The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  “I think I might’ve made a terrible mistake,” she said softly.

  “What?”

  “It’s like I wasn’t thinking right. I believed something was true that wasn’t true, and then I … and then I …” She shook her head, as though to shake away the thought. “God, I’m such an idiot. I’m so stupid. I’m so stupid. What did I do? Look at the mess I made.”

  “Maybe you can still fix it.”

  “I don’t know, it might be too late for that.” She looked at me. “Am I a terrible mother? Do you hate me?”

  Her eyes were damp, her brow wrinkled and pleading. An honest answer might’ve been, Yes, sometimes you are a terrible mother, and yes, sometimes I hate you for that. But now, I sensed, was not the time for honest answers.

  “No. No, of course not,” I said.

  Across the square, someone was checking the microphone on the podium. “Test. Testing one, two.”

  She wiped her nose. “He’s a stubborn man, isn’t he? Your father. He never gives up. He just keeps on going. I don’t know how he does it. He stands by his beliefs, no matter … no matter what other people think. You have to admire him for that, I guess. Even if sometimes he does seem a little … a little, I don’t know what. Cuckoo.”

  At the courthouse, the mayor had begun speaking at the microphone.

  “It’s starting,” my mother said. “You should go watch. He’d want you to be there.”

  I hesitated before leaving her. We hadn’t really resolved anything, but the mayor was introducing my father now, and Gabriella was somewhere out there, maybe watching and waiting for me.

  I turned once more to my mother. It could’ve been the way the light in the alley fell on her face, but she looked suddenly older. She might’ve aged twenty years since that afternoon. I thought of her as that teenage girl staring dreamily out the window of the drugstore, and then the nervous young newlywed boarding the train for her honeymoon, and now the sad, mistaken lover dropping to her hands and knees on the sidewalk in front of our neighbors’ house—

  She leaned abruptly across the seat, grabbed me by the shoulders, and gave me a strong kiss on the cheek. Then she pushed me toward the door.

  “Go. Go watch it, sweetie,” she said. “Once in a lifetime chance and everything. You wouldn’t want to miss it.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  THERE was a smattering of applause in the square as my father came forward and laid his notes on the lectern. The wind riffled the pages. He adjusted his broken glasses and thanked the mayor, thanked everyone for coming out this evening. Then he stood up straighter, cleared his throat, and began his speech.

  “Tonight, we are gathered here to witness a truly remarkable event, one whose importance will be recorded not only in the history of science, but also in the broader history of civilization. As inhabitants of the planet, we are fortunate indeed …”

  The sound system was weak, and from where I stood at the edge of the square it was difficult to hear what he was saying. But the audience was attentive. People shushed one another. A woman beside me stopped her child from running and held him at her legs in front of her and told him to be quiet, the scientist was talking now. I moved to a spot nearer the chairs where I might hear him better.

  He said how, for as long as men had wandered the Earth, they’d looked to the stars for guidance. He spoke about celestial navigation, and how ancient men used the stars to find direction on land and sea. Then he spoke about guidance of another sort, referencing the Greek myths and the stories of bravery and love we found memorialized in the constellations. From there he moved on to astrology.…

  It was a carefully thought-out speech. I knew how much time he’d spent writing and rehearsing it, and I knew how important it was for him. As he spoke, he gestured woodenly, raising a finger to emphasize his main points and making broad sweeping motions with his right arm.

  Halfway through his speech, a breeze lifted his hat off his head. It tumbled away across the porch. A Cub Scout chased after it, and as my father turned from the lectern to receive his hat from the scout, his papers fluttered to the porch. Two more scouts ran up to help, and as the three boys and my father chased the flying papers around in a circle, it looked for a minute like the program was going to turn into a comedy. Some people in the audience chuckled, but others upbraided them for laughing during what was obviously meant to be a serious lecture.

