by Lydia Netzer
“Good afternoon,” said Dr. Miller, taking the podium. “I will waste no time in presenting our speaker for this morning, whose work you all know has been so important to our field. He is a friend of mine, and as such he has agreed to leave his work at the University of St. Petersburg to come and stay with us for a few days, expound on his work, and enlighten us as to his current research. Please welcome Dr. Nathaniel Lebernov.”
Everyone clapped.
Dr. Lebernov took the podium and waved off Dr. Miller, who sat down in the front and leaned way back, rolling his eyes up toward the ceiling. George did the same. Irene sat up straighter, her hands on the keyboard. Then Dr. Lebernov himself raised his eyes upward to the sky, taking in a big breath.
“The universe, my friends, is spinning. Spinning fast, beyond our control,” he said. “We look up at the stars, we see them flare and fade, and we are afraid.”
“He’s talking about you guys, not him,” said Dr. Miller, calling out without a microphone, “He’s not afraid.”
Dr. Lebernov made a shushing gesture with his hands and continued.
“My friends, we are all afraid of what we do not know. We are afraid of what we cannot clearly see. Of uncertainty, and chaos, and unexpected things we had no chance to predict. Chance collisions scare us, and explosions in our backyards, our heads being torn off our bodies by a sudden gust of stellar wind. What might happen to us in the future? What rock might plummet from the sky? How might we change, in an instant, forever, only because of chance? There is nothing we can do about it. No way to protect ourselves. As long as we have only these”—and he pointed to his eyes—“which are all most people have.”
“They have their eyes, and they can stare up into the sky. They know now that the stars are distant. They have a vague idea that the universe is large. They know that giant clouds of gas are burning, that rocks the size of Belgium hurtle around like bullets, and they know that they are tiny, and everything else is big, and that’s scary.
“Sometimes I wish,” he went on, “that people would still believe the earth is flat, the sun is a lightbulb behind some paper board, the stars gods.”
“Some people do,” whispered George to Irene. His breath in her ear.
“Wouldn’t that be easier?” said Dr. Lebernov. “Chaos is the most frightening phenomenon. Order, even malicious order, is at the least predictable. But the cruelty of chaos is murky, malignant in its expanse. Reason may be harsh, and difficult, but it is defensible. So in the absence of agency we create agency, in the absence of information we create myth, and we created gods to rule the heavens so that we know what is there.”
Irene snuck a glance at George and noticed he was listening to the lecture. He still had his head thrown back in a posture of disregard, but his eyes were open. He was still awake.
“But then the astronomers came and put the gods out of business. Set the sun aflame, scattered the stars across the universe, made the earth into a ball. In this crusade, we have one friend. This is mathematics.”
George leaned over and put his fingers on Irene’s laptop and typed the words “this is crap” before she pushed his hands away. “Don’t do that again,” she typed back. His fingers were long, his knuckles reddened and rough, as if he were a longshoreman instead of a physicist. Those hands felt strong when she pushed on them, and in a comforting way: they were warm and tough. She wished that he would put them back. She wanted to watch them flicking over the keys of her laptop, writing more letters, more words to her.
“Math dispels ignorance. Math conquers discord, and anarchy, and revolution. It is math that says 6.3184 times ten to the third. Math will see us through.”
George made gagging noises in his throat and shut his eyes. She felt free, with his eyes shut, to look at him, to think about touching him, about tearing at him, about striking her hands against his wide collarbones, being encircled in his long arms. I want to take my clothes off, she thought. I want to be naked for him, press up on him, naked as a clam. I want this. She had never, ever wanted this before. And this was why she couldn’t stop looking at George, all through the lecture. She was surprised to be wanting him. It wasn’t like expecting a red circle and finding a blue one. It was more like unfolding an envelope and finding water. Looking into a hole and seeing the sky. She didn’t know when she had been so surprised.
After it was over, she snapped her laptop shut and said, “Well, Dr. Dermont, thanks to you my notes for today consist of the word ‘crap.’ And here I thought you would only impede my work if I dated you.”
“You could have taken notes,” he said. He stood up.
“That’s true,” she said, relenting. “And anyway, I probably wouldn’t have taken notes. Most of that lecture is in his published work, here and there, if you piece it together. If you take the spirit of the thing.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to take the spirit of the thing. I thought we were to singe the spirit into a blackened pile of ash and then count every molecule in the pile and call that the answer. Isn’t that what he just said?”
“George, you’re a dreamer, I’m afraid,” she said, throwing her laptop bag over her shoulder and letting him out of the row of seats. She gave him a smile. She reached out and took his hand. It was almost as if her body acted on its own, and before she knew it she was holding one big hand of his in both of hers, and the bones inside it were moving around, pulled and pressed by all his soft tissue, and she grabbed it, and held it, and then dropped it as if it had become too hot.
“I said you’re a dreamer,” she repeated snappishly, and stalked off.
He followed her out into the hallway and down the stairs.
“Where are you going?” asked George.
“My office,” she said. Now is when he will say something about liking my skirt and wanting to talk me out of it, she thought. It will happen right now.
“Do you want to come out on my boat sometime?”
