She was on the second landing—her mother’s floor. A spiny display of dried flowers, dusty and a decade old, sat in the window like a time-stopped explosion. Ah yes, the flowers in her mother’s room, they would be there, too, she thought as she approached the door. The fresh flowers, the branches of blooming fruit trees, the bowls of seed pods rattling angrily when you disturbed them. The artifacts of her botany, and also those from her other religions. Lydia always forgot about them—they were not part of the old mother. The Buddhist portraits and beads and mystical books—they always surprised Lydia, who was brought up by a father who insisted religion was a hoax. Her mother, back then, had agreed. Scientists sought the meaning of the universe, too, she’d told her daughter. They sought it in the distant stars and how they burned, in contemplating the reality of time, in the pattern revealed when you brushed nail polish on the underside of a begonia leaf (something she once did with Lydia, to show her the little breathing holes there). “But we don’t claim to know,” the woman had said, touching Lydia’s hair. “Religions will give you an answer, but who wants just any answer? It’s all right to say you don’t know, Lydia. Smart people say it all the time. Try saying it. Do you know why we’re alive?”
Lydia, so young, had been upset by this lesson. “I don’t know,” she told her mother, fearful, knowing that in any other case her parents would have grown frustrated by such an answer.
But her mother smiled that afternoon, holding her daughter’s little hand. “I don’t know, either,” she had admitted. “Maybe nobody knows. Maybe you’re the one who’s going to find out.”
Not me, Lydia had thought. One thing is for sure, it won’t be stupid me.
But twenty years later, her mother could no longer accept not knowing. Suddenly, with old age approaching, she had to know. She had to believe in something, and it simply turned out to be Buddhism. And like so many other dissonances in her family life, Lydia accepted this change by refusing to talk about it.
She was at the door. She put her key in the deadbolt lock and, after catching for a moment, it turned. The same with the doorknob. She walked in and the room was nothing like she’d pictured it.
“Mom?”
The blinds were drawn—there was no glowing cat-scratch of light cast on the floor. Instead, a dead brown darkness. The dining room table was piled with books, and clothes lay strewn in the order her mother had removed them—stockings, skirt, blouse, bra—but arranged, by accident, so that they re-created another flattened woman on the floor. There was the smell of garbage, and only later would Lydia realize that it was the flowers she had pictured so vividly— garlic flowers, sitting in a vase of murky green water. The bedroom door was closed. As Lydia walked in, she saw containers of food out on the kitchen sink, a folder of sheet music spread out on the linoleum, and, oddly, a phone neatly unplugged, wrapped up in its cord and set atop the refrigerator. The room contained the muggy disaster of a fishtank left untended.
“Mom?”
Somehow she got the impression that her mother was there. The woman’s current project—sketches of the human eye and nasolacrimal apparatus—lay stacked on her desk, and one drawing sat squarely alone, half-inked on thick paper. On it, Lydia noticed, were her mother’s reading glasses. By chance, they rested on the drawing so that each lens contained a small human eye, capped with a tear duct and ribboned with muscles, staring into the room. Lydia got the sense that something was unfinished here, that a calm rainy morning had been interrupted and hastily abandoned. She stepped quickly over the clothes and turned the knob to the bedroom door, forcing herself into a cool, breezy room where her mother lay motionless on the bed.
At first, Lydia thought she was dead. The woman lay on top of the sheets, legs together and hair spread out white on the pillow. For a moment, the thought of death came partly from the surprise of seeing her mother so old—Lydia still had an image of the woman from her youth, thin with a tight auburn bun, lowering branches to show her the leaves. She half expected that same mother to appear in this apartment, yet this older woman was always here. That was part of the shock—the oldness of her, the corpselike repose that seemed to come to her more naturally year after year. Lydia rushed to her side, but then stopped, because her mother was clearly alive. She saw the slow breaths, and the dried marks of tears running in a delta through her makeup. Her hands, also, were not relaxed; she held them palms together against her forehead, a folded butterfly. She was not dead; her mother was praying.
“Just a moment, sweetie,” she said quietly.
