The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel Page 4

  “What?” Eli asked, feigning ignorance. The Swede was listening to a colleague, stopped maybe fifteen yards away.

  “He’s his friend. Find out.”

  “Find out what?”

  Denise didn’t answer, sniffing the vegetable air.

  Eli remembered when she’d met this Carlos. A garden party at Jorgeson’s house, and Denise in a green frilly dress, talking to some handsome, military-stiff man, cocking her grinning head to one side in a girlish way that was utterly unlike her, some remnant of the upper-class coquetry she’d been taught in San Francisco. Eli could tell the man was a swindler. When he heard this Carlos had a wife, sitting inside the house, he assumed the meeting had been harmless. Carlos left, Denise came over and listened to one of Eli’s astronomy jokes, joined Kathy in a few drinks, and all was as it had been. It was months before Denise admitted she was seeing him—and then only through Kathy, who told the story plainly, as if it were a natural course of events and not a painful mistake. Brainy Denise had been seduced by married Carlos, had believed a promise from a man who could make no promises. And, Kathy told her husband, their blond friend was in love.

  It had been infuriating to watch. Denise came to dinner far less often, rarely made it to the movie dates they all had together, and in general began to treat the Spivaks like a phase she had passed through, an old routine she wanted to forget. She was still friendly at school, but he could never catch her for coffee after class because of her complex schedule with Carlos, one that involved grabbing his lunch hours and breaks and free weekend moments, tiling her life with these shards of love.

  When it had ended, a few weeks ago, Denise had returned. The prodigal friend. Kathy had listened to the whole tale, gone over the words Carlos had spoken, sat with Denise late at night in the living room with brandy and read these phrases like entrails, telling a fortune. As if this Carlos were a deity, hiding his heart in this tangle of cliches! Eli kept quiet; he knew the phrases, the phone calls and visits meant nothing. There was no code to break; there was no lock to pick; there was no anagram of love within this fool’s farewell.

  He listened to her plea that night and stared at her sunburned scrap of skin. He seemed as if he wanted to reach out and take it from her, such was the look in his eyes. Perhaps he thought it was rare to own a piece of someone’s skin, taken from a memorable first day on this island, on this trip where she might have a chance to forget a bad romance and take the course he’d planned for her. Because he did have a course for her; he felt he made good choices for other people, but from experience he’d learned not to tell them. He had kept his silence, but here was at last a way to touch and change her.

  “I need a favor, too,” he said.

  She gritted her teeth, staring at him, then said, “Oh Eli, just do this for me.”

  He was quiet and watched the boys throwing a ball, the background of stars behind them. Eli knew he couldn’t ever win by talking; she was too stubborn and selfish, and he had lost too many scientific battles with her to bother now with a real one. He couldn’t argue with her, but he could wait her out, let Denise fill the silence with arguments far better than he could come up with. He’d learned the trick of her. So he sat and let his pupils dilate in the darkness while he felt her beside him, looking, thinking too hard.

  Denise folded her arms across her breasts. She asked softly, “What is it?”

  “First, after this, let’s not talk about Carlos anymore.” Her face folded in subtle rage, but he knew she’d forgive him. He was always hard on her in a way no one else dared to be; that’s why she cared for him.

  “Eli….”

  “And also,” he said quickly, and she was quiet. He thought for a moment about how to put it, then he said, “I hoped you could … I want you to ask Kafhy something.”

  She closed her eyes and the sunburnt skin fluttered on her nose as a cool wind came. The breeze lifted her hair slightly from her face. Eyes still closed, she said, “You don’t just want me to ask. You want me to report on what she says.”

  He said nothing. There was a breeze that took the edge off the hot night, and you could hear the soft noise of people leaning in their plastic chairs, relaxing, taking it in.

  Denise asked, “Is this a trade? That you’ll talk to Jorgeson if I talk to Kathy?”

