The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  There were so many things to say, but my thoughts were tumbling, racing. For some reason, all I could manage to get out was “Mike, I threw out all your stuff.”

  He smiled. “It’s okay,” he said. “You didn’t know.” He was so gentle and practical about it. And then he disappeared. I woke up. My heart was beating fast. I looked at the rainbow on the wall and dissolved into tears.

  Oh, Mike. You could be so kind.

  After the last of his hope was gone, and he knew he was facing down death, Mike had made me a gift. He sat at his computer, pecking out what I would come to call my Guide to Life on Earth. Through his pain, he somehow managed to fill three double-spaced pages in the months before he died. Parts were filled with names and phone numbers. Who to call if this goes wrong. Who to call if that goes wrong. Plumbers and electricians. There were also notes on bills to pay. Which Montessori school to consider after the boys had outgrown their current one. He also wrote a list of chores, a catalog of reminders of what needs to be done and how to do them. Our house has a central vacuum. Of course the dirt it sucked up had to go somewhere, but I’d never given its fate a moment’s thought. I didn’t know that it went through a filter into a bag in a tank in our basement, and I didn’t know that the bag needed to be changed before the vacuum stopped working. Mike’s list included a reminder to empty that tank.

  He must have sat there and wracked his fading memories for the things he used to do, remembering the routines of his life before cancer, task after thankless task. Those three crumpled pages were my connection to his former world. They were a physical reminder of the man he had been and the things he did in his time on this planet. His literal and metaphorical DNA were all over them. My Guide to Life on Earth was a list of answers, but it also posed for me a single, overarching question: How could I not have known?

  I had appreciated Mike when he was alive, but looking at that list, I wasn’t sure I had appreciated him enough. Maybe I hadn’t appreciated anything enough. Mike had given me the time and space to become an expert in the rest of the universe; he took care of home. Until he didn’t. Now home was an arena for amateurs.

  CHAPTER 11

  Life on Earth

  I could parent well enough. I kept the boys clean and well fed. They were always in bed on time. I answered their hard questions and set harder boundaries, even when it would have been easier to let them run free. They rarely had screen time; instead we spent hours in parks and at Walden Pond. I played tennis with Max and hiked with Alex. I even learned the special patience required to watch someone play LEGO just because they want you in the room.

  It was more the physical world that defied me, the countless interactions with strangers and objects that guide us through the course of our days and weeks. I tried to remember the little girl I had been, forced to be brave by neglect. Once I had stood beside lakes in the dark and wintered in libraries and learned things nobody else had known. I could be that person again. I could do my research.

  If Mike hadn’t left me the answer to one of my questions, I sought it elsewhere. I suspect that I became the talk among the store owners in town: the lost, sad-looking lady who stumbled in and asked questions a child could answer. I actually came to enjoy some of the encounters. A new butcher shop opened across from the train station, and I decided that the two men behind the counter were going to help me learn how to cook. I went in, bought a steak, and asked for instructions. One of the men told me to cut it into thin strips and put it in a pan with a couple of inches of oil.

  “That seems like a lot of oil. Okay, then what?”

  “Then fry it on each side for two or three minutes.”

  “Okay, then what?”

  “Then you eat it.”

  I trusted him, so I followed his oily-seeming instructions, and the boys and I sat down to a delicious steak.

  Other lessons were harder to learn. It struck me as unnecessary that Mike shopped for groceries in four different stores, so I just took Max and Alex to Whole Foods. We had dinner at the Hot Bar, where Max wolfed down curry, Alex ate fruit and entire loaves of bread, and I’d pick away at chicken and rice. Then we shopped for groceries. A few months later, I realized why people call that place Whole Paycheck. I began following Mike’s careful instructions more closely, buying staples where he had bought staples, produce where he had bought produce. I walked in his literal footsteps.

  Groceries were the hardest, I think. Not just because I didn’t really know what to buy or how to prepare whatever I lugged back home, but because there were always checkout lines, and lines gave me time to stop and think. My lonely commute on the Red Line was similarly flooded. I lost track of how often I stood in line and remembered Mike and felt the familiar rise of heat to my face. Nobody ever asked me what was wrong. People wanted to keep their distance from sadness, like it was contagious, like I had a disease. I would stand there by myself, turning into a puddle, worried that the bag boy would soon drop his head and get a mop: Cleanup in aisle four…

  The employees of Rocky’s Ace Hardware? Now they really did see me coming. They should have set up a system of alarms, a Rube Goldberg machine to lock their door the instant I darkened it. I might have had a growing army of help at home—Jessica got the boys ready for their day and babysat two evenings a week; Christine chipped in with mornings, cleaned the house, and sometimes left a dinner I could reheat; Diana was a constant during the after-school shift. But there were problems none of us could solve, for which I had to seek outside assistance. If I was walking into Rocky’s, something had gone wrong at home, not procedurally, but with the house itself, which meant that I was either crying, had just been crying, or was about to cry. One of the men who worked there, whenever he saw me, said: “Ma’am, no need for the backstory. How can I help?”

  In moments like that, I could see myself how others must have seen me: a crumpling woman, dressed in black, trapped in some kind of spiral.

