The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (27 page)

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.
I
might, 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.

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 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 with 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.