The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel

by Greer, Andrew Sean

  The course of Manday’s life was altered by the sultan. Manday had grown up with a wealthy merchant father and two sisters; he did so well in school that he was soon working for his father, figuring all the calculations for the business with an abacus and his scrap paper. It became widely known that he was brilliant with numbers, and when he was a teenager, the sultan called him to the palace at night to show him the stars from his rooftop. There was a brass telescope there that the sultan had bought long ago in England, when he went to university, and the old sultan pointed out the constellations, the planets, opened books on their orbits and ephemera, hoping he could catch the boy’s imagination in these numbers. He did, and young Manday came up to the palace on moonless nights to check his calculations against the movement of the heavens; it amazed him that numbers could burn and gutter like candles. The sultan was bored and lonely, having been sent away to England for his education only to return full of ideas and languages and no one else to speak them with. Though Manday never knew it, the sultan was trying to make the boy into someone he could talk to. He was waiting for the young man to grow up, become another man to sit in a cane chair and speak with about the universe. In 1938, when Manday was eighteen, the sultan arranged for him to go to England to the same university (where he was a year behind the sultan’s own son, who was interested in nothing academic)—and this was how the sultan ruined his own plans, offering this treasure of foreign numbers, poisoning this skinny boy against his own island.

  When Manday came back in 1942, the world was at war. Nothing was the same about his island for Manday, and in March 1943, the Japanese landed on Bukit. There was little resistance, and the sultan was allowed to remain, but young, outraged intellectuals such as Manday and two political philosophers were imprisoned on a spit of land at the north end of the island. Manday stayed there for a full year, in a cell where the salt air blew in hot and stale, the harsh sun coming through the keyhole outlined like a chesspiece. He had, though, a wide view of the night sky where, with a telescope sent by the sultan, the twenty-three-year-old Manday watched the meteor shower of the Leonids and the forty-eighth return of Comet Encke and used a nail to scratch his calculations on the cinder walls. He would never tell his American friends what had happened in that prison.

  After the war, he had no choice but to fall into his old life at his father’s store. The island had to be rebuilt, and the sultan had grown old and weak during the humiliation of his island’s capture; he could not sit out at night, nor bear any visits from a young man with a college education and no life he could attach it to. So Manday worked selling rice and tea from the island’s north and south sides, trying to make a living in that hard time after the war. He met a girl through his family, married her, and watched his first son Sami growing. He lived as though he had forgotten that whole other life he’d planned.

  In 1948, however, the old sultan died, and it felt, to Manday, as if some ancient temple had crumbled in an earthquake. There was no replacing that time or those chances; somehow, the young man had always thought he would lift his life back onto that road, but here was the only man who had seen it in him, and he was dead. The new sultan, the man’s brother, had no interest in the stars. Manday began to ignore his family, his business. He took long walks up the side of the volcano with his six-inch brass telescope, desperate and lonely. Then, just months after the sultan died, Manday saw a fuzzy glow in the sky and was able, through the use of an old sky chart, to determine that it was a new comet. He telegrammed his discovery to England, to one of his old professors, who forwarded it to Berkeley. The note Manday received back was a terrible blow: “The new comet you refer to was discovered one month ago in Australia by Harrington.” It went on to inform him, however, that his calculations had been valuable in determining the period. In 1949, this note got him into a U.S. graduate school in astronomy, and he never truly lived on Bukit again.

  And here he stood, old man Manday, dizzy from his wine and stumbling into a clearing in the moonlight to escape his friends. Twenty years later, and he had discovered no comet. His students drew low lottery numbers in the draft and left their papers on their desks to go to Vietnam; two had died there. People on the street still looked at Manday in a way that made him want to run up to them and shake them, as if they were the locked gates to a kingdom, as if they understood at all what lay between them and this man. No one knew about his life, his island, his wife, the prison. Were you ever young? Swift had asked him. Someone had been, a skinny boy on a rooftop had been young. But not Manday, not ever.

