The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (3 page)

Their lives were very different from the Americans’. How could an island girl, equally brokenhearted as Denise, passing the woman as she left the boat, how could she understand her? They each stared at the other—the girl in a red sarong and headscarf, the tall beige-colored woman in khaki and pale blue—and could not comprehend that other life.

The only one among the Americans who knew this place was Dr. Manday, who had left to go to school in California twenty years before and had never returned. He stood next to Professor Swift, wiping the sweat from his broad mustache, chattering to the bearded man about his island, the sultan, the customs. He told him that the old sultans had never accepted the Gregorian calendar—the decision by Pope Gregory in 1584 to recalibrate the calendars by ten days— so that the island was always ten days behind the rest of the world. Actually, he told them, the error had grown to thirteen days. All the students were listening as Manday spread his hands across his chest, across the dark sweat heart there. “It’s thirteen days ago here. Not March twentieth: March seventh. A little joke, yes?”

But it was more than that for all of them. It allowed them, as they trudged across the hot beach, men in sarongs carrying their bags, it allowed them to feel less of a shock—this was old soil, in the past. Everything strange or uncomfortable was due to that, to Manday’s little joke about time, and they could feel, oddly, at ease believing (knowing it was ridiculous) that the modern world would arrive in thirteen days and change things, that they weren’t trapped here, that life wasn’t really like this.

“Look,” Eli whispered to Kathy and Denise as they walked toward the shade of a tree. He pointed to a man sitting beside a brightly painted fishing boat, smoking a cigarette and looking at them. “Manday said some of the men tell time with cigarettes.”

“Like a sundial?” Kathy asked.

“Like I’d say to you, ‘I’ll be back in two cigarettes,’ and you’d smoke them, ten minutes would pass and I’d be back. Like that.”

Denise shaded her face with a hand, beginning to be hung over now, feeling her mind becoming iridescent and confused. “Oh my God.”

Denise, Eli, Kathy, Jorgeson—all of them might have gone a little mad if they hadn’t been given Manday’s little joke. They were allowed to feel like aliens, like different creatures, like visitors from the future.

It was a familiar feeling, scientifically. They could look into the heavens like any human and see a swarm of lights receding from the earth, but their minds would spoil the wonder with mathematics. They knew, for instance, how distant each point was—in blackest space, and in time. The light from the closest stars had originated only years before, but images of the most distant objects arrived millions of years old. Yet each star sat equally on the dark palm of night. Orion’s belt had three stars of equal brilliance; yet Swift could point there for his daughter and tell the girl (baffling her) that the rightmost light showed that star two thousand years ago, but the center showed light thousands of years older—a visual paradox, a time machine. What could the daughter say to that?
What do I care, what does it matter, I can cover them both with my thumb….

They could feel proud, the students and the professors stepping across the fiery sand. They could feel in command of light and time above them, of the rabbit-shaped green clump of land before them, of each staring woman passing with fruit in a basket upon her head. Yet at home they were lost. They could travel thousands of miles and be in command, but at home, where they should have seen the world so clearly, they were blind—one eye to the lens each midnight—and already part of the past. It was 1965 in Berkeley; they were each twenty-five or twenty-six, yet they were born too soon to be young anymore. They remembered the end of the war, the atom bomb, the music of victory and Daddy coming home; they had parents born in the teens, the twenties; they remembered beatniks; they could conjure up an image of an old TV, a gray blob in a radio cabinet; they had worn hats on the street as young men, coats and ties in college (Denise had worn white gloves each day). Just a week before, in Berkeley, they had sipped tea in the lounge at Campbell Hall at 3:30—they did this, every day, tea at Campbell. They were young, in their prime, yet they had been born too soon.

