The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel

by Greer, Andrew Sean

  The scene released its catch. Swift threw the telescope aside and leaned over the wrecked hole in the wall, shouting with the sultan, acting as if there were something they could do. Those already standing raced to the edge, followed close behind by those, like Eli, who had left their seats. Some did not run, but grabbed their children or wives and held them close. The baseball-playing boys were embraced immediately and coaxed away from the edge by parents who shouted, trying not to sound too frightened, trying not to think about what had surely happened. It still had not quite happened; they had not fully realized that the boy was dead, bones broken on the rocks of the beach below, near a fan of seaweed, where each wave unfolded its luminous edge onto the sand.

  The students moved all at once to the wall, but randomly, like molecules of water panicking at the boiling point. They ran around each other, toward the open edge, drawn to the horror. Denise and Kathy, together at the beginning, split around the huddled parents and children, and this might have made a difference, in the end. Together at the wall, or apart. Kathy stopped to hold frozen, crying Lydia, taking her in her arms. Eli came with the Mandays and headed straight for the wall. It was only chance that put him next to Denise. Kathy stood in the middle of the overlook, hushing Lydia, kissing her cheek. Everyone was yelling until they heard voices from below.

  When the shouts floated up from the beach, those on the overlook understood. Denise and Eli stood together at the wall, looking down on a village darkened by the sultan’s edict, one small lantern recently lit and showing a scene too complex to understand: rocks and driftwood and, somewhere in the rubble, a small, thin body. Denise took Eli’s hand and felt it shaking; she looked up at his eyes in shock. Kathy held the little girl. Island voices shouted in a foreign language. A high girl’s voice, which they later learned was a grown woman’s, began to wail somewhere in the darkness. They understood before the sultan faced Swift and whispered a translation; before the solemn, bearded professor turned toward them all like a giant and told them what had happened. If only Manday’s time machine were true! If only each of them could have gone back thirteen days, they would have chosen to remain in their old lives: Swift writing a letter; Lydia hearing her mother’s bedtime story; Eli writing out his thesis proposal; Kathy washing dishes and listening to the Beatles; Denise waiting in a cafe for her old lover, shaking her head at the waitress, nothing yet, as she read through the jukebox choices. Each of them would have chosen those petty worries over this one, but how could they have known? We are deaf to what our lives will bring us.

  It began here, when they were young. Denise held on to Eli’s hand and he whispered to her. Kathy, far away, stared at the crumbled wall. It was born of this moment. They stood on the overlook, silent, watching, listening to the men and women shouting and crying below. The meteor storm was reaching its peak above them, sending sparks of light across the stars, shattering the dark bowl of the sky as if a god had dropped it. Only the children raised their heads to see.

  1971

  near aphelion

  It is always hard to realize that these numbers

  and equations we play with at our desks have

  something to do with the real world.

  —Steven Weinberg

  Her father would not let her chop the vegetables.

  “But I’m sooo good at it, and sooo careful,” she complained, pulling up a bar stool and resting her chin on the countertop.

  He refused, wiped the blade of his heavy knife, and began slicing a moon-white onion, letting the rings fall silently to the board.

  “Oh, come on,” Lydia said to her father, and then flailed her arms out, crying: “Oh, just drop it!” She was trying out a new way of talking now, similar to her friend Kim’s voice—so many sighs and ohs and weary eye-rolling expressions—but she hadn’t got it right yet, and could see it wasn’t working now. He glanced up at her and she was a little afraid she’d offended him, somehow; acted too teenagerly for a girl of eleven, like a tourist saying the wrong words from a phrasebook. But he waved her away with the knife—he was unconcerned, and unmoved. Usually, when she wanted something, Lydia returned to childhood and her early successes at manipulation—that artificial smile she was flashing now, the giggle with a finger at her lip, the curtsy. But the tricks tended to cloy these days, and they rarely worked on him anymore. Yet, despite this Kim language, she had not come up with new stuff. It made her furious and confused, and she walked away looking for something to destroy in retribution.

