by BRIAN HALL
“You can find Lyra by—”
“It’s there.” She pointed. “It’s easy to find because of Vega.”
He didn’t speak for several seconds. Then he said, “I’m sorry.”
“That’s OK,” she said. “You’re a professor, you can’t help it. And since I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff about the Lyrids you know and I don’t, why don’t you tell me, while we lie here and wait for—” you to get up the fucking courage to lay one on me “—some celestial fireworks?”
So he rattled on, and it turned out that the comet responsible for the Lyrids has an orbital period of 415 years, and they’re more spectacular once every sixty years, but this year wasn’t one of those years, and it used to be thought that there was a cloud of debris that had shifted into a 60-year orbit, but now they know that it’s a consequence of gravitational mechanics that steer into the path of the Earth the one-revolution dust trail, by which term is meant the material shed during the revolution prior to the last return, which was in one, two, buckle my shoe, near, far in our motor car, what a happy time we’ll spend, bang bang chitty chitty bang bang.
In the meantime, she would say every once and a while, “Oh! There’s one!” and he’d stop talking for a moment to say, “Where?” and she’d point and say, “It’s gone now,” and he’d say, “Was it a good one?”
He reached the end of the Encyclopedia Galactica entry on the Lyrids, and the night got colder and they sat up to have more hot chocolate.
“There’s one,” she said.
“Where?”
“Have you seen a single one tonight?”
“I’ve seen three. But you’re right, I seem to be missing a lot of them.”
They sipped for a while in silence. Then she said, “I had glow-in-the-dark stars on my bedroom ceiling when I was a kid. I actually used a star chart to place them.”
“Is that what got you interested in astronomy?”
“No. Maybe. Well . . . I was already interested. Anything related to wandering appealed to me. I’d read that seafarers used to navigate by the stars, so I’d lie in bed and pretend I was steering my boat to some far island or undiscovered continent. Anywhere but here, that sort of thing.” She hadn’t yet told him anything about her childhood.
“You weren’t happy?” he asked after a few moments.
She felt a surprising stab. “I don’t know. Not miserable. I sometimes felt lonely, that’s all. Like a lot of kids.”
He seemed to be waiting for her to go on. No fucking way was she going to talk about her family right now. “How about you?” she asked. “Happy childhood?”
“I was lucky. My parents loved me. I mean—not to suggest that your—”
“That is lucky. There’s one!”
“Where?”
“Jesus, you’re terrible at this.”
“I’m usually better.”
“I’ll bet.”
He flopped onto his back. “I’ll be the first to see another.”
She lay down again, closer to him. “No way.”
Then, of course, several minutes went by during which neither of them saw anything. Touch me, kiss me, tell me I’m lovable.
Finally he said, “So yes, I was a happy kid. But there’s something about nighttime and stars, isn’t there? I used to lie out in my parents’ yard at night and wish that one of the stars would turn out to be a spaceship, and it would come down and land in the yard, and a door would pop open and this bright light would spill out, and a friendly alien would say hello and they’d whisk me away and I’d learn everything about the universe. No matter how good we have it, we always want more. At least, I think so. Don’t you think?”
She thought, Of course, you dolt. Is that a new idea for you?
Suddenly, she was fed up with waiting. And besides, if she thought it was too old-school to let him pick her up in his car, why the fuck was she lying here with expectant doe eyes like mermaid Ariel waiting for Prince Eric to kiss de girl? “Well by golly, Mark, now that you mention it, I think you’re right!” And she grabbed his hand and rolled over on top of him.
* * *
• • •
It took him another two weeks before they had sex, and right after that it started to go south. Not that the sex was bad. She’d give the first time a five. He did seem to understand that heterosexual congress wasn’t all about the human male’s temperamental—a girl is tempted to call it hysterical—plumbing, so good for him. And he was teachable. They had sex half a dozen times and by the end the judges were awarding solid 6.5s.
But she had imagined that once they became physically intimate, some species of emotional intimacy would also appear, or at least poke its topgallants over the horizon and crave parley. She kind of thought that all the opaque logician needed was to have his ashes skillfully hauled and he’d turn into something like her best girlfriend with balls. (“Oh, oh! Doctor! Now I can see!”)
Well, no, she’s being hard on herself. But her expectations were unreasonable. Of course, if he was in some way a father-substitute, then in some way she wanted to convert him from the absent hero into the available homebody. And naturally, that didn’t happen. Who knows, there might have been progress after a few years, but they dated for only two months. (Six dates in nine weeks: yes, he worked all the fucking time.)
He had a blank way of staring at her just after she said something that looked an awful lot like he was trying to decide whether or not she was spouting nonsense. His expressions in general were hard to read. She thought at first she’d be able to see more in his eyes when he took his glasses off, but instead that somehow made them look even emptier. Not always—they grew animated when he was talking about ideas or facts. At those times he looked to the side, or down, and his eyes darted and sometimes filled with joy. But when he looked at her, they seemed to go dead. She looked for, and could never find . . . what? Affection, maybe; appreciation, fellow feeling. Just the tiniest hint of, you know, Hey, nice to have you around, whatever your name is.