  Settling his papers back on the lectern, my father resumed his speech. He spoke now of the human condition, and about how life as we knew it was mostly an unpleasant experience. He mentioned the commonplace disasters that awaited us all: loved ones might leave us, our families break apart, our houses slide into disrepair. Objects we treasured fell to pieces in our hands. Everything raced toward its dissolution. For proof of this we only had to look in the mirror and see our skin sagging on our face, our hair turning gray. Like it or not, we were all dying, every day and every minute of our lives.

  And then, he went on, if we looked around us, we saw that others suffered the same fate as we did, often worse. We turned on the television or opened a newspaper to see a seemingly endless parade of daily disasters: floods … famines … earthquakes … whole cities washing into the sea … men shooting each other with guns …

  “What’s he talking about? Can you hear him?” a man near me asked his friend.

  “About the comet,” his friend answered.

  “I could’ve guessed that.”

  “About nature and the comet. How they go together.”

  My father turned at last to the consolations of science. Becoming emotional, he said how in the midst of all this misery and decay, science gave us reason for hope. Yes, it did. Science revealed to us the beautiful order hidden within the natural world.

  Consider the comet, he said. He spoke about its origins in the invisible crystalline sphere that surrounded our solar system, and how the comet itself was a relic of the same swirling cloud of dust and gas that, billions of years ago, gave birth to our Sun, the Earth, and all our familiar planets. Indeed, when we looked at the comet, we could not help but be reminded of the common origins of all creation.

  “Look, here, in this tiny piece of dust,” he said, and touched his finger to the lectern and held aloft an invisible mote. “Some carbon, silicon, sulfur, maybe some water …”

  “What is it?” whispered the man near me.

  “Don’t know. Can’t see it,” his friend answered.

  My father went on to say how this very speck of dust might well have come from the tail of a comet like Kohoutek. This same species of dust filled the universe. It floated in the space between stars, it combined with gas to churn in the fiery furnaces of nebulae to produce yet more stars and planets and comets. It was, he said, the elemental fluff of life.

  A thousand tons of this cosmic dust fell to the Earth every day. It was in our water, our soil, our food, our blood. We ate it and breathed it. It was us. We ourselves were made out of this cosmic dust. He wasn’t speaking metaphorically, my father insisted; it was a simple scientific truth: when we traced the origin of the elements out of which human bodies were made, we discovered that we all ultimately were, in fact, stardust.

  This, he said, was the message of the comet. This was what Kohoutek had come to remind us of: that we were a part of everything, and everything was a part of us.

  And seeing how we were all so intimately connected in this way, he concluded, we couldn’t help but feel sympathy for our fellow human beings. And from this feeling of sympathy, we couldn’t help but feel compassion, and from this compassion, we couldn’t help but feel …

  But we would never know what it was that the comet was supposed to make us feel, because just then the air-raid siren wailed to life, drowning out the end of his speech.

  Everyone knew this was on the program, but it was nevertheless startling to hear. The sound began at the fire station on the corner, was echoed by another siren four blocks up Franklin Street, and still another one atop the water
tower. The sirens swelled, increasing in pitch and volume until they became a sustained cry filling the air above the square. My father shouted out something over the noise, but it was impossible to hear what he was saying anymore.

  And then right on schedule, the streetlights around the square went dark. After that, one by one, the lights in the shops along Franklin Street blinked off, and then their marquees. The policeman standing at the edge of the square saw that the blue flashing lights on top of his car were on, and he reached in the door to turn them off. Finally, as though they’d almost been overlooked, the lamps flanking the courthouse steps clicked off.

  With that, the night became suddenly, surprisingly dark, like a blanket had been thrown over the town. My father vanished, the courthouse vanished, the square and the benches and the trees all vanished. I couldn’t see the people standing beside me, or even the tips of my own shoes. The sirens trailed off, leaving an absolute and profound silence. No one talked, no one moved. We might’ve all disappeared from the face of the Earth, leaving nothing but an empty square and the distant stars winking between mountains of clouds.

  We stared up, bodiless, and watched. For the moment, all our town’s hopes, all our aspirations, were focused on that one patch of sky above our heads. I could hear the unspoken wishes of my neighbors swirling and rustling around me like leaves stirred by the wind: wishes for love, for happiness, for peace; wishes for a new car, a friend’s toy; the safe return of a son, an end to illness, the cure of a habit; respect from a spouse, success at work, a more certain future. Our wishes rose together into one great silent prayer of longing sent up to the stars, where, as if in answer—Ahh!—a thin streak of fire shot into the clouds from the east.

  Everyone gasped as the streak burst into a shower of sparks. And then another streak shot into the sky, and then another.…

  Fireworks. Someone was shooting off bottle rockets, that’s all it was. In the distance, a boy whooped. The crowd chuckled in response.

  “Huh. Thought it was the comet,” someone said.

  People began to shift and look around themselves, somewhat embarrassed. They scanned the sky and whispered to one another.

  “Do you see it? I don’t see anything.”

  “Give it time.”

  “Maybe we missed it.”

  I could feel the spell that had held us in such breathless suspense already beginning to slip away. We looked up, we waited, but there was no comet, not tonight, not that we could see. There was nothing up there but clouds and stars in the same sky that we had always known. A man—it might’ve been Coach DuPleiss—shouted from the rear of the crowd: “Hey, Professor! Where’s your comet?” This elicited a good round of laughter from those standing near me.

  The evening, I feared, was turning into a colossal failure, a great joke at the expense of my father. I was glad it was so dark because I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to recognize me as the son of the man up there on the steps with his ridiculous coat and hat and his crazy talk about balls of fire falling from the sky. What could he have been thinking anyway, bringing everyone out here tonight if there was nothing for us to see? Why go on and on about his marvelous comet? Couldn’t all his charts and calculations have predicted something like this might have happened? Or was he honestly expecting some sort of miracle tonight? Whatever his idea had been, I hated him for building up everyone’s hopes like this, and then I hated myself for allowing myself to believe for even one minute that my father could’ve been anything like a great man, a hero.

  I pushed my way through the square so I could get my bike and resume my search for Gabriella. As I drew near the courthouse, I saw Mr. Coot, Peter, and the scouts clustered anxiously at the bottom of the steps, staring up not at the sky, but at my father—

  Who stood at the edge of the porch, his dark figure silhouetted against the pale front of the courthouse. His whole body trembled as he extended his arms to the sky, as though he were trying to reach up and pull down the comet from heaven.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  THE streets around the square were dark and quiet. Most of the houses had complied with the blackout, making it difficult to see much of anything, only the dim outlines of homes and buildings, the traces of trees and telephone poles. Here and there figures floated along the sidewalk, and I peered at them as I rolled past on my bike, looking for Gabriella’s hair and shape.

  After circling through downtown and still not finding her, I headed back up Franklin Street. Here, too, the lights were off, the houses dark. In the distance I heard the popping noise of firecrackers, or maybe gunshots. Dogs barked and howled. A gang of junior high school boys came flying past me on their bikes, whooping and hollering like wild Indians before melting again into the night.

  I passed the dim legs of the water tower, crossed the bridge, and turned in at Beau Rivage Estates. As I pedaled through the blacked-out neighborhood, I could make out folks standing on their lawns, talking and visiting one another. The Martellos’ house loomed at the end of the block, its walls and roofs elongated into shadows so that it appeared even more imposing than usual. I stopped half a block away and straddled my bike. I heard the voices of Frank and Barbara Martello; I saw their figures crossing their drive to greet a neighbor, heard the tinkle of ice cubes in drinking glasses … but no sign of Gabriella.

