Light from Other Stars

by Erika Swyler

  Mayor Macon coughed, then started in on food safety.

  “How do we get food if the trucks can’t get in? I’m supposed to get a delivery that hasn’t come and the store’s almost out of bread.”

  “The mail hasn’t come in or gone out. How am I supposed to pay my bills?”

  “Should we board windows?”

  “There’s no clear roads out.”

  “My water won’t shut off.”

  “I can’t get out of my driveway.”

  “I can’t reach my aunt and she lives by herself.”

  “My car froze in a goddamn puddle because you never fixed the drainage system.”

  “Where the hell is the Papas family?” Desmond Prater was a foghorn in the noise. Heads turned at the shout that came from somewhere deep in his gut. They gaped at his red face, the twisted brow. “Anybody seen the professor since this started? His daughter was out with my son.” His fist clenched, the knuckles remembering the feel of smashing his son’s eye. “You heard something happened. I know you all did. She was with him. Then Theo Papas was in my grove with Pete McIntyre. And where the hell is he? Where are any of them?”

  Susan Lowery had seen Betheen earlier, but not Theo, and she said as much to Barbara Friel, who hadn’t thought about checking on the Papas house at all.

  “He ought to be here,” Desmond Prater said. “I should be able to ask the man a few questions.”

  Though the crowd of bodies should have made the auditorium stifling, it grew colder. Children shuffled into their parents’ legs, and teenagers leaned against walls, casual and broken in their perfect angst. Inside the walls, running along the water pipes and electrical wires, time dribbled, a thick and viscous charge that crept and cringed. Electrons jumped and froze. The clock on the back wall stopped.

  “What’s Theo Papas got to do with the sun not setting?” Tall, broad, wild, and dirty, Rebekah La Morte was an easy kind of loud. Her son, Jimmy, hid behind her. “You think one man is responsible for that? Show me a man who can keep the damn sun from setting.” There was no Mr. La Morte. Rebekah was enough for two. She bred greyhounds and ran charter boats by herself. She’d taken tours out when she was nine months pregnant with that rat of a boy. “Show me, Prater. If he can keep the sun from going down, he’s been holding out on us.”

  Nervous laughter like a layer of smoke.

  “I’m saying he knows something, and he’s not here to answer for himself,” Desmond said.

  “The pond out my way is fucking boiling. You ever heard a frog scream? It’s like somebody’s stabbing a baby. That’s some county bullshit. But you go on thinking Theo Papas keeps the sun from setting and boils frogs alive. See if that fixes this government shit. I’ll wait.”

  Mayor Macon cleared his throat, throwing his belly into it. “That’s enough now. Everybody watch your language. Keep things neighborly.” The microphone sparked. He dropped it, and the spark hung in midair, a ragged line of blue-white light. Geoffrey stared at the spark, moved around it slowly, the light burning his eyes. Pain buzzed in his hand, searing, jarring, making him more alive than he’d been before.

  “I think,” he said when he regained his voice. “I think we might benefit from talking to the man. I’m sure he’d have some insights. But no one’s done anything to be upset about, not as far as any of us know. Let’s not go starting a lynch mob.”

  Some in the auditorium knew enough to cringe, the ones who remembered that Island Paradise Park and Zoo had boasted a photo spot called the “Hanging Tree,” and that the old hunting club had once had loose rules and members from the police department, as well as a judge. They were good people, though. And times had changed. Good people didn’t form lynch mobs.

  When the question arose as to who would look for Theo Papas, Annie Prater began crying. She took Desmond’s hand and squeezed it as hard as she could, pushing her nails into his calloused palms.

  “Des, I can’t take it. I have to go, I need to go to his room. I’ll feel better if I can smell his pillow. I need to hold it for a while,” she said. “It smells like him, like his hair, like his cheeks.”

  “Go then,” he said. “I’ll figure it out.”

  It wasn’t hard for Annie to slip away. Her size and quiet nature made her a ghost in the hallway, a fast-moving shadow.

