparently pleased with his own voice, felt the urge to comment: “Your bird doesn’t look too good.”

Manday laughed and leaned down to the cage. When he did this, the parrot fluffed its chest and clucked loudly at him. The old man stood up again, saying, “You know how long I have had him? Forty years. He is forty years old. His name is Rama, isn’t it?” he asked the parrot.

“Salaam, Rama!” said the bird, watching Eli with one eye.

“And you know what?” Manday said. “After all that time away from him, maybe twenty years, I come back and … he’s decided he’s in love with me. Aren’t you, Rama?”

“Salaam, Rama!”

Manday touched his eyeglasses and looked weary. Then he smiled at Eli. “He’s in love with me. He wants me to be his mate. The veterinarian told us. He cannot stand to be away from me, he plucks the very feathers from his back when I leave the room, you see. Parrots do that, old parrots do that. They go a little mad you see; there is actually an asylum here on the island just for parrots. Old parrots. But Rama is harmless. He just wants to nest with me, don’t you? Hadi carries him around so he can be with me.” Manday patted his grandson’s head. “I don’t want to break poor Rama’s heart.”

Manday leaned down again and the bird puffed and gave that clucking sound. “Yes,” the old man said quietly, holding out a finger for the bird to bite. “I love you, too.”

An image came to Eli’s mind of something else, something he tried to keep far away and so he worked to erase it. He looked again over the edge to the calm bay and noticed that the water’s reflection was full of clouds. They undulated in the waves as far as the eye could see—they looked like billowy creatures lingering just beneath the surface. Wave after wave they huddled, dull and gray, watching. Eli stood still as the others talked; he was fascinated by the water’s effect. It easily cleared his mind. Then the sun arrived and the creatures seemed to scatter, dazzled, diving below, until moments later when it left and they appeared again, that flock of clouds, that school of eyes.

It was so far to come for just a comet, a hatful of falling stars which, with the full moon up tonight, none of them would be able to see until just before dawn. So far for just a funeral, or even a reunion. In fact, before yesterday, Eli had not planned to attend. He’d received the invitation in the mail—a ludicrous thing Manday had sent to everyone, engraved and formal, as if he were handing his comet off to a new husband—and Eli did not consider it for an instant. A gathering of old men, war heroes, bragging of the stars and nebulae of their youth—certainly not. But chance had landed him in Hawaii the week before, on another visit to Mauna Kea (using its new submillimeter-wavelength telescope), and he stood in that same breathless spot as he had in 1986 when he realized how badly he’d been cheated, when he plotted the next crucial curve of his life. And this time he had looked at that same ginger light, that same shy volcano being stripped of mist, and knew he should go. For her, somehow. So he extended his stay, bought a ticket for a flight, and slept against the window for the few hours of sunrise before the clumsy landing awakened him and he was rumbling on the landing strip of the main island, young boys running alongside his window, grinning and shouting.

So Eli stood apart from the growing crowd of astronomers. He had not come here to see them, and he faced away, out toward the beach. A flash of red caught his eye—there on the rocks, the figure of a woman walking away down a path. In and out of the palm shade. He could not know that it was the mother of that boy who fell, returning with bottles of oil and spices in a basket on her head, having just anointed her son’s grave. Yet for some reason he thought of a grave. On a hill. Eli watched her careful walk and, because one must always pretend something in the face of death, he fell into a fantasy of his own.

He imagined he had come here on a nervous mission. He imagined the plane ride, the landing, the run to catch the boat over to the island, all of them with the same frenzy as the ants struggling along the wall, the same desperate purpose, and that here he was, breathless from his jog up the stairs, waiting to see if she would come. Denise. He let himself imagine this. He spent those years after Mauna Kea working himself into her life again—this was the true part— putting himself beside her as a friend, as a good friend, pressing no notes into her hands and whispering nothing into her ears, just being there again. That was the plan he’d made at the volcano’s lip: to be slow and kind. She took it well, letting him make a speech at her son’s birthday party and then sitting with him on the back porch, sipping lemonade, while Adam and the boys went to a movie; but she would not relax. Still, he thought of it as retraining an animal you’d hurt; you sit beside it and let it glare at you with luminous eyes; you touch its fur while it bares a few back teeth, and after years, he thought, it would come again when you called it, jump into your lap and sleep again. So he sipped his lemonade beside Denise. His plan was never to seduce her back; he did not know himself what he desired. But unless he got them back to where they started, as friends and comet-hunters, he would never know. He would never reach the day he longed for—the one when he would finally explain to her what he’d done—and examine Denise’s face for some sign of what might happen next.

