What is the right way to treat the relics that do not belong to you, but in some way define you? How should we treat our subject matter—what we study and collect and try to piece together—whether we believe its truth or not? I should ask Roger this, but maybe I should also ask myself.
After my mother, I would visit Roger’s shop with my girlfriend Sarah. For three years, we would drive out when we lived in Tucson and then, after we moved away, we would come back and visit. Roger liked Sarah; he strung a peridot-pendant necklace together for her on her birthday and answered her questions before he did mine.
Then one day I typed Roger’s name into a search engine and clicked on his Facebook profile. Here is what I found:
A split-image of baboons piled on top of a car and young black men on a police cruiser in the Baltimore riots following Freddie Gray’s death. “See any difference?” Roger writes.
A photoshopped image of three chimpanzees wearing clothes and below, Roger’s caption: “On Russia’s 2016 Moscow University calendar, they show what might be an average appearing family unity in a liberal Western nation with an open door immigration policy.”
Another post that begins: “Slavery ain’t entirely what you thought it was . . .”
On December 6, 2015, the post: “Did all these men and women die for THIS?????? if you voted for this Islamist shame on you! If you voted for this traitor you’re his comrade in arms and you’ve spit on the graves of every man and woman who died defending America so that someone like Hussein Obama could never hold ANY public (or private) office.”
And a few weeks earlier, on November 19, 2015, this: “I believe there’s a more formal name for climate change . . . Winter, Spring, Summer & Fall . . . I’ve read about global warming seriously ever since scientists and divisors developed this scam because there is so much money for them to be maid by supporting the lie.”
At first, I thought I had clicked on the wrong profile. “I just can’t believe that’s the same guy,” my mother said when I told her. “That’s not the man I met.” But then I saw a picture of Roger next to three women in bikinis in Times Square (“No John, these weren’t trannys. I know boobs when I see them . . .”), and I recognized the same fervency of description, the misspelled and oddly capitalized words, the periods and punctuation marks marching to their own beat. Facebook too, of course, can be its own cabinet of wonder: it collects the private self and puts it on public display. I remembered Roger’s rape jokes and penis jokes and the skull with the word Mexican inked above its bullet hole, the black-and-white photo of a lynched, possibly Hispanic man taped to the glass case. I thought maybe this was the real self in front of me the entire time, the one I had avoided seeing. Maybe I had convinced myself of Roger’s maxim as well: it’s true if you want to believe it’s true.
I felt sad. I had so much wanted to trust Roger. The story of his father. His explaining, with great delicacy, the anion-cation ratio of gold-plating mummified pack rats. Or his telling of how concretions formed in the Great Lakes over tens of thousands of years ago, that they start from a very small nucleus and then grow layer upon concentric layer into a shape that represents what time collects but also distills. I had hoped that someday a visitor would make the hairpin turn over Gates Pass, drive through the saguaro forest, and turn left on Kinney to find Roger and myself, the collection and collector, suspended in our amber, expressions mid-yowl, a sign under us saying “kills just by pointing at you,” or “100 percent guaranteed as described,” or simply “Ouch!”
And all he turned out to be was a mean old man, stoking his quiet bigotry in his cluttered office so as to putter out and kindly answer questions.
Sarah and I visited Roger one last time after we found his Facebook page. We went back to Tucson for a wedding and decided to drive out.
When we entered the store, we found a teenage girl working the register. It was the first time we’d seen someone else there besides Roger or Rick. She was the daughter of Roger’s friend. A security alarm blared whenever the door opened and, behind the register, a video camera fed tape to the office. It was the summer of the presidential election. Roger shuffled out in a black T-shirt and dirty flip-flops. He recognized Sarah before he recognized me. It was almost her birthday again.
We were polite to Roger just as he was polite to us. He showed us his latest purchase, the femur and tibia of a Mexican soldier, an arrowhead sticking out of it at a comically straight angle. His skulls were missing. Afterward, we learned they’d been stolen. When the local news interviewed him, Roger said the thieves must be “devil worshippers.” On Facebook, he wrote, “I’d like to nail them to the wall.” The skulls had been there over fifty years. Their descriptions were still taped to the glass shelf.
After a little while, Sarah asked Roger about a crystal pendulum she had noticed. He told her to open her palm. He swung the pendulum above it, and then he placed it in her free hand. He said she must hold it over her palm until it made only the slightest quiver. She must think of a question, a yes or no question of great importance, but one whose answer she did not yet know. If the crystal swung clockwise, then the answer was yes. Counterclockwise, no.
Sarah asked Roger the ever-logical question: did he believe in this? Roger paused, as he always did, and wet his lips. He said the pendulum’s answers were just a reflection of our mind. That the brain subconsciously knows its answer and delivers that information to our body. He said God is not some guy sitting on a throne decreeing this or that, but all the forces and laws of the universe of which we only know a fraction. That this is more divine than anything conjured by the vision of a man.
I thought of all the questions I would ask if Roger had given the pendulum to me. I searched for the right one. Collections are mayhem. We make meaning of them in so many ways. The only conclusion I could draw was the obvious one: that Roger, like God, wasn’t one or the other but all of these things. An old man in front of you in a T-shirt and flip-flops is both kind and racist, generous and bigoted, hatred and love. What would I admit if I said my fondness for him outweighed my knowledge, that I still believed the fraction I saw in front of me? What did it matter if he was telling the truth if the meanings we made said more about us than the person we made them about?
I looked back at the pendulum. Sarah had steadied it. She thought of her question. Slowly, it began to swing.
When it had stopped, Roger said very quietly, “Good. Now drop it in your hand. Gently. Feel it? There, it’s yours.” And he took her hand in his and closed it around the answer.
Parallax
First, disable the smoke alarm. Then look for rooftop tar, printer ink, the chunk of asphalt you pocket where the road is torn up. Drop a measure of this on a surface set to sear. A frying pan will do. Petroleum, black and viscous, will begin to smoke. Clouds rise and disperse in strange shapes. Give them a few fans. Keep track of their patterns on the air. Simple as that, you are looking at sunspots.
Well, not sunspots per se, but only their imitations, at earthly materials emulous of the celestial. At what Galileo Galilei likened them to in his Letters on Sunspots. He suggested using the bitumen found in tar or asphalt to approximate their shapes, in the same paragraph where he went on to write, “I do not mean to assert anything positively . . . I do not wish to mix dubious things with those which are definite and certain.”
What Galileo believed definite and certain about sunspots was this: they were contiguous to the sun’s surface, they generated and decayed like clouds, and they were extremely large, though not so large as Venus. He believed it vain to determine their true substance. That it’s sometimes easier to explain what’s farther away than what rests close at hand.
A sunspot also grows on one’s skin, a blemish the result of overexposure to the sun. My father, born in Brazil with Swiss skin, developed a number of these cancers, basal cell carcinomas to be harvested out. He’d come home after a visit to the dermatologist with a bu
tterfly Band-Aid on his nose, a small sealed thumbprint on his forehead. Once he showed up with his ear bandaged, the tip snipped off, like a dog that had been caught in a fight.
I have my father’s skin, the skin that one day turns us into lizards. But I see no signs yet of the inherited trait, just a few white freckles, a loss in pigmentation. Like the sun’s, mine are mere blemishes, harmless if cared for. The most they do is signal that the body they rest upon moves in time and space. That it will one day burn up and disappear.
From June 2 to July 8 in 1612, Galileo recorded sunspots. He drew these to corroborate his arguments in Letters on Sunspots and refute those made by Christoph Scheiner, who had observed them in Augsburg the year before. Scheiner, a Jesuit astronomer, wished to retain the heavens’ perfection and so hypothesized that the spots were distant from the sun, satellites or small planets passing between it and the earth, momentarily darkened by its brightness. In concluding that the spots existed on the sun’s surface, Galileo placed imperfections upon what was believed perfect.
He also concluded that the sun itself moved, rotating from west to east around its own center every twenty-five days. It would take a dozen or so days for a sunspot to pass from view and a dozen more for its return. Galileo believed the spots to reappear, but because they continued to expand and condense when out of sight, he could not be sure that what had vanished had now returned.
Galileo also misjudged size. Sunspots are immense: an average spot swallows up both Venus and Earth. A monstrosity approximates Jupiter.
In my childhood home, my parents built a solar system to hang from my ceiling. They cut planets out of wood, looped thread through their tops, and hung them from quarter-inch hooks. The sun in the corner, then the planets in order. They fashioned Saturn’s rings out of wire, used cotton balls for Earth’s clouds, sprinkled glitter on the wooden circles to indicate the surrounding stars. I stared up at these as an infant, my father and mother on either side of the crib, reciting the names as if trying to orient me on a vast scale. It worked so well my mother claims my first word was Jupitah. An unlikely story, yet only she remains with the authority to tell it. We moved out of that first apartment, and my parents packed the solar system and hung it from their new bedroom. It stayed there for many years before my mother stripped it down and threw the planets into storage.
To disprove Scheiner’s claim that sunspots were separate planets, Galileo used parallax: the effect created when the position of an object appears to differ based on where it’s viewed. Simply put, we see things differently from different places. If the spots were planets moving between the sun and Earth, they would appear outside of the solar disk at some point during the earth’s orbit. But Galileo observed that spots fell within the same narrow zone of the sun. Not only that, no matter where on Earth people observed the spots, they fell within the same arrangement. What Galileo telescoped in Florence, Daniello Antonini saw in Brussels and Lodovico Cigoli in Rome. The spots could be drawn from anywhere. They resisted parallax.
There are specific types of parallax rooted in our physical limits. Geocentric parallax, when celestial bodies become displaced because we observe them from the earth’s surface and not its center. Heliocentric parallax, because we observe them from the earth and not the sun.
There is another parallax, not a displacement of bodies but disembodiment itself. The parallax that came when my father and I walked across the park to his work and he led me to the microscope at his desk and I pressed the eyepiece to my socket until it left a red mark. Those eukaryotes, floating and dividing, quivering on their jellied stage. When something becomes disembodied, we struggle to see it for what it really is. When someone becomes disembodied, we struggle to see him for what he once was.
My mother took down the mobile because she developed what she terms cosmophobia. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a fear of the universe, specifically the night sky, its stars and its moon.
I thought it was a joke at first. She’d tell people she had just met, “I have cosmophobia.”
“What’s that?” they’d ask.
“I hate the sky!” she’d say.
When she takes the poodle out for his nightly walk at her house in the country, she keeps her eyes on the road. If the moon hangs low and she catches sight of it, she’ll shudder. If I’m out with her, I’ll point out the constellations I see and remark how beautiful they look. “Stop it, stop it!” she’ll scream, and then she’ll tell the dog, “Don’t listen to him,” before scooping him up and taking him inside. I am joking and she is joking but we are also, of course, not.
Letters on Sunspots did not overhaul the geocentric organization of the heavens, but it did point to a system that would. At the end of his last letter, Galileo endorsed Copernicus, foreseeing his system’s “universal revelation” with “little fear of clouds or crosswinds.” Though this was not the exact case (and though he would later refute this), Galileo took a step he could not take back. He dragged Scheiner with him, in thrall to his orbit like one of Jupiter’s moons.
One can’t help but feel sorry for the Jesuit. What do we do with the news that shatters our hypotheses, the revelation which forces us to rebuild a world? Or the realization that the world has always been built this way, but that only now—because you’ve swung around on the globe and drifted in latitude—it appears as such. I imagine Scheiner must have felt the way we do when a loved one betrays us. Or the way we do when a loved one dies, which is its own sort of betrayal, because that is not supposed to happen to us, at least not so soon.
