The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (5 page)

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?”

“I don’t think I was listening.”

“You should really listen.”

“You’re right.”

“Sometimes,” Lydia said quite seriously, leaning forward, “I’m a princess.” Then she went away.

Kathy was more astonished by this little girl than by anything happening above her. The stars were forever falling, the sky turned nightly; but how often did you find a subtle strangeness in an ordinary girl? It was a precious thing to see. Most of the people who knew her would have called Kathy a misanthrope, but they misunderstood her. She adored people, loved being with them and talking to them, but she didn’t like any of the obvious things about them. She hated joke-tellers, “charming" people, beauty or grace in any form, raconteurs or wits or geniuses. What Kathy loved were the hidden, tiny madnesses in ordinary people.

At a party, for instance, she often found herself confronted with grinning, clever couples. The man could always talk wittily about the president, and the wife could whisper cunningly about the hostess. This kind of stable marriage, this vaudeville act, bored Kathy to tears. She had come up with clever ways to separate the spouses and then pry past their dull exteriors until she discovered an obsession, an old regret, or a long-abiding fury that quickly subsided in an embarrassed murmur. It wasn’t that she wanted to humiliate these people. Really, Kathy just wanted to like them a little more. She wanted to discover how they, too, were human. And when she told you that she liked someone, what she really meant was that she’d glimpsed some unexpected oddity within them, and loved them for it. It was why she liked Denise, for instance—that ordinary rich girl who revealed her craziness so easily, almost happily, at the first scratch of a nail. It was also what had drawn her to Eli.

Eli had at first, like all people, seemed unnecessary. Another Jewish boy at a chemistry party, another dark-browed and selfish intellectual for her mother to adore. After being introduced to him, Kathy had quickly escaped to a corner where she could sit by herself, but he had persistently found her and the safe corner became a trap; they were walled in by laughing scientists and girlfriends, and Kathy was forced to sit beside this dull man on the plush red love seat, listening to him chat about his life and prospects. Kathy pretended to listen, sipping her gin, looking at Eli’s face; noticing how he had tried to slick his curls back; thinking how, in his narrow tie and dark suit, he looked like a child dressed up for a wedding.

She wasn’t pretty or clever, and she knew it. Kathy was plain, odd and aloof and, as she understood it, men wanted nothing to do with such a creature. Her mother had often yelled at her to stop reading, fix her hair, sit in the parlor when boys came around so they might see her. Her mother tried to teach her a secret way to bake a pie, thinking this kind of talent might give Kathy’s ashen skin a buttery glow, but cooking had merely made the girl interested in chemistry. Once, before a school dance, her mother took Kathy downtown to look at dresses, promising her a book if she would go into Sears, if she would at least point out something she liked. Kathy dreamed of her book—
The Waves,
by Virginia Woolf—and, impatient for the feel of its cover, gestured toward a white dress with daisies all across the bodice, knowing her mother couldn’t afford it. One morning a week later, Kathy awoke to see a shabby copy of that dress hanging on the door. Her mother had stayed up nights to make it. She had sewn it all from scraps and memory and a sharp, desperate hope. Kathy wore the dress that night as Eli tried to charm her, not out of sentiment or vanity. It was the only nice dress she had. Her only thought was how to escape this nice, dull boy, until she began to listen to his babbling monologue about comets and realized he was out of his mind.