Her response was to storm the Bastille. She jumped on him, tickled him, teased him, poked him. None of it offended him, and some of it he even seemed to like. But he had no physical playfulness of his own. The moment she stopped, he retreated into his fortress. On the last couple of dates, she admits, she resorted to trying to piss him off. She criticized some habit of his (she can’t remember what it was, something trivial, a weapon to hand) and later made a mean comment about his hair. But that didn’t work, either. He only looked surprised, and a touch disappointed in her. The only way she could get a rise out of him was by putting forward an idea he disagreed with. She said once, toward the end, that he lived only in his head. He was provoked, but not in response to her transparent emotional reasons for saying it. No, it was the fucking conceptual framework of the argument that irritated him.
“The head-heart dichotomy is bogus,” he said. “Feelings originate in the head, too.”
“Well of course. I’m referring to thoughts versus feelings.”
“The thought-feeling dichotomy is so simplistic it’s functionally useless. Feelings are also thoughts, they’re just unexamined. I like to analyze my feelings before I dump them on other people.”
Obviously, she had hit a nerve. And equally obviously, he wasn’t going to admit it. Maybe he didn’t even realize it.
The end came on the summer solstice, under a romantic full moon. They’d had a late dinner downtown and then walked to the lake and picked their way out along the crumbling concrete breakwater to the little lighthouse that marked the entrance to the flood control channel. The sun had set an hour previously. No one was around. The moon had just cleared East Hill and was lighting up the lake in a way that was totally predictable in a thirteen-times-a-year kind of way, yet miraculous and unspeakably beautiful. They sat dangling their legs off the breakwater and as usual she had to make the move to hold his hand. A
pity—those beautiful big hands, and he had no idea what to do with them.
“No matter how many times I’ve seen the full moon, it thrills me,” she said.
“It always surprises me how convincing the optical illusion is, that it looks bigger near the horizon,” he said.
She played with his fingers. This little piggy went to the weekend conference. This little piggy stayed home and caught up on a shitload of work. During dinner she’d talked about some writers she liked, and he’d mentioned that he didn’t read much fiction anymore. He said novelists often wrote about things they were ignorant of—the job their protagonist supposedly had, for example—and got basic facts wrong, and it killed his enjoyment because it reminded him that it was all made up. She said something about it being a pity that a little detail like that kept him from reading good fiction since there was no better way to broaden your understanding of other people. He hadn’t responded.
But now he said, “I read a novel by a Pulitzer Prize winner which began with a scene in the evening. The people described in the scene were believable—no one had three arms, for example—and the sentences I’m sure were very pretty. But in the sky there was a rising crescent moon. And I thought to myself, why should I have any confidence in this writer’s ability to observe anything, if she’s never noticed that crescent moons in the evening can only sink? Does she not understand why the moon is a crescent? Does she think the moon’s motion is retrograde?”
“But a lot of smart people don’t know that. Modern people spend most of their lives indoors, especially at night.”
“I think there’s an arrogance among literary folk. ‘I understand people better than you scientists do, so I don’t have to bother my head with simple facts.’”
Ah, so her comment during dinner had wounded him. Did he even understand why this bee was buzzing in his bonnet right now? She took pity on him. “That’s a good point. I can see how that would irritate you.”
“I tried to read another ‘acclaimed’ novel, and in that one a full moon rose at midnight. If the idiot had written that the sun set at noon I think even his literary readers would have realized something was wrong.”
“You’re right, you’re right.” You poor thing, you feel attacked. The good news: you do seem to care about my opinion.
They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, during which the full moon correctly kept rising. You couldn’t see Polaris for the glare, but you could trust with all your heart (that is, the one in your head) that it was 42 degrees above the north horizon, standing as still as a soldier guarding the tomb of the Unknown Murdered Novelist.
She said, “When I was a kid, I don’t know, maybe eight, I first read about Newton and the apple and I didn’t get it at all. Everyone knows apples fall to the ground, so why would seeing that tell him anything about gravity? It wasn’t until I read a book for older kids, which explained his insight was that the same force might govern both the apple and the Moon—then I understood. And ever since, when I see the full moon, I think of it as a big ghostly apple.”
“The same force governs the apple, the Moon, and the Earth. Part of Newton’s insight was that the Earth also falls toward the apple.”
“Sure.”
“Strangely enough, that detail about the apple is true. It sounds like the storybook nonsense people love to make up later. But Newton mentioned the apple in his journal.”
“So anyway, with this apple and Moon thing, and of course the Earth, too, you’re right, being governed by the same force, and the fact that at first I didn’t understand the Newton story—I ended up with this vivid sense of how all things everywhere are tied together by gravity. I mean, that’s obvious—but the idea of it just stuck in my head and really appealed to me. Maybe because my family was pretty disconnected. My father was for all practical purposes as far away as the Moon. I don’t know, that’s kind of pop-psych. Anyway, then I read somewhere this medieval idea that gravity was a manifestation of love, you know, God’s love working in nature. I thought it was something Aquinas said, but then later I couldn’t find it. Maybe it was Boethius. But this idea that gravity is love, that it makes everything in the universe want to get closer to everything else, that you could say, in a way, that the apple loves the Earth that it falls toward—I thought that was just wonderful.”
