by Brian Hodge
Except I never knew how to describe the photo in a way that would do it justice. You had to see it, in as high a resolution as possible, and even then there was no guarantee it would make an impression. Just looks like bugs splattered on a windshield to me, someone in high school said, probably before moving on to some vital topic like skateboarding or getting stoned.
“Infinity,” I said. “It showed infinity. There are about three thousand objects in it. Ten thousand in a later one called the Ultra Deep Field. Some of them are bright. Some are so dim you can barely see them, because the light’s coming from so much farther away. Some are visually distinct, others not so much, they’re like streaks or pale blobs. Lots of different colors. But they’re not stars. Almost every single object is an entire galaxy. Spiral galaxies, some of them, you can make out the arms. Thousands of galaxies captured in this one picture, with billions of stars in each one. Planets circling the stars. They’re all just floating in the black. The very dimmest one in the Ultra Deep Field, it’s the one farthest away…its light has been traveling our way almost since the beginning of the universe.
“And the most mind-boggling thing of all to me was finding out what a tiny area of space it actually represents,” I told her, on a roll now. “The perspective from Earth…if you held your hand up to the sky, you could cover the area they shot with a fraction of the nail on your little finger.
“So that’s why astronomy. Everything that’s out there waiting to be found? I want to touch it, I want to be a part of it.”
All of it was true, every word. The wonder had always been palpable for me. But I couldn’t get into the rest of it with her: how there was no place on Earth I could go that would seem far enough away from my family, even if it was a family that didn’t want me in the first place, because there was always the possibility that they could change their minds. Antipodal points on the planet would still not be far enough away. So I started thinking in terms of light years.
“You make it sound almost not dorky,” she said, teasing. Mostly. “But why Seattle? I don’t get that.”
“The University of Washington has a great program. What’s not to get?”
She pointed toward the window, the chilly onslaught that makes Seattle renowned for its coffee houses and bookstores, its ports in the storm. “That. Half the time you can’t even see the sky. Remember last winter and spring? Ninety-three straight days of rain. How are you going to look at the stars if you can’t even see the moon?”
I should’ve guessed. “There’s an observatory on campus, but that’s the least of what we use. The better one is about a hundred miles east, on Manastash Ridge, in the Cascades. For the real heavy lifting, we’re tied into Apache Point Observatory, in the mountains in New Mexico. Grad students get to use that one over the Internet.”
She didn’t say anything for a while, taking it all in, I guessed—not the specifics, but the presence of them, the hard evidence of this gulf between us. I was an alien being to her, humanoid in appearance, but something else upon closer inspection. Maybe it made her suspicious. Aliens, except for the ones in Spielberg films, always have a dire agenda, always want something that makes the close encounter a calamity.
I just adored her physicality. The feel of her, the smell and taste of her, the sound of her. It was grounding. They don’t call it earthiness for nothing. Without it, I might get lost in the cosmos, something I’d always craved, but at the same time I knew there was only ever going to be one world I would be allowed to function in. So I needed the lure back.
“Can I ask you a question without you taking it wrong?” she said.
“I hope so.”
“What good is it?” Ashleigh spoke tentatively, as if setting a foot on a freshly frozen pond. “Suppose you looked at stars and planets until you couldn’t even remember them all. And found out everything about them that you wanted to know. How does that make anybody else’s life any better, is what I’m getting at. How does it make my life better?”
It was a good question. Naïve, maybe, but good.
I could’ve told her that, with the original space program, going to the moon and all, it had been estimated that every dollar spent on these grand endeavors ultimately rippled outward to generate something like $38 of growth for the greater economy. And then there’s the technological trickle-down. Everybody knows that, without astronauts, there never would’ve been Tang.
“Maybe it wouldn’t,” I told her instead. “But just ignoring it isn’t an option. That would be like locking yourself in the bathroom for the rest of your life because you’re not interested in the rest of the world. Without wonder, there’s no progress. Nothing gets done, nobody goes anywhere. If you don’t exercise your capacity for wonder…well, use it or lose it. A civilization without wonder is a civilization that’s starting to atrophy and die.”
Which, I feared, was already happening all around us.
Even so, when you really thought about it, it seemed strange even to me to be so drawn to, so in love with, something so unutterably hostile. Space may be enticing, but nothing about it is welcoming. The subzero vacuum of it alone would kill you in a minute or two. You’re already flirting with death at the Kármán Line, just 62 miles from home, an hour’s drive if you could do it vertically. Breech that, and space is populated by terrestrial worlds whose gravity would render you unable to walk, and gas giants you would sink into until the pressure crushed you to jelly. It’s home to black holes and radiation that would destroy you in ways most people don’t have the capacity to imagine.
It’s populated by worlds whose atmospheres are thick with poisons. Worlds where the lakes and the rain aren’t water, but liquid methane. Planets that would immediately burn you to a cinder, and moons with cryovolcanoes that erupt torrents of ice. Worlds where the winds blow faster than the speed of sound. Watery moons whose surface is a rind of ice as thick as a glacier, where gravitational forces are continually ripping crevasses that fill and refreeze under your feet. Even on our nearest neighbor, Mars, dust storms churn three times the height of Mount Everest. Rocks the size of states hurtle through the vacuum at a velocity that makes bullets look slow, and someday, one of them will find this planet, too.
