“Kaaaaaaa”—George heard Allen shouting behind him—“BLOOEY!”
“Are you in the third grade?” George asked without turning around.
“I wish. Okay. So I just got off with the guys in Madrid. They’re getting us some time on the Messier Telescope tonight to get the last of the data.”
“Us? Don’t you have the Phoenix-13 all afternoon?”
“That weakass telescope can’t get us the readings we need. Come on.”
“Again, who is this us?”
Allen shouted, “You and me, G-man! I’m telling you—this is exciting shit!”
“This is a catastrophe, Allen.” George pointed to the shelf full of black three-ring binders, identical except for the steady fading plastic, moving leftward, as they went back in time toward his first research years. “Four years in those. Two thirty-seven Lyrae V was supposed to be stable.”
“That’s what makes it so interesting, G-man. She ought to be one of the most stable cores in the Ring Nebula, right? I mean, from what you’ve found so far, it should take a goddamn supernova to collapse two thirty-seven. Only there’s not one. So we’ve got to ask ourselves, in the words of our great scientific forebears—what the fuck?”
“Allen—”
“I’m saying, George. It’s not too late to get on board with this paper I’m writing.”
“You’re writing?”
“Okay, okay—we’re writing. We’re going to watch the collapse in real time, G-man. That’s rare as shit. We’re talking ‘target of opportunity.’ We’re talking you and me are going to get time on the motherfucking Hubble,” Allen said, standing quickly. “Look, I’ve got a lunch with Cokonis. I’m going to catch him up on all this. Think it over. If this is what I think it is, you don’t have a lot of time to start writing grants.” He was practically skipping as he left the cubicle.
“Oh, and by the way, I’m getting married . . .” George said to the empty air. There was a long quiet, and then steadily he heard the clack of keyboards and the squeak of chairs from the other cubicles all up and down the hallway. The click of phones being put back into their cradles, the hum of fluorescent lights, the scuffing of rubber soles on carpeting.
Allen was right. George knew it. He had been massively wrong about everything leading up to it, but aside from that fact, 237 Lyrae V’s collapse could actually be huge for them. Shouldn’t he want that?
George rolled his chair over to Allen’s computer, where he’d left the interface open for the Phoenix-13 telescope. Pausing the data stream Allen was downloading, George’s fingers typed in the set of complex coordinates without conscious thought: Right ascension of 18h 53m 35.079s. Declination of +33° 01' 45.03. There was a long pause as the telescope, twenty-five hundred miles away in Arizona, adjusted its mechanized gaze to a completely different part of the universe. The sheer scale of these little keystrokes still floored George some days and still briefly distracted him from the heinous particulars of his job—that morning consisting of ten e-mails in two hours from Cokonis about getting the next round of grants written up, about publishing his next paper, about presenting at a conference in Wichita.
The images began to come up on the screen. The Ring Nebula, aka Messier 57, aka NGC 6720. A planetary nebula in the constellation Lyra, a great reddish ring of fire surrounding an iris of blue-green like ocean water. On the sad little computer monitor, George couldn’t see much detail, but he knew it glowed like an ember on the big infrareds . . . and that it was, in its way, an ember, left over when a star exhausted its supply of hydrogen and the outer layers pushed outward and it became a red giant. He zoomed the telescope to its maximum point and found his little core inside the nebula. Just a hundred thousand years old. Practically an infant in cosmic terms, emitting no light, only heat and gas, but he knew it was there.
He’d first seen the Ring Nebula in AP Physics C. Mr. Pix had put it up on a color transparency, explaining, “Every once in a while, a dusty red giant star can become a nebulae, like M fifty-seven, here, which contains an unknown number of nebulosities, and in this way, one dying star becomes a kind of breeding ground for new ones.”
George had been stunned. Until then they’d been so fixated on heat death and entropy and black holes that he’d never stopped to think about the fact that the universe was constantly generating new stars. Against all the data it now seemed as if 237 would become one of them. But, as Sara had reminded him, its fate was sealed. Whatever was happening had happened already. The weak light he could see had left the star two millennia ago. It had all been over and done with back in the days of Babylon and Plato, when the first astronomers had turned their lenses toward the black sea above them and ventured to look more closely at those white shining spirits. His little dot was just one in 400 billion, but George didn’t care. It was his, and he whispered to it, there in his cubicle, “Don’t you die on me.”
2
How exactly like George, Sara thought, to ask someone to marry him at three in the morning, when she couldn’t call everyone she knew. She considered this while waiting for Irene to arrive for lunch—already twenty-five minutes late. Maybe there had been news, and Irene had decided to bail. She was a disappearance artist, Irene was. Days or weeks could go by without contact, either because she was working on a new piece or because of something personal. She could be maddeningly private. Evading the circling of an impatient waiter, Sara pretended to be on her phone while she replayed the weekend’s events in her mind.
For the first two minutes after George had asked, she’d said almost nothing but “Oh my God” until George reminded her she technically hadn’t said yes yet, and so then she said yes for the two minutes that followed. But after those four minutes were over, she had wanted nothing more than to burst into the bedroom Irene and William had vanished into, except maybe to call her parents in Gloucester, except maybe to call her sister in Vancouver, except maybe to call Sue, her best friend from third grade, and then there were her grandparents in Sacramento and Austin . . . but it was still after midnight there and everywhere else.
“Let’s call your cousin Peg in London!” Sara had shouted, leaping from the hot tub and hardly pausing to wrap herself in a towel before rushing to find a phone.
“It’s only eight there,” George had said.
“Call her, call her, callllllll her!” Sara had screeched happily. While George hunted down his phone, she continued to make erratic squeaking noises.
“I don’t have her new number,” George concluded after investigating his contacts list.
Sara grabbed the phone and began flipping through, looking for people to call. “Do you ever clean this thing out? You still have your RA’s number from freshman year.” Then she clapped. “Jacob! Let’s tell Jacob!”
She was inside the hotel again before George could catch up to her. There they found Jacob wearing nothing but couch cushions.
“Wake him up!” Sara insisted. “He’s your friend.”
“You’ve known him practically as long as I have!”
“But you knew him first,” she insisted. “So technically he’s your friend.”
George thought about this. “Does that mean I get to tell Irene too?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. She’s a girl. It’s completely different.”
“Completely different according to who?”
“Polite society,” she insisted. “And it’s ‘according to whom.’”
George looked dubiously downward at their naked, snoring friend and begrudgingly poked him in the shoulder. Sara had to hand it to him—Jacob seemed neither polite nor social as he made a half-snarl and shifted, exposing one gigantic pale buttock. She sighed and gave Jacob a hearty slap on the back of the head. When this succeeded in opening just one of the boy’s bleary eyes, she looked at him squarely and said, “George has something to tell you.”
The bloodshot pupil had swiveled in its socke
t toward George, who stammered at it, “We’re . . . um. We’re engaged!”
There’d been a short silence, and then, in a growl from deep beneath a throw pillow, Jacob had said, “Engaged in what exactly?”
“To be married, you ass!” Sara shouted happily, bouncing on the couch beside him.
Jacob snorted, closed his eye, and said, “Does this mean Sara’ll finally stop being a puritan priss and move into your place?”
“Obviously,” George said, just as Sara said, “George’s place?”
They paused, each sure the other was joking.
“Who’s moving in with who?” George had asked.
“With whom,” Jacob and Sara both corrected him at once.
That matter had still not been settled. And Jacob hadn’t been the last to ask. Her parents had asked almost immediately, as had his. It was ridiculous that George imagined she could move into his place. It was hardly big enough for even one person to move around in. Granted it was on Riverside, in a beautiful prewar building, a stone’s throw from the park and close to Zabar’s. And of course it was insanely cheap, which was why George had remained in this prison cell, with its single sad window that wasn’t wide enough for an air conditioner. And people never believed her when she said this, but his shower was inside his kitchen! The toilet, then, was in another room the size of a coat closet, with no sink. But the worst thing by far was that his bed folded up into the wall. Yes. George Murphy, her soon-to-be husband, slept on a Murphy bed.
Sara’s apartment, all the way across the island on York Avenue, was vastly superior. The railroad style wasn’t all that convenient for living with Karen, a former coworker whose boyfriend, Troy, now spent every night and most of every weekend there. But it would be perfect for her and George, if Karen could be convinced it was high time she moved out to Westchester, where she and Troy both worked now anyway.
The waiter was circling Sara like a shark now, trying to get her to give up the table. He was new and didn’t know that she was there practically all the time. He kept asking if perhaps she’d like to wait at the bar until her friend arrived. Sara pretended to take important calls from the office when he approached, her thoughts flitting to The Death of Eurydice. Some artsy friends of Irene’s were in it and had given them all tickets. But now Irene was saying she was too busy, and George couldn’t make it, and Jacob flat-out said he could make it if he’d wanted to but didn’t want to. Rude. Well, William had already written back to say he’d be delighted to come, and Sara could hardly wait to see him. She hoped he might inject a bit of civility into the group.
Sara came out of her reverie to find the waiter hovering again. She coughed and ordered another coffee, though she was jittery enough from the first two cups. It was strange being there alone. Since they’d come to the city, this had been where they’d all gathered by default for brunches, lunch breaks, and late-night bull sessions. They’d last been there a week ago, though actually—no, they hadn’t all been there. Jacob hadn’t been able to make it. And it had been trouble, as it always was, when one of them was missing. Whenever all of them were anywhere together—picnics down at the Battery, visits to see a new exhibit of Edwardian Court costumes at the Met, an investigatory meal at a new restaurant—no one said a cross word. If anyone did (most often Jacob), it was seen as genuinely good-natured . . . However, whenever someone was missing, that person almost instantly became the subject of speculation, criticism, and suspicion. It was as if the person’s absence left a hole in their mutual fabric, and the others couldn’t help but pull at the fraying threads around the hole, as if to say Something ought to be here. How has this happened?
Just last week they’d been right here in Bistro 19, without Jacob, because he was out on a date with a new boy. Isn’t he still secretly dating his boss? Irene wanted to know, even though his arrangement with the boss had been open from the get-go and they all knew it. Then George had started calling the new boy “Siddhartha,” because Jacob had mentioned that he lived this, like, monastic lifestyle, though not for religious reasons but just because he was sort of OCD about clutter and—here was the worst part—were they ready? They’d met at a coffee shop when Jacob had seen him finish reading a copy of Angela’s Ashes, get up, wipe down his table, clear his cup, and then throw the book in the trash can.
Irene couldn’t believe it. What George wanted to know was, had Jacob seen the Siddhartha guy’s place yet, and was it, like, completely spotless? Sara hadn’t been able to help herself from asking if Siddhartha had seen Jacob’s place yet, and Irene and George had almost lost it. None of them, not once in six years, had seen Jacob’s apartment. It was somewhere way up in East Harlem, and as far as they could tell, he never stayed there. Either he slept with a current or past boyfriend, or he stayed up in Stamford with his boss and took the train in as if nothing were at all strange. But it was strange. For one thing, he wouldn’t tell any of them where the apartment actually was. Sara thought it was because he’d bitten off more than he could chew in terms of the neighborhood, all blustery and believing that he could fit right in, only to find, as she’d explicitly told him a hundred times, that he didn’t feel safe, but of course he couldn’t admit that, and kept renewing the lease just to make the point.
She checked her phone again. Still no message from Irene. She texted Jacob to see if he’d heard from her. She texted Irene a question mark. She texted George a smiley face and admitted to herself, then and there, that of course she’d move in with him in a heartbeat—even into that tiny closet-toilet apartment. She’d live with him in a refrigerator box, in a nursery rhyme shoe, a teepee, an igloo, or a fortress made of couch cushions. Let the doubters doubt. Let the future be unsure. In a city of eight million, they’d always be two, together, and that was the beginning and the end of it. Then, just as she was about to get up and head back to the office, Irene rushed into the restaurant, her hands up high in breathless apology.
