by Peter Walker
‘She’s mad with me,’ he thought. ‘I wonder why.’
The American sky, the horizon, was all lit up as if expecting visitors from space. The pick-up turned down a narrower road, hem-stitched with dark trees. After a while the lights of a police cruiser appeared in the distance, coming towards them, and went past.
‘He’ll be back,’ said Caspar, nodding his head several times as if agreeing with someone else.
Caspar was thin and dark, and clever like his mother. He worked part-time as a security guard at the mall at Tyson’s Corner and studied business administration at night school. He looked sure of himself and rather amused at the human race: he didn’t seem to mind or even notice that he was right in only about the same proportion of cases as the rest of mankind.
‘So who’s there?’ said Jojo.
‘Where?’ said Toby.
‘At your place. At your mother’s.’
‘Oh, well,’ said Toby, feeling relieved. It was a normal question, he thought, perhaps he and Jojo had resumed normal communication.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s Mom, and Chip, my step-father—’
‘Step-pop,’ said Caspar.
‘Step-pop,’ said Toby.
Chip had once referred to himself in this style and the boys, then teenagers who found everything adults did richly comic, had heard him.
‘And Granddad. He’s my man.’
‘What does he do?’
‘Oh, Lord,’ said Toby. ‘He’s retired. He sits on the couch.’
The police cruiser came up behind them. Its lights flashed red and blue in the mirror and the siren sounded a single wail.
Caspar pulled over. The road ahead was very dark. The state trooper came up to the driver’s window. He peered in at Caspar. He looked worried, like a man presented with grievous household bills. He took Caspar’s licence, then asked him to step out of the vehicle. He and Caspar went to the back of the pick-up and stood in the headlights of the police car. Then Caspar was left standing there while the trooper walked round the pick-up to look at it. Caspar stood motionless and looked at the back of Toby’s and Jojo’s heads. The trooper bent down at the passenger window. Toby pressed the button and the window came down.
‘Where you folks off to?’ said the trooper.
‘Middleburg,’ said Toby.
‘To see a comet,’ said Jojo.
The trooper looked at her sharply, picking up the accent.
‘Meteors,’ said Toby. ‘It’s a meteor shower, officer.’
The policeman suddenly looked relieved, thankful.
‘Oh, I heard about that,’ he said. ‘You folks have a good evening now.’
He went away and spoke to Caspar who came back and got in the cab of the truck. The trooper came back and looked in the passenger window again.
‘Where you from?’ he said to Jojo.
‘Australia.’
‘Australia!’ he said, smiling. He didn’t sound the ‘l’. ‘Orstraya,’ he said again. ‘You folks have a good night now.’
They drove on. The police car stayed where it was for a while then did a sudden U-turn and went away in the other direction. In Caspar’s truck, they all thought separately about the encounter for a minute. Jojo started to laugh.
‘Did you see?’ she cried. ‘That was so funny.’
‘What was so funny about it?’ said Toby.
‘He had sugar on his chin,’ said Jojo. ‘I couldn’t work out what it was. Right there.’
She touched Toby on the upper round of his chin.
‘Good,’ he thought, ‘we’re all right again.’ He thought briefly of growing a beard just under his lower lip.
‘Icing sugar,’ said Jojo. ‘He must have been eating a sugar doughnut. All alone in his police car. In Virginia.’
‘Yeah, that’s funny,’ said Caspar.
‘So what did he do, before he hit the couch?’ said Jojo, reverting to the subject of Bernard.
‘He was an eye surgeon,’ said Toby. ‘He cut corneas.’
‘Is that a pun?’ said Jojo.
‘No,’ said Toby. ‘He’s in the ophthalmologists’ hall of fame.’
‘Ha,’ said Caspar.
‘I’m serious,’ said Toby. ‘There is one. Bernard went to the Soviet Union to learn some new technique. Radial corneal surgery. He used to go there a lot. When he came back he would go talk to the CIA. He kept his eyes and ears open in Russia. “You were a spy,” I said to him. “I was not a spy,” he said. “They used you,” I said. “On the contrary,” he said, “I used them. I was against the Soviet Union before those boys were even born.” ’
‘Here we go,’ said Caspar. They stopped at a wide gate with a sign that said: Mickie Gordon Memorial Park. Caspar drove in and they went bumping over the open grass.