  Eli murmured something, nodding, and looked toward the tall Swede. Jorgeson was close now, looking ridiculous and shouting something. A few yards away. A choice had to be made.

  “What am I asking her?”

  He quietly told her to ask if his wife was pregnant.

  She sat back and placed her fingers to her forehead, as if her headache were returning. He knew she was watching Jorgeson’s approach, timing her decision.

  Eli wanted to be patient with her, but it was difficult—she seemed so much younger than he was, so frustratingly fragile for someone so brilliant. He looked at her face, how it cracked—shouldn’t she be hard as a diamond? Weren’t people either weak or strong, he wondered, not both at once, not unpredictably both? This was the flaw— he hated finding it—the flaw, as if she were a vase he was examining in a shop, cinnabar with two handles, discovering the flaw that would widen with time, crack and destroy the shape. He had found it now, a hint of it; you can’t return a friend at this point, but what do you do? You wait; you try to see if they will fix themselves before they grow too old to notice. Eli turned away as the Swede approached, as Denise considered the deal, and he let his doubts enter again.

  He had his own flaw, of course. The great sign of this decline had come half a year before when, after collecting a preliminary set of data, Eli had let Swift sign him up to give a presentation at a professional meeting in Berkeley. A presentation—it was an honor. But he was not ready. Eli had taken the data so carefully over three nights at Palomar, but he found himself in Campbell Hall at four o’clock in the morning, unshowered and feeling crazy, unable to resolve his data into the answer that he knew was true. It was not even important; it was not even the purpose of his research, and yet it had to fit for him to move on. Eli stood up and walked down the polished halls, listening to his steps, peering into all the darkened offices until he came again to his own with its one fly-specked light. He was alone. What had happened to those years of surefooted reason? When he could bend gravities with a mechanical pencil? Now, when the other BADgrads slept, he scrabbled at the simplest set of data and could not get a hold. And it wasn’t even that he didn’t understand. No, he knew exactly where his paper should go. It simply would not go there. Standing outside his office, listening to the buzz of the hall’s fluorescent lights, Eli imagined the rows of scientists, coughing impatiently as he described his inability to bring this simple research to conclusion. “Thank you,” they would each say, “but not entirely persuasive.” Those would be the exact words.

  So he trimmed. That was the expression they used back then, the scientists who spoke of such things; he sat back at his desk with a clean sheet of paper and trimmed the data of its upsetting spurs. He left a roughness to the shape, but now the numbers fell more or less as he predicted. He sped through his conclusion and moved on. The presentation came and went with no surprise, the scientists applauded him, and Swift, impressed, had offered Eli part of his grant to come here to this island. No, he would never tell anyone. This was how you overcame your flaws, he believed; with tricks like this one, which he wanted to teach Denise, about letting yourself forget.

  The bats were back again, catching insects drawn in by their feeble lights. He looked to Denise for her answer. Just then, that small piece of skin broke off in a gust of wind, and he watched it fall slowly through the air and into the darkness of the jungle.

  “All right,” Denise said finally, facing away with a smile. “Hello there, Jorgeson.” The deal was struck.

  The blond Swede stood above them, chattering in his antisocial charmless way, and Eli began to lead the conversation toward Carlos. He kept glancing to Denise, seeing the vague smile on her face as she
listened. Eli could see only her pale, thankless profile now as she waited for some morsel of information to pounce on. As he pulled her Carlos from the weeds of this conversation, he noticed how his words made her face shift—and not just in expectation of her lover’s name, but at what Eli himself said. She was coaxing him on with small gestures: her eyes, a smile, a stiffening of her features. She was leading him. All this time, Eli had thought he’d tricked her into doing what he wanted her to do, leading the life he planned for her, but that wasn’t what had happened at all. He was doing what she wanted—the very sentence falling from his mouth came only as she’d planned it. There was no one like this woman, no one.

  Eli said loudly, “So, Lars, tell me about your friend Carlos….”

  Three days later, nothing but the accident would matter.