  Swift continued to work away at his onion, turning the rings ninety degrees so he could chop from a new angle. Everything had to be done in a particular way—you wouldn’t have guessed this about him if you’d caught him drunk and boisterous at a party, spraying rum into his beard, telling stories of Richard Feynman and those mathematical jokes—and even he wouldn’t have recognized or admitted it. He would have said that it was easy and obvious how to cut an onion: the best way. You might have said this was a sign of his genius, the outward show of his facility with stars and numbers, but the same obsession in a lesser man could just as easily have been taken as desperation. Because Swift was also desperate, moving on to his red peppers, half-listening for his daughter as she stomped around the house. He was afraid, despite all his efforts, that he had grown suddenly old.

  It was 1971, and for so many professors like Swift, it was hard to read the newspapers and believe that this was the world they’d known. Bombs were everywhere: on airliners, campuses, even in the rest room of the Capitol. Science jobs were at an all-time low; Nixon had cut aerospace funding drastically, and then, inevitably, an Apollo mission had gone horribly wrong and the scientists themselves were blamed. Universities had closed down to protests after the invasion of Cambodia, and many of the male astronomy undergraduates, in a panic over the draft, had abandoned science and left for Canada and Denmark. Young professors led their students in protest; older ones shook their heads at empty classrooms. Science, the savior of the world a decade before, had become some kind of enemy, so how could men like Swift feel they belonged? He tried; he lectured against the war in his classroom, smoked pot with his students, bought trippy records they recommended and listened to them over and over until he found something to enjoy. He tried to feel some sympathy for the young.

  Lydia was already outside. She knew very little of what was in the newspapers. She had stolen a handful of crackers from the table, and here she stood outside in a mist of crumbs. They were on their farm in Sonoma, north of the city—once her parents’ place, and now just her father’s; a weekend at the apple orchard in mid-March. Usually it was still cold at this time of year, officially winter, prone to fog and night chills that sent the spiders indoors to torment them, but nothing was for sure in northern California, and the late afternoon air was unseasonably warm and bright, birds wrestling in the budded trees, the weeds and grass of the field she stood in glowing greenly, smelling deeply of themselves.

  They were there too early. They had never come to the farm in March before, but when her father suggested it, she had grown so excited that she puzzled even herself. She had friends in Berkeley, a birthday party to go to (Kim would be there), but there was something so secret and true about the farm, something so old in her that she could hardly resist it: the half-a-year of waiting, then that sudden reward that she was never able to predict (though it came every year, without fail) that first weekend when her parents, filled with relief, would pack food and coffee and drive off with Lydia and her older sister. There was the mysteriously long route across a bridge, the familiar water tower in white, then the old unchanged and cob-webbed homestead where her mother had always crept off happily with a book and her father paced restlessly through the fields in an old fishing hat, leaving her alone with her sullen sister and a dark barn full of attics, coops, sharp mysteries. March—they were there too early; it threw her off. But she didn’t question it. Perhaps some wonderful thing had happened to her here when she was young, so young she had forgotten it—a gol
d earring found in the dry straw, or a nest of chicks—something lost and invisible that drew her here without the ohs and sighs and feigned boredom.

  This month was the aphelion of Comet Swift—its point farthest from Earth. Her father had told her this the week before, in explanation of their early trip, pulling a pink piece of construction paper from her art table and drawing ellipses across it in dark ink, lovingly sketching the comet with its old-man’s beard. He talked about the attraction of Jupiter, the Oort Cloud, the effect of the solar wind. Spirals and lines covered the pink paper. He made sure Lydia understood the science of it, and she nodded as if she did, and then Swift folded the paper, squatted down beside her and asked the strangest thing: “Do you remember the boy who fell?”

  Lydia did not know what to say. It was a terrible crime to say you didn’t know something in her family, in that house crowded with books and maps. Could you say you didn’t remember? “Sort of,” she said carefully.

  “At Bukit? At the perihelion?”

