The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  “Thank you, Professor,” said the coach, winking and grinning. “I’m sure we can all appreciate that.” As soon as my father had gone, the coach stuffed his handouts behind an equipment locker and made us run laps instead.

  “You’re comets!” he shouted, snapping a towel at us. “Pick it up. Hey Junior, let’s go! Run!”

  Nothing discouraged my father, though, not mocking coaches, or skeptical students, or a disinterested family. When it came to his comet, he was indefatigable.

  Nights, he would take my telescope and head for the back door.

  “I thought you said we weren’t going to see it for another couple months,” I said.

  “I’m just checking. I’m just having a look, that’s all. Turn off the porch light, would you?”

  From my bedroom window I watched him set up the scope in the backyard. His white shirt caught the light from the Moon so that, moving against the dark line of trees, he looked like a ghost bobbing around at the rear of our yard. He hunched down to the eyepiece and then stayed there a long time, his hands resting awkwardly on his knees. He seemed to sigh occasionally, his shoulders rising and falling with his breath. I’m here, he might’ve been whispering to the comet. I’m ready. I’m waiting.

  When I went to bed he was still there in the yard with my telescope, still waiting with his head bowed beneath the stars. Drifting off to sleep, I imagined a spark from the comet floating down, down like a mote of stardust, to land inside my father, where, settling in his belly, it rekindled the long-forgotten dreams and ambitions of his youth. I saw his white shirt glowing yellow in the moonlight, flames shooting from his fingertips, like he was a man set on fire.

  And who knew then how great the flames would grow, how bright they would shine? Or how completely they would consume him? We couldn’t have known, not then. Then, his comet was still little more than a joke to us all.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Groovy Scienceby

  Alan Broussard

  In a weekly special to the Daily Herald, local science teacher and astronomy expert Alan Broussard discusses scientific topics of interest to a general audience.

  A Sunday morning a month into the start of the school year, my father trotted into the house in his pajamas and bedroom slippers carrying the newspaper. Megan, our mother, and I gathered at his elbows as he unfolded the paper on the table with a jerky excitement. On page three of the Fun section, just below my mother’s horoscope column, was a black-and-white photograph of him. His glasses looked larger than in real life, and he wore a stiff, crooked smile.

  “ ‘Groovy Science’?” Megan said, frowning. “Whose idea was that?”

  “The column was my idea. But the title, that’s the editor’s. They wanted to, you know, jazz it up a little.”

  We knew he’d been working on something for the newspaper but didn’t know what, exactly. He told us he’d delivered this first piece just last week and everyone at the newspaper had liked it. “Careful you don’t get butter on it.”

  I began to read the article aloud.

  The Great Comet Kohoutek

  Aristotle called them “stars with hair.” Before the telescope was invented, people didn’t know what to make of comets. They seemed to appear from nowhere in the sky, like strange stars with long hair. They would linger for a few days, weeks, or sometimes months before gradually disappearing. Early astronomers said they were rogue planets, or the exhalations of gas from the Earth, or even the smoke of human sins that rose into the sky and burst into flame. But no matter how they understood them, people throughout history have always been frightened by comets. They were bad omens. They portended disaster: wars, famine, the death of kings, even the end of the world.

  Today, of course, we know that comets …

  “Okay, okay, you don’t have to read the whole thing,” Megan said.

  “It’s just something easy. Something for families and kids,” my father quickly explained. “I thought with the comet coming, this would be a good opportunity to raise awareness in the community about the importance of science in our everyday lives.” He had already mapped out a bunch of ideas for future columns: the history of astronomy, early views of the solar system, the laws of gravity, the origins of the universe, the nature of time … “You could go on and on.”

  My mother looked at him with a peculiar expression of pride, envy, and disbelief. “And this is going to be in the newspaper every week?”

  “Every week.”

  “Great,” my sister said to me later. “Now everyone can know what a geek our dad is.”