In her enamel class at the YMCA, my mother makes copper clocks. For a long time, even after my father’s death, she made universe clocks, in which the second and hour hands moved over a glazed indigo background (the night sky) and small multicolored baubles (the stars and planets). She made many of these, handing them out as Christmas and birthday presents. It’s a funny idea—keeping time out of what seems beyond it. But cosmophobia hit and now she makes clocks with sheep in the background. The universe became a former friend, one that offered to take care of someone for her and then double-crossed her. It swallowed that something up without even the sense to apologize or admit mistake, and now she has cut off conversation, avoids eye contact when they run into each other on the street. She loves the sheep on her clocks because they resemble the ones that graze on the hillside opposite her window in the country. But these clocks conceal no secrets: in the end, she’s counting sheep.
In the year 807 ce in France, Charlemagne ruled as Holy Roman Emperor, people dressed in sack-like tunics, and a black smudge passed over the face of the sun for eight straight days. Clouds obscured the dark spot’s entrance and exit, but it looked for all the world like the passage of Mercury.
Yet it wasn’t. It could not have been, Galileo argued, because that planet travels so quickly it can’t reside within the sun’s sphere for seven hours, much less eight days. The smudge must have been a sunspot.
There was, of course, no way to know this if you were alive in 807 ce. No way to build your own telescope, as Galileo did in 1609, because the Dutch had not yet invented it. Though this wouldn’t mean you were alone. We’ve been interpreting and misinterpreting sunspots for centuries, choosing to see them as we please. We’ve cured and salted their mystery, preserved them against their own heat, and taken from their smoke the signals we need to survive.
My mother and I are not joking those nights in the country because I want her to accept what she refuses and she wants me to accept her refusal. It’s ridiculous, this game of chicken, this incessant pointing at the moon. Perhaps just as ridiculous as being asked to continue a life where what gave that life meaning has been removed. If my father is absent, then she believes she can will that other system, the universe that confirms his absence, to disappear as well.
In her cosmophobia, my mother has moved closer to the sun. “I love the sun,” she tells me over the phone. “It’s ours. He makes thing
s grow. It’s responsible for life.”
“Did you call it a he?” I ask.
“I call it an it. S-u-n not s-o-n. Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she says.
“Do you like the earth?” I ask.
“I like the earth. I love the grass, the trees, the birds. The sheep.” She goes on, but then another voice obscures hers—the phone lines have become mixed up and I must wait through this snippet of conversation until her voice returns. When it does, she is asking me where I am.
“I’m here,” I say and ask again: “Do you ever think the sun is one of those stars that has already died and we just don’t know it yet?”
“Tom,” she pauses, “we would know it. It takes nine seconds for its light to reach us. It’s only ninety-three million miles away.”
“What about sunspots?”
“Oh, I love sunspots,” she gushes. “They’re the ones that fuck up all our technology.”
Sunspots are neither blemishes nor smokes, but areas of intense magnetism on the sun’s surface. This magnetism leads to another definition: sunspots as a notional cause of an odd error. Why did the television screen suddenly go blank? Sunspots. What caused this unforeseen and disastrous event, this irrevocable loss? Sunspots. If we don’t fully understand something, we attribute unknown causes. Sunspots have been blamed for the Great Depression and climate change. Their frequency affects the amount of ions in the air, so we say they alter our moods. Their magnetic storms disrupt radio communications and interfere with electronics or, in my mother’s words, fuck up all our technology. The voice that crackles through the telephone wire while I speak with my mother. Is it a ghost? Is it my father? No, sunspots.
My mother did once contemplate the universe. Scorpius RA 17h 57m 40s D –37° 33’ is a star in the Milky Way. After my father died, my mother contacted the International Star Registry and paid to rename this star Rafael, Judy, and Tommy. The dedication was retroactive to the day of his death, as if that were when the three of us packed up the wooden planets and relocated once more, shooting forth from Earth to star. The International Star Registry has no official authority with which to redesignate celestial bodies (they’re really something of a swindle), but that is all well and good because my mother now prefers to forget there’s a ball of gas out there with our names on it. The dedicatory plaque hangs in a corner of my room. I ask her how she can love the sun and hate the stars when the sun too is a star, when stars, if seen from a different perspective, could also be suns. “But it’s our sun,” she says. “Those other ones are far away and probably dead. All they do is twinkle. I don’t give a shit about twinkling.”
The Book of Resting Places Page 10