Lights on the island were slowly being extinguished, and from the overlook, the scientists could see (much better than before, down on the beach) the town below slowly snuffing itself out, with only a few lights visible in the jungle or high in the tea plantation, even these lasting only half an hour longer before the sultan’s decree of total darkness went into effect. The new sultan seemed just as helpful as his father, providing by law an untainted view, with all the locals going to bed in darkness. Despite the decree, however, a mist of lawless fireflies arose from the jungle, as if the star-mirroring surface of a lake lay down below, slowly filling, creeping to the high edge of their walls. Someone said that this would affect the meteor count, but the insects would depart long before the deep darkness of the morning when stars would shoot across the sky.
Eli was not on the overlook, however. He stood on the beach in his long sleeves, smelling of mosquito repellent, smoking a pipe. He was searching for a particular light. Not the stars, not the fireflies and not even the light from the departing boat, which carried his wife. That boat had left for the mainland half an hour ago, and its glow was already lost out on the darkened horizon amid all the other fixed and fluttering lights. He stood on the beach, past the spit, on the most desolate strip of luminous sand, beside a small stone building; he stood at the edge of the jungle, in a darkness so thick he could not tell one thing from another, searching while the waves rustled their pale skirts on the shore. What he searched for was a human glow: the bobbing stripe of a flashlight, eagerly approaching down the path. It would be Denise.
We have been here before. He thought this, smiling, just as anxious as he’d been the last time this comet came around. We have been here before. Waiting on the darkened twilight beach for this woman to arrive, trying not to think of what they were doing, trying not to think at all as the hot air blew in from the ocean and the insects swarmed around him, somehow gathering in the corners of his eyes. He felt the rare exhilaration of being very young, and he had not felt young in a while. Even earlier on the beach, as he stood with Denise under the tree, he had looked at his hand above hers on the trunk, and they did not seem the same age. His seemed paler, older, all wires and buttons, and he knew that he seemed older than her all over: the few sweaty curls on his bald head, his body growing cylindrical despite his jogs in the university woods, bruises taking a week to heal, and how his face seemed to have the black-and-white grain of an old photograph. Yes, a photograph of his father. Kathy recently said to him, I can’t look at these old pictures of you and think this is the same person. So his own wife saw it, too. But this feeling, this waiting on the beach and wondering if his old friend would come, made time fold on itself. Those few nights after the boy’s death, those stolen moments on this strip of beach. This feeling had come then, too, just the same. Young, saved, immortal. He would fight to keep this; it would be unfair, be the worst unfairness, if it, too, should grow old.
He had to keep his mind at bay. He could not think of Kathy innocently and coldly traveling toward Japan, of the good hours he had spent with her even today, in their hut, talking of literature. He could not think of anything but leaving her, because this was the rare moment when he could believe in such things calmly; it was the time for mentioning one’s heart’s desire. He could not think of the night, twelve years before, when he had stood at Denise’s doorstep, wet with fog and desperately confused, begging her to right his upturned life. He could not think of how her face turned like a lock, spun irrecoverably closed in that thin space of the open door, stating We don’t need to have this conversation, we don’t need to have this conversation before she sent him away. He had not loved her then, not at all—he had only panicked in his marriage, and groped for some relief—but when Denise said those words, he saw how terrified of love she was. That strange, brilliant woman, terrified of love. And then it happened—the last thing he expected: He felt the possibility, alone with her on that plain doorstep, the possibility of their lives changing. They were young—it could be done—he might step into that hall and never leave. It would take only a few right words to convince them both of how life might go. At that moment, though, she shut the door. The light went off; the night air moved in. He stood for a while with his finger on the glowing doorbell, caressing it softly, hoping he had the nerve to press it again and see her face appear suddenly, tear-streaked now, certain of what would happen. The doorbell moved slightly under his finger. He could not do it. He fled to England.
So much time had passed, yet he still thought of those words: We don’t need to have this conversation. He struggled for years to understand them, yet now he felt that he did; he knew, for instance, that he would do the same. If Denise hurt him, if she even threatened to hurt him, he knew he, too, would end things without a word: Wedon’t need to have this conversation. Eli, at last, agreed with her about what needed to be said. He understood, and this was forgiveness. He was all forgiveness tonight. Tonight, just as he had been that time under the stars when, heady with their newfound comet (a child given their hyphenated name, as if from a modern marriage), she had touched his back as he stood there by the telescope. Put her palm against the bone of his right shoulder so that he had to turn, had to see her face alight with need. He forgave her then, though she had not asked for it. He forgave himself tonight. He forgave Kathy for not making him happy.
He searched the jungle. She was late; he felt a rip of fear at the thought she might not come. He couldn’t see well in the darkness— what was that? It could be a fallen tree, or a rock, or a panther watching him from the leaves. There was no way to know. Was she coming? Of course. Yes, he would leave Kathy. It was simple; they had no children; they had few relatives to please, or friends, for that matter. If Denise asked him, he would leave his wife. If she asked him soon enough.