The truly young had just arrived at Berkeley—first as naive undergraduates, still in their bouffants and skirts for the first few months, then falling into dingy shirts and jeans when the work began; there they were, thousands of them, swelling the lists. Loud and joyous, they were already outnumbering and outshouting the older students like Denise, Eli, and Jorgeson. These new students knew the death count in Vietnam, knew what it meant to have the Black Muslim headquarters in San Francisco burned, knew every detail of the Reeb beating in Alabama. They began their marching, their sign-painting and anger, their senseless carefree parties, too, out in the sunshine. But it should not have been the eighteen-year-olds’ time. It belonged to the scientists—the BADgrads—this time had been promised to them, promised by their parents and teachers, as their time to shine and take over the reins of America. It was their moment, now, as older plants folded and left a thinner shadow, to rise and flourish above. Their eyes were on their comets and fireballs, though—they read poetry aloud in bed and didn’t hear—they didn’t notice their moment being stolen. America was being shaken by their students while they slept. By the time this comet came around again and shed its meteor shower, they would realize their time had never come at all.

So they seemed a little innocent, a little more kind, walking toward the jungle and their huts, pointing at the man smoking a cigarette beside his brightly painted catamaran, at the pounded tin dome of the mosque, at the girls hiding their faces under their hands, dropping nuts for a frenzied monkey on the ground. The wind caught the palms and turned them, wheels in the sky, and a veil of dust rose between them and their boat. A cloud hovered magic carpet-like over the stunted volcano—on its hillside, you could see gleams of white from houses, bones buried in the lush green jungle. The women approached, smiling, their sarongs red and gold, their fingernails long and pointed, and they began to dance, smiling, jerking their arms, tossing rice in welcome. Each of the Americans shivered; thought,
I’ve lost my way;
then turned and caught someone else’s eye.
Look at us,
they all thought in relief,
we’re wonderful, look at us.
And they saw Dr. Manday halfway down the beach, holding a woman with a thin light-blue cloth over her head, a stout woman who touched his mouth, his cheeks, whispering. Manday laughed and whispered back, pointing up to the sky.

They all saw her head turn, owl-like, as she gazed at the bright sheet of sky, her mouth slack and expectant, her long black hair brushing his cheek. Through the cloth, you could see two golden combs in her hair, glinting. Manday was telling her about the comet. She was looking for it near the sun. They all saw that she did not understand, and they all saw him insisting. He took her arm, talking in her language but not in words she could understand—
perihelion, aphelion, coma
—and she kept her face to the sky, nodding and seeing nothing and looking afraid. She was his wife, they would all later learn, whom he had not seen in eight years, wearing gold combs in her hair for him.

Oh look at us,
they thought, standing on that bird-haunted beach before the dancing women,
look how wonderful we are.

Eli was quiet in his chair that night. A few meteors had already streamed across the sky, the earth passing through that cometary dust, and people had called out “Time!” to mark those few teeth pulled from the night’s dark mouth. Too early for the real shower— only midnight—but Eli was still searching the sky; every moment, his eye would flicker on its own. He had learned, over the years, to ignore the imaginary flashes in his brain and pick out the real ones.

They had found their huts and unpacked in the humid afternoon air. They had eaten lunch under a palm-leaf roof on the beach itself, and Swift had told long astronomical stories and jokes as Kathy and Eli held hands and tried to spoon the thin soup into their mouths. Denise had been quiet, staring at her food, sad or hung over or both. Later, they all returned to their huts and slept deeply in preparation for a night of watching the sky, each turning in the hot air, feeling a fever coming on. Around them, the jungle had rustled and made noises they had never heard before. Then it was dinner, and up the long stairs from the beach to the sultan’s broad overlook, where the chairs had been arranged. They took their stations. Eli and Denise, the best eyes, were put facing south, and Kathy was put facing north with some other wives. The Spivaks had kissed and parted. A few of the children, including Swift’s daughter Lydia, fell asleep out on the open stone, and others played catch with a baseball, which went over the edge of the wall and had to be retrieved from the beach far below. It was midnight. Darkness lapped against the overlook wall, the night’s tide coming in.