  He opened his eyes to find himself inside the house, walking up the stairs, being supported by a woman—Denise, it was Denise in her green blouse.

  “No,” he said softly, not understanding how he had come here. “No I have to talk to that girl.”

  She was struggling with him, helping him to walk, taking him toward one of the bedrooms. “No, Dr. Manday, you just get some sleep,” she was saying and he could smell her hair—apples and something; smoke, apples, something.

  “I am all right,” he told her, falling into the bed. What had happened to everything? He was in a bed, his shoes being taken off, and a child’s mobile swung above him like a mad set of planets. He had been wanting to talk to Swift; he had something to tell him; he had to get up.

  “Just get to sleep, Dr. Manday,” she told him forcefully, pushing him back into bed, pulling a blanket over him. She looked so calm and good, and yet he’d seen her just moments before (or how long ago was it?) standing in that crowd of people, letting her husband hack up her life and present it cleanly on a plate with toothpicks.

  “Denise,” Manday said. He was sweaty, and the crescents under his eyes were shiny and dark again. Only moonlight came through the window now, and Denise drew the curtain against its brightness. If they had cared to consider it, they would have realized that they were alone for the first time in their lives.

  “Yes?” she said, close to him again. I don’t know this room, he was thinking, nearly panicked under the blanket, looking at the mobile turning in the darkness, the pale poster of an animal, the books, toys, gingham curtains blocking the moon. Nothing’s familiar here, nothing at all, and is this woman good7.

  A new hope marched through his mind. He said, “Beautiful Denise.”

  The sound of her son’s wail came through the door from downstairs, and she turned her head, touched her wooden necklace, and looked back at Manday with a smile. “Yes?”

  “Come in bed with me.”

  Trees shifted outside the window, and the shadows moved like gentle hands upon the two of them in the room, rearranging their faces and positions. He became calm and quiet, pleading, making her palm sweaty with his, touching her arm with his fingers to persuade her. Come in bed with me. And she changed, her face broadening in sorrow, slipping her arm from his touch and reaching out with a tissue to dab his forehead. Kissing him on the cheek, whispering something in his ear that he would forget by morning; he closed his eyes and smiled. The shadows rearranged the room again and she stepped quietly out.

  He lay there, bloated and exhausted, crazed, his thoughts deformed as they trod through his brain. Colors seemed to flash around the room. He turned his head to the pillow, smelling Lydia, and cried until he slept.

  What would remain: a birthday cake, blue cotton candy, a lake in June.

  Lydia, in the pleasant slow-motion haze of marijuana, was trying to remember her dance. As she turned, she could see the adults arranged before her, against the bushes, all at different heights, slumped in metal chairs, lying side by side in the hammock, standing with a hand on a spouse’s shoulder, all watching intently and smiling. All those spectacles, jewelry, scotch glasses flickering as they moved; all those pipes, cigarettes, joints and cigars fuming into the air and making all the light (from the torches, the setting moon, the bright farmhouse with its glass doors) diffuse around their bodies, a phosphorescent vapor or a lit veil. They shifted and whispered to one another. They touched each other and ki
ssed. They watched poor Lydia crouched on the floor, rising as a growing flower to the tune of “Good Morning Starshine.”

  The girl had found the pot just ten minutes before. Someone had left a paper-clipped roach in an ashtray, and Lydia was able to pinch it and sneak into the bushes. She found a disposable lighter and puffed away, delighted, terrified, lonely. She thought of what she would tell Kim about tonight, the wonderful shocked look on her pink face, a boy in her class who would be impressed, and she thought about her sister, Alice. Lydia had only smoked pot with Alice, and she associated the stupefying sensation with those times up in their room, giggling, their roles at last undone. She was amazed that doing this alone, it was even better. In the cold waxy leaves of an azalea nearing its prime, listening for a telltale footstep or crunch of leaves, hearing all the laughter and outdated music from the patio, it seemed better. When you do some things alone, you give up worrying whether you’ve done them right. She sucked on the few strands of smoke, closed her eyes, felt like she wasn’t stupid after all.

