by BRIAN HALL
Cerimon had lifted her right hand out of the box, and was massaging it (Blocking Decision #5). “Death may usurp on nature many hours, and yet the fire of life kindle again the o’erpressed spirits.”
Charles was one of the former Equity actors, having trod the boards in minor roles in New York and a couple of major ones in Philadelphia. When he was sixty, he’d moved to Ithaca with his partner—now husband, yay!—to enjoy a quiet life gardening and occasionally directing plays in the summer. He had a magnificent voice, but had somehow managed not to fall in love with it, so it remained his servant. He also had a wonderfully large craggy face with bright black eyes. If Saskia ever needed resurrection for real, he would be on her short list of mages to do it.
“The fire and cloths,” Charles went on. “The rough and woeful music that we have, cause it to sound, beseech you.”
Brandon was an Ithaca College performance major in viola who’d grown up in the area and was staying home for the summer because his mother was ill. He had taken it upon himself to compose the moonlit air that he now began to play. Saskia lay in the coffin and listened to the music—for every performance Brandon was on stage for only three minutes, and like everyone else, he worked for free—and felt her hand being warmed by Charles as he knocked Shakespeare’s words out of the park: “She is alive! Behold, her eyelids, cases to those heavenly jewels which Pericles hath lost, begin to part their fringes of bright gold; the diamonds of a most praisèd water doth appear to make the world twice rich. Live, and make us weep to hear your fate, fair creature, rare as you seem to be.”
She opened her eyes and saw the edges of the casket like a frame, within it Charles’s rapt, wondering face looking down at her, Brandon still playing softly, and she was suddenly swamped by a wave of emotion as she realized how insanely lucky they were, this small-town gang of enthusiasts, to have Charles and Brandon, and how lucky that humans have such a thing as a viola, and the whole crazy series of episodes in Pericles, in which Fate seemed to count for everything and individual merit nothing, suddenly seemed right and true, we’re all lost and helpless and continually washing up on a shore somewhere, and we can only hope that someone will find us and pry open our lid and say that we smell good.
She sat up, wanting to throw her arms around Charles and kiss him and wrestle him to the ground and sit on him, but restrained herself, and in rehearsal she had worried about technique, about keeping clarity while conveying emotion, but all that was forgotten in a blaze of ecstasy and idiocy so complete it could only be holy. “Oh dear Diana, where am I? Where’s my lord? What world is this?”
None of which is to say that she necessarily delivered the line well. Private spasms are dangerous. But this story is about her, not about whoever had nothing better to do that evening than fork over forty bits, expecting not much and getting it. What she got was her first heroine (heroin!) glimpse of what acting might mean for her, if she could get it under control, learn to ride that breaking wave.
Where am I? Where’s my lord? What world is this?
Okay, sure, “where’s my lord,” patriarchal horseshit. What Shakespeare meant—or anyway, what she meant—is, Where’s my guidance? What is my purpose on this earth?
She sips her tea, gazes on the familiar objects of her sitting room. She’s a single mother, an unknown actor barely making ends meet. The world is overheating. Gays can marry in every state, while a third of Americans seem to have been driven literally insane by the election of a Black president. Her ambition when she was young was to know everything, to read all the great books, including the Zulus’ Tolstoy, to know French history and the human genome, theories of consciousness and artificial intelligence, the complete works of Bach and the multiple authors of the Bible. Now she thinks she’d be satisfied with understanding her daughter.
She hits the remote, streams an episode of a show with an actress she had a fling with years ago. Then a different show, and a third. She tries to enjoy the solid work she’s seeing without dwelling on how her opportunities have mostly dried up. This business has taught her that the human sin underlying all others is not pride, but envy. Pride is merely an injury to the patriarchal god she doesn’t believe in, whereas envy is an injury to one’s fellow human beings. She finishes with an episode of the old Twilight Zone. That gorgeous look of black-and-white film.
Then it’s midnight. She picks up her phone.
don’t torture your mother
Goes to bed.
When she startles awake at 6:00 a.m., she checks Mette’s room. The bed is neat as a pin, unslept in.
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
“Hello, what’s up?”
“Mette’s missing.”
“What do you mean, missing?”
“What do people usually mean when they say ‘missing’?”
“How long?”
“Since yesterday.”
“Maybe she pulled an all-nighter at Qualternion, some programming problem.”
“Of course I called. Someone there said she showed up yesterday morning and a few minutes later she walked out. Didn’t say a thing. She’s not answering my texts. Some of her clothes are gone.”
“So she hasn’t been kidnapped.”
“Don’t joke, for chrissake.”
“I’m not joking. If she went somewhere on her own volition she’s probably fine.”
“So why worry? How convenient.”
“I’m just—”
“I think she’s run away.”
“Run away? I don’t think—”
“She’s been withdrawn lately.”
“I don’t think you can—”
“I mean more than usual.”
“I don’t think you can run away when you’re twenty.”
“Mark—fuck! Could you please pass the test? I’m worried because there’s a good reason to be worried. Can you just accept that?”
“Okay.”