  But I was impressed, seeing my father’s name and picture in the newspaper. That afternoon he brought home a whole stack of them. And that same night he got to work on his next column, “Why Can’t People Fly?” (“Ever since Icarus strapped his waxy wings to his arms, men have stared at the birds in wordless wonder and envy, and thought, Why can’t I? Groovy science tells us that according to the laws of gravity …”) When I went up to bed he was still working on it, sitting at the table, consulting his old college textbooks and making notes in the light from the overhead lamp as the house creaked around him.

  At school, my father’s column was posted on the notice board in the entrance hallway with his name circled in red ink. Coach DuPleiss, seeing him out in the parking lot at recess checking the weather, couldn’t resist poking fun.

  “See any comets yet, Professor?” DuPleiss shouted. Mark Mingis and a handful of other football players standing around the coach chuckled.

  My father lowered his eyes from the clouds. “If you’re referring to Comet Kohoutek, not yet,” he answered. “He’s about halfway to Mars now. You’ll be able to see him next month with a good pair of binoculars. By December, of course, you won’t be able to miss him.”

  “I’ll start digging my bomb shelter, Professor,” DuPleiss said.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. The chances that Kohoutek will actually strike the Earth are negligible.”

  “Negligible, you say?”

  He could brush off the teasing easily enough, but the coach’s nickname for him stuck. Students began to call out to him on the playground and in the hallway, in a half-joking, half-admiring tone: “Hey, Professor! How’s it going, Professor?” Before long, other teachers picked up on it, too. “Any news on the comet, Professor?”

  My father, far from shrinking from it, seemed to enjoy the attention. He answered all come-ons with a chirpy, self-conscious irony, as if to show that he was in on the joke. He’d pull his shoulders back and, smiling and twitching, say, “The Professor is feeling fine today, thank you,” or, flipping open his notepad, “Latest coordinates are RA eleven hours, eighteen minutes, and twenty seconds; declination minus six degrees and six point two arc minutes. Distance two point two eight one astronomical units. Yep, Kohoutek’s right on track.”

  Emboldened by the success of his newspaper column, he finally resolved to approach the school principal with a formal request for money to repair his department’s crumbling science labs. He wouldn’t be denied any longer, he told us at home over dinner. Didn’t he deserve as much support as a football coach? Wasn’t his work just as important? More, even?

  He made a list of supplies and equipment, drew up a budget, and rehearsed his arguments with us at the table. It was, he said, “vitally important to engage students while the flame of their natural curiosity still burns.” My mother said that he should try to be more forceful and less flowery in his delivery; he shushed her and went on: “… the space race … the reputation of our school … the health of our community … the future of our nation …”

  In their meeting, Principal Lee agreed with everything my father said. He’d love to have new labs, too, he said, but he didn’t have any more money in the budget for science that year. (“Tight. Tight tight tight this year,” said Lee.) My father knew it was no use protesting that the principal had somehow found money for improvements to the football field. Instead, he said he’d be willing to start small—just the
most basic repairs so that their labs could even do what labs were supposed to do. Lee said he’d help if he could. (“I’d build a, what do you call it, a launch pad right out there in the parking lot for you if I could.”) But he really didn’t have any more money. Those were the unalterable facts of finance. My father would just have to make do.

  My father was disappointed, naturally, and came home grousing about the idiotic principal and his misplaced priorities. “ ‘Tight tight tight!’ What an ass. Don’t tell anyone I said that.” But his anger was short-lived. After he’d burned himself out complaining, he hunkered down and went back to work on his lesson plans and newspaper columns.

  He didn’t say so, not in so many words, but it was clear he was hitching his hopes to the comet. He fairly glowed with anticipation.

  Just you wait, he seemed to be saying. Just you wait. When the comet came, it would outshine all our expectations. It would dazzle, it would amaze; it would prove, to Principal Lee and to anyone else who had ever doubted him, the true value of science in our everyday lives.

