The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel

by Greer, Andrew Sean

  The earthquake came half a year later: waves of angry earth toppling overpasses and bridges on one unseasonably hot day, setting the richest areas of the city on fire, killing. That intersection in the grove of eucalyptus, that square of asphalt facing the beautiful ocean, split into pieces and crumbled. The blood and oil had long since washed away, but the tremor erased the scars of tire tracks and embedded glass, and what was left was repaved, undone, forgotten. And once again came the comet.

  Manday had expected a coffin. They always had a coffin—Westerners needed their lacquer and their wood, a few brass handles on the thing so it more closely resembled the door to some great mansion. That was the idea, wasn’t it? A mansion, glowing grandly in its copse of clouds, and this the door? Ridiculous—knock-knock, who’s there? Just awful death. One might as well attach a doorbell to the lid and have it done with. Manday had sat through many Western services in his one black suit, dutifully fanning himself in the California sun as they mechanically lowered another shining box into the rocky soil. Fake grass always lined the grave, a hymn was always sung, a hawk always turned overhead, and then it was either egg salad or whiskey and, in any case, a long forgetfulness. That was the strangest part, the forgetting; as if those gathered around the grave in their new black lace were weeping not over the end of this person, or his passage, but over his strange misfortune. Yes, their grief always had this touch of disbelief, surprise. Awful death—because this would never happen to them, of course, they thought as they ate their deviled eggs—they were never going to die.

  Manday had seen his former students go down like this, wrapped in American flags, a battered helmet set at the head of the grave. He had seen colleagues and their wives and children, people he barely knew, but the one funeral that might have mattered had gone on without him. Swift, a month before, his heart failing him in bed, old Swift. The telegram arrived both too late and too early—late enough that, with two days before the memorial, he clearly was not expected to make the complex and expensive plans necessary to airlift himself from his island to California, but early enough that, if he really felt unraveled, despairing, he could still make it. Yet he had not gone. He had not even arranged an international call to give his regrets. He simply had sent a card, and the family’s response a few weeks later gave a kind description of the service: school chapel, a crowd of international scientists, a quartet of grad students singing the periodic table set to Gilbert and Sullivan. Manday imagined the same old American grave, the same set of relatives looking annoyed. The smallest taper of religion set alight. With Ali, of course, it had been different but, of course, the same.

  Manday had expected a coffin, so when he saw Lydia arriving on the early boat with nothing but a suitcase and a bag, he assumed the body was coming on the next boat. He had pictured four men in sarongs lifting a cedar crate onto their shoulders as the young woman directed with her handkerchief. Yet she assured him this was all, and then, because he had to pry, she opened her bag, lifted out a box and showed him the aluminum urn that lay within. Ashes—of course, that was how they did things these days. Manday’s efficient mind immediately appreciated the idea, admired the savings in space and expense and peace of mind, preferring it to the island’s own culture of raised tombs on rocky beds. Why, you could compress the ashes into a lozenge, and keep it gold-plated around your neck! How elegant and simple, Manday thought, and then it hit him—the full understanding that it was his best friend in there. Old growling Swift, his paranoid brilliance stoppered forever now, an evil genie in a bottle.

  They stood on the overlook in the gray afternoon: Manday under a parasol, sipping an orange fizz, and Lydia over at the edge, looking out at the ruffles of the overcast sky and the clear broad plane of water. The bright light kept her in silhouette to the old man, and he could see so little of the girl he remembered giving cotton candy to. She was pregnant. Manday could not think of them as girls when they were pregnant. No, they had passed into some other class. Like his own wife: no more smiles, no more beauty; a switch from tending to the present, to him, toward the future. Some child in her belly. He watched Lydia place a hand on her stomach. He knew what that felt like; he remembered touching his own wife’s stomach, feeling the hardness of a foot against her soft skin. Beside her, resting on the wall, sat Swift’s urn, ready to be emptied once the other guests arrived. How could she know what this felt like for him? The angry, aching loss of that old friend, but also the unspeakable: the triumph of outliving another man.

  He had made it to the end of another decade, or nearly to the end. And yet it seemed to Hayam Manday that very little had happened in the world. Mostly, from his vantage point, he watched how the iron grip of Bukit’s government was loosening, how General Malak had become President Malak, how people were forgetting the coup and the few boys killed in that demonstration, an accident, a little blood to feed the growing county. Elsewhere, he read about the space shuttles in America—he’d known about the plans, of course, but here it was, happening without him. Women walking in space (an idea that scandalized his wife, as if it were the height of immodesty), the secret shuttle launches that Manday objected to, and then the disaster in 1986 that seemed likely to close down space exploration for good. The newspaper made him cry only three times in that span of years: when he saw that the physicist Richard Feynman had died, when he read that a fire had destroyed the L.A. Central Library and 800,000 books, and when he saw a photograph of Comet Halley taken by the spacecraft Giotto before it was damaged by dust. A boulder darker than coal, shooting reddish jets of light behind it. Some fingertip of God. Otherwise, the world passed by like a serial TV show whose crucial episodes he had missed: jets exploding, terrorists and their demands, presidents and prime ministers rising and falling, scandals, AIDS, earthquakes in California. He had left to forget, and so he allowed himself to forget.