And that’s without even getting into the question of other forms of life that are almost certainly out there, and what they would make of us. What they might do to us out of intelligence and intent, or merely because they would regard us as so inferior as to be not worth worrying about.
Nothing can play havoc with your sense of scale better than looking deeply into the night skies. It can leave you feeling immense and privileged one minute, minuscule and insignificant the next.
And that was quite enough of that. Ashleigh had asked, and didn’t seem sorry she had, but really, there’s a threshold for anybody who isn’t stoned.
We might have been happy to while away the rest of the morning in bed, after more earthbound pursuits. Except she had to check her phone and find a voice mail from her neighbor Rafael, frantic that he’d misplaced his key to her place, and couldn’t get in to feed and walk her dog.
“Could you run me home?” she asked. “Like now?”
Clothing, shoes, getting out the door—Ashleigh was two gears ahead of me for all of it, driven by the kind of urgency that only kicks in when you’re racing the threat of animal waste. She sprinted through the rain, splashing fans of water along the sidewalk, then stood by my Toyota, impatient, waiting for me to catch up.
Then she looked through a window and went rigid, and backed away.
And nothing was ever the same again.
“There’s some guy sleeping in your backseat,” she said.
* * *
We may have been brothers, but Cameron and I had never looked anything alike. There was apparently more father than mother in our DNA, but we’d each had a different father.
I’d ended up wiry and none too tall, and night and Seattle clouds suited me fine, because I’d always been too fair-skinned to get along well with the sun. All i
n all, this seemed very much like the man I’d seen in the photos of my father that used to come in the mail.
Of Cameron’s father, nothing was ever said, at least not around me, although our mother’s refusal to talk about him didn’t seem rooted in any lingering resentment or trauma. To the contrary, she would light up at the thought of him, then keep those thoughts to herself, as if it was enough to dwell in memories of a better place and time, and they weren’t for me to share.
I wasn’t his son. Maybe that was the core of the problem.
Just having Cameron to go by, he must have been tall, must have been athletic. He must’ve had a keen mind, although not without its vulnerabilities—he had gotten mixed up with a head case like my mother, after all. He must have had great hair that could be worn long or short and look perfect either way. He must’ve had reassuring yet distant eyes and a confident smile. The last I’d seen of Cameron, he looked like the type of kid who was going to grow up to be president of whatever he wanted, from student council to the country.
Not now, though.
Still, I knew him the moment I saw him, getting that first clear look at him after banging on the window and motioning for him to get out of my car.
“Are your kidneys doing okay these days?” I asked.
Not the first thing most people would say to a sibling they’d not seen for more than a decade, but then, we were way off any scale you could chart with a mean, median, or mode.
He didn’t even get it.
“I once asked our mother why she was even keeping me around,” I said. “You know what she told me? ‘What if something happens and Cameron needs a kidney. You’d be the best match.’ That was her answer. I was your spare parts cabinet.”
He looked as if he might snicker. Go on, laugh, I dared him. Laugh, and I’ll punch you in the face. But he didn’t. Maybe it was a wince at the ugliness of a mother telling her grade-school-age son such a thing, and I was seeing only what I wanted to see.
“I never knew about that,” he said.
“Maybe not. But you couldn’t have missed the attitude that went with it.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother,” Ashleigh said in a perplexed and forcibly sunny tone, as she pressed close to my side. It really was sweet of her, in a misguided way: She was actually trying to lighten the moment.
“I don’t. There’s just this guy. It’s not the same thing.”
I pushed past him to reopen the car door for Ashleigh and get her out of the rain, to get us both out of the rain and down the road. Dog shit was still the higher agenda.
“You’re not curious?” he called out to me.
“No.” Although when I looked at him over the roof of my car, I hesitated too much, lingered too long. He saw through it to the truth. Of course I was curious.
“Family,” he said. “It’s where they have to take you in when nobody else will.”
That earned him a spiteful laugh, but then the implications widened and the obvious question occurred to me. Which he answered before I had a chance to ask.
“She’s been dead for two years.”
My mother, dead. The words computed but didn’t generate any reaction inside. It was just minor data. She was an outmoded, irrelevant variable whose status had changed, and if it signified nothing, that was only because she’d been dead to me for years, and that was because there was no evidence I had ever been alive to her in the first place.
“How?”
“Pancreatic cancer,” he said. “It was quick, after the diagnosis. It often is. She had about three months left by then.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d thought of this woman as Mom. Words have more than meaning; they have nuance. Mother is a neutral fact of biology. Mom is a title, and can be squandered, relinquished. An altogether different woman had earned it in the vacuum left behind.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, a reflex action. He’d dropped a quarter into the jukebox and that was the recording that came out. “I’m sure it was painful for you. But I have to go now.”