“I’m telling you because you should know.”
“Okay.”
“I might need to reach you, you’re not about to run off to a conference?”
“No, I’m teaching.”
“Good.”
1993–1994
Numerous studies have shown that visual memories are untrustworthy, but for what it’s worth, he remembers seeing her for the first time. He was in his second year teaching Intro to Astronomy, and back then he talked too much about his own work in the opening lecture, imagining that students would find it helpful to keep in mind his particular perspective as he guided them through the field. Also, looking back, he thinks he was nervous, and talking about his areas of expertise has always calmed him.
He was in Taft Auditorium, looking out at a hundred and fifty young strangers in varied warm-weather dress, bored or studious or on the tiresome mating prowl, a few of them actually interested in astronomy, the rest satisfying the college’s science distribution requirement with a course light on math. He nattered on about himself (it’s embarrassing to remember this), telling them more than they wanted to know about astrometry, and why—although measuring the positions and relative velocities of stars as accurately as possible certainly sounds dull, doesn’t it?—it was a necessary foundation for all of the other branches of astronomy, because how could any theory be evaluated without firm data etc etc.
A hand went up (he still sees it, for what it’s worth, about halfway up the rows on the left-hand side), which surprised him, since questions were supposed to be reserved for after lectures or during sectionals, but he said, “Question?”
“So you’re like a modern-day Tycho Brahe.”
He was so startled, he said, “Excuse me?”
“You’re like Brahe, making Kepler’s fancy-pants theories possible.”
He must have just stared at her for a second or two. She was petite, swallowed up in a sweater that looked too warm for the room. She ha
d curly hair and complicated dangling earrings. She was smiling. It was a show-off question—or strictly speaking, a comment—but he was impressed that she knew enough to make it, and had the temerity to do so on the first day of class. It almost felt like she was teasing him. Finally he said, “Exactly.” Then he went on, but feeling self-conscious, he cut his description short. (Was it possible, he wondered much later, that that was her intention all along?)
She came up to him at the end of the lecture and he thought she was going to flaunt some more knowledge. He wanted to tell her that grading was done by the section leaders. But instead she apologized. “I have a tendency to show off.”
“Not at all. You’re interested in the subject. That’s great.” She really was quite small, perhaps not even five feet. She had a narrow asymmetrical face, glistening dark eyes, and a rather large nose, also asymmetrical. “Were you in the astronomy club in your high school?”
“Ha! God, no.”
“But you’re thinking about majoring in astronomy?”
“Not really.”
“But you know something about Tycho Brahe.”
“That’s only because I had a—” She stopped, shook her head, snorted. “I had a strange childhood.”
He couldn’t read her expression. Embarrassed? Proud? Could it possibly be flirtatious? Surely not. His students never flirted with him. In any case, he had no idea what to say, so he said nothing. After a moment she walked off.
In the following weeks, against his will, he always noted where she was sitting. She never missed a lecture, usually arriving at the last second, barreling through the door in the back on the left—though small, she really did kind of “barrel,” other students stepping and even jumping out of her way—and running down the left-hand steps, slipping into the first open aisle seat. She’d pull out a fat spiralbound notebook (few students had laptops then) and spend the hour writing furiously, pausing to chew on her pen, cupping her high forehead with her left palm. She didn’t raise her hand again, or speak to him after the lecture, and it bothered him that he even noticed this.
Against his will—of course that phrase makes no sense in this context—he asked her section leader, Paul, how she was doing. He’d briefly considered inventing an excuse for his interest, but he hated lying.
“I think she’s a couple years older than her classmates,” Paul said. “Talks a lot, is always wandering off topic into stuff like I’m not kidding medieval philosophy or eighteenth-century mapmaking. The other students roll their eyes. But she’s bright as hell and seems actually interested, which of course puts her in the minority.”
Sometime after that, he had a dream about her. He was lecturing in his underwear, and hoping that if he could just keep talking about Barnard’s Star, no one would notice. He was running out of things to say, and since there was a new university policy, adopted with great fanfare, that legally proscribed repeating yourself in a lecture, he was beginning to panic. She raised her hand. He was trying not to look at her, but she came down the aisle with her hand still in the air and sent him a challenge with her eyes across the lectern. He knew for a certainty that she was going to ask him something arcane about Barnard’s Star, but phrase it in such a way that it would sound like it was really about his underwear. He kept leaning right and left, trying to see past her, but she kept floating in front to block his vision. That’s when he woke up, wondering at himself.
Could it have to do with Susan? She had died in the spring, and he’d had a terrible summer, sleeping badly and having trouble concentrating. He had just turned thirty-four, and apart from a couple of relationships in his twenties that had lasted a few months, then seemed to fade away of their own accord (he worked too much, was one refrain), he’d been alone and never minded it. Or in any case, he’d never felt the desire to initiate a relationship. Both Stephanie and Janice had approached him. Yet it was true, now that he thought about it, that his distress after Susan’s death felt not unlike loneliness. Which in a way was odd, because he’d hardly seen his sister for years, and only rarely traded a letter with her. Of course there had never been a time when she wasn’t part of his world. He’d always looked up to her, not only as the smarter one, but the more honest, or . . . He didn’t know what word he was looking for. She was the delver, the unearther. She was like his emissary to the realm of meaning. She made the world feel more real. She even made his own feelings feel more real. He couldn’t articulate it any better than that.