Lydia stood and waited as her mother lay there motionless. She felt so angry to have come all this way, to have wandered through a hopeless day in search of her mother, calling at work, calling even here only to find the woman fallen apart once again, tear-streaked, sewing her body tight with prayer. A moment, she had to wait a moment, and Lydia considered not waiting this time, not laying her hands on this woman in pity and whispering that she loved her. She considered shifting her slippers in the dust of the floor and leaving. Walking back out into the locked-tight world she’d left. Maybe to find Max down at the bar, maybe to drink enough beer to feel as though she loved him. She might end up sleeping behind the bar tonight (not the first time) or, more probably, in Max’s cramped room, where the bass of a late-night club downstairs pounded like an angry neighbor on the floorboards. She might do something she would never recall, if she did this, this not-waiting.
Or she could talk. She could snap her mother’s spirit just by recounting her day. The sort of thing her mother often wanted to hear, when she was well, when she sat carefully combed and dressed, with a cup of tea in one hand, a matching saucer in the other. But what could she say about a day lost in the rain? About her father and his comet? About the vague memory of a boy falling from a cliff? About that other boy her mother had never met, that grinning Ali Manday who was dead?
Her mother opened her eyes just then. “Things sort of fell apart….” she began.
Lydia stroked the woman’s forehead and she fell silent, expressionless. The trick, she’d been told as a child, is knowing what details to leave out. There was so much to say. But it was not the time to state one’s heart’s desire. It was the time to notice one silver hair waving in the breeze, reaching vainly into the air above the woman’s face. It was time to take the hair in her hand and tuck it behind her mother’s ear. It was the time to study the faint shadow her mother’s hands cast along her body, falling to the bedspread and floating again here on Lydia’s arm. There were these small farewells.
Lydia hushed her mother wordlessly. She stood up and closed the open window, then turned to the apartment and began to pick up the mess.
The lights came up in ash-blond simulation of the dawn. Martin Swift awoke, trembled a little in fear and then pretended to his granddaughter (who was talking to him about a doll of hers) that he’d been listening all along: “Yes, that’s nice, she’s very pretty,” he grunted vaguely as he blinked in the bright theater lights and the clouds of color moving all around him.
Outside, it was unexpectedly dark and chilly. They came out from the gaping scalloped mouth as from a tunnel of love, all three holding hands, and felt the moist air groping them and pushing the warmth from their shoulders like a robe. Alice leaned down to button Benny’s coat. Martin Swift tried to walk to the steps, but his body seemed to disapprove of every move he made; he would lift his leg and feel an ache echoing through the muscles. His hands, as usual, were numb and stiff and useless as paws but still he shook them, as a boy might shake a broken radio, hoping that all the frayed wires and broken tubes would, by chance, fall back into their proper places. The scientist in him knew that the probability was low, but Martin Swift was only human, and so he still thought, like a child, perhaps….
“Daddy, Benny wanted to ask you something,” Alice said. He could see her, coiled down like a mainspring at her daughter’s waist, pushing the large buttons through the cloth. He could see the smear of pink and gold of her face, and he cou
ld make out the effort of her smile. She was whispering to her daughter: “Ask Grandpa, honey.”
But the little girl was turned sideways, watching something in the distance that Martin Swift couldn’t see. A parade or something, a busload of clowns, surely something bright and red to catch her eye on this soft woolen afternoon; he could even hear something like music coming from far away, perhaps a band.
“Honey, honey, ask Grandpa….”
But little Benedicta was twisted in fascination, her neck taut as a lapdog’s pulling at a leash, stubbornly sniffing a nondescript thorn-bush. There was music. Martin Swift quieted his body and looked out toward the streets, and it was like looking at a stall of cheap flowers: soft and bright, varied in color but otherwise all the same. He tried to squint, to reach into those bunches and pull out the striped lily his granddaughter saw. He loved that she stood there watching a distant avenue, thinking she saw something she adored. He loved that she lived in her own world, quietly, alone; it made it seem as if this little girl—frail and silly in the red crocheted hat her mother was pulling over her head—as if she might be like another.
“Honey!” Alice pulled her daughter out of that reverie; the music was gone, anyway. Swift had never found that flower.
Benny looked up, still dazed with recent memory, one hand rubbing her cheek. “Is the moon a star?” she asked.