  But he could not ignore Swift’s death. Worse, it only reminded him that there was double grief to bear: Another telegram had come a year before, another hurried announcement of a death. A car accident in California. Manday had felt fury as he read it, shaking his head and making the tears fly from his lashes. Death should come only for the old! Only for men like Swift, like him! Death: the cheat, the cheat. Was it what the shadow doctors always claimed: the comet’s fault? Dripping poison down below, into each unblinking eye?

  Today, Manday stood beside the golden dome in full command of the day. He was anxious for the other old scientists to arrive, because he had so much to do. So much planning, fussing, arranging and greeting—because though Swift’s ashes might be tossed into the island wind, this was, after all, Manday’s great day now. His comet had been recovered—albeit unnervingly late, putting this event off by a year, a bad sign—and this was the perihelion party.

  “Wash them again!” Manday insisted to a bartender who had come up the stairs behind him. The boy, tall and sullen with a faint mustache, held two spotted glasses before him. His shoulders bent wearily under his white jacket, and the beads of sweat on his forehead gleamed more clearly than the glasses.

  “There is no more hot water,” the boy whispered to Manday.

  Manday stared, furious, turning the one glass over and over in his hand. Spots, spots—it was not right, it was not right. “No hot water?” he asked, something taut as a wire in his voice.

  “It is used up from washing.”

  “Then boil some!” Manday commanded. Lydia turned to listen, both hands on her belly now, and birds went by in a flock behind her head. The boy just stood there, uncomprehending. The old man, nearly seventy, motioned to include the island, caught in its time lag. He educated: “That’s what we used to do, we used to boil the water for the white people. We used to boil it to wash our white shirts for temple. In the … in the war we boiled water to sterilize the blades, the bandages, everything… and the Jap laundry, the prisoners did it, we’d set up cauldrons on that very beach…. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Just do these again.”

  “The ones wit
h spots?”

  Manday looked at him curiously, almost smiling. “No,” he said slowly. Then he saw Lydia, her inquiring face, and he lowered his tone. He swatted as if at a mosquito, whispering: “All of them! All of them!”

  It was very important for Manday that things be perfect for this occasion. The bar must be all white and crystal; there must be a bower of shade made from green woven bamboo in which the guests could rest; the local women must stop hunting the endangered lizards for their aphrodesiacal tails, at least for the weekend; and the hummingbirds with their poison-red throats must be released, quietly, to seek out the glass tubes of nectar in the garden. He had a vision of how it would be different from all the other times they had viewed this comet. Manday had realized long ago that the appeal of his island was not really in its spectacular view of one solitary meteor shower shed by a comet; only a few Australian amateurs might come to see that now, and only as part of their vacations. No—Manday understood, as Martin Swift never could have, that the island had an allure of geological nostalgia. There was no bomb-testing near here, no hunting, no overfishing or pollution or industry. To the Western world, his island was pure, and so it gained a deeper level of paradise. An island thirteen days in the past, so far from the main island that no insect could survive the flight; the place had its own kinds of insects, glinting as they darted, vicious emeralds, through the jungle. New brands of science had arisen—environmentalism, ecology—and Manday had merely to advertise in a few places, call some reporters, direct their attention to his birthplace. Manday spoke with the president, announced a global conference and found himself at the center of a wild adoration. He looked to the overcast sky; he would give his comet its due at last.

  He could not think, as he sent the sad bartender away, about the cauldrons he had pushed onto the beach forty-eight years before. Building a fire while in shackles—a young man of twenty-two, angry at the world—waiting for the women to pour in the fresh water, the soap, and then churning the uniforms for what seemed like hours until they lost their jungle stink. The women lay the clothes out on leaves on the beach, military trousers and jackets and green-red caps, each with its red sun on a white field, drying and bleaching in the daylight. The heat of the fire, the heat of the sun. How the prisoners fainted, tried to drink the boiling laundry water, how they were whipped or ridiculed as the sultan himself sat in his stony white tower, silent. The women in the village, yelling. The return to that cell on the spit, hungry, watching that chesspiece of light thrown at his eye.

  “No, give the running water to the women,” he insisted to a girl who had arrived after the bartender, showing him the room bookings at the huts, the lower palace, and the new hotel on the unfashionable side of the beach. “Women want running water, yes, Lydia?”