He was silent. Then he said, “That’s silly.”
Stung, she glanced at him. He was looking straight ahead, so she only saw his profile—his cow-catcher nose, his out-of-style glasses. “What do you mean?”
“What’s the point of having two different words, ‘gravity’ and ‘love,’ if you’re going to use them to mean the same thing?”
“It’s called a metaphor.”
He made a dismissive gesture. “Metaphors are attractive falsehoods. They only confuse people’s thinking. Most people are too confused already.”
At that moment one of the washed-out pitiless stars above them brightened and descended, roiled the water with its retro-rockets and landed on the crumbling jetty. The door hissed open, and out of the blinding light stepped a couples counselor who approached Saskia and took her gently by the hand and said, “Get out now, and don’t look back.”
Did she and Mark talk more that evening? Did she go home with him? She can’t remember. She remembers writing him a day or two later and telling him it wasn’t working.
He didn’t even call. He wrote a note, starting with something like “If that’s the way you feel then of course—” He expressed no regret. It confirmed all her doubts.
Then, as in an annoying indie rom-com, she discovered she was pregnant. (She used a diaphragm, but there was that one evening a couple of days after her period ended when she had accidentally left her bag in the car, and how could she have been so stupid, and how fucking Leave It to Beaver was it—ha!—that she was blaming only herself, as though pregnancies were parthenogenetic.) Angry at him, she didn’t tell him for six months, during which he didn’t call or write or hire a single plane to fly over her house with an apologetic banner, and then she wrote him another letter in which she said she was a few weeks away from giving birth and he was the father, and he deserved to know, but she wanted to raise the child on her own, because he wasn’t around even when he was around, and because, to be fair, she had left him no say in the matter, whatever small say a man should get in such a case.
If this was a final test, he either failed it spectacularly or aced it, responding with the same passive acceptance. Under a surface of generosity and understanding that probably made him feel good about himself, she sensed an ocean of indifference. His own child! It was appalling.
In retrospect, she can see that in those years, still so close to her traumatic adolescence, the most wounded part of her wanted to rip a man’s heart out and hand it to him on a silver platter. But he didn’t have a heart. And by the way, Tin Man, everyone knows what they mean when they say that.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
She has to admit, this is kind of interesting—Newman’s volume 3, page 1936, “Paradox Lost and Paradox Regained,” by Edward Kasner and the man himself. There’s a tricky little cheat that could be applied to the bus she’s riding on. Consider the tires. When a tire makes one revolution, it travels a linear distance along the road, assuming no slippage, equal to the circumference of the tire. That much is obvious. But now consider the smaller circle formed by the wheel hub. During the same interval, that circle also makes exactly one revolution and travels the same linear distance. Doesn’t that therefore prove that the circumference of the hub and the circumference of the tire are equal?
Of course not. Kasner and Newman’s elucidation, involving cycloids and curtate cycloids, leaves something to be desired. The more fundamental point is that here we have one of those conceptual sleights-of-hand whereby a particular case is falsely generalized. Obviously, every point throughout the volume of the wheel is displaced the same hor
izontal distance, regardless of what cycloid it inscribes—or straight line, if we consider the center of the wheel. At the same time, none of these points travel the same curved distance, because the parameters of their cycloids vary. It is only at the point of contact with the road that we can infer the circumference of the wheel, precisely because that is the point of contact. But that measurement is not the same as the actual distance traversed by a point on the circumference, because that, too, is a cycloid.
Amazing, how easily you can fool people with simple ideas.
She remembers one from third-grade math class: Three friends (of course men) arrive at a hotel and rent three rooms for ten dollars each. They pay the thirty dollars and go upstairs. Then the manager (male) remembers that the hotel is running a discount: three rooms for twenty-five dollars. He gives five dollars to the bellboy (boy) and tells him to return it to the guests. (The boy passes one woman mopping the stairs and another sponging toilets, but neither woman appears in the puzzle.) The bellboy, being dishonest, returns one dollar to each man and pockets the other two. Each of the three men has now paid nine dollars. Nine times three equals twenty-seven, plus the two dollars that the bellboy kept makes twenty-nine. So what happened to the thirtieth dollar?
It turned out that the kid sitting next to her in class had already heard the puzzle from his father, and he said to her in awe, apparently quoting his pre-arithmetical progenitor, “And you know what? No one has ever figured out where that dollar went.”
She turns off her overhead light and stares out the window into the blackness and thinks about human stupidity.
Oh—hers, too, for sure.
Here’s a simple idea that a simple mind believes, despite itself, to be true: Mette loves Alex, therefore Alex loves Mette. There’s something compelling, conceptually, about symmetry. Look at physics, Newton’s third law. Look at physicists, searching for supersymmetry. Look at a number line. Look at your face in the mirror. There’s something DNAish in our attraction to it. Yet DNA itself is right-handed. And for some reason matter slightly predominated over antimatter just after the Big Bang. And time has a direction, since entropy never decreases. But still, her anguish that Alex gave up on her, despite what she told herself she expected—that must come from some deep feeling that Alex should love her. Why? Symmetry!