3
Jacob lay in bed with a poem wadded up inside his mouth. A dry, papery obstruction. The toxic stinging of ink along the ridge of his tongue. He reached in with two fingers and tried to pull it out, even as his throat, in some sort of horrible reverse gag reflex, tried to contract and swallow the poem whole. Just as his fingers hooked onto one pulpy piece of it, he felt his esophagus swell and take the whole thing in like Jonah’s whale. He pulled, gagging, on the edge of the paper, but it ripped, leaving just a scrap pressed between his fingers. His nightmare ended with a gasping breath, the poem ingested again—again! every fucking night!—and his bleary eyes staring down at the ripped fragment of paper he’d torn free. On it was the first line, in handwriting so messy he couldn’t read it.
And then he’d woken up, and that too, had vanished.
It took him a moment to be sure he wasn’t really choking. He could still feel the lump in his throat. As he got his breath back, he tried to think of where he was. Pete’s apartment, he thought, when he saw Pete snoozing on the right edge of the mattress. He worked from home on Tuesdays and Fridays. Which means that I am in Morningside Heights. Again.
Moving softly so as not to wake the slumbering Pete, Jacob found his pants on the floor, next to the copy of Breakfast at Tiffany’s that Pete was still finishing. What was it, like a hundred pages? He squeezed himself out of bed and slipped into the bathroom with the blue jeans, button-down Oxford, and brown tweed sports jacket he had worn the night before. He looked out the window at the white light of early afternoon. He remembered he had a night shift up at Anchorage House.
He closed his eyes and tried to see the words from his dream. It was there somewhere; he could hear its footsteps just around the corners of his head. Impulsively, he grabbed his cell phone and texted Dr. Boujedra. Oliver—Under the weather. Won’t make it up tonight. It was a message he sent at least once a week. One of the perks of his relationship with his boss was that he could usually get away with playing hooky when inspiration seemed about to strike—or
even on days when he just couldn’t handle spending eight hours in the presence of hallucinating, drug-withdrawn, suicidal teenagers.
Back in Pete’s bedroom, Jacob picked up the Capote. It was the only book in the apartment—practically the only thing in the apartment. Pete owned one pot, one frying pan, one plate and one cup and one fork, a tacky lamp made out of conch shells, the mattress he slept on, one set of sheets—sky blue, with white puffy clouds—a yellow towel, and a cardboard box that contained his three outfits. One dressy, one for loafing around, and one to wear while washing the other two. He had a refrigerator and a stove, only because they’d come with the place, and both were always empty. His apartment was really quite large for a Manhattan studio, and Pete made good money working at Eco-Finance Apps or iPod Banking or something like that. He didn’t belong to any cult or ascetic belief system that Jacob could discern.
You’re such a weirdo, thought Jacob as he kissed sleeping Pete’s cheek goodbye. Then he slipped out through the blank white door, which locked behind him with a click.
Jacob hurried down chilly Broadway and bustled up the icy iron ziggurat of the 125th Street station, just as the downtown number 1 train groaned onto the aboveground platform. He hardly had time to admire the view as he blew aboard just before the doors cinched shut. Morningside Heights yawned before him, and he tried to feel the immensity of the entire island, of the steel tonnage beneath his feet. He willed the whole labyrinthine mess of it to vibrate up his calves and forearms.
He had the first line—he had it—of an epic poem. Or at least it was nibbling on the little gleaming hook that dangled from his spinal cord. He reeled all the way in and recast, way out into the deep white city: the literal soul of a thousand poets who’d come before him; the fishing grounds of two thousand others who’d gotten up earlier, read longer, worked harder, breathed deeper. Still, couldn’t he just snare a little Langston? Snag some Allen or Frank? He barely dared dream of angling for Walt or for Hart—those two slippery silver sturgeons, each eighteen feet long and weighing, together, a metric ton. Guarding their salty eggs, that humble caviar. Walt, the monstrous Methuselah, with his prehistoric whiskers in the murky bottom. And Hart, the lithe Leviathan, his steel-cabled fins propelling him through the upper currents. Jacob blinked twice as the ground outside the windows rose upward on each side, and in an instant he was underground.
Why We Came to the City Page 5