  One Friday evening I went to the library. Not long after we’d moved to Concord I’d joined a book club, a group of mothers from school. One of them had asked whether I wanted to come one evening. My initial response had been: No, whatever for? But reading the book seemed optional, and I was starting a new life in a new town. I was about to drive off to my first meeting when Mike had teased me. “You won’t be able to make friends anyway. Why bother?” He said it with a smile. He knew me a little. He knew me better than anybody.

  I had still gone. Now the old book club seemed like the easiest possible reintroduction to the outside world. Step one: I had to get the book they were reading. I got off the train at Concord at 5:45 P.M. at the end of a long week. The library closed at 6:00, but I ran over and found the book. Prematurely triumphant, I headed for the checkout.

  The woman behind the counter told me that I couldn’t check out the book because I had a book overdue from another branch. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but then I remembered that Alex and I had stopped by a distant branch in the spring to kill time while Max went to a friend’s birthday party. That book had been long lost in the chaos of my house. I told the librarian there was no way I would ever find it. I would have to pay for it.

  She frowned. A lost book. For a librarian, there is no greater sin.

  “How much will it be?” I asked.

  “Ten dollars.”

  I rummaged through my purse.

  “You can’t pay for it here,” she said. She was still frowning.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have to pay for it at the branch that’s owed the book. The branch is so far away, it’s part of a different system.”

  I just wanted to check out a book. I could feel everything rushing to the surface again. There was nothing I could do to stop it.

  “If I can return it here, why can’t I pay for it here? I don’t know why you’re singling me out. I don’t know why you’re trying to make my life s
o difficult.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I work sixty hours a week. I can only come here on Friday night, in the fifteen minutes between my train getting back and when you close.”

  Now the other librarians were gathering around us. It was maybe a minute before six. They just wanted to go home. We all just wanted to go home.

  “My husband died. I have two kids. I work full-time. I just want to have a night out with my book club. BUT FIRST I NEED TO READ THE—”

  “I’ll take the ten dollars,” she said.

  * * *

  ●

  My job was a magnet, one end or the other, the push or the pull. I found my sixty hours of work each week—maybe forty at MIT, and another twenty at home—either tiresome or therapeutic, depending on my mood that day. I didn’t have a lot of patience for the drudgery of faculty meetings or campus niceties. If I was at a talk and it didn’t interest me, I walked out in the middle. Time had become so precious, I refused to waste a second of it. But when I saw the value in my work, I still threw myself into it. When I saw how it mattered to the universe, it still mattered to me. My attention just wasn’t automatic anymore—it had to be earned.

  I worked on multiple projects at once, as I often had since grad school. They were each purposeful, each related to finding other life in the universe, but I liked toggling between different approaches to the same search. Both out of interest and strategy, I’ve always thought of research as a well-structured investment portfolio. I usually have some steady, safe work on the roster, conservative but with a fairly guaranteed yield, like my atmospheric research of real, known exoplanets with my students, including our studies of planet interiors and mini-Neptunes. I’ll also dabble in something moderately risky but richer in possibility, like studying climate on rocky exoplanets—a challenge because it will be years before we can confirm today’s theories with actual observations. And then I take a few really big swings, high in risk and reward. I take on more of that kind of thing than most researchers, and it’s easily my favorite work. That’s where biosignature gases fell in my mind. So, too, ASTERIA.

  I’d made progress toward a prototype for my tiny satellites, inventing and testing precision-pointing hardware and software, and perfecting the design of the onboard telescope and its protective baffle. I worked hard to clear the rest of the path for ASTERIA to become real. After we’d laid the groundwork in the design-and-build class, my students and I were joined in our efforts by Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, where researchers work on things like missile guidance systems and submarine navigation. They also do a lot of work on space hardware. We had meetings every week, trying to solve the problems of small telescopes. We could build minuscule enough components, and we could deploy the satellite and tell it what to do, but we still couldn’t figure out how to keep it as stable as we needed it to be. While we tried to solve that issue, I used my ongoing biosignature gas research to determine what types of exoplanets deserved our focus. I thought we might be able to explore a hundred star systems or so in my lifetime; they had to be the right ones. Stumped somewhere, I tried to make progress elsewhere. I never wanted to feel as though I’d reached a dead end. I wasn’t sure I could stand it.

  I helped teach the design-and-build class again. It remained a bright spot. David Miller, the lead professor, couldn’t have been kinder. We weren’t especially close, but he had been so supportive of ASTERIA, and he had a clear-eyed, levelheaded approach to everything. I arrived for the first class, the steep rows of empty red seats slowly filling with new students. David and I sat in the front row and waited. Nobody knew what to say when they were sitting in a quiet room with me. I didn’t know what to say to David, either. But after a few moments, he turned and looked at me with a warm, disarming smile. “Welcome back,” he said. It was the right thing to say.

  This time the class would work on a new project, called REXIS. It was a proposed X-ray spectrometer, one of five remote-sensing instruments to be built for OSIRIS-REx, a NASA-funded mission. With David’s leadership, MIT had won a NASA competition to guide a graduate-student build of REXIS, and $5 million to get the job done.