  You could have walked down the aisle of their plane, headed through the dawn toward Hawaii, toward California, and seen the difference in their faces. Every window shade but one was pulled down to create an artificial darkness in the uncrowded cabin, glowing in places because light came in through the crevices nonetheless, jungle vines breaking into the room. The one open shade belonged to Dr. Hayam Manday, who sat with his chin on his hand, watching the dawn without his glasses, alone. The rest of them—the students, wives, professors, children—were hours into a fitful sleep: faces crumpled against pillows and bulkheads, bodies spread uncomfortably across a row, hands grasping at thin blankets to cover a shoulder. Many, though, like Manday, were awake; they sat wide-eyed in the darkness, their wives or children sleeping against their sides. They thought of a scene on the overlook, or another scene from their lives which now seemed different. An accident had happened. Not all of them had seen it, but none could forget the brief cry from the wall. None could forget they had witnessed a death.

  Any group but this one would have blamed it on the comet; that’s what the locals did. They had stood near the body on the beach, then pointed east to where Comet Swift still shone its chill arrow in the sky, and the shadow doctors proclaimed that the comet had scattered misfortune on the island, left it behind for them to breathe like dust from an ox-drawn cart. This was not ignorance; the shadow doctors belonged to a centuries-old tradition of comets and their ill augers, from the ancient Chinese and their dying emperors to the latest return of Halley’s Comet in 1910, when Americans panicked in the streets, afraid that the comet’s tail would poison the earth with cyanide. Any group but this one would have believed it: that comets were vile stars.

  But, worse for them, the scientists blamed themselves. They had come to the island to draw a net across the sky and trawl it for meteors, and, like fishermen, they planned with care each part of the project, where each person sat and how they looked at the sky. They were scientists, and could turn life into a laboratory setting, control every aspect so that it pointed toward an answer. They could bend even nature to their bidding. Yet they had failed. Something had gone undone, and they had lost a life. A crowd of artists, of dancers, of poets could never have blamed themselves for terrible chance, but these scientists thought they held chance firmly in their grip. Like trainers, they bent their heads happily between its open jaws. But it was as Eli had always feared: They had been wrong about themselves all along. Someone had died. A child, no less.

  Some of the wives and children had gone home days earlier, unwilling to sit for more nights under the comet’s watchful eye. Kathy had been among them, her eyes darkly circled, waving from the boat at sunset, as the ones who stayed behind, the young astronomers, pretended to be stronger than those leaving. None of them doubted this was a lie. The remaining days were spent sleeping and reporting back to California; the wide-awake nights of meteor-watching became silent now except for the hesitant cries of “Time!” and it was hard for anyone not to glance over to where a piece of wood lay propped against the wall, covering the part that had crumbled.

  The plane flew on silently. Professor Swift, three seats behind Manday, was wide awake as well. He sat in an empty row, smoking a pipe, turning the pages of journals under his crisp reading light. The light caught the gray in his beard and turned it tinsel. He was not known to sleep well, and students heard rumors that he had, in fact, become nocturnal in order to function under the telescope, forcing the department to schedule his classes to coincide with dawn or sunset. The professor seemed to be working, jotting notes; but in fact he turned the pages only to signal time passing. He was not reading them, and the notes were part of a letter to his wife. He would see her the moment he walked across the tarmac, only hours from now, but he wrote her a letter nonetheless. There was no way to express this out loud.

  A woman woke and moaned. Her husband whispered to her, patted her arm, and she fell asleep again, her brow creased in worry. Manday sat by his open window, growing golden from the dawn over Hawaii. A stewardess in a cap and miniskirt came down the aisle, touching a seat in every row as if she could heal them by her passage. She showed a little girl to the bathroom, then returned the way she had come until someone asked for water. She left briskly and did not return. Passengers lit cigarettes, smoke trailing into the cabin, giving the air a thin blue haze. A man stumbled from another bathroom, ill, and fell, sighing, into a seat that was not his.