They would swim in the warm ocean tonight, he thought, growing happier by the minute, imagining the scene: Dropping their clothes on the sand, shouting and falling into the oncoming waves, treading the dark liquid as they laughed and remembered how this had all been before. Spitting salt water from his mouth. Her arms waving in the water, keeping afloat, her breasts almost visible in the starlight, and how she might turn over to swim a few laps along the shore. Her white legs in the water. This must be love, this, rather than the odd comfort his wife gave him. Surely love was beating time. Surely love was never dying.
Where was she? Oh, there—a light began to stab the jungle darkness, dipping and curving in a stream among the trees. It was her; she was coming. He could feel the warm waves already around his hips. What man could drown in any ocean tonight?
The blackness around them thickened like pudding, sending the fireflies away from their search for mates, back to the leaves or flowers where they dimly slept. Crunches came from the jungle, a scurrying panic of noises and then silence again. On the overlook, the scientists were arranging their chairs, their telescopic cameras set with rotating blades to capture a streaming meteoric tail. They laughed and sipped coffee, moving to their quadrants, calling “Time!” and “Time!” and “Time!”
Her stars would not be performing tonight. Kathy stood on the stern of the boat, and above her glowed a Southern Hemisphere sky filled with constellations she could not recognize. No Libra, no Orion. Their parts were being played tonight by rougher, tropical understudies: the Peacock, the Cross. Nothing that Eli had taught her. Nothing at all familiar.
From where she stood, the island was completely dark, invisible against the night sky. The lamps along its mountains, its volcano and the houses that edged the beach had been extinguished by the sultan’s edict. So, from the departing boat, from Kathy’s view, the island was gone. No lights, no fires, no radio towers blinking their red eyes above the mountain; only, if Kathy looked carefully, a rabbit-shaped place in the sky where the stars stopped. Even that absence grew less distinct as the boat moved away, and it would have taken an astronomer indeed to recognize the missing space. Yet Kathy stood on deck, a shawl around her shoulders, an
d watched what she assumed to be the island’s retreat into the distance. She hadn’t looked back at first, caught up in a novel she was reading in the fluorescence of the cabin, but it occurred to her that this was what people did. So she closed the novel, headed out to the stern where a young island man in a white shirt stood smoking a cigarette. The stars were everywhere, randomly, and the boat’s wake was a pale ruffle in the blue dark.
“You are leaving?” Kathy heard beside her. It was the young local with the cigarette, who then noted in his island accent: “You are much sad.” He had a wide, dark face, perhaps the widest she’d ever seen, and his upper lip rested high on his teeth in an unintended smile. She saw now that he wore a hemp necklace around his throat, set with shells, hiding a tattoo. Where he held his cigarette, his fingernails looked two inches long.
“No,” Kathy said. “I’m not.” She was suspicious; she knew that she wasn’t pretty to a young man like him, so it interested her to think there might be another trick here. Kathy was nearing forty, her face overcome by her thick glasses, her wiry hair threaded with silver in its tight barrettes, fitting more and more the role of a librarian as time passed. She didn’t care; her body was an old favorite dog-eared book from her childhood, and nothing but a passing fancy now.
He smiled and pointed his cigarette at her. “I think you are!”
“Maybe you’re the one who’s sad, is that true?” she asked, and he didn’t say anything, but elegantly brought the cigarette to his mouth with those long, shining nails and, closing his eyes, inhaled. Then the young man turned and went inside and she was left alone with the receding waves.
Kathy unknotted her shawl and knotted it again, better. She did this without thinking, just as she looked out at the view-that-wasn’t-there without any deeper consideration; her mind was often elsewhere. Having abandoned her old hobby of picking at people’s minds, having discarded her voyeuristic curiosity about Lydia, she was left with only her private habits. She was the kind of woman who kept ideas for a long time in her head, the way some women, in brick apartments high above a city, keep many cats. These ideas were hidden from the world, from the rest of her life, but she found herself sometimes tending to them—at a dinner party, for instance, when others were talking about a recent movie, Kathy would bring one out to warm herself, stroke it under the table, feed it a little. Ideas like a fantasy about the perfect city, or how time functioned, how she could manage to fall from an airplane; silly, odd ideas she would never want to mention to anyone else. They would crawl over her while she was doing something important, dishes or something: Oh, but what would it be like to fall above Barcelona? And, of course, like pets, sometimes they felt more important than people.