“Your boat? What are you, rich?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s new money, though, so I don’t have an attitude yet. I’m all bewildered and charming about it.”
There were still people walking around in the building, waiting to have their moment with the great scientist. Can I have your autograph? I just love your equation, they would say. She planned to send an e-mail later. I am Dr. Irene Sparks of the Toledo Institute of Astronomy. I have read your book, it would say. I have these comments about your lecture.
Stiff, dry, intelligent. Just the kind of person you would want to send a stiff, dry, intelligent e-mail back to.
*
“What would you say to Lebernov after this evening,” she said to George, letting him walk her down the sidewalk.
“I’d tell him he had no soul.”
“You would not.”
“Dare me?” George stopped on the sidewalk. “Because we can go back in there right now.”
“George!” she said, and pulled him by the elbow so that they were walking again. Her hand stayed on his elbow, that wonderfully working hinge that connected the upper part of his arm to the bottom part. And they were walking along the sidewalk with her hand inside his elbow, her knuckles bumping up against his ribs. She had to reach up to hold on to him. He didn’t seem to notice.
“I’m surprised Miller didn’t stand up and bash his skull in with a chair leg,” said George. “I know he doesn’t buy into all that age of enlightenment claptrap.”
“Claptrap? Did you really just use the word ‘claptrap’?”
George growled at her and smiled. She liked the look of his face. She didn’t know which direction he had chosen to walk in, but she didn’t care. She kept looking up, seeing his face outlined against the night trees and the orange glow of street lamps. Fuck and run, she thought. Might not be so bad.
“You know,” said George, sort of wistfully, “everyone takes an astronomy course in college because looking at the stars is so cool and romantic. They get taught the constellations and everything, and how thi
s used to be thought and that used to be believed. And then we get into calculating the distance in light-years from here to there, and everyone quits because they don’t like the math. I mean forget parallax.”
“It’s parsecs,” she said quietly.
“Right, parsecs, yes. But you don’t get what I’m saying. I don’t like the math. But I stayed with it. The math is a necessary evil, but the stars are still stars. It’s still cool and romantic.”
She looked over at him again, and he had a little smile on his face.
“Did you want to be an astronaut when you were little?” she said.
“No,” he said seriously, “always an astronomer.”
They were nearing the west edge of campus, where the reproduction of the ancient temple ruins were. Now George reached out to her, and took her by the hand, and led her through some of the rocks, and she let him because she actually was small and genuinely did need help over the climbing parts. For a while they were just climbing. There was a path around on the other side, but they didn’t use it. Then they were standing in the middle of the temple where the pillars were still in a rectangle, a dais at one end.
George pointed up to the night sky. It was really beautiful, the dark sky and all the stars, outlined by the stones and nothing else around.
“A star is being born right now,” he said.
“Stars aren’t born, George. And they don’t die. Lithium, hydrogen, fusion: that’s not birth. Just call it what it is. Don’t engage in that stupid anthropomorphizing garbage.”
“I like thinking about it that way,” said George.
“But I always thought,” said Irene, “that it was stupid to wander around and write poetry and sing. Elves do it. Not astronomers.”
“Really? You never read poetry?”
“Sometimes,” Irene admitted. “My mother read it to me.”
“Bless her. I like her already,” said George.
They stood under the bright sky, and she felt small next to the big columns, and the ruined room with no ceiling framed the stars. George was just standing there looking up. Maybe some people don’t feel scared when they think about comets and supernovas. Maybe they think it is wonderful.
“So do you want to?” said George.
“No!” she said automatically, and in an instant she was brought back out of the heavens, into her skin and her brain, which was wondering how many girls George had plundered on that dais. How many girls had he had under these clouds, being a poet like he wanted to be, shunning convention, throwing out math with a dramatic, sexy flourish? He would say, Look, Cassiopeia, isn’t it beautiful, and the girl would swoon, and he would put the moves on. His rough hand on her back, his face drawing down to hers, the warmth of his chest against her breasts.
“I mean go out on the boat,” he said. She stared at him.
“Um, I don’t know,” she said. She thought about how it would be. Bright sun. Sparkling smile. Probably wine. Wind. Freshness. “My mother just died.”
“Then we should go right away,” he said, “for best stargazing. I can go so far into Lake Erie, we may be able to still see her, up in the sky.”
“Wow,” she said, “That’s not what I was thinking at all.”
*
That morning, she had gone to an appointment at the funeral home.
Bernice’s body had been taken to the default funeral home for people whose bodies landed in the city morgue. Irene didn’t know whether to feel bad about this or not. The funeral home was called Metropolitan Funeral Home. It had a generic flavor. A red brick building in the shape of an H, and in the center a glassy lobby. One branch held a large chapel and one branch held administrative offices. One branch held the coffin showroom (there was a brochure titled “Merchandise”), and the other branch was entirely closed off. That’s where the bodies are, thought Irene, taking note of the way the building was mapped. That’s where my mother is. Back there in that part, next to where I parked. She’s inside, and she’s about to be lit on fire. As soon as I sign the paperwork, she will burn.