  Denise sat in the middle of the plane, sleeping at times, hopelessly awake at others. She lay under her blanket for a long time, eyes open and glistening. Then she pushed the blanket from her and noiselessly left her seat, padding down the aisle to the very last row, where Eli sat, leaning against a carpeted wall with his hands together in his lap. His glasses were off so that he could sleep, but he wasn’t sleeping; he was staring ahead. Kathy was far away. Denise moved into the seat next to him and pulled the blanket across them both. He looked over silently and touched her head.

  Manday pulled his shade against the golden bars and closed his eyes. Swift turned off his reading light. The underwater darkness was complete. People settled into their places with whispers and sighs, and even the stewardesses dozed off up front, near first class, sideways in a row with their white boots up on the seats. There was no one in the rear of the plane to hear the few quiet words floating in the last row. There was no one to see Denise talking in Eli’s ear as he sat staring ahead of him. Or when she touched his chin and turned his head toward her, when she kissed him with a hand spread out on his chest. If someone had seen the two friends, eyes closed, almost asleep in grief, kissing and holding each other in the last row, would they even have said a word? After all, for them, nothing on that flight, nothing from the moment of the accident until their arrival in California, was real.

  But three days earlier, on the first night of the storm, they all lay innocently under the stars. Kathy sat in her station, far from her husband, bored and confused by all these shouts of “Time!” sprouting in the air. Around her, young scientists were rising from their chairs, pointing, grinning excitedly and then they would yell “Time! Time!” And though Kathy knew it couldn’t be anything as literary or religious as she imagined, still she amused herself with the idea that she was caught in a starry revival tent. That these precocious introverts had seen some vision and were witnessing, shaking like Quakers in a meetinghouse. She knew it wasn’t true, but she also knew that eventually someone would explain it to her—these people were forever explaining—and she enjoyed her own version for a few minutes. Eli, Denise, the others, handling snakes. It made all their passion seem ridiculous.

  Suddenly, a little girl went running across the parapet. It was Lydia, Swift’s daughter, a five-year-old who had a kind of wild, baby animal look beneath her pigtails, running close to the wall. Kathy was surprised to feel her stomach clench, and she shouted. The girl stopped, and Kathy shouted again. She coaxed her away from the wall. Lydia was looking for a monkey that had long since been taken inside. The girl refused to believe it was gone. Kathy asked about the shouts of “Time!”

  “They’re seeing meteors" was how Lydia explained it, looking doubtful that this was a real question
.

  “I don’t see them,” Kathy said, looking up. Nothing but that foreign spread of stars. “Are you sure?”

  “Well, you have to look very hard. My dad tries to show me, my sister can see them. You really have to keep looking in the same place and sort of make a wish for them.”

  “I thought it was the other way around.”

  This idea was too confusing for poor Lydia and she stood silently, letting her doll’s feet drag the stone. Her hand went to her mouth, and Kathy watched her slowly chewing something. Her nails? Nervous habits in such a young girl? Or had she found something to eat?

  “Did you see where Riki went?” Lydia asked again, hopefully. This was the monkey’s name.

  “I think he said something about baking a cake.”

  “Monkeys can’t bake cakes!” Lydia said, grinning, something in her eyes saying she believed quite the opposite.

  “Oh yes they can,” Kathy told her, deadpan. “Just not very good ones.”

  Two American boys, a redhead and a fat kid, ran by, coaxing a local boy to join their game of catch. He failed to catch a baseball and it went flying, once more, over the edge of the parapet into the darkness and down to the beach fifty feet below. Parents were shushing them but they would not listen, producing another ball and tossing it again.

  “Do you have him?” Lydia asked, meaning the monkey.

  Kathy ignored the question. “But why do they yell ‘Time’?”

  Lydia sniffed and brushed loose curls out of her eyes. “I don’t know. So Mr. Manday can write it down. Didn’t they tell you?”