  “I don’t care,” she said, turning back to the view.

  The girl sputtered: “But the huts have the garden….”

  “They want running water more than gardens. Redo it. And give Dr. Spivak a ceiling fan, he is an important person.”

  He could not think of his son Ali at the moment, or how, if he lifted his eyes, he might see the broad red back of his wife making her way around the volcano, carrying the basket of flowers and the jug of oil for the noon anointing, nor, off in the distance, how the raised tombs looked like plain white teeth among the vines and trees. And there was another woman he could have seen, coming to anoint another grave marker, on the beach, for her son dead now twenty-five years on this night. The boy who fell; his mother had come every year, with the shooting stars, to mourn him. But Manday could not think of death, nor of the old man compressed into an urn, nor of a high cliff north of San Francisco, two cars embracing beneath a eucalyptus grove, and the woman buried now in a posh cemetery beside her parents.

  “Tell the president everything is going perfectly.” The girl departed, bowing. He saw two men walking along the path, surely some scientists arriving for this small ceremony. And then he recognized them: Jorgeson, Spivak. Such stout and healthy middle-aged men now, chatting as he used to with Swift on this very path, walking slowly to the palace. Spivak, rubbing his chin carefully and looking distractedly at a bird-of-paradise flowering gloriously beside them as they stepped from the shade of the palms. He had come after all. Suddenly, from within the golden dome of the stairway, came Manday’s grandson, walking toward him across the stones, carefully carrying Manday’s old parrot in its cage. The boy’s tongue showed between his lips: the look of concentration. The parrot, pale, disheveled, turned one eye to its master and cried “Salaam! Salaam!” as the little boy smiled and looked up to his grandfather at last. Manday motioned to the boy and grinned. He could see Lydia watching him; he didn’t care. “Do you see it?” he asked happily, pointing out to sea. Voices rang within the stairway’s nautilus.

  On the water was the boat carrying the journalists, approaching from over the horizon. A little top hat floating on that pale meniscus. It was still a half hour or so away, but Manday could not keep from staring at it, feeling in his body the shivering, awkward hope of castaways. The day would be his; the comet would be his; it would all be worth it. The years of captivity in the stone hut, the decades of study and smiling and bowing in America, the years stolen from his family, from his sons, from Ali, the rough arrival back here on the island. The life as a scientist floating on a raft of unimportant papers, the phone calls that came from that blind man in Berkeley, begging to have his comet back before he died, the love and distaste that Manday felt around him. It would all be worth it. They were coming to honor him at last.

  “Dad, don’t lift that. Let Henry get it.”

  “Henry’s not here,” Adam said.

  Josh held the box against his hip, pointing at his father. These were his things, his belongings wrestled from his canceled college life and carted across the bay to San Francisco where, under the watchful eye of his father, he might thrive again. Adam looked at his son: nineteen, but so commanding, so in control. “He’ll get it later. You bring the lamp,” Josh said, then went inside the house.

  Adam put his box down, on which was written Books A—J, and turned to the thrift-store desk lamp beside him. “Just the lamp?” he asked, then looked around at the piles of heavy things his son would never let him carry. “Why am I even here?”

  Josh was back, sweating heavily. “It’ll be over really soon, Dad. I don’t have much to move.”

  “Well, I’ll take you to dinner in a little bit. Decide where you want to go.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “We should explore. It’s your new neighborhood.”

  “I have time, Dad.”

  That was true enough, Adam thought, but how did the boy know it? Wasn’t it the quality of youth to be impatient, to stretch out in time and yet, paradoxically, to feel that there was not one moment to be wasted, as if the hours spent asleep or alone would be counted against you in hell? But Josh seemed in no hurry, wiping the sweat from his head and then replacing his baseball cap, breathing heavily and lifting the very box he had forbidden his father: Books A—J. He had a nineteen-year-old son who alphabetized his books. The very soul of patience and order. And yet despite all his maturity he was still so young, and made mistakes, like this one. Not just the Christmas vacation surprise where Josh assembled a turkey-and-stuffing sandwich and announced he was taking the next semester off to pull himself together, to look at his life, but this mistake happening right now. This pile of broken furniture and boxes hauled into a Victorian flat. Josh had taken time off from college for this—of course to deal with his mother’s death, but obviously also for this—in order to move in with his boyfriend: Henry, the owner of the flat, a man of twenty-six. It was a mistake, the kind of mistake a parent can’t tell the kid about until it’s long over. The kind of mistake you worry about at night as you sleep alone, picturing your son sitting in a room of older men with wineglasses, your son wanly smiling and trying to seem bright as they all snicker. Hard to take, hard to take. We’ll see, Adam thought.
He looked at a long crack in the entrance’s mosaic; one good sign, at least, that it had survived two earthquakes.