  It was another word she knew she was supposed to understand, so she didn’t hesitate to smile and nod. So he smiled, too, relieved, and began to talk with her about it. He gave her the details that she’d lost in the confusion of youth—the rusted telescope, the broken wall, the baseball moving against the sky—but instead of bringing back her own memories in a rush, she regarded this as another of her father’s amazing stories, from a long time ago. And though he put Lydia in the story, placed her on a mat in the middle of the overlook, playing with a monkey, she believed this was, again, his old device. She was always in his stories. Lydia knew she wasn’t there that night—how could she have been? Nothing so terrible could happen except in the distant past of fathers. No one died these days.

  Swift did not always know the right thing to say; he told her things adults should never share with children. He talked about the crazy, wailing women on the island and the money he’d had to give to the sultan. He talked about his own doubts, about how he felt, for a long time, as if it were his fault—he had moved the telescope out of the way, just at the wrong moment, pulled the boy’s only support from underneath him. He no longer believed this, he told her, smiling through his beard. He’d meant to save the boy; that was all that mattered. He had tried. Lydia sat very still on her bed, afraid that if she moved, she might crack the mood and lose this odd confessional, lose the intensity of her father’s memory. So often he ignored his younger daughter, caught up in his stars, and here he was squatting before her, talking as if he was sharing a secret with her. She loved him desperately.

  He told her the story, he said, getting up at last, because people might talk about it at the party. He wanted to make sure she knew. Lydia nodded, acting as if it were nothing, but the image remained in her mind long after he left the room: A boy fell from a cliff, through palm trees, onto a darkened beach.

  What she considered now, however, was not the boy at all; it was the people who might mention him. The scientists. Lydia didn’t like them; they were too strange, too unlike her or any of her friends’ parents. They talked about the oddest things, and their fascination with Lydia was beginning to seem suspicious to her, because they didn’t seem to recognize who she was. She felt this meant they didn’t recognize her star appeal, the beautiful and lazy way she reached for a pear (something Kim had taught her), the sexual batting of her eyelids and (of course) the clear brilliance of her mind. She was an Indian princess in disguise among the common people, and they should take note. But really it was just that they didn’t treat her like a child; they talked to her like an adult or, rather, as if they were children, too, as if she were no different; and yet, still, secretly, she pined for that distinction. She loved the way other adults, like Kim’s parents, fawned over her, brought presents, deferred to her as if she might save the world. None of that happened with her father’s friends. Instead, these scientists and grad students might spend an hour in her room playing with her camera while she sat on the bed picking at her jeans, arms crossed and furious. Didn’t they know who she was?

  Lydia ran across the field toward the barn. She had decided she would spend the whole evening there, in the loft with her magazines and diary, spying on the adults. Grass broke at her ankles, wet from an earlier rain, and flecked water into the air. Her socks were getting wet, and green, but she was careless. She hardly ever noticed anything except the object of her focus; somehow, the absentmindedness passed over the professor and grew in his daughter. Blue moths were floating over the field—she didn’t notice them—and, caught in her wake, they flew like tissue into the sky, which was as blue as they were. She hated being eleven. It killed Lydia that she wasn’t twelve; she despised being eleven; it was so young. It seemed to her that she’d been cursed with childhood forever, that no one else in the world had ever been so young for so long.

  So there she was, climbing up the splintered crosspieces of her ladder, wet straw clinging to her hair as the bats slept high in the rafters; there she was getting higher but, to her mind, no older. And there was her father, cutting lamb into cubes, humming some new song through his gray beard, some tune he’d heard on the radio, trying to be relevant and oh-so-seventies. Yet he could hardly go to bed without another year passing him by. The girl with straw-littered hair, a mere slug in time, and her portly father moving like a greyhound through it.

  The doorbell rang. Someone had arrived too early.

