Chapter 2
2
B y the time Jack had returned with his bike, Sidney had eaten the last of his sourdough and had taken several large bites of cheese straight off the block. When he got off the bike at the entrance to the astronomy building, his stomach hurt, but he didn’t have enough time for the slowest elevator on campus to take him up to the third floor where faculty offices and the equipment room were located.
Panting and with a stitch in his side, Sidney heaved himself into the cluster of offices that the adjunct lecturers shared. Hanging on the wall beside the light switch was a hook. An empty hook. The key to the equipment closet was missing. It wasn’t possible for his night to get any worse.
“Fuck,” Sidney groaned, his eyes scanning the clipboard where people were supposed to sign the key out and in. Unsurprisingly, it had not been signed out.
“Sidney?” A head of brown curly hair poked out of one of the open office doors. Bodie Thomsen, Sidney’s occasional officemate, pushed his glasses up onto his nose.
“Bodie,” Sidney sighed. “Thank God. Where’s the key for equipment storage?”
“Oh, Mars probably has it.”
“Mars?” Sidney wrinkled his nose. “Who in the hell is Mars?” Bodie blushed.
“Mark. Professor Heaney. He goes by Mars now.” Christ. Sidney had to fight the urge to gag. He had been avoiding Mark since the beginning of term, and this was exactly the sort of reason why. Sidney breathed out through his nose and blinked at Bodie, who answered in a rush. “He’s with a 102 class in the observation hall. It’s a practicum night.”
“Thanks, Bodie,” Sidney managed before he turned and walked back out into the hall. He had one flight of stairs and half the length of the building to compose himself. First his father, now Mark. Maybe Satan himself would be waiting for him at Kilton House when Sidney returned. Apparently, anything was possible, so long as it made Sidney’s life horrible.
Mark was standing at the back of the observation hall, too close to a student who couldn’t have possibly been more than a sophomore. Mark Heaney’s dark hair was slicked to the side, tortoise shell spectacles perched on his nose, tweed jacket straining over his broad shoulders. Sidney watched as Mark leaned toward the student, brushing her arm as he pointed something out to her on the star chart. As he pointed up to the sky, Sidney could see the edge of a tattoo on his wrist and did his best to swallow down the bitterness crawling up his throat.
“Mark,” Sidney said from the doorway. They were no more than four feet away, the dark classroom lit by stars from the glass roof and the small, dim lamps the students were taking notes by. Mark did not respond. Sidney sighed. “Mark!”
The student Mark was talking to looked over Mark’s shoulder, arching an eyebrow at Sidney.
“Mars.” She nudged Mark in the elbow, and Mark finally turned toward him.
“Oh, Sidney!” His smile was more like a smirk, one eyebrow arched up to his hairline. Mark stepped close enough that Sidney could smell the overpowering vanilla cologne he preferred. He wore his shirt without a tie, the top two buttons open at the throat, a star chart tattoo visible across the top of Mark’s chest.
The tattoo was real, though it wasn’t accurate, and Sidney had been more than a little disappointed to discover that it was possibly the only real thing about Mark Heaney.
“You have the key to the equipment room.” Sidney held out his hand for the key in lieu of asking. Mark patted down his trouser pockets.
“It’s around here somewhere,” he turned back to the podium where a stack of papers sat. “How are you?” he asked as he began to shift things around with no urgency. “I haven’t seen you around much.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“How was your trip? Falklands, right?”
“Menelaus,” Sidney sighed. Wrong body of water. Wrong part of the planet. Another student came up to the podium and Mark immediately got distracted. Sidney bit his tongue. “Mark, I’m kind of in a rush.”
“It’s Mars now,” Mark corrected, as he held the keys aloft and struck a triumphant pose. Two students clapped. Sidney tasted regurgitated sourdough. “I visited a shaman over the summer, and she renamed me.”
“Shame she couldn’t relabel your tattoos for you too,” Sidney muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Sidney said, taking the keys from his outstretched hand. “Thanks!” he said and beat a hasty retreat.
They’d been in bed together when Sidney had noticed that the lines of the star chart on Mark’s chest, and the stars and planets themselves, were in the wrong places. And labeled incorrectly.
Sidney should have noticed it sooner. He should have realized that the time Mark claimed he had spent sailing up the east coast and charting the stars, overlapped with the time that Mark had supposedly been summiting Kilimanjaro and filing his award winning dissertation.
“What chart is this from?” Sidney had asked, tentatively, barely letting his fingers brush Mark’s chest. The sex hadn’t been stellar either, and Sidney wasn’t trying to instigate a second round until he’d had some time to figure out what or who had gone wrong. Looking at Mark’s tattoos had just seemed like the simplest way to pass the time before Sidney could politely roll out of bed.
“Chart?” Mark blinked his eyes open and then stared down at his chest. “Oh, that. You like it? I drew it myself. The stars from the crest of Olympus. On my birthday.” It wasn’t his first clue that Mark was a hack, but it had been the most damning. The fact that Sidney had gone back to Mark’s apartment a few times after that still chafed. His loneliness had gotten the better of him, that was all.
Sidney tried to shake off the lingering discontent that Mark’s presence always brought, as he unlocked the equipment storage room. He was going to have to warn Bodie not to get involved. Sidney and Bodie weren’t friends. Sidney didn’t exactly have friends in the department, except Karolina, but she was also his advisor, so forced proximity had played a large part in the growth of their relationship. And to her credit, Karolina had tried to warn him about Mark (“an inconceivably useless blowhard.”) Sidney just hadn’t listened. He was reasonably accomplished at deluding himself, when he wanted to be.
Equipment storage was barren. A few telescope cases with broken latches sat high on upper shelves. Sidney hoisted himself up, one foot on the bottom shelf, stretching his neck as he peered around for a case that would at least survive the trip across campus. Behind a short stack of standard tripods was a brown leather satchel, the strap for it snaking around the other equipment.
Sidney grabbed for it, pulling it down as he stepped back off the shelf, the whole unit creaking under the shifting weight. He unbuckled the flap of the bag and paused. The pretty mahogany telescope inside was not something the university would ever have purchased.
Sidney put the bag on his shoulder and pulled out the scope, turning it over to check the lenses, which looked to be in good working order. There were the intricate etchings on the metal fixtures on the tube, but in the low light of the equipment room Sidney couldn’t make them out. Three brass levers on the side, about halfway up, likely had something to do with focus or aperture. Maybe there was a way to attach a camera to it?
None of that mattered, though. What did matter was that it looked like it would work. Sidney slid the telescope back into the satchel and checked his pocket watch. He was running out of time.
He signed out the telescope and then returned the equipment storage keys to the hook. The office where Bodie had been working was dark now, and Sidney dipped inside, leaving a note on the top of Bodie’s folder.
‘Mars’ is a gasbag. He should have named himself ‘Jupiter.’
Sidney smirked to himself, and then headed back out into the night.
Kilton House was practically vacant by the time Sidney got back. The party must have moved to a different part of campus, which was perfectly fine with Sