The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  On Franklin Street, cars rolled in a steady trickle from the square, people returning home from the failed comet viewing. I turned in at my street and passed Peter’s house. Mr. Coot’s truck was parked in front and their house lights were on. My own house was still dark, but I barely registered this as I got off my bike and pulled it around to the backyard, where I saw—but I could hardly believe it—my father with the telescope.

  He was bent over the eyepiece, still wearing his hat and raincoat. He slowly straightened up when he heard me come into the yard.

  “I was just giving it another look …,” he said, and made a pathetic gesture toward the sky.

  This was too much. I couldn’t take it anymore. All the misery and confusion, all the hurt and humiliation that I’d ever known welled up inside of me and sent me charging across the yard to my father.

  I grabbed the telescope from him. He tried to hold on to it, and as we tugged back and forth, I cursed him and his damn comet. I cursed him for my mother and Frank, and for Gabriella and Mark, and for every damn thing that had ever happened to us … but I hardly knew what I was saying anymore.

  “Wait. Wait, no, please—”

  I wrested the telescope from him and, taking it by its legs, swung it around into a tree. The thing smacked the trunk with a satisfying crack, followed by a tinny clatter as pieces fell to the ground. I swung it around at the tree again and again, shouting, “There is no comet! There is no love! There’s nothing, you idiot! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Do you see? Do you see now?”

  I threw what was left of the scope to the ground and then kicked it for good measure. Then I wheeled back around to my father. He cringed, and had he not looked so pitiful at that instant, I would’ve lunged in and ripped him apart.

  “This is all your fault, you know,” I said, panting. “Everything. You did this. You did this to us!”

  “I know. I know,” he said, and spread his arms helplessly. “You’re right. I’m sorry.…”

  “I hate you. I want you to know that. I hate you for everything you’ve done. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you! Is that clear? Is that perfectly clear?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know, I know, son.”

  “You’re useless. Absolutely useless. And I wish … I wish to god I’d never been born.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  BUT Kohoutek hadn’t left us yet. The comet was still there, flickering yellow and faint as a candle above the clouds as our town settled in for the night.

  In the empty square, a scrap of paper tumbled down the steps of the courthouse, rested against the leg of a park bench, and then fluttered free. Bare tree branches creaked back and forth beneath the streetlights, casting waving shadows on the pavement. Moonlight silvered the narrow canals that crisscrossed the fields and farms and wound under bridges and behind rows of quiet houses.…

  While at home upstairs in my tiny room, I tossed on my bed, unable to sleep. I felt like a stranger to myself, overgrown and monstrous. My bed was too small, the walls were too close, the ceiling too low. I thought of the comet, and of Gabriella, and of my father and mother, and of the whole miserable wreck of our family. I hugged myself beneath the sheets, shivering with sorrow and regret, and wished that I could undo this night, undo this entire mistake-riddled year, and send myself back in time to start over again from my fourteenth birthday.

  In his room below me lay a man who looked very much like me, my adult twin, tossing sleeplessly in his own bed. From time to time I heard a groan escape him. I pictured his broken glasses on the nightstand beside him, his clothes scattered around the floor. He sweated and grimaced; he clenched his hands into fists. Rolling back and forth on the mattress, he knocked a fist against his bony forehead, as though trying to dislodge whatever thoughts were stuck there in his brain.

  If I could have, I would have sent him back in time, too: back to a time before there was any thought of this family, this house, this difficult life. In my prayer for my father that night, I turned my eyes once more to the sky outside my window and found again that heavenly place beyond the stars where dreams were born and memories never died and people lived forever. And there, floating in a cloud of cosmic dust, I saw my father as he used to be: a bespectacled, carefree young man, back during a time when his future seemed to roll out before him like a smoothly paved road on a sunny day.

  He was steering a rented DeSoto along the Pacific Coast Highway. One hand rested on the wheel, his elbow propped up in the opened window. His new wife sat beside him wearing a pleated white skirt with a road map spread on her bare knees. The air was dry and light, so unlike the swampy heat of southern Louisiana. As they rounded a bend, a pleasant, woody scent blew through the windows of the car.

  “What is that? Pinyon?” my mother-to-be asked.

  “Desert cactus,” my father-to-be answered, although in truth, he had no idea what it was.

  “It’s nice.”

  He looked at her and smiled. She caught her hair and laughed for no apparent reason, and in that instant he felt himself buoyed up on the wave of her smile, her hair, the golden sunlight on the hills and road.

  Did my father, in that long, lonely midnight of his soul, remember that day? Wouldn’t that have been enough to pull him back from the brink? Or was not even that smile, that skirt, that sunny road enough to overcome a lifetime’s worth of disappointment?

  The sun warmed their faces as he piloted the car between the glittering blue-and-white ocean on the one side, the dry green hills on the other. Already the newlyweds were planning other trips they could take out west, a seemingly endless summer of holidays: The Grand Canyon. The Rocky Mountains. Pike’s Peak, Yosemite Valley, Yellowstone Park …

  So much to see, right here on Earth, the best of all possible earths. Who in the world would ever want to leave it?

  They drove through Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, and Mussel Cove. At Capistrano Beach he turned inland—Lydia wanted to see the swallows at the mission, and Alan was quick to agree. They could stop and stretch their legs, maybe have some lunch, before continuing on the road to Palomar.

  Their guide at San Juan Capistrano, a tanned, bearded man, led them through the ruins of the old church, pointing out the mud nests of the birds clustered up among the crumbling stone arches. The newlyweds followed, he squinting up with his hands clasped behind his back, she listening attentively as their guide explained how the swallows flew six thousand miles from their winter home in Argentina to arrive like clockwork every year on the Feast of Saint Joseph. “What do you know about that,” Alan said, impressed. “Like a miracle,” Lydia said, and the guide smiled indulgently and folded his hands across his belly like a priest.

  At the mission gift shop, they spent some time looking through a stack of handmade rugs. The one they ended up with was a garish thing, with bright Mexican colors and a rough weave, not even the one they really wanted, but the woman who sold it to them was so sweet and insistent—she didn’t have any teeth—and they had already spent so much time bargaining with her over the price, that when she folded it up and shoved it into their hands, they really had no choice. “For our new home,” Lydia said. “So we can always remember this day.”

  For lunch they had real Mexican food at the El Adobe restaurant. “Honeymoon,” they told everyone, and four mariachis in sombreros came to serenade them at their table. The window was open; pink bougainvillea frothed in around the wooden frame. The skinny mariachi shook a pair of red maracas and threw his head back and sang something high and plaintive in Spanish, prompting Lydia to find Alan’s hand and squeeze it under the table. Budget be damned, Alan thought, and when they left the restaurant, he tipped the singers and the waiters and everyone much more than he should have.

  From San Juan Capistrano the road wound up through the Santa Ana Mountains, cutting switchbacks along a high, narrow ridge, through forests of fir and cedar, pine and spruce. The air became cool and misty. Huge green ferns hung from the sides of steep rocky walls. There wasn’t a service
station in sight, and Alan worried whether the rented DeSoto would make it up the next bend. But the old car proved sturdy enough, and late in the day they rolled into a high green valley and found the lodge where Alan had made reservations.

  The Palomar Mountaintop Lodge was a picturesque, rustic resort surrounded by wooded hills. Tidy cabins and stables were tucked against the trees, and a mountain spring ran down along one edge of the pasture. The peak of Palomar Mountain rose up dramatically behind the roof of the lodge house.

  The owner, Mr. Lundgren, met them on the porch and showed them to their room on the second floor. From their balcony they could look down the mountain and see the coastline stretching all the way from Santa Monica to Mexico, with a chain of low gray islands far out in the water, like a school of giant whales. Lydia leaned over the railing and breathed in the clean air. She felt lighter, larger, on top of the world.

  “Alan,” she said. “Come see the sunset. Isn’t it gorgeous?”

  He joined her on the balcony, and she held his arm in both her hands. The Sun was a giant ball of fire lighting the sky with a fantastic smear of colors. As they watched, the gap between the rim of the Sun and the edge of the sea slowly narrowed, although without any perceptible movement of either. Lydia was impressed by the grave drama of the event; she pictured planets like massive iron spheres creaking past one another, and the thought of this almost frightened her. When the Sun touched the horizon, the sea swelled orange and red, like it was catching fire. She tugged urgently on Alan’s arm, and he looked down sideways at her, smiled reassuringly, and patted her hand.

  They had just time to get cleaned up and eat dinner before going out again. Alan got directions from Mr. Lundgren and then waited outside on the porch while Lydia ran back up to the room to grab a sweater. The night was dark and brilliantly clear. And the stars—more stars than he’d ever seen in his life. “Look at that. Look at that,” he kept saying to Lydia as they walked to the car. “Gosh. Have you ever seen anything like that in your life?”

  It was a short drive up the hill to the observatory. As Alan turned into the research complex, they were both hushed by the sight of the white dome rising grandly above the top of the mountain, like a perfectly realized emblem of science. Getting out of the car and approaching the observatory, they spoke and treaded more softly than usual, feeling like they were walking on sacred ground.

  Dr. Greenstein from Caltech was waiting for them, just like he’d written Alan that he would. The professor was a genial, gray-haired man dressed in a white shirt, dark pants, and narrow tie. On his nose, black-rimmed glasses. Alan was only a jittery first-year high school teacher from Louisiana, but Dr. Greenstein welcomed him with all the courteous respect of one scientist meeting another. As the professor showed them around the various outbuildings and facilities of the observatory, Alan felt a warm sense of brotherhood swell in him, and Lydia, recognizing the importance of the occasion, linked her arm in his, the proud wife of the promising young scientist.

  Arriving at the white dome, Greenstein led them through a set of doors and a dark vestibule that opened up into the dim, cavernous interior. He guided them past a mystifying array of scaffolding and equipment that looked like something from a science fiction movie, and then—good lord, it was as big as people said it was: the two-hundred-inch Hale Reflector, the world’s largest telescope.

  The shutters were open and they could see a band of sky through the parted ceiling of the dome. They climbed a flight of metal stairs to a platform and then stepped up under the enormous bowl-shaped mirror of the telescope while Dr. Greenstein spoke about its design. He pointed out to Alan the mirror support mechanisms and the small springs he’d installed to preserve the alignment of the panes. “What is that, a spring gauge?” Alan asked, curious. “A fish weight scale,” Greenstein said. “I found a bunch of them at a tackle shop down in Long Beach. They work perfectly.” “Huh. What do you know about that. Honey, come look at this.”

  Two men in lab coats passed carrying important-looking equipment. “Oh, good. You’re in luck,” Dr. Greenstein said. They’d been taking exposures of a white dwarf that night, but just now they were changing the plate. Did Alan want to go up to the cage? The prime focus cage?

  This, Alan knew, was a rare invitation. Only well-vetted researchers were normally allowed to go up inside the telescope. But it was a slow night, the professor said, and after all—here he winked at them—it was Alan’s honeymoon.

  “Give you something to remember,” Greenstein said. “Something you can tell your kids about.”

  And so, while Lydia waited on the floor below, Alan rode with Dr. Greenstein in an open elevator up along the side of the dome. He followed the professor across a short catwalk and then down into a metal capsule suspended above the telescope’s mirror. There was barely enough room for three or four men to crowd shoulder to shoulder around a steel tube that came up through the middle of the grated floor. Engines groaned and the giant telescope began to move. Holding on to the side of the cage, Alan tried not to show his excitement, but he felt like a boy on a carnival ride.

  Below, Lydia crossed her arms and watched the machinery tilt into place. It looked very serious and impressive to her. She didn’t especially mind being left behind for the moment; the men were doing science, talking about things she couldn’t have possibly understood. Besides, she recognized that this was Alan’s adventure now, and so she was content to stand on the sidelines and cheer him on.

  As she waited, something made her think about the swallows back at Capistrano, how they returned to the same place at the same time every year. How did they know how to do that? she wondered. Maybe she would ask Alan about it later; he might be able to tell her. Those tiny birds, flying thousands of miles over land and sea, mountains and valleys—it didn’t seem possible. She pictured them in dark, cloudlike swarms, the Earth far below, the stars above, beating their little wings determinedly through the night. The guide had laughed when she called it a miracle, but really, what else could you call something like that?

  Inside the focus cage, Dr. Greenstein was showing Alan where the photographic plate screwed into place. They’d been using a spectrograph designed by Dr. Page for nebular work, he explained, a really fine instrument with a 390-millimeter dispersion. The engines quieted to a low hum as the telescope locked into tracking mode. Dr. Greenstein bent to an eyepiece angling out of the side of the tube. He adjusted some knobs and then scooted to one side.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Have a look.”

  Alan held his breath as he bent to the eyepiece. Dr. Greenstein stood at his shoulder describing what he was seeing.

  “I love this star. It’s one of Luyten’s white dwarfs. We found some really pronounced hydrogen lines, very broad and shallow. I mean, they’re so obvious, you can’t miss them. Kuiper classified the spectrum as ‘continuous,’ but he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Okay, to be fair, we’ve got a better telescope. But anyway, what we’re finding is that there’s a rough correlation between spectral class and color index—which is no great surprise, really, given that the DA-zero-two stars, as we’ve always known, are bluer than the DA-three-seven stars.”

  Alan hardly knew what Dr. Greenstein was talking about. But it didn’t matter. He was lost in his own wonder at what he was seeing. The doors of heaven had opened to show him this star, this white dwarf, a small dot of light couched in a luminous blue halo. It was, he knew, a star in the last stage of its life. How appropriate, how beautiful, he thought, that it should die this way, reduced to the pure white core of its being.

  “How far?” Alan whispered.

  “About seven thousand light-years, give or take.”

  “How old?”

  “Hard to say. Maybe ten billion years?”

  Ten billion years. Good god. He might’ve been peering down a tunnel into the past, billions of years before any of this—he, the telescope, Dr. Greenstein, the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, the planets—even existed.

  Alan
lifted his face from the eyepiece, staggered by the thought. He looked up through the crack in the ceiling at the star-filled sky, dizzy with a sense of the vast expanse of time and space within which he stood. His position in the universe felt so, so … tenuous. So unlikely. So very, very fortunate.

  He looked down over the edge of the cage. His wife, standing eighty feet below on the concrete floor, smiled and waved up to him. What more could a man ever want than this? And with tears starting to his eyes, he thought: I could die now and be perfectly happy.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  MIDNIGHT, I was awakened by a stirring in the house.

  I sat up in bed to listen. The night was quiet; the Moon shone in at my window. I heard a rattling noise outside at the garage shed, and got up and went to the top of the stairs. As I did so, I was seized by the peculiar sensation that I’d done this before, sometime once long, long ago.

  “Dad?”

  But his bedroom door was ajar and the house was empty, as I knew it would be. There was the tilting Christmas tree in the corner, the TV set, the couch, the rug, the chairs. My broken telescope, the pieces that were left of it, sat on the floor near the back door. Light and elevation, I thought. Light and elevation. I paused just long enough to pick up the phone in the living room and dial a number.

  I asked Megan if she’d seen our father. Was he there with them? No? I told her where to meet me and to hurry. “Something’s wrong. Something terrible is happening.”

  Outside was cold; I hadn’t stopped to put on a coat over my pajamas, and I could see my breath rising in front of my face. Up above, stars and a bright wedge of moon. I jogged out of our driveway and down the street. A breeze stirred the trees, and a dog barked from a nearby backyard. Here and there a neighbor’s house was still blacked out, with the curtains drawn and the lights off. Some still had sheets of newspaper taped up behind their windows, giving them a ruined, desolate air. The streetlights, though, those were back on, and as I ran below them I passed from light to dark and light to dark again.