  I set off again, thinking to circle the block and approach their house from the other side, out of sight of her parents. If she was at home, I would find her; a force as irresistible as gravity drew me to her. For every boy, one special girl was waiting, and every cell in my body, every star in the sky, told me she was the one. As I stood up on the pedals of my bike, I was already halfway up the stairs to her room, taking the steps two at a time … and then Gabriella and I were falling into each other’s arms … and then we were rolling on the carpet, lost again in our kiss, that golden kiss that would rescue the day and make everything better.…

  I pedaled past new homes, past half-built homes, past vacant lots in dark cul-de-sacs. I turned, and then turned again onto the road at the far side of the neighborhood, heading back toward the bayou. Overhead, the clouds had shifted to reveal more stars, sharp and bright in a moonlit sky. I’d never seen them so bright before. The Milky Way was a wide, luminescent band arching up from the horizon, and the constellations appeared as plain and obvious as a child’s line drawings: Cancer, Gemini, Pegasus. Looking around, I was surprised to see that the road and sidewalks, the homes and vacant lots were all lit up by a diffuse, silvery skyglow. Beneath my bicycle tires, the asphalt itself seemed to sparkle, like a pathway of stars laid out before me.

  I must’ve missed the last turn, because all at once the road ended. I bumped over the curb and came to a stop in the weeds of a vacant lot, almost toppling off my bike. To either side were dim mounds of bulldozed dirt and stumps. Dirt tracks led through the weeds and disappeared around a line of bare trees. I was backing up my bike when I saw, ahead through the trees, a faint yellow ball of light.

  Was it curiosity that drew me to it? Intuition? Fate? Or did the stars overhead tell me this was the place, command me to get off my bike, lay it on the ground, and walk forward through the weeds?

  A small animal rustled in the brush to my right and shot across the path in front of me. Past the line of trees, the track opened up into a clearing. It was the site of someone’s future home: ribboned stakes in the dirt, stacks of lumber to one side, and a pole with a circuit box propped up in the ground. Straight ahead was the bayou, and tucked into a stand of evergreen trees at the edge of the water was Mark’s car.

  I recognized it immediately on account of the low, curved shape of the body and the wind spoiler on the back. The motor was running and the radio played. The yellowish interior light lit the trunks of the trees around it, giving the impression that the car itself was surrounded by a soft golden glow. I squatted down in the weeds to watch.

  They were in the backseat, their heads and limbs bobbing in and out of view through the rear window. A pale arm fl
ashed past, and then a foot, and a shoulder, and a head of dark hair. Then the car rocked and Mark reared up. His chest was bare, his face red and wild-looking. He began violently jerking up and down, and I immediately became afraid for Gabriella. I heard her cry out. I sprang up from the ground, and in my mind I was already running to the car to save her, already dragging Mark out the side door and wrestling him to the dirt … when I heard her laugh. It was a low, throaty chortle, nothing like the laugh I was familiar with, but unmistakably hers.

  I squatted back down in the weeds, breathing heavily, and continued to watch.

  Mark dropped out of sight and Gabriella rose up to take his place. She was shirtless, and her lush hair spilled forward over her bare shoulders to partly cover her breasts. She pulled Mark up and clutched him to her chest, digging her fingers into his hair. She shuddered and lifted her eyes up, and in the dim light of the car, her face glowed with a terrible, radiant joy.

  In that light, in the moment of her ecstasy, the girl I loved appeared more beautiful, more angelic, than ever before; and as I watched her bend down and kiss his mouth, I knew I was witnessing nothing less than the end of the world; and as he raised up and wrapped his arms around her, I heard my father’s voice at my ear, solemnly reminding me: “Nothing to be afraid of, son … It’s perfectly natural … a very … lovely … event.”

  And with that, it was as though a curtain had been ripped aside, revealing a truth that had been hidden from me for so long.

  As I pedaled back through the neighborhood, I was shaking so hard that I could barely steer my bicycle. The air had become colder, and the light, too, had changed; the stars looked dimmer and farther away than they had moments ago. It was only gradually that I realized that the streetlights had come back on, and that was why the stars were so faint, and why I could see all the objects of everyday life clearly again—the houses and sidewalks, the fire hydrants and stop signs, all restored to their stubborn ordinariness.