‘Plenty people had the same idea,’ said Caspar.
Other headlights were roving slowly in the dark, and more parked cars and SUVs showed up here and there in Caspar’s own headlights.
‘Here, I guess,’ said Caspar, stopping. ‘It’s all the same view, hey?’
He pointed skywards with his forefinger. They sat there for a moment, then unbuckled seat belts and all got out of the vehicle.
‘We have sleeping bags, we have airbeds, we have blankets, we have coffee, we have a little whisky to go in the coffee,’ said Toby. ‘And cushions.’
‘I’m going to take a look around,’ said Caspar and departed, vanishing instantly on the unlit sward. One smudge of horizon light showed, in the east, from Washington.
‘So,’ said Jojo. ‘Just what, I mean just what exactly, is all this?’
‘What do you mean?’ said Toby.
‘I mean just what exactly are we here for?’ said Jojo.
‘What do you mean “what are we here for?” We’re here for—’
‘What I mean,’ said Jojo, ‘is why are we here, with him?’
‘Who?’
‘Caspar.’
‘Don’t you like Caspar?’
‘I like Caspar. I’m crazy about Caspar. But I want to see you. I want to be with you. I haven’t seen you for three and a half weeks, twenty-four and a half days, and I look forward to flying in and meeting you and seeing you and here we are out in the middle of nowhere with Caspar and whisky and coffee. I’m jet-lagged, remember. I’ve flown eleven thousand miles. I want to see you and I want to go to sleep.’
‘I thought you’d like it,’ said Toby. ‘I thought you’d like doing this. You’ve never been to America really, only LA, and I thought you’d like it driving out here into the country, I thought you’d like to see the Leonids. I mean we could turn round and go straight back to town and creep around the house not waking everyone, though we’d be bound to wake up Mom and Gillian, not to mention Bernard, though he’s stone deaf, and Chip, he’s a whole lot of fun, I can tell you, but if that’s what you want, then we’ll do that.’
‘Well, how do I know if that’s what I want?’ cried Jojo. ‘I’ve never met your mother so how do I know if I want to wake her, though I’ve always wanted to come to Washington and meet your family but that’s hardly this, is it, here, is it?’
She waved her arm, unseen, at the night.
‘Well it is,’ said Toby, ‘in a way it is, I mean there’s Washington right there’ – he pointed, also unseen, at the light pollution – ‘and here am I, and Caspar more or less grew up at my house—’
‘Oh, Toby, all I wanted was to be alone with you, is that so bad, is that so difficult?’
‘Well, I wanted to be alone with you, too, that’s why I thought of coming straight out here instead of Barleycorn Street with the whole family breathing down our necks, that’s why I asked Caspar for the truck and then he said “Sure,” but then he said “I want to see those meteors too.” So what was I supposed to say? “No, no – I’m taking your truck and you can’t come”? Could I say that? Could I?’
‘I don’t see why not. Why not? Why did you need his truck anyway?’ said Jojo. ‘You’ve got a car. Haven’
t you got a car? Why do we need his truck?’
‘Well, I thought we could lie on the flatbed and, you know, look up. I thought it would be nice. I thought that would be fun,’ said Toby, but his heart was sinking. Why didn’t he take Candy’s car? he wondered. Why did he take the Caspar option? Was Jojo right? Was he secretly avoiding being alone with her? Jojo had accused him before of not loving her – not sufficiently, not intensely, entirely. Was she right? Or was it rather that the more she accused him, the less sure he felt of himself, and then the less he did in fact love her, for causing this uncertainty, this anxiety?
‘Aha,’ said Caspar, manifesting himself out of the dark. He leaned in and turned on the cab light. He looked amused. He gave the impression, in fact, of having overheard the conversation between the unhappy lovers. A lesser spirit might have been affronted by what had been said, but Caspar was not. It was not in nature, his expression seemed to say, it was beyond the realms of possibility, that he should be surplus to requirements.