  The pot was making the “Starshine" dance difficult, however. Lydia found her mind wandering as she rose from the floor, became a bird, soared in a figure eight around the stage. She kept floating into kinds of memory, and then thudding into the present, where she discovered herself twinkling her hands before a crowd of her father’s friends—were they laughing at her? Was she doing this right? Then her mind would exit again, thinking about her sister and her mother in the kitchen, kneading dough for raisin bread and singing along to the radio, the pale yellow daisy pattern of the curtains rising with a breeze into the middle of the room. And there she was, doing a dance move that her teacher called “planting flowers,” tossing her hands out toward the adults, because there they were in crisp detail— Denise grinning with her baby, looking down at him and making him clap his hands, her husband smirking, other students singing along themselves, swaying back and forth, the student with the braids applying lipstick and her father laughing, patting the woman’s knee, turning to say something to an older colleague. There they were, all the judges of her young life in their box—and here she was, Lydia, called to testify at last; and she could not help it, turning in her planetary circles, could not help spinning hopelessly out of control to the words: Gliddy glop gloopy, niddy naddy noopy, la la la lo lo….

  This was her life with her father: Mornings of boxed cereal and milk, evenings of radio news heard through a speaker in the kitchen, dumplings boiling on the stove, her father railing at every comment from above, and weekends spent in parks doing unparklike things: discussing (on his side, mostly) a two-dimensional world, discovering the fastest position for the slide, getting hot dogs from a vendor and putting on spots of mustard, ketchup, relish, onions just to taste the independent flavor of each. And parties like this, with all these people whom he called his friends but who were not his friends, not in the way Lydia had friends, people who held no secrets with him, who had shared nothing terrible together, parties of nuclear fission jokes where Lydia was always called upon to perform. She had to be brilliant in conversation, worldly in appetite, and, above all, as talented as they were. Faculty brat—of course that was what she would later call this early life. How could she complain? She had, after all, chosen it.

  At the custody hearings a year before, the judge had granted both daughters to her mother. Lydia and her sister had hugged her dad, crying, afraid, and gone to live with her mother in that new apartment in the city where at night they barred the windows and ignored the sounds of shattering glass in the streets. But it was going to be okay, Lydia told herself (barely eleven), because her mother had told her that new lives were always hard, but always worth it. There would be more of the good times—the raisin bread and lifting curtain— even without Dad, just us girls, just us. Lydia’s sister (typically) disappeared into her room most of that first month and their mother’s speech had turned out to be a lie. There was a man who came over, took her away so that the girls were left alone. The man would call and in a minute Mother would be ready to go, smiling, pulling an orange scarf around her head as she went out the door. The girls could sense a change, though, and in winter Lydia found her mother out on the balcony in the freezing cold, dressed in only a bathrobe, holding an unlit cigarette and a martini. Ice frosted the glass. The woman’s face was streaked with red, veined like her own botanical drawings, and even Lydia’s persistent tugs on her sleeve could not get her to move. That was the end. There was never going to be a new life for the girls—there was only room for one now.

  Her father took over the court process to bring them both back to him, but it was long and complicated, and they had to live in the house with their frozen mother, who would crack open in anger at times, at other times despairingly waking them both in the middle of the night, holding them, whispering things they wished she had not said. It was clear, though—both girls wanted to leave. The worst part about leaving, however, was that they had to testify in court against their mother. Lydia remembered sitting in the chair and the judge asking questions, trying to be kind, trying to mask the cruelty of it all: “Tell us, Lydia, if you want to, about that night you found your mother on the balcony.”