Children gave you foolish hope; they were a set of random pictures, Swift considered, like the tea leaves in the bottom of a cup, in whose jumble any adult could find a compelling prophecy. And yet you had to depend on this hope, on this brief possible sign, to defend your utter love for them. Children spilled these crumpled hopes from their pockets, unawares, and we, the adults, were forever bending to pick up what we saw as treasures. Little Benny could be a scientist now: She could be anything now that she had asked this question. Martin Swift was overjoyed. “That is a wonderful question,” he said, putting out his hand for her to take, ignoring the unnerving numbness when she held his middle finger. “The stars—you know this, right?—are all suns, like our sun.”
“They’re on fire.”
“Exactly. They light up like a lightbulb, and you know how at night? At night, when we’re walking around after a party? You can see a woman in a white dress better than a woman in a black dress, right?” The girl nodded. “And yet the woman doesn’t have lightbulbs on her dress, does she? She isn’t a light. She’s reflecting light, like a mirror. And the moon is like a woman in a white dress at a nighttime party, you see?”
The girl stared at him, smiling. He looked over at Alice, unbending now and watching him, her face trained on him carefully. Yes, uncoiling like a mainspring, that was exactly it; surely Alice saw herself that way, working her spine into a tension that could make the world move in her direction, cause the people in it to spin like counterweights within her watch. Helpful Alice. It was a setup, the question about the moon. He should have guessed that sweet Benedicta didn’t care, didn’t think the moon needed an explanation any more than her mother did, or her grandfather. For her, the world was easy and good. She sat in her red hat, staring at an invisible parade. So his daughter Alice was giving him sweet lies. This would be love?
Martin Swift felt tired. He looked away from them and sat down on the step, and it was cold and rough like sandstone. He let his hands rest on his legs and breathed slowly, letting the blurry crowd pass, watching the heads float by like balloons in the misty air. What’s the name of that poet I was thinking of? He was a distant cratered moon, breathing the people in, breathing them out, causing a tide out here in the pool of the concrete park. It was better sitting down; still, he found it hard to think. There was a terror in these moments, when the thoughts he had taken for granted all his life, had picked wild and untended everywhere, became suddenly dry and rare, hard to find and withering easily, blooming whole only in a forcing jar. There was the terror of loneliness. The diameter of the coma is equal to one-fourth the interval in seconds times the cosine of the comet’s declination…. The mind should have no winter. The spiders in his eyes should never be allowed to crawl inside his skull, spinning their dusty webs there. He had to protect his mind somehow, like those Iberian cities that, defending against Roman attack, burned the palaces around them to save the stone tower of the library. What is that poet? His fingers rubbed his forehead slowly, trying to get in. The mind should have no winter.
“Daddy, you need your shot. Benny, you sit next to Grandpa and hold his hand. Daddy, it’ll just be a second….”
Manday could not be forgiven. It was the half-birthday of the comet that Martin Swift had discovered that hot afternoon in that island hut, staring at the floating image of a blur, exactly thirty years ago on this day. He remembered Manday’s face, so young with the island astronomer’s first try at that ridiculous mustache, as Martin ran into his house and joyously demanded that he find the sultan and a telegraph. The man had been eating a bowl of rice, and his fork hovered in the air like a silver dragonfly. He was frozen in what Martin took as joy, as love. Manday’s wife stood behind him with her long hair down, young and beautiful, wearing a Western apron over her sarong, solemnly staring, slowly wiping a plate with her checked cloth. That parrot hung silently in a bamboo cage. The room was dark and smelled of earth, but threads of the brightest sunlight came through on all sides, under the uneven boards near the floor, through chinks in the walls, the thatched roof of the house: Light seemed to be falling around them like hay in a barn. It was the anniversary of that moment today, and where was Hayam Manday? Where was his old friend with that astounded expression today?
It was easy to imagine: Far away in that same house. The same wife, grown stout and gray. The same parrot chattering in some foreign language as it picked the green dull feathers from its back. The same dishes, and tables; perhaps the walls, though, had been plugged with cloth to block the light. Manday, who was younger than Martin Swift, still might look older. He would be eating the same rice from the same bowl; he would have chosen the wrong life out there, life on that wretched island instead of his professorship across the bay, his students, his research. He had given that up, and yet… yet he insisted on appealing to the CBAT. Perhaps there was a cake there at the table, instead, celebrating the half-birthday of Comet Swift -Manday. Who could ever understand him? You meet a man, you speak with him three or four times, and from those points (like those of a comet hurtling toward the sun) you should be able to chart the whole rest of his orbit. His personality should be clear; the mathematics were complex, but not profound. And yet, eventually, the damned data for this man would swerve and never fit again—maddening! These people—Lydia, Manday, his old wife, all of them— what was one to do?