  And over the upcoming weeks, as the summer turned toward fall, and we continued to read his articles in the newspaper, and we saw the posters going up in the hallways, and we watched the foil-covered cut-out inching closer to the Sun, a similar feeling of anticipation grew among me and my classmates so that, in spite of our habitual teenage distrust of anything that adults claimed was true, and in spite of my father’s reputation as a geek, a clown, Terrebonne High’s most boring and ineffectual science teacher, we began to suspect that he could be right this time: something big could be in store with this comet of his.

  From time to time I would see younger students, third and fourth graders, running across the playground. They’d see my father in his black raincoat standing in the parking lot looking up at the sky, and they, too, would slow, stop, and look up. Then they’d stand there a minute or two, rocking slightly back and forth, their mouths hanging open, their arms limp, gazing up at the heavens, hoping to catch a glimpse of something spectacular glinting behind a cloud.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WHO were we? Where did we come from? How did we get here?

  Lying in my room at night during those early weeks of my freshman year, with my schoolbooks scattered on the floor beside my bed, and Gabriella’s house lit up on the other side of the bayou, and the sharp, bright stars dotting the sky outside my window, I mused over my father’s questions, the ones he said the comet might answer for us if we only listened closely enough.

  My concerns weren’t so much scientific or philosophical as they were practical. I wondered, for instance, why I was so damn timid and shy all the time. Why couldn’t I just approach Gabriella in the cafeteria, say hello and introduce myself, like Mark Mingis had done that first day of school? Why was that so difficult? And what about this constant, aching longing I felt, the one that made me want to knock my head against the wall and roll around on the floor because I felt I was about to burst into flames out of loneliness and desire? What was wrong with me? Did everyone my age feel this way? Surely it was something you grew out of—“a phase” as our teachers put it—because the alternative, that I would be like this for the rest of my life, was too horrible even to consider.

  I spent long minutes studying my reflection in the mirror above my dresser, searching for clues to myself. I turned from side to side, checked my profile, and adjusted my hair. I wondered if a girl like Gabriella could ever find me handsome. I doubted it. I had a head just like my father’s, all square and narrow, as though cut from a block of wood. I saw his other features in my face as well. We had the same high forehead, the same thin eyebrows and long nose; if I’d put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses, I could’ve been his little twin. Whenever my classmates looked at me, they couldn’t help but think of my father, and when they looked at him, they thought of me. That certainly didn’t help my chances with Gabriella any.

  And why, oh why, I wondered, had he named me after himself? What kind of a father would do that to his son? What could he have been thinking? Was it an excess of pride? Or was it, as my sister had once theorized, just the opposite, a deep-seated sense of inferiority that made our father want to double himself? He must’ve imagined we were just the beginning of a long line of Broussards: Alan the First, Alan the Second, Alan the Sixteenth, and so on, my father replicating himself forever into the future. Whatever his idea had been, I hated having to carry his name. When my classmates teased me, they didn’t even have to invent new names for me; they only had to add a certain mean, twisty inflection to my own: “June-yurrr!” That said it all—the name contained not only my shortcomings but his as well. There was no escaping him; in the mirror, in the classroom, in the shops in town, he followed me everywhere. I dragged his name and reputation around behind me wherever I went: Alan Broussard, Jr.

  For better or worse, I was my father’s son, and I intuited, however unclearly, that my life was inextricably bound up with his. I was who I was because of him. His blood was in my blood, his history was my history. Even my future, the person I might one day become, depended on him, because everything he’d ever seen or done or thought or felt flowed up through him and into me.

  And just who was he, that peculiar wooden man who lectured to us every day in class and then sat down beside me every evening for dinner? My father wasn’t inclined to talk much about his past, and when he did—when I pressed him for details and he began to reminisce about his youth—he became so dull and long-winded that I soon regretted ever asking him anything. His storytelling lacked, as my mother said, “a sense of the dramatic.”

  Still, I already knew the basics. His background was part of our shared family history, told in bits and pieces over the years, embellished by my imagination, until it was almost as real to me as my own past.