  Above, out away from the little farm built on its quarter-lot of an orchard, the apple blossoms only green teeth on the branches— above, into space, past the Moon and Mars and the asteroids, somewhere out near Jupiter—the comet sailed on its bent orbit. Just a fist of ice and dust now, a few kilometers across, nothing propelling it but momentum and these giant gravities, no heat here to give it a tail or any brightness. Dark and asleep. It was nearing its farthest distance from them—its aphelion, its half-birthday—oblivious, of course, to the party being thrown in its honor.

  “Manday!” Swift yelled in the doorway and it was indeed Dr. Manday, holding a bottle of wine like a baby. His skin was drier and paler than it had been years ago, and he was as stout as Swift now, though a decade or so younger. Perhaps it was his timidity that aged him faster, and his old friend had always cursed him for that, demanded that he listen to rock music and wear blue jeans instead of the stiff collars and slacks of an old man. Manday couldn’t bear it; it was hard enough for him to be an American. The loudness and frankness of being American, the utter selfishness and greed and great compassion of it, the whole opera whose stage he stepped onto—it was hard enough acting his role without having to be young, or brave, or handsome as well. Did he have to leap into the very fire?

  “Best wishes to your comet,” Dr. Manday said and waited in the doorway.

  Swift made no gesture for him to enter, but stood there in his apron, that frightening knife clenched in one fist. He was looking past Manday into the sky, burning blue as flame, and perhaps to what might be hidden out there, impossible to see; perhaps wondering whether either of them would live to see it again. These were troubled times. A cloud moved away from the sun and warm light made its way to them, first to Swift, then to Manday, as they both stood in awkward contemplation of this invisible object and its course. It seemed to Manday that Swift had forgotten him, or could see through him, and that he simply didn’t matter. Even standing in the doorway with a bottle of red table wine, he didn’t matter. The bearded man finally took the bottle and patted his shoulder.

  “Let’s hope the old boy’s fine,” he said.

  Manday stepped into the house; he was careful about crossing thresholds here. Americans were so territorial. “The old boy?”

  Swift brandished the gleaming blade as they walked through the mud room and into the kitchen. “1953 Two,” he said. “The old vile star.” He always used the numerical name for it, being too humble or aware to call it Comet Swift.

  “You think it’s gone?” This made no sense to Manday; there was no way to calculate such a thing.
The comet, with no tail now, could not be seen or even sensed on Earth.

  “Well, that’s always the fun part, isn’t it?” Swift said, violently pulling open drawers in search of a corkscrew (he always had to relearn this house, his mistress). “You remember Van Meehern, poor guy. He was my best friend, you know. I remember we were so young when he got his comet. He was … oh, it was called 1948 Three, so how old was I? Thirty-five or something, truly young, truly young. Beautiful comet, brand-new from the Oort Cloud, just bright and amazing.” Swift seemed to be talking wistfully about a woman as he opened the wine bottle between his legs. “We were at Palomar at the next calculated return, just a few years later—oh, it was exciting! Were you ever young, Manday?”

  Manday hadn’t expected a question. He was just holding a wineglass, waiting for it to be filled, and then here he was, being asked if he had ever been young. It felt like a punch—him, young, no he hadn’t ever been young. He had been a different person. How could he ever explain it to this man?

  But Swift didn’t wait for any reply: “We had signed up nights for a week, and we were there with some grad students, up all night with coffee, talking, looking at the sky to see that signature glimmer. Five nights passed before we realized it wasn’t coming back, and then another night before Van Meehern ran outside and just looked up at the sky. Damn cold. Never trust a woman or a comet, Manday.”

  “Was it Jupiter?” Manday asked, although he knew this story, and knew Swift’s old expression. He knew what was missing from the story, too: the real grief of Dr. Van Meehern that night, something they all had felt at four in the morning when the lenses showed nothing, a strange sadness over empty numbers; forgetting, in that cold air, the people whom they loved or ought to love.

  Swift poured wine happily, never mentioning that embarrassing sight of his friend under the dark sky, weeping. “Who knows? Did it break up, or was it too big? Did it shoot out into space? It’s lost. So, as for 1953 Two, who knows?”