  And the poor girl had to tell it all. She lied; she changed details to make her mother seem warmer and caring, not drunk, not crazy, but living a good life that was eaten (with an image of shiny termites) by small, terrible details: a phone call, a broken vase, a cigarette burned to the fingers. But Lydia gave them the scent on which they could hunt her mother down. There her mother was, of course, sitting there the whole time in a light blue suit and white gloves, very much the way she must have dressed on her honeymoon, her face kind and understanding, and Lydia remembered (strangest of all) how, as she spoke, she examined her mother’s face, and saw each wrinkle as a notch her body had made: each smile, each raised eyebrow, each summertime squint at the sun. Her mother’s face was an index that Lydia, as she tried to ignore her own testifying voice, could finger through at last. She was looking for a particular expression, given many years before, and Lydia paged through each wrinkle of the woman’s forehead until—the greatest surprise of all—her mother gave it to her right there in the courtroom: a creased sigh of relief.

  Life with her father, this was the life she had chosen. Spinning like a planet before a crowd of astronomers, their glasses shimmering, their eyes blinking in calculation of her orbit, the smoke, the beards, these men and women, standing here, in a universe unlike the normal world—they were smarter, colder, unskilled at small talk or people, the kind of nerds Lydia’s friends would beat up in school these days. You would see children like this coming into classes with bloody noses, smiling oddly, mumbling to themselves. Spinning before them—how had she chosen this?

  When her dance was over, all the women ran up onto the patio and hugged Lydia, toppling the poor girl because they were far more stoned than she was. The student with braids was passing around her lipstick, and the women were kissing the girl all over, leaving bright marks on her legs, her neck, and Lydia was surprised and frightened by this sensation. The geekish, manly women, the skinny science-fiction geniuses whom she laughed at and wanted to impress—they were kissing her. Her wide eyes searched for her father as she rolled in this pile of women, and there he was, proud hands-on-hips near the edge of the slate patio, drunk, approving. Didn’t he see what was happening? Was it too Greek to be believed, that they were eating her alive?

  “I would like to propose a toast!” her father shouted, and his voice sprayed into the cluster of lipsticked women and dispersed them, leaving Lydia alone on the slate patio, breathless, giggling, quite alive.

  “This toast may sound grand,” he said, “but forgive me.” He was standing taller than them all, raising a mug of beer that had long ago lost its frost (though three more sat in the freezer), and seemed a little bit surprised that everyone had turned so quickly to listen, leaving his daughter and her dance behind. He was used to others listening—he was a professor, a comman
der of attention, an old ham— still, it left him silent for a second as Lydia, covered in kisses, watched. His daughter loved him, how he was larger than any other man in sight, left a silhouette against any sky, how he never twitched or fidgeted like other adults, how he was bold with her mother, how at night sometimes he whispered his scientific German to her while she was on the edge of sleep. She loved how with a word he could draw everybody in, Jupiter-like.

  “I would like to propose a toast to comet 1953 Two!” There were Hear! Hears!and little claps from the drunken adults. “I know that sounds self-serving, but she’s the birthday girl tonight and by god we’ll toast her.”

  There was a shuffling and clinking sound as people moved to get their glasses, or, discovering they had lost or drained theirs, hustled to find more. Denise was proposing to share her husband’s glass of wine, and Lydia was on all fours now, struggling across the patio for her Coke. Glass and plastic were lifted into the air as people laughed, someone yelped as she was pinched, and some other young man’s voice cried out “Let’s hear it!”

  Swift stood still, smiling under his grizzled beard, arm raised in the pose of an old statue. He looked up, and there was Mars directly overhead, beaming pinkly from the constellation Virgo. The other planets were scattered across the sky as well, invisible to the eye, but on the southern horizon the constellation Centaurus could barely be seen, and Swift had a hope just then that they might see a meteor or two at that moment, because it was rare to glimpse the constellation this far north, and it was the night of meteor showers, of remnants from the comet he was now openly adoring. Swift looked up at the sky; it looked back down; they were old friends.

  “To comet 1953 Two,” he began.