  Some objects in space require us to go to them. Some are coming to us. OSIRIS-REx was a planned mission to visit an asteroid now named 101955 Bennu. (It was called 1999 RQ36 at the time.) 101955 Bennu is what we call a “carbonaceous asteroid”—the most common kind, made mostly of carbon—about five hundred meters in diameter. There is a faint possibility that 101955 Bennu will slam into the Earth sometime late in the twenty-second century.

  There is an algorithmic scale, the Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale, that classifies near-Earth objects in terms of the risk they pose to our planet. 101955 Bennu is in the second-highest risk category, with a 1-in-2,700 chance of colliding with us. It’s about one-third the size of the meteor that carved out Chesapeake Bay, so we should probably try to avoid it. (The bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a blast yield of 15 kilotons of TNT; 101955 Bennu would be the equivalent of setting off about 1,200 megatons. There are 1,000 kilotons in a megaton, and it’s better not to finish working out the math.) OSIRIS-REx would visit the asteroid and return a sample of it to Earth. Our component, REXIS, would look a little like an advanced and possibly overengineered microwave covered in gold foil. It would hitch a ride on OSIRIS-REx, land on the surface of 101955 Bennu, and take an X-ray of the entire asteroid. That would allow NASA’s scientists to confirm that the sample OSIRIS-REx brought back to Earth was representative of the whole.

  The entire mission was built on the premise that it’s better to know your enemy. It wasn’t something I’d normally help tackle—it had nothing to do with finding another Earth; it was about saving this one—but I was happy to work with my students on such a practical and necessary project. The hardware store might overwhelm me, but space hardware I could understand.

  * * *

  ●

  Can you imagine someone with much more sophisticated telescopes than ours, looking for us and seeing the orange glow of our cities at night? The lightless rectangle of Central Park? The black ribbon of the Seine finding its way through Paris? The reverie made my heart beat faster. The reality, however, was that so much of my work was still just math: theoretical, statistical, sensing not seeing. Numbers were too often all we had.

  When Mike died, our family of four became a family of three. Mathematically speaking, his departure represented a significant loss: 25 percent of our household. More critically, however, we went from an even-numbered family to an odd-numbered family. That might not seem like it should matter, but in the way our world can seem custom-built to defy left-handed people, we also live under the tyranny of even numbers. Deep down, a lot of people find something imperfect or unsatisfying in odd numbers; they’re like building kits that come one part short or with one part too many. The archetypal nuclear family, the mythical bedrock of American society, is two adults and two children. We see in those numbers balance and symmetry, a square root and division without remainders, and we have built our society on the foundation of that mathematical ideal.

  Everywhere Max, Alex, and I went, I was reminded that we were incomplete. Not just by our own accounts, but by our suburban society’s greater calculus. If you’re an adult, it’s almost always assumed that you are part of a couple. Or, if you’re not part of a couple, then you aspire to be. A table for one in a restaurant always has a second empty chair beside it, just in case you need the confirmation that you are missing someone. And if you’re a family, the working assumption is that you’re a family of four. Cars and restaurant booths, roller coasters and family tickets to the museum: Two adults and two children. Two plus two. Two by two. Four.

  I forced myself to go to work-related social events, just to get out of the house. That meant leaving the boys with Jessica. It was too soon. I almost always regretted it. Once I went to a big dinner with a guest speaker at work, unaware that most of my coll
eagues were bringing their partners. Someone said to me: “Well, you’re single, so you sit here.” What I’d once found so comforting in MIT—the eminence of logic, of bluntness, of practicality—now sometimes hurt me. Simple statements of fact had never been so cutting.

  Humans are bad at dealing with damaged humans. If people said anything to me about Mike, they almost always said the wrong thing. I have no idea what I’d do if my husband died. That’s not the best message for a widow to hear, but widows hear it all the time. I learned to break the news of Mike’s death slowly to people who didn’t know, as though they were the ones who needed protection, not me. “You know Mike was sick,” I’d start. Nod. “You know the chemo wasn’t working.” Nod. I’d keep going until their face registered the appropriate discomfort. Others would ask about Mike or “your husband” in more generic terms, and I learned that it was better to deflect those questions than answer them directly. “Why doesn’t your husband do more to help out?” or “What does your husband do for work?” Those were hard. I coached the boys on how to answer similar questions from kids at school or summer camp. We’d practice glib, vague responses, and build them into a sort of arsenal, a collection of the darkest inside jokes. “Well, he isn’t able to talk right now” or “Gee, he’s really busy at the moment” or “He’s away on a long trip.” The three of us would laugh until our laughter turned into something else.

  I went to a colleague’s wedding, and that was a form of self-harm. After he and his new wife exchanged their vows in a solemn Eastern Orthodox ceremony, I was the only single person left in the room. Then came a loud, rousing party. Everyone was having fun, drinking together and laughing together and dancing together. I left alone. I walked back to my car, found a parking ticket on the windshield, and drove back to my single bed through the first heavy snow of the winter. I didn’t know what grief triggers were then, but Eastern Orthodox weddings must be high on the list.