‘Let’s get us comfortable here,’ Caspar said, shining a torch into the back of the pick-up. ‘Any dam’ nigger can make himself comfortable. That’s the wisdom my Wesleyan forefathers handed down to me.’
He leapt onto the back of the truck and wrapped a blanket round himself.
‘Where’s these shooting stars anyway?’ he said.
He held out his hand.
Jojo, despite herself so to speak, put one foot on the tow-bar and let Caspar haul her up. Caspar had a gap between his two front top teeth which for some reason added to his air of self-assurance. He was not only amused, his teeth indicated: he knew what to do next. He now lit a marijuana joint and inhaled deeply.
‘This – this – this—’ he said, pointing at the joint while also trying to hold his breath during utterance, ‘is necessary to appreciate the scale of the solar system and its – uh – uh – attendant families of – of – of—’
Jojo laughed. Toby felt relieved. There was a problem, he thought. He had a problem, they had a problem, but for the immediate moment the problem would not present itself. He unzipped the goose-down bag and put it round Jojo’s shoulders, and then he pumped up an airbed with the plastic hand-pump.
‘Where you folks headin’?’ said Caspar, standing against the night-sky in his blanket. ‘Orstraya? Well, I’ll be doggoned. You have a nice evening in Orstraya, you hear?’
Jojo laughed again. Toby lit the halogen lantern and put it on the roof of the cab. Someone screamed across the dark field. Some teenagers went past in a car with its doors hanging open.
‘Oh, yeah – let me tell you my dream the other night,’ said Caspar. ‘I was in this house in Washington and I saw my watch start to run backwards. Then my beer glass, when I emptied it, filled up of its own accord. “It’s a Scharnhorst variation,” I heard a voice say. “A local, limited backward run of time. Quite rare. Rather interesting.”
‘It had a kind of British accent, this voice. Then there was another one across the street. Another variation, I mean. I can’t remember what it was, but it was a much bigger one. Then I was on an old-style streetcar and we went crashing down the hallway of a house and then we were all sitting down to dinner. That was all right, except it was a Baltimore streetcar and we were in Washington. “Oh well,” said the voice. “It’s the break-up of space-time. It’s the end of the world. But it’s nice to see it being done so well. So . . . British.” ’
There was a pause.
‘Whaddya think?’ said Caspar.
‘Fairly nuts,’ said Toby.
‘Yeah, yeah, but you don’t get it,’ said Caspar. ‘This dream was about you. She’s got a British accent.’
‘I have not,’ said Jojo.
‘And you – you got a little twang. I can hear it. You’re turning English on me.’
‘I do not have anything remotely resembling a British accent,’ said Jojo.
‘Remotely resembling,’ said Caspar in a British accent.
‘Cheek,’ said Jojo.
Caspar did not answer. At work as a security guard he had been trialling the use of a motorised scooter. He now saw himself scooting along endless passages of the mall, skimming through the crowds, a head taller than all of them.
‘These shootin’ stars,’ he said dreamily, ‘these shootin’ stars, they were left behind in 1776. These are American meteors coming your way tonight, folks.’
‘I don’t follow,’ said Jojo.
‘Well,’ said Caspar. ‘This comet swings by the sun every thirty years, but the debris doesn’t hit us for another couple of hundred. And here comes the 1776 crop of thistles now.’
‘Oh!’ went a voice out in the dark as Caspar was speaking.
‘Tempel-Tuttle, that’s the guy who found it,’ said Caspar. ‘Crazy name, crazy guy.’
From different parts of the field people started calling out.
‘Oooh!’ they went.
‘Aaaah!’
‘Oh, wow,’ said Jojo. ‘Wow . . .’
Out of the constellation of the Lion, the debris of Tempel-Tuttle streamed above them in the night.
3
‘Radial keratotomy,’ said Bernard, ‘is the name of the procedure. As well as that, of course, we used the cryolathe, which freezes the cornea tissue and then lathe-cuts it just as you would cut the lens of a pair of glasses.’