  The front door to the school didn’t want to open. As Annie pushed with her shoulder, she noticed a water fountain running though no one drank from it. The stream was flowing, yet not. Stopped, while her son sped ahead. Pain had flowered in her chest when she’d come home to find Des waiting, when he’d taken her to the grove and she saw Denny in that shed. It shifted, settling under her ribs. High, like the way she’d carried him.

  Her car sputtered in the strange night—perpetual dusk the color of bile. She turned left instead of right. Betheen Papas had taken Denny in when she’d asked, and Annie had watched Nedda from the time she was small. She’d seen Nedda be kind to her son, never acknowledging that he wasn’t as smart as her, never saying he’d done anything stupid, even when he had. Nedda was a little strange, but she was Denny’s too. If Denny didn’t live, if the son who was everything to her died in that equipment shed, Nedda Papas might be the only other person who remembered him, saw him, loved him even close to as much as she did.

  Betheen’s car was at Pete McIntyre’s. Desmond didn’t know that, but Annie did. She’d seen it being towed. She’d seen Betheen crack and pull herself back together. When Betheen walked away from the accident—an accident in which someone had died—it looked the same as Betheen’s normal walk. Annie knew then that the wound from Michael had never healed. That would be her life without Denny, if there was life at all. Stiff-backed walking. Gritted teeth.

  Annie drove. There were three places Betheen and Nedda might be. The house, the college, or Pete McIntyre’s garage. Desmond had been by the house, so they likely weren’t there any longer. She’d find them. Then she’d drive to the grove and sit with her son. She’d be with him when he was old and changing. She’d see all the things she wasn’t meant to, the painful parts that parents missed when God’s order was preserved—the illness, the breaking down of bones and body. For as long as it took, she would stay. No one should be alone.

  1986: Sequence

  “You must have something,” Betheen said. Pete’s garage, his yard, his entire home was a storehouse of machine parts, mechanical devices, building blocks for everything. Betheen snapped the gold expansion band on her wristwatch, pinching her skin between the segments. The pinch was all that kept her from shouting. Can’t wasn’t an option.

  “I don’t see what,” he said. He stared at the notebook, scratching the gray stubble on his neck. “I’m working on the copper and I’ve got enough rebar. Batteries, generators. Power supply and current’s not a problem, but getting it to pulse like that? No can do.”

  Nedda was in his yard, picking through his collection with rodent-like diligence and determination. Every now and again Betheen caught sight of Nedda’s braid and fought to keep from calling her inside. Her daughter was a junk rat. That made Betheen smile, inappropriate as it was. She and Theo had done something right.

  “I thought maybe an alternator, but I don’t know.” Pete shoved a cup of coffee at her, sliding it across the kitchen table’s peeling shellac. “Sorry if this is no good. You’re probably used to better, but it’s usually just me and I guess I never cared much.” The coffee was mostly grounds, brewed in a dented pot on a chipped gas stove.

  “It’s fine,” she said. There was something subtle and blushing about the way he moved. He looked close to fifty, sagging, but not badly. He was lean, unlike most men his age.

  “If you want to keep thinking, go for it. I’ll get on the rebar and the coiling. It’s going to take me a good while.”

  She followed, observing a stiffness creep into his walk, a consciousness that she was there, a woman in his space. The halls of his house reminded her of Theo in that they teemed with things she’d seen before, familiar
phone banks, pictures from office walls. Pete was a space scavenger. Like Nedda. He opened the screen door with a hand on his back, which drew attention to her own aches and pains brought on by lack of sleep—the lurking migraine.

  “Did you check on Denny before you came by?”

  “No.”

  “I guess it’d be hard to see him with Nedda.”

  It was that, yes, but more. Potential loss was terrifying, realized loss was devastating, and the transition between the two was sudden and inexplicable. She should have been awake. She should have stopped them from leaving the house. She should have watched Denny with the care that Annie had watched Nedda.

  Should, a short word for Never would be.

  “Mom!” Nedda stood in the back of the truck, something dangling from her hand, a shadow against the sick sky. Betheen ran to her. “Mom, it doesn’t work. It’s not going to work.”