The one about time was visiting her now, on the stern of this boat; it was leaning against her ankles and mewling. She remembered something from her last trip here: that the sultan’s invisible island had never accepted the Gregorian calendar, that it was always thirteen days earlier there. That island was set back in time, a temporal hollow like a thumb’s dent in a ball of dough, and as they approached the main island, they were approaching real time. Each wave passing under this boat, each wave rolling out of sight was, maybe, another second she had to pay back to the world. They were a quarter of the way to the big island, so that was three days lost. It made her smile a little. She stood here on the night of March fifteenth again, as she’d been seven days before, and time was doubling forward here. It amused her to think that there were two of her: one here, in a shawl, watching the boat’s lights drown in the sea, and another time-lapsed Kathy in their house, sipping scotch with the neighbors, her left hand’s fingers held loosely by Eli’s. The other Kathy must now be listening to the woman’s story of her youth in Denmark, nearing the point when the young woman would turn to clasp her lover’s eyes and remark on when she met him. “We were such strangers,” the woman would say to the other Kathy. Then Eli would hold Kathy’s hand more tightly. “I know how you feel,” he’d say, giving a broad smile across his face, blue-shadowed with a late-night beard. “And you come to know each other so well.”
He’d look at Kathy and it would take a moment for her to tell him: “Yes.”
It was all passing under the boat again for her, four times the speed of life. She was thinking what a funny thing it was to say, “And you come to know each other so well.” They often said that, and they meant it. But what did they really mean? Just that each knew the other so well, all the while holding something small and secret to themselves, turning out their pockets for marital inspection but palming this trifle. Like Kathy’s ideas, her pets in her brick apartment. She knew this had to be true, because of course she thought she knew him, too, better even than he did himself; but how can you know you know? Like a cosmological theory Eli might carefully explain to friends, there was no way to prove it true, and it didn’t claim even to be true, only to fit what they saw. It could merely be proven false, by one odd color in a star, and down it came. So Kathy tried to have no illusions about her husband, since any moment her theory of him might fail; still, she couldn’t shake the sense that she, above all people, knew him. Of course she knew Eli! And he, naturally, didn’t know her at all.
The long-nailed boy was back, holding a triangular paper cup, through the translucent sides of which Kathy could make out a restless oblong of water. The boat suddenly rocked starboard, and they both hop-hopped to the side, automatically grabbing the railing. The young man had not spilt a drop. She commented on this, and he told her he was a dancer. He held up his beautiful nails, as if this explained something.
She tried to ask him about his dancing, and he told her a little— how he was raised even as a boy to be a dancer, and all the lessons he’d taken—but he kept lighting cigarettes and looking away. Kathy thought she understood this, or at least she placed on top of his silence her own, familiar silence: the wish to be done. Her undergraduate chemistry career, done, and now, after this last conference, her literary career, done. People with one passion never understood— people like Eli; or Denise, with her confused expressions; or even Denise’s dull husband, Adam, scribbling in his notebook. They always thought she was disenchanted, restless, that she had made some mistake and was correcting it, but they didn’t see. It was a new life. Were we really issued only one?
“Visiting the island?” she asked him at last. It turned out his name was Nasur.
He shook his head and the curls of his black hair, down to his ears, trembled. He exhaled his cigarette smoke and said, “No, I live there my whole life.”
“So … hmm … maybe this is your first time away.”
He looked at her, his wrists resting on the railing, hands dangling, smoke being pulled away by the wind. “First time for a person of my family,” he told her, but again without emotion.
She said quietly, “You don’t seem excited.”
“My family asked me to go,” he said, and then, seemingly embarrassed by this confession, he walked away to another part of the boat. Within a few minutes, he had returned, crumpling the little paper cup and standing again at the railing, wrists crossed, hands dangling. She asked him, this time, about the shadow doctors she’d heard of on the island, and he nodded, smiling, telling of the time when he was a little boy with a fever and his mother brought him to a shadow doctor, and the man had stood him naked in front of a bright lantern (though now they used electric) and let his shadow fall clear and dark onto a white mat. The old, awkward, grasshopper-like man sewed and cut at the mat for an hour, at the shadow, of course, then sent the boy away. He was cured.
“I don’t believe in it,” he added. “But I remember.”
Slowly, over the ride to the main island, with the minutes passing now beneath them rapidly, foaming in the wake as they watched, she had him tell her more about his family. Kathy did it carefully, as one would remove a tick. This was her old favorite hobby back again, a patient one, which now worked only on the very young. Nasur mentioned a few more times that his family had “aske
d him to go,” and she could tell, through the repetition, that he really meant that they had sent him away. He had done something awful, and they had sent him away. Over the rest of the crossing, Kathy thought she guessed at what he’d done.
“You have beautiful nails,” she said, smiling for the first time that night, keeping her lips tight over her teeth. “And necklace.”
He leaned over, embarrassed again, staring at his nails. “I think in the world I need to cut them?”
She shook her head, saying, “No, keep them. They’re beautiful. Girls will be envious. See,” and here she held her hands out, plain and pale, “mine are chewed away.” He did indeed look at her hands, interested, then showed her his own, shining in the light above them, each slightly brown, translucent, curved like a little sword.
The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel Page 16