Eli could smell the sea coming over the white walls, the slight leafy death of it, something like flowers from the jungle below, and something sour as well. Above them all, a bowl of sky with nothing in the way but the low wall and a small gold dome that hid the staircase. They had traveled far for this diamond-clear view. Dr. Manday had taken out a notepad on which to record the meteors, and he walked among them all with an old man in gold brocade— the sultan himself, who murmured and scratched his slippers against the rock, talking about the repairs he would make to the overlook’s wall, which had been damaged during the war. There was no wind. People were whispering. Denise had chattered for a while, but seemed to be asleep beside Eli now, her headache beginning to fade. Eli listened for his wife’s voice across the parapet. There was no sound but the whispering, the sea, the flutter of bats’ wings. He stared at the sky, then over to the wall, where he saw that a gecko had crawled onto the whitewashed surface. Eli could hear it faintly croaking, a quasar in the night; he stared and wondered if they were all wrong about him.

He was lucky to be brilliant—his father had been so brilliant, a lawyer in Seattle, and everyone had watched Eli to see how this egg would hatch. Would he be ordinary and forgettable and safe in blue-collar Washington? Afterward, as an older boy, he had found a copy of
Action Comics
and felt just like that, like a death-kissed superhero with the parents peering over the crib to see if he might be human or extraordinary, if they should bother sewing capes. But he passed this test—his mother came home one day when he was three to see the letters
ELI
written in crayon on the wall. Had they really held a party for that? As if it were a true passage into genius, like the sailors passing the equator and pouring milk joyfully over one another. He had sweated after that, to live up to their prophecy.

But they were wrong. He had so easily conquered the scientific math, of course, shone so brightly as a student that even Swift remembered his name soon after Eli became a BADgrad—and wasn’t he one of the two fellows picked for this trip? Hadn’t he, finally, been tapped? But Denise, silently, was more brilliant. No one could see it but him. She had taken her preliminaries a semester early, and now was ready for her qualifying. Was anybody watching? Didn’t they see her there, with no praise, no support or notice, calmly jerking her slide rule through its motions until she had the answer before the rest of them? She didn’t raise her hand or speak, but she was first. Didn’t they see her?

Eli, on the other hand, was fading. He felt it fading, his brilliance, at twenty-five, like an aging actress feeling her once beautiful face. And somehow, in Eli’s mind, as he stared at the pale wall and tried to see the tiny lizard crouching there, croaking, the equation was simple and true: If Denise was brilliant, then he was not, and they were wrong. QED.

He turned toward his station again, and there above him was the constellation he had described to Kathy the other night: Centaurus. High in the southern sky, hidden from their usual vantage in California, it spread out hugely above him, the body of the creature drawn from the star Menkent and east toward the Southern Cross, where the imagined human head looked down. But there was nothing there, no meteors anymore—an empty vessel held before them all, or a magician’s hat which might (a childhood hope if anything) produce a rabbit all in fiery shards tonight. This he could see with his eyes. It was so clear here, and it was still so new to him that he could make out for the first time the stars of the Southern Hemisphere: the Southern Cross, Menkent, that open star cluster NGC 3532 just to the east of where the meteors would fall—wasn’t it amazing! All his life some curtain had been held up at the horizon, and here it lifted, as in a carnival tent, to reveal this museum of oddities—southern stars unknown to the ancients, named after objects in the sixteenth-century world: clocks, telescopes, air pumps.

But you could not describe these things to Kathy. You could try; you could name the stars and draw their lines on scraps of paper; show where, deep in the constellation, a spiral galaxy brooded. But in her folded arms, her tired stare, you would know it didn’t leap and form in her head; that even if she tried to pluck an image from his scribblings, hanging like a grape among the vines of math, it would not keep. Her mind was a poor place for his kind of wonder; after a while, the joy of it grew bad, turned to nothing. He had wanted, when he married Kathy, to take her up and show her what obsessed him as a boy, the hours he had stolen to bike in darkness to an observatory, the passion for it in college (all gone, of course, or changed). His mind was overfilling, like a library crammed with volumes to the ceiling, stacks on the tables, pages dusty on the floor; he had wanted to attach her to his library and fill that, too, with charts and names and nebulae. It was a foolish way to treat people, Eli knew, standing staring naked-eyed at the constellations (nothing yet in Centaurus, no sparks from its hoofs), and he felt very sorry.