The Necessity of Stars

by E. Catherine Tobler

  The anchors spent the afternoon speculating what it all meant, and what had happened, given no terrorist organizations boasting that they were responsible. Of course, it could have been something as simple as an electrical malfunction, one news anchor insisted, but Navuluri said it could not possibly be—why the media blackout if the answer were so simple? Why the lack of public transmissions?

  And why a frantic call from Sugden, I asked myself that evening, having heard nothing since. I didn’t press him for more information, for I had the patience of a stone when it came to waiting on people. If Sugden needed me, he would call me. The idea of traveling to the Kingdom was a strangely exciting one—despite the terror leaving my own house provoked in me. Foolish, I called myself, because deep down I was what I had always been: a diplomat. The idea that I might foster a solution to whatever had happened was exhilarating.

  I don’t think we feel that nearly enough, especially in our later years. Exhilaration. I had forgotten how my heart could pound from it, and not something more ominous.

  It was Delphine I wanted to tell, Delphine above all others, for she had been my closest companion for more years than I could count. As I stepped out into the evening garden, I tried to count and came up with forty—could it be so many? Had we known each other so long? I glanced at the sky, to be certain I had enough time to reach Delphine’s house before full dark, and stopped in my tracks because the darkness was moving.

  This is why the darkness in Hyde Park was familiar; the darkness had also touched my own garden. I had stepped outside and I had seen it—something—before.

  My legs did not shake. Standing there, I felt the same exhilaration I’d felt at Sugden’s suggestion that I would be going to London—that I was needed in London. Isn’t it the idea that we are still needed that keeps us going and doing—the idea that our work has value even when, or especially when, we are in doubt of it. How beautiful it was to be necessary.

  Sometimes, in a negotiation, you can only wait. Sometimes, you didn’t know your exact place, or what the other party wanted, and you had to wait. You had to listen and watch. You had to open yourself to the other side, because your own side would not tell you what you needed to know in order to continue. (This is what amazed me with Sugden—there was only his side, so how could he have possibly opened himself to other perspectives and needs, and yet he had done.)

  I waited, and I listened.

  One by one, the trees reappeared. Or rather, the darkness reformed itself into the trees. The gaps in my garden filled themselves, save for one—the gnarled oak at the edge of the pond. What darkness remained fell to the ground instead. The darkness took a different shape. It was not a tree, but neither was it a man, nor an insect. It was somehow trying to be all three, though it hewed most closely to tree and insect—as if it knew these shapes more intimately than it did man.

  The shadow drifted toward me, knitting legs and feet together as it approached. The too-long legs and too-long arms mimicked tree branches, thin and spindly, sprouting other branches from the main line. There was a face too—and those same eyes from the day before. One blue, one bright. Saturn seemed to have fallen into the eye, all those rings endlessly circling.

  I waited, and I listened, but the night had gone silent around us, until at long last the crickets started. Crickets were rare these nights, so much of their land lost to wildfires, but here in my garden, they had been given new life. The sound startled me and the shadow both; we both looked toward the sound, as if we could pinpoint it. Then we looked back at each other.

  The shadow had gone as blue as the clearing sky above us, the blue when the sun has set and the stars begin to come out. They would have been invisible but for the moon glowing. One branched arm reached toward me, spreading long fingers as if it wanted to take my hand. I did not move because I had been taught not to touch the person I was negotiating with, either in anger or joy.

  “My name is Bréone Hemmerli,” I said.

  “My name is not Tura, but you may call me Tura.”

  I did not expect the shadow to speak English. Tura’s voice had a rumble not unlike a fully-loaded train moving across flooded land. A hard sound, punctuated with a softer, wet hiss. I stared at Tura a long time, my mind racing like it had not in quite some time.

  Often in a negotiation, one party will say something entirely unexpected and part of my work as a diplomat is to not betray my surprise. I wanted to leave myself open to every possibility; I wanted to hear everything at the table, not only what I presumed would be said, so had to make room for the unexpected.

  Another part of my work was learning to roll with whatever happens. Planning and organization were a large part of my work, but spontaneity was also necessary. Given the many different cultures the UN worked with, it was often difficult to anticipate every avenue of a dialogue; we were expected to be resourceful, expected to adapt to any need that might arise. Here was certainly a need—a conversation with... What, precisely? A lifeform previously unknown to me. To humanity?

  “Parlez-vous Français?” I asked.

  “Oui,” Tura said.

  Something happened inside me—something I could not put a name to. I have been trained, above all else, to maintain my composure in the face of negotiations, but I felt that composure slipping away in the face of this extraordinary moment. I simply could not stop staring at Tura and fearing that I would stop breathing and topple over. (Oh, Delphine, get the cart!)

  I didn’t stop breathing and I didn’t topple over. From somewhere inside me, I found the ability to continue. I spoke to Tura in Italian, and then Portuguese, and each left them saying no, they did not understand. I tried Mandarin, Hindi, and also Spanish, and failed to connect. This told me one important thing: Tura had probably not ventured outside of France. English remains the world’s language, by and far, the language of business, as it were, but the people of France would never only speak English.

  “We have trespassed and seek your understanding,” Tura said.