Irene was met by a smiling man in a black suit, who guided her to a luxurious-looking seat in the hallway between the offices and the chapel. There she waited for her consultant.
“I don’t want to buy a casket,” she had said earlier to Belion, who had called the funeral home on the phone for her. “I don’t want to buy an urn.”
“She doesn’t want to buy a casket or an urn,” Belion had reported into the phone. “She will come in and just sign papers. That’s all she wants to do.”
Belion had waited, his listening face on.
“Don’t you have something lying around to put the ashes in? Something regular?”
Irene felt she should have known which funeral home had exsanguinated generations of Sparks women, should have recognized the very building where they had lain in state. But she really had no idea what had happened to all the other generations of Sparks women. There was no record. Irene might be able to turn up something in her mother’s attic, but right here, right now, the Metropolitan Funeral Home, with all its easy-to-vacuum carpet and all its posh-looking chairs that you could wipe up with a paper towel, had been chosen for her.
There was a large flat-screen TV on the wall. On the screen, there were pictures of dead people in rotation, displayed with information on their funerals and snippets of quotations from their families. Irene sat in horror that her mother might come up in the rotation, smiling patiently, next to a blank space, or worse, a note that read, “Bernice Sparks, survived by her daughter, who declined a funeral, declined an urn, declined to give us anything with which to fill this space. Will she be missed?”
A half door swung open and a young woman called out, “For Bernice Sparks?” Irene came to the half door, and beyond it she could see a very pedestrian sort of office, with filing cabinets and rolling office chairs, just the sort of place where accounting is done or billing is accomplished. She received some forms on a clipboard and retrieved a check for several thousand dollars from her purse. The transaction was made over the half door, Irene never stepping inside onto the vinyl tile, and the billing person never stepping outside onto the appropriately colored carpet.
“Thank you,” said the woman in a hushed voice. “You’re all set.”
“All set for what?” said Irene. Beside her on the flat screen, the parade of dead people continued in silence. They were all so old. Most had tubes coming out of their faces, or wisps of white hair falling into their eyes.
“You’re all set.”
“Are they going to—” Irene felt tears coming into her eyes. She pushed her mouth shut.
“They will cremate your mother and go ahead with the death certificate, as you specified.”
“When?”
“We do our cremations at night, ma’am,” said the young woman. “So, probably tonight.”
Irene hesitated.
“Did you need to view the charging?”
“No,” she said quickly. She wiped at her eyes. “No, I just wanted to know when.”
Irene knew from the Metropolitan Funeral Home Web site that the inside of a crematorium is called a retort. What a strange word for it. She lingered by the half door.
“Did you want to look at an urn?”
Irene turned and walked back to the lobby, pushed the door open, and walked out to her car. She went to work at the institute. The weather was beautiful, the roads clear of traffic, and she felt, looking around, as if the world was showing her what a good thing it was to be alive. All the fall-blue sky, all the sparkling windows and the dark taut wires crisscrossing the air between her and space. In the coldest branch of the letter H, her mother lay dead in a refrigerator, and soon she would be all burned up in a fire. Burned the rest of the way. Her first burning had happened many years ago. It had not killed Bernice. But you might argue that it had killed her daughter.
13
Fire is an astronomical necessity. On stars, everything burns.
When Irene was
six years old, her mother burned their house down. It was not an accident, but it was not suicide. The difference between an accident and a suicide is that someone dies. So the fire was not a suicide because Bernice did not die. Had she died, it would have been full-on suicide, because the fire was absolutely set by her. Much time was spent among neighbors, discussing whether the fire was set by her on purpose. It was actually caused by drunken mishandling of a smudging stick, and a profusion of oil-soaked silk scarves.
Was it a suicide? What death is not a suicide? What choices does a human really make, and where does the fault lie? When you have determined what constitutes “on purpose,” then you will know.
The police had questioned everyone, and no one knew what happened. Bernice did not know. She was screaming when she woke up, screaming louder than anyone had ever screamed. At the time the fire started, she was unconscious. She had been drinking. She had been smudging. That’s all they knew. Whether she purposefully laid down a smoldering smudge stick on a pile of oil-soaked scarves, or whether she had genuinely fallen asleep with a smudge stick in her hand and cascaded over herself onto the scarves, or whether the scarves and the smudge stick had not been involved at all was unclear. You could say that when you take that first big gulp of liquor, the rest is like falling off a log.
Irene did not remember waking up that night, but the smoke was probably making her choke. She most likely fell out of bed coughing, her eyes bleeding tears. Taught by her schoolteacher to crawl along the floor in the event of a fire, she stayed on her knees and crawled. This is what they learned from the bruises on her knees: she crawled fast. Irene did not remember crawling out. She must have crawled down the stairs, maybe calling “Mommy, mommy!” or maybe just trying to breathe. It doesn’t matter what was poignant or what was real. It only matters that Irene went down the stairs and, finding her mother lying there, on fire, she had begun to kick her and pull her burning hair. What was known for sure was that Irene had kicked and dragged and prodded and forced her mother out onto the porch, where the firefighters were arriving. And they saved Bernice and Irene from that fire.