  In her daughter’s fingers was a small magnet—nail, wires, a D-cell battery. She clung to the battery, their machine in miniature.

  “You made this?”

  “Dad taught me how. You were working and I didn’t want to bother you, so I went downstairs and did it. I thought I could test it on something small. So we could get more information, more data, maybe build it better. But I tried and it doesn’t work. It’s not going to work.”

  At first glance Betheen mistook the animal in the truck bed for a baby possum, but then the eyes and ears took shape, its face like a person’s. A monkey.

  “There’s a current. I tested it with paper clips,” Nedda said. “I did it right. I know I did it right. I thought maybe because there’s metal in the truck and I had the biggest battery we had …” She stopped, swallowed as if gulping air.

  “Here, let me see.” Betheen gently unwrapped Nedda’s fingers from the magnet. Wire was coiled tightly around a screw, almost as if a machine had done it, free of wiggles and unnecessary kinks—flawlessly smooth, like a fine icing bead. A D-cell battery, screw threads as guides for the wires, the ends taped carefully to the battery. The screw was hot in her hand, almost burning, as power drained from the battery. A simple but perfect machine. “Go on, what were you thinking?”

  “I thought that bending the metal under or around the monkey, even just a little, would change the shape of the bubble, maybe stretch it, and maybe it would break.”

  “It’s perfectly built. Your dad couldn’t have done it better.”

  “It doesn’t work. It’s too small. What if what we’re making is too small?”

  “You didn’t know the exact size of the truck or that bubble when you built it, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Right.” Betheen turned the magnet around in her hand. “Well, we know the size of the machine from your dad’s notes. That’s why we’re making our electromagnet so big. All you had to work with was a D-cell battery.”

  “That’s what was in the basement.”

  “That’s not a lot of power, is it? We’re going to be using two generators. One of them kept the whole Bird’s Eye running.” Betheen wasn’t sure if it had been one or two, but she needed to stretch that truth, and not only for Nedda.

  “How do you know it’s going to be enough?”

  “I did the math.”

  Nedda chewed her lip, mulling the way Theo did.

  Beside the monkey in the truck bed was a pool of water, a murk of rust and mud. Above it, something dripped from the power lines. Water-like, but almost pearly, heavy looking. The power lines, the water pipes, all of it was connected. Marvels of engineering pumped Easter dry, moved the water, lit the town, and formed a lattice that both connected and isolated them from surrounding towns and the rest of the county. Theo’s machine was in that lattice. Water below, power lines above, the town trapped between. Three layers, like a bubble.

  Like Nedda had said.

  She swallowed, forced her voice calm. “Nedda, get down from the truck, please.”

  “But—”

  “Now.”

  Pete leaned against the side of his porch, carefully not looking at them. “C’mon back,” he said. “I’ve got hot chocolate or something around here.”

  Pete held the door open as her daughter walked inside, like the house was somehow hers. He kept holding the door for her, and Betheen didn’t feel eyes on her skin, on her back, anywhere at all.

  The absence felt like kindness.

  They stripped and twisted wire and cable from everything inside Pete’s garage and house, everything except the truck. Betheen’s nails split, grease getting under them for the first time in years, and her hands looked younger for having a layer of grime. Nedda twisted wires together into thicker cables. The weight of her daughter beside her was raw and tender.

  Nedda whispered and rocked as she worked.

  “STS-6: Weitz, Bobko, Musgrave, Peterson. STS-7: Crippen, Hauck, Fabian, Ride, Thagard. STS-8: Truly, Brandenstein, Bluford, Garner, Thornton.”

  The magnet would rip Theo’s machine apart and fill the lab with poisonous gases. Flammable gases. She’d read his notes, seen some of the chemicals that he’d used. He was right; combined they’d be as bad as chloramine. There would be acetylene in the air. A single spark and the room would burn like a blow torch. Theo knew this. He was using a radioactive isotope too, though she didn’t know what amount. What would happen if they did nothing at all? She could leave him cycling through his life infinitely. Visit him for the few moments each day when he seemed himself. Every two hours and seventeen minutes she’d feel the snap as their bond broke. Eventually that loss would become like Michael, ever present. And there was Nedda, who would lose her father again and again, without knowing what loss was supposed to feel like.