  The language threw me off, but also their ability to form full sentences. One might know a language, but to know how the words fit together was something else entirely. I waited, not sure what Tura meant, they gestured to the pond, to the yard in front of it. I was distracted though, by the sweep of their wing when they moved their arm. I had not expected a wing, nor the grace with which they moved.

  I would have never mistaken Tura for an angel, but wondered if anyone had. If someone had seen their shape in passing and believed them to be holy. I had not been raised with such traditions, and felt that if god and his cohorts had ever been a true presence in this world, they were here no longer, given the way humanity had turned its back on its duties to the planet.

  Beyond Tura, I saw pieces of frogs littering the grass, and the half-eaten bodies of goldfish. I was at first delighted that the goldfish had come back—the pond had been home to so very many, but in recent years I hadn’t seen any at all. Now, here was a half-eaten bounty. Still not understanding, I tried to be angry at first—how dare these fish be wasted. Was that what Tura meant? But then I realized no, I was the trespasser.

  How many nights had Tura and their kind fed in the garden? The garden had been theirs, had it not, for I had kept to the hearth and my chair for years now. I paid to have the garden tended to, I paid to stay out of it, and the men came only on their regularly scheduled days. Now, I had seen a strange shadow—oh, Tura—and I had come investigating. They had come out of the trees, as it were, thinking they were safe because the gardeners were not there. I had interrupted their dinner.

  “We are so hungry.”

  In the course of my looking away, the shadow had moved closer to me, and now stood beside me. I startled, looking up at them—and up, for how like a tree in height they were. The canopy of them was leafless, a tree in winter but for the wings, the face. (The face was so alarming—not in a frightening way, but perhaps also that, because one does not expect a shadow to look at them. One does not expect a shad
ow to have a face, to have eyes that echoed the planets.)

  “You should eat,” I said.

  If food was what they wanted, standing between them and their desire was of no use to me—Tura was asking to be understood, and I understood hunger well enough to know that I needed to leave. I took a step backward—how easily I could have been a frog, or a goldfish.

  The goldfish are back—Delphine will want to know.

  I took every step toward the kitchen backwards, unable to look away from Tura. The closer to the kitchen I got, the more the garden seemed only naturally dark. Tura had faded into the evening dark, but even as I watched, the lawn came to be cleaned of frogs and fish and every single bone.

  5

  The path to Delphine’s house was well-worn. Sometimes we would see each other multiple times a day, needing this or that—as old women do—but mostly needing to know we are not alone. Delphine worried about me, but would never say it outright; she would instead come to see if I had an extra cup of loose tea, the proper color thread to mend a skirt she’d torn in the garden, or if I had a moment to listen to her complain about her wayward son and daughter. As I have my own wayward son and daughter, I would listen for hours, for perhaps in Delphine’s stories, I would find a resolution for my own.

  Sometimes, I got her children and my own confused. Sometimes I thought of my son as a prim and proper lawyer for the corporations ravaging the world and of my daughter as a renegade environmentalist who would not sleep until the world had been restored to its proper balance. Delphine’s daughter did not seem to care whose lives she impacted, so long as she impacted them, through violence or other means. Delphine often said “my daughter the terrorist,” and often I woke thinking “my daughter the terrorist,” but my daughter was a school teacher, and my son was—

  Well, I didn’t know what had become of my son, because he was determined to go his own way as soon as the world deemed him old enough. He was out there—somewhere. The alternative made me queasy. It was all too possible he wasn’t out there, and what then? I couldn’t negotiate my way out of that truth, could I?

  Still, Delphine brought me conversation, and bouquets of painted flowers, and picked me up when I toppled over, and in every conversation made a point of asking when I meant to retire, because the UN was as crumbly as the world around us. Why fight for a thing that is falling apart, she asks. Because it is falling apart, I said each and every time.

  But today—

  Today there was something extraordinary in my garden, and I wanted to tell Delphine. I wanted to tell her about my garden and Hyde Park and the idea I’d had about both. I wanted to tell her about Sugden’s call—though he had very carefully not mentioned the Kingdom during our conversation. I wanted to share everything with her, because it was as natural as breathing. Delphine was always who I ran to—figuratively speaking, given I no longer had the legs to run.

  I was not sure if I should tell her these things—but I wanted to. How does one say, “I think there is a frog-eating alien in my lily pond, Delphine.” Delphine would sit me down and take my papery hands into her papery hands, and give them a good squeeze before she told me I had lost what little remained of my mind.

  She might be right. On waking this morning, it was a wonder I remembered the encounter at all. Nothing had looked strange in the garden this morning—Tura had not made an appearance. It was easy to think I had imagined it. I glanced back at my garden gate, still visible down the path behind me, and told myself I had not. I had not imagined the news and I had not imagined Tura.

  But what if I had?

  “I am Bréone Hemmerli,” I whispered as I made my way down the path connecting our houses. Bowers arched over sections of the path, constructed by me and Delphine in younger years for shelter from the rains.