That day came the very last time he saw her. Years had passed, and they now talked about science with some of the old excitement; and if the nervous joy of their youthful friendship was gone, the arguments in the hallways, the joking on the boat, it was replaced by something calm and silent that was good as well. He decided that she had forgiven him, and when he came up to give a speech at Berkeley (crowds of nervous BADgrads twitching in the audience), he called Denise and got her to spend the day with him alone. He took her to see an old fort looking out on the ocean, a poured block of concrete with rusted iron semicircles on the cliffside showing where the machine guns used to pivot in preparation for the Japanese attack that never came. Grass had overgrown it all now, and they walked on the mounded earth, on a path bordered by wild ice plant blooming with pink jagged flowers. The cold wind rushed up from the water and, caught on the hilltop, dropped its spray onto the pair. She held her hat to her head with one hand, talking about their comet.

It was to return in five years, and Denise had already been making preparations: assembling grad students, arranging telescope time in Australia. They chatted about the next apparition of their comet, knowing of course that it might not happen, knowing that it was the most common thing in the world for comets to miss their mark and disappear.

“Maybe there’s an associated meteor shower,” she said.

He knew it was ludicrous; all the known showers had already been linked with their comets. But she was enjoying the thought as they walked along, and he indulged her.

“We could have a party like Swift,” he said.

She nodded, stopping, hand on hat, to look at the ocean. Somewhere out there was an island dedicated to birds, but it was invisible that day.

He went on: “A comet party for us. That’d be fun.”

“Come on,” she said. “Were they ever fun?”

It felt like the moment then. I’ll tell, he thought, and when I see her eyes, I’ll know what I want to do. Take her hand and kiss her, or reach for a phone and ask poor Penny to marry me. He started to talk, but the sound of the ocean beat his words down to the grass. Later, he thought, when things are quieter. Denise pointed out toward a long strip of foam in the ocean. He thought she said something about a whale, but he couldn’t hear her. He just watched her take off her hat, using it to gesture. Her freed hair exploded in the wind.

He had another chance on the drive home. They were sitting in a tunnel, mired in traffic, with a half-moon view of the Golden Gate before them. Denise was fixing her hair. She had thrown the hat into the backseat, and it sat there like a punished child while the mother took her own hair and pulled it back into its old waves, revealing, as she lifted and coaxed, how it had already unblonded at the roots. Such a fuss and perfection. Yet she’d grown beautiful; she’d learned how to do it. It took Denise nearly fifty years to learn true vanity, but here it was; and if she was older now, with lines around her eyes and that sag beneath her chin, she was lovelier than ever.

This was the moment. Here, at the height of his affection for her. Eli knew he should force it out, he should will his body to do what it refused to do years before: touch Denise’s hand there on the gearshift. That smooth pale hand resting on the knob, shivering with the engine. Just tell her, test her, and move her, for this third and final time, out of their constant double orbit. There, her hand, choked by a bracelet, one nail tapping on the plastic. Will yourself to touch it. Just as, twenty-five years before, he had stood with a finger resting on her doorbell, grazing the surface, Eli sat now watching her tapping on that gearshift, five more taps and he would tell her. He waited, watching, counting in the silence of the car.

“I need to tell you. I was misinformed, and I was quick to hate you,” he began, but someone up ahead began to honk, filling the tunnel, and then another, and then everyone was honking and letting the echoes gather around the concrete walls in a cloud of noise. Even Denise was doing it, laughing, pressing on the horn to the consternation of the women in the car next to her.

“What?” she asked, distracted. The horns kept going.

“You need to listen.”

“I am!” she shouted.

So he shouted back, feeling his words were echoing, too, careening along the walls of the tunnel with all the cacophony, and this gave him the bravery to press on, not knowing if she really heard him, not willing to repeat it now, but simply saying it. And as his own speech died down, the horns began to fade as well, and traffic began to move, so that they slid in silence out of the tunnel and into a creeping fog. They stayed in silence for the next hour. They passed along the wharfside freeway into the shroud of the city’s fog, across the Bay Bridge and various tunnels and overpasses, more traffic, and out into the sun of the East Bay again. Denise said nothing, and since he had only asked that she listen to him, he could not bear to press for anything more. Had she heard him? At stoplights, or in traffic, her fingernail kept tapping against the gearshift. That was the only sound. Patient, he did not ask her to give him even the slightest sign, and so they drove on with just that persistent tapping; this, later, was what he could never forgive himself for.

In Berkeley, where his car sat ticketed outside the astronomy building, she let him go with a slight two-fingered wave. The way she looked at him, though—she had heard him. There was something in her eyes that promised more, later, if he would wait, and he took this for what it seemed and smiled and waved and watched her drive away. It seemed like all he could do: stand there, waiting for her to think it through. Later, he would learn how life would go. Her car rounded a green hill where students lay in the sun. The rear window flashed with sunlight and was gone. This was the last.

His fantasy, today at the wall, continued as if life had never happened. It erased her death. It erased her silence. Instead, it produced a different kind of day, still in a tunnel, with cold air, horns blasting like migrating geese. This time, though, she said something; she made a promise, a pact with him: If either of them wanted to have back what Eli had thrown away, they would arrive on this island, on this day, and stand beside this golden dome where they’d first touched hands. He had built this fantasy over the course of a year, so it was full of detail and drama. They would arrive here. That would be the sign.