  There was also Denny. Denny, who wasn’t near anything dangerous. Denny, who should have an entire lifetime ahead of him.

  Pete welded lengths of rebar with a torch. The smell carried the same acrid bite as anise with a touch of benzene to it but came with a fall of sparks both blinding and beautiful. Once, Betheen had looked through the lens of a welder’s mask. It made things simple; everything vanished but metal and spark. Now, Betheen’s world had narrowed to Nedda, her litany of names and numbers, and loops of two hours and seventeen minutes.

  “You know everything Mr. McIntyre has in here, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Nedda said. “I think he’s forgotten about a lot of stuff. He’s got a better patch collection than me, but he doesn’t look after it.” She wiped her cheek, leaving a splotch of grease.

  “Do you know what any of it does? How it works?”

  “Some. There’s no manual for the control table and a lot of his stuff doesn’t work. He has it because it’s broken.”

  A whoop came from the side of the house, followed by a thud. “Got to let it cool a minute,” Pete yelled.

  Nedda sucked a bead of blood from the edge of her thumb. “He likes that I like his NASA stuff, and he knows I won’t break it any worse than it already is. He’s nice.”

  “He is,” Betheen said. It was important to say that, just as it was important to add, “I’m not.”

  Nedda’s mouth twitched. “Me neither.”

  When they checked on Pete, he was shoving his hand back into a thick glove, but appeared unscathed. Betheen closed the screen door and something caught her eye, a gray monolith of metal, resting under an awning. It had the look of NASA or military to it. The inside would doubtless be full of copper wiring, but Pete hadn’t mentioned it as something they could strip.

  “Nedda, what’s that?”

  “A sequencer from Launch Complex 36A. It ran cues for missile and satellite launches, plus timer checks, system checks.”

  “So is it like a remote switch, or a trigger?”

  Nedda stuck her finger through a hole in the screen, wiggling it, widening the opening. “Yeah, kinda, but you can run a whole series of things off it. Each button is for a different operation and those needles at the top run a giant graph so you can get data on the entire launch and see what hap
pened when, what went wrong. It’s cool.”

  The obsessions, the single-mindedness, the twitches—there was so much of Theo in Nedda. But her daughter’s wrists matched her own, as did the shape of her face, her curiosity, and her temper—parts of herself she’d learned to restrain.

  “Do you think it still works?”

  “I don’t know, maybe,” Nedda said.

  “Let’s make it work.”

  1986: Assemble

  Nedda had stared at it for months, trying to figure out where each lead used to go. It was a big series of switches and a timer that flicked on and off at intervals. She’d looked in the library to see if she could find everything it had ever launched, but the library didn’t have things like that, or NASA or the military kept it secret. But it would have been good to know. There were a million parts to a launch, the mechanical system checks, auxiliary power checks, checks for the main engines, turning the power on to the fuel cells—so many things happened way before liftoff.

  “I bet we only need one feed,” she said. Something to tell the generator when to power on. Simple. “Mr. Pete?”

  He dropped something on the ground, scratched his arm with a wrench, and grunted.

  “Mr. Pete, does the sequencer still work?”

  “Mitzi? I don’t see why she wouldn’t. She was working fine when I took her out. They were upgrading systems, moving analog to digital. Mitzi doesn’t do digital.”

  Mitzi. Nedda liked that. The sequencer looked like a Mitzi, and almost had a face where the readout would be: The needles were eyelashes; the buttons were teeth in Mitzi’s smile. It was sad that things like Mitzi weren’t used anymore. At the space center, unused rockets stood like high rises in the rocket garden, pointing into a sky they’d never get to. They didn’t fly. They didn’t grow like a garden. They stood and waited to rust.

  “If my mom gave you an equation, a time that Mitzi was supposed to turn something on and off, could you make it do that?”

  Mr. Pete was quiet. The kitchen timer went off in her mother’s coat pocket. Another two hours and seventeen minutes. One father. Two and a quarter brothers.