He looked sharply at his listener to make sure she was attending, and also – she had the feeling – to check the state of her corneal tissue. She was a diplomat’s wife. Her name was Heloise. She was a handsome spare-boned woman with black hair drawn back in a – what was the word, Toby wondered – barouche, barrette, barrique? Her husband, the chargé d’affaires at the Belgian embassy, sat further down the table. These were the kind of people Chip often found and brought home. He felt that they added lustre to his dinner table, in this case, a Thanksgiving table. Heloise was on Bernard’s right. She felt slightly trapped but she brought all her powers to bear on concealment of the fact. Toby watched Bernard with, as usual, admiration. The poor old nonagenarian who wasn’t quite certain where he was – a displacement Toby didn’t necessarily buy – had vanished. Bernard sat at the head of the table in his excellent grey suit, his cuffs were gleaming, his small, neat head was combed, and gleamed as well, as with a kind of exo-cranial intelligence.
‘Now Voltaire—’ he was saying.
On his other side sat Candy. Also present were: Chip, Toby’s sister Gillian, Jojo, Race, Race’s date from the marine biology department, Chadwick and his wife Laura, Merle and Romulus.
‘Merle is coming for Thanksgiving,’ Candy announced a week before. ‘I have more reason to give thanks for Merle than anyone else on the planet.’
A place was set for Caspar but he hadn’t showed up. It was four in the afternoon. As usual, Toby thought, Candy had got up to some tricks with the seating plans. She loved arranging seating plans. This time she had put Toby next to Race’s date. But why? Only to annoy him, he guessed. He didn’t want to meet Race’s date. He didn’t like Race’s dates. He had never in fact reconciled himself to the divorce of his parents. On the other hand, he didn’t much like seeing Race at Barleycorn Street. He loved his father but on these family occasions there was this forced cheer in the air as if they – Race and Candy – were secretly looking back at something complex and sad and far away. Was it their break-up? Or was it the fact they had married at all? That was a fear of Toby’s.
‘I myself played a part – a small part, but I am pleased to think a useful one,’ said Bernard, ‘in designing the microkeratome, which, as you may know, has an oscillating blade to open a flap in the cornea. At one stage I went to sit at the feet of the illustrious José Barraquer, in Bogotá. Now José was a very odd chap – he adored fish—’
‘Adored what?’ said Heloise.
‘Fish!’ said Bernard irritably. ‘But Slava – he was a genius. Slava—’
‘Who is Slava?’ said Heloise.
‘Slava?’ said Bernard. He looked at Heloise stern
ly. Was the woman mad, or was she just playing games? Everyone in the world knew of Slava Fyodorov who had invented radial keratotomy.
‘It’s all a question,’ he said, ‘of flattening the curvature of the cornea. The funny thing is that Slava discovered the procedure purely by accident—’
Candy and Merle were bringing in the soup. They placed a bowl in front of each guest.
‘Do all start,’ said Candy.
Jojo took up her dessert spoon and dipped it in her soup. A flicker passed across Heloise’s face; she raised one eyebrow by less than a millimetre. Then Jojo realised what she had done. Then Gillian took up her dessert spoon and dipped it in her soup as well. Death to tyrants! That was what she meant. Toby loved his sister for that. And the two of them could have been sisters, he thought, looking at Gilly and Jojo laughing silently, side by side. He himself was still not getting along with Jojo. There was a freeze in relations. After two nights sleeping in his old bedroom they still had not made love. Strange, he thought. At fourteen, fifteen years old, in that very room hadn’t he, nearly asleep, imagined sumptuous orgies, and now there he was, with a woman a foot away, and he did not know how to cross the space between the two beds. The decals on the wall were the same, and the woven rug with the picture of a brown bear by a waterfall, a friend from childhood, was still on the floor between them.
‘Delicious, the soup,’ said Laura Chadwick. ‘Artichoke, I think.’
‘One of Slava’s patients was a young ruffian who got into a street-fight,’ said Bernard. ‘His glasses were broken and glass pierced his eye. After Slava removed the splinter he found that the patient’s sight had quite improved. A deep radial incision, you see.’
‘I see!’ said Heloise.
‘The last twenty years of my professional life,’ said Bernard, ‘you might say I spent fine-tuning the results of a street-brawl in Moscow.’