Alice was at his side, pressing his finger into the little white box, feeding it a little blood. The box was always hungry at this hour. He watched her performing her nursely duties, talking the whole time (although he couldn’t quite hear it) in tones to reassure him, and she was close enough for him to see the round bump on the ridge of her nose, the careful blue mascara, the one holy bead of sweat caught in the downy hair between her eyebrows. Alice held the box to the light, frowning and nodding and talking wordlessly. Then she brought out the little tin kit with the needle and he turned away. Benedicta was on the other side of him, holding his finger tight as if he might float off into the soft sky. Imight, my dear, I might. He could hear her short, wet breaths, and he could smell the powdery odor of her hair that he had memorized just as he had memorized the eclipses of the coming year. He knew the shape of her at a distance—a triangular blob running with two arms straight out at the sides. He knew the shape of her up close—face round and pointed as an acorn, always a shimmer under her nose. But this time he could see so little of Alice in there; he rummaged in Benny’s features and found only the pollen freckles, the thimble nose, the plump chewed lower lip that belonged to Lydia.
The needle slid into the crook of his arm. If only Lydia were here, five years old again, beside him. Before
she learned that he was nothing but an intellectual. Back when she was his out on the overlook of the island, sleeping under his warm coat on the stone, beneath his own bright star. A mist of red hair beside him that he could stroke as the stars fell from the sky, and her tiny voice talking in her sleep, and the frown of dreaming on her face. She was still here, though— she was in Benny sitting beside him holding his finger and breathing with a whistle through her nose. He sat and held each feature in his hand; perhaps they were all in here: Ali, Lydia, his wives, the boy who fell, his best friend Manday. Perhaps he hadn’t lost them at all. Perhaps, after long enough, time would return the things it borrowed.
1990
near perihelion
One might, one might, but time will not relent.
—Wallace Stevens
The British man had never seen the Pacific before—and there it was, spread out in miles of pounded metal, gleaming in the midday sun among the groves of eucalyptus. He sped happily down this road in the Headlands, and to his left the waters of the Golden Gate ran under the famous bridge in bars of sun and crashed against the cliffs outside his window so that he could reach a hand out and feel the cool pointillism of the air. The city lay across the water, visible in his rearview mirror. He later said that this was what he had come for, this view, this drive down from the battery to Point Diablo jutting out there into the water. It was 1988, a few months before the Loma Prieta earthquake, so all these old roads were still firm and good, begging you to speed on them. The sound of surf and birds and rustling trees, the view tugging you forward, the wind grabbing at your hair. The British man felt a kind of freedom, a weightlessness as the road descended, turning beside the cliffs. The sun was too bright—he squinted, smiling—and eucalyptus trees blocked the scent of every other thing with their medicinal odor. He later told the police that those trees blocked the stop sign as well, the one placed at the entrance to the road from the abandoned military barracks. Now he was rushing toward the trees, though, taking the curves more quickly than he would have back home on the wet roads outside London, and it occurred to him that he’d seen this road before. Was it an advertisement on TV? A car like his, hugging the curves amid the brush and salt spray, in just this brilliant light? His brain flashed for only one second with a vision of another car—small, white, a face turned in terror—and then everything stopped. He found himself thrown forward into the sunlight, blood stinging his eyes and staining the deflated airbag before him. Heaps of broken glass lay everywhere—in his hair, his lap, across his arms—and the sunlight, changing with the leaves overhead, moved across him like a living thing. Birds sang, and the eucalyptus shuddered in the breeze; no other sound came. How much time had passed? He looked up, shaking off the glass, and saw through the hanging remnant of the windshield, as through a break in the clouds, that other car. Wedged against a tree, crumpled along the driver’s side. But, most terrifying of all, he saw what looked like a woman’s face staring at him from the broken window, staring motionlessly, twisted, wrong, one trickle of blood coiled in a question mark around her lip. She stared at his car for three whole hours before the police were able to pry her body from the wreckage.
The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel Page 22