“Just hear me out, one quick thing, and if it doesn’t mean anything to you, then I’ll be gone when you get back and you won’t see me again. Okay?”
I waited by the driver’s door, still staring silently over the car roof. My coat was an armored shell and the hood was a helmet and the rain pattered loudly on it, and if I didn’t hear Cameron over it, I wasn’t going to ask him to repeat it. He was soggy, he was rumpled, he was road-worn, but he still looked to be doing all right. The wool overcoat looked pricey, and so did the sweater beneath it. My brother, the golden vagrant.
“It’s true, she treated us in two very different ways. Neither of us knew anything different, and we didn’t choose it,” he said. “You got the worse end of this, I realize that. But that doesn’t mean we both weren’t her victims, each in our own way.”
Unfortunately, I heard every word.
I could choose to be bitter.
Or I could choose to concede that he was probably right.
* * *
I thought I’d handled the surprise of seeing him well enough, and maybe I had. But midway to Ashleigh’s apartment, the questions started to bubble from underneath the rocks.
He’d tracked me down, yes, that much was apparent, and it would’ve been no great challenge. I hadn’t changed my name, or tried to cover my tracks. I’d never had anything to fear. I’d been unwanted. When, by the last year of middle school, I’d gone home less and less, staying away for longer stretches of time, and finally had been informally adopted by my best friend’s family, the Cotterells, it was no big deal under my former roof. My mother didn’t object.
But when had Cameron done it? How long had he been watching? He knew which car was mine, even though I tried to drive it as little as possible. I preferred riding my bike, which meshed easier with a campus-based life.
“I thought you always locked your car,” Ashleigh said. “Like, religiously.”
That was another thing. “I do.”
“Then how did he get in?”
“Maybe I forgot.”
She shook her head. “You don’t forget. That whole absent-minded scientist thing? That’s not you.”
And how had he gotten to my neighborhood? For all I knew, he had a Lexus parked the next block over. Moreover, he’d scarcely looked at Ashleigh, as if he already knew everything he felt he needed to know about her. Not even looking? That wasn’t a typical guy’s reaction on seeing her for the first time. Unless he was gay, just not into her gender. If he was, it would’ve been a later discovery. By the time I never went home again, he was fifteen and enthusiastically into girls.
“Do you trust him?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You make it sound like you’d disapprove if I did.”
“I don’t think I would. Trust him, I mean. If I were you.” She looked at me the way you look at something when you’ve noticed a detail that’s eluded you before. “Did your mother actually say that to you…what if he needs a kidney?”
“She actually did.”
“That’s really fucked up.”
“So was she.”
“You don’t owe him anything.”
Maybe I didn’t, or at least nothing beyond a hearing out, whatever he’d come to say. Although I’d never looked at it this way, he was right: We were both her victims, even if I hated the word. Its baggage, its weight. Victim. It was like something you were supposed to drag everywhere you went while insisting you wouldn’t let it define you. Survivor was better, but I still found something condescending in the term.
Products—that was the one I liked. We were her products, the result of two divergent manufacturing processes, and I’d actually been the lucky one. She’d repelled me. With Cameron, she’d had the proximity, and many more years, to warp him. It had been easy for me, back then, to drift into resentment, wondering why it couldn’t be me, why couldn’t I have this special bond with her too, and what was so wrong with me that I didn’t.
I could be glad, finally, that I’d been spared.
“Was he mean to you?” Ashleigh asked.
“No more than any other big brother would’ve been,” I said. “After a point, it was more like he studied me.”
A couple minutes later I let her off at her apartment, and she hugged me, a different hug than I was accustomed to, tight around the neck, and despite the urgency to get here she was reluctant to let me go, to send me back to this rogue asteroid that had come crashing into our orbit.
* * *
Home, for me, was the top floor of a triplex, an old blue house on 18th Avenue NE, a few blocks north of campus. Its bottom floor had been subdivided into front and back halves, with the smaller second floor left intact, except for the subtle amputation scars where the inside staircase had been, and was no more.
When I got back, Cameron was nowhere to be seen, and I circled the house in a peculiar, unwarranted panic, then looked up at my door, at the top of a gray wooden stairway grafted onto the south side of the house. If he’d broken into my car, then it was likely he would have no trouble breaking into my home.
But then he came strolling out of the front half, as if he’d been watching for me through a window, and behind him followed my neighbor Lara. They were laughing like old friends, and for no good reason I could pin to a corkboard I decided I didn’t like it. He’d charmed his way into her life in the span of my twenty-minute absence, a complete stranger she’d let in off the sidewalk. Lara was sweet, and she was open, and as good a neighbor as you could ever hope to land next to, but even she couldn’t be this naïve.
“I didn’t know you had a brother!” she said.
“Don’t judge him too harshly,” Cameron told her. “You know how these science nerds are. They’d forget their own heads if they weren’t attached.”
Now it was starting to needle at me. It was as though he’d been in the car with us, eavesdropping as Ashleigh stated precisely the opposite. Or was he only playing on stereotypes, and seeing anything more to it just my imagination?