  And sometimes at night, if I squinted in just such a way at the black spaces between the stars, I believed I could see, as though through a crack in the sky, a glimpse of my father as he must’ve been: a boy who looked just like me, a boy who might’ve had the same doubts and yearnings as I did—a boy who, maybe just as I did, once stood gazing out of his bedroom window at a star-filled sky, wondering at the wild coincidences of time and space and desire that had made him who he was.

  He came, so the story went, like a bolt out of the blue.

  He wasn’t even supposed to have been possible, but then, defying doctors’ predictions, he appeared, just like that, presto! He was born a full decade after his next older brother, to become the last of three sons from the marriage of a Baton Rouge Broussard to a Baton Rouge Schexsynder.

  “God’s little surprise,” his mother liked to call him.

  “He must’ve gotten lost in the mail,” his father quipped.

  In early photographs my father-to-be appeared as a serious, frowning baby, with a full head of thick black hair and peevish eyes that seemed to say he was still angry about being yanked from the dark, peaceful universe he’d so recently inhabited and that, given half a chance, he’d gladly crawl back into that quiet place. They named him Alan, after, his mother later admitted, a picture she’d seen on a prayer card of Saint Alan of the Rock.

  Even as a toddler he was a curious boy, always burrowing into the backs of closets and taking apart anything that could be taken apart. His older brothers, busy with their sports and scouting, stepped around him on the living room rug like he was a weird and troublesome new pet. It wasn’t that they disliked him; they just didn’t know what they were supposed to do with him, and so they shooed him out of their rooms when he was in the way and tossed him a ball from time to time when they wanted to distract him.

  As he grew older, Alan retreated into his books about science, his model rockets and homemade radio sets. He became the studious one of the bunch, preferring indoors to out, and before he was even ten years old, he was wearing his first pair of eyeglasses. By the time he was ready to start junior high school, his oldest brother was already married and settled in his own apartment, and t
he other one was off in the navy fighting the Japs, leaving Alan alone with his parents, a single child in a suddenly quiet household, which, truth be told, suited him fine.

  His mother he would always remember in a cooking apron with a smudge of flour in her dark hair. She was a thrifty, devout woman who said the rosary every night and who, even for years after other ladies had stopped doing it, continued to cover her head with a veil when she went to Mass on Sunday mornings. Alan’s father was a practical-minded, vest-wearing man who worked for the post office—not as a carrier (a point of distinction for him), but as a manager in the big downtown branch. He owned one pair of shiny black shoes that he resoled every two years for twenty years.

  His father liked his work, so much so that he brought it home with him: he collected postage stamps, which he carefully mounted in thick gray albums that he kept locked in a glass-fronted cabinet. Alan would watch him handling his stamps with a pair of tweezers at the dining room table, his breath sighing in and out over his mustache as he inspected their watermarks with a magnifying glass. He spoke of finding the one rare stamp—an Inverted Jenny, or a good Confederate provisional—that would make his fortune. Alan’s island-hopping brother, the one in the navy, sent stamps home to their father from faraway ports, exotic miniature landscapes embossed with the names of mythical sounding countries and kingdoms. At night in his bedroom in the quiet house, the young Alan would sit hunched over his homemade radio, pressing the headset to his ear as he listened for voices in the white noise, and imagine he was flying daring solo missions over Burma, Formosa, Trengganu, Syburi …

  When he eventually graduated from high school and entered the College of Science at LSU, he felt, as he would later say, like he had died and gone to heaven. Biology! Chemistry! Physics! Astronomy! There were so many wonderful courses to choose from, he hardly knew where to begin; he wanted to take them all. Walking into his classes on the first day of college, he discovered rooms full of boys who were not so different from him, boys who even looked like him—young student scientists in glasses, their shirt pockets stuffed with mechanical pencils and slide rules, their arms full of books. He felt like he’d been waiting his whole life for exactly this.