  We’d planted climbing roses and nasturtiums, clematis and wisteria, anything that would climb the shelters and turn them into little flowered boxes. Delphine and I often picked the nasturtiums and added them to our salads, which we ate to convince ourselves we didn’t need croissants. We hadn’t had croissants in an age, for though there is a bakery in town, it concerned itself with the basics that people need. Good bread, well-milled flour, sometimes sunflower seeds. Nothing grew the way it used to in the strange climate.

  “I am Bréone Hemmerli and there is an...” I paused on the path and looked behind me once more. The gate of my garden was but a copper sliver amid the green of the trees. So many trees, I thought they would eventually swallow the path whole. How was this place still a miracle? How were we here? Why were we here? “I am Bréone Hemmerli and there is a frog-eating alien in my lily pond, Delphine.”

  It sounded perfectly normal.

  “Bréone?”

  Delphine’s voice behind me was startling. I looked over my shoulder at her and she was splendid in a tunic of magenta, belted so as to keep from tripping in the garden. Her trousers were wet and dirty from her morning gardening, one cheek smudged with mud, her hair escaping in a wild silver tangle from beneath her wide-brimmed hat. There was no sun today, yet she persisted with her hats.

  “I am she,” I said and moved toward the bench that marked this part of the path. Roses climbed the shelter, a tangle of blush and honey. I sank onto the bench with a groan, though the bench was still wet with morning dew. I hadn’t walked very far, but it was so very good to sit. My hips thanked me and my legs sighed in pleasure at not having to do all the work.

  “What has happened?” Delphine was instantly at my side, taking up my hands. She was the constant grandmother, even to me, her equal in age.

  I knew that trying to pull my hands from hers would be useless; she is not strong so much as she is abiding. She would never let go first, and I wished I was more like her because I always seemed to be the first one to let go, to turn away. I was always the one to slip first from a shared bed.

  “Why must something have happened?” I asked, frowning at her.

  “You haven’t—”

  Delphine released my hands (she wasn’t supposed to release my hands) and I shuddered. She withdrew her hands into her lap and stared at me as if she were about to scold me. I didn’t like that look—I knew it too well and always wondered how her children withstood it.

  “It has been three days since you have come down this path,” she eventually said.

  Three days. I had no idea.

  In my age, time is more elastic. The house is full of clocks and the news reports always carry dates—as do the briefings I get from the UN—but even so, I don’t have a good sense of how time passes. A day is a day; tomorrow would be much like today—or, would usually be, were I not about to tell Delphine about what I’d found in the garden.

  Still. Delphine’s voice carried her sorrow—that’s what it was, not anger—and her shoulders slumped for a breath before she pulled herself back up straight. Delphine rarely allowed anyone to see her in defeat; she often said that she hadn’t lived so long to collapse into a black hole now—stars were much older when they did that, and black holes didn’t just lie there doing nothing. Of course, black holes were hungry and never full, and this was how I saw her too; always learning, wanting to know more about the world even as it collapsed.

  High in the trees above us, a bird called out, and another answered. Delphine’s eyes slid shut and she tilted her head. The leaf shadows made a beautiful lattice across her face—but there wasn’t a shred of sunlight. Tree shadows.

  “Are they wrens do you think?” she asked.

  Not wrens, I thought, Tura rising in my mind. But that isn’t what she meant.

  “The call is higher than that,” I said almost instantly. For all that I have forgotten, I still knew my birds. “Sharper. Siskins, maybe?” I looked for the birds, for their black and gold amid the canopy of green, but couldn’t find them. Perhaps I was distracted, thinking again of Tura. Of the way their face emerged from the shadow.

  “Three days,” I murmured. I could not remember the last time I had seen Delphine.r />
  “Do you remember, I found you in the grass?” Delphine asked.

  I said nothing. I thought I remembered (the grass stuck to my feet), but I didn’t want to remember (the fear at the very sight of the garden). I could clearly recall the touch of her hands (soft, strong), but was that now or was it then?

  “I was coming to see you,” Delphine said. “To be sure you were all right. And here you are. It is the best thing I could have found on the path. I will admit I was also thinking about the nasturtiums, the little yellow ones if there are any.” She shook the little basket she’d brought.

  “They’re so peppery,” we said together, and laugh as we always have.

  Somehow, I had known Delphine for forty years. Though we know each other inside and out, it didn’t feel that long. But time—elastic. If there were anyone I could tell about what I’d found in my garden, it would be Delphine, but when our conversation lagged, she went to pick her yellow nasturtiums. I didn’t say the words—they sat heavy on my tongue, and yet I could not say them. Worry rose up around me like a cloak, wrapping my shoulders until I could only imagine Delphine laughing and putting me in the cart. She would take me to an asylum where they would lock the door behind me. It is how the world still deals with the mad, with the misunderstood.

  I met Delphine Chefridi on my first official day of work for the United Nations. She was one of several visiting scientists, all gathered to speak about climate change, because the UN had always excelled at discussing problems at great length even if they never moved forward to do anything about them. The UN very much wanted Delphine to join their economic division, because they needed people like her, they said, to ensure the work would carry on.

  “Carry on into what?” Delphine spat the words as she threw her coffee cup into the recycling bin, only to have the plant-based cup bounce off the edge of the bin, and splatter coffee everywhere before hitting the floor.