And then someone killed her.
He actually saw her just before she flew out of New York, because he happened to be in the city for a conference. He watched the back of her head as she went down the subway steps, her short unkempt hair, the worn leather knapsack on her much-traveled shoulder.
He’d spent the summer doing nothing but trying to work and trying to sleep, mostly failing at both. A mass of data from some telescope time the previous summer on molecular clouds had looked promising, but he just couldn’t get excited. Which was kind of terrifying. He’d always been puzzled by the large fraction of people who didn’t seem to love learning new things. Now he was just another sleepwalker.
He would get over it. Research indicated that people have emotional set points to which they return, following both good and bad events. But it didn’t feel like he’d get over it. Of course that feeling was a predictable aspect of not yet being over it, but still . . . Anyway, he wasn’t himself. And now he’d just had a dream about a student and he’d woken with an erection. REM sleep in men induces erections regardless of the content of the dream, but the chance contiguity of her presence in his dream with his waking in a tumescent state had now added to his thoughts of her a spurious erotic tone.
Her name was Saskia White. He went that far, bothering to learn it from the class list. And the fact that she was a local. But no further. After two or three more lectures he realized he was addressing his remarks to the right side of the room to avoid looking at her. How ridiculous.
Then one day she approached him again at the lectern. This was after the midterms, because he remembers that by this time he’d perused her test booklet and been impressed—ridiculous that he’d looked—and as she came up to him he addressed her by name, forgetting that there was no good reason why he would know it.
If she was surprised, she didn’t indicate it. But she surprised him all over again. He had been lecturing on the outer planets of the solar system and she had a question about Triton. He must have mentioned that Triton’s retrograde motion around Neptune showed that it could not have formed in the same part of the solar nebula as its host planet, but was probably a captured Kuiper Belt object. She wondered to him how likely that hypothesis was, given that Triton’s orbit was almost perfectly circular. “I mean, what are the chances that Triton would collide with another Kuiper Belt object and end up with exactly the right trajectory for that to happen? Isn’t that like the orbital dynamics version of a hole-in-one from, I don’t know, thousands of miles away?”
For a sophomore in an intro course who wasn’t already an amateur astronomer, this was a remarkably sophisticated question. “Good for you,” he has a feeling he might have said. “The initial orbit would have been eccentric, but tidal forces tend to circularize orbits, because a circular orbit is in a lower energy state, tidally, than a noncircular one.”
“But why is Triton’s orbit more circular than most of the other moons and planets?”
“The orbital influence of tidal forces depends on a number of factors, so there’s no standard timetable for circularization. Triton almost certainly interacted with other Neptunian moons, which had the effect of ejecting them entirely from the local system while reducing Triton’s eccentricity. This would help explain why Neptune has so few moons compared to the other gas giants. But as it happens, you’ve hit on a question that still is a bit of a puzzle since, despite what I’ve just said, the solar system isn’t old enough to entirely account for th
e near-total absence of eccentricity in Triton’s orbit. There’s a theory involving gas drag from a planetary debris disk—” and off he went (probably, he doesn’t remember exactly), chattering and nattering, backing and filling, restating and elaborating. He starts to use his hands a lot.
Finally, he noticed her looking bemused. Or maybe bored. “Sorry,” he said.
“What? Why?”
“I can go on too long.” (This part he remembers exactly. For what it’s worth.)
“Shit— Oh, sorry, I mean damn, or . . . darn. Or maybe even fudge”—and here she laughed—“don’t apologize, I’ll bet I could talk you under the table, most people talk about nothing but themselves, it’s adorable.”
Again he thinks a few seconds probably went by during which he just stood there like an ox. Even when he’s alone, his mind works deliberately. In social interactions he’s always three steps behind everyone else. Did she just call him adorable? Or did she mean the people who only talk about themselves? And if she meant him, wasn’t that kind of condescending and presumptuous? But if so, why did it fill him with delight? And if it was about him, and it delighted him, where were the warning bells that ought to be going off in his head? Or was wondering about warning bells in fact the warning bell?
He must have said something in response, but he can’t remember what it was. He suspects that even just seconds later he wouldn’t have been able to recall it. At moments of emotional confrontation he has no short-term memory of anything he says. Not so, his visual memory. He can call up now, twenty-two and a half years later, exactly what she looked like at that moment. She had applied a coral lip balm against the November weather, and her mouth was narrow and shapely beneath a well-defined philtrum; her smile was what people would probably call “roguish”; when she tensed her cheeks, as now, she had a dimple beneath her left eye; her earrings were lily-of-the-valley bells made out of misty blue-gray glass; her eyebrows were sparse; her irises, which he had thought nearly black because of her eyes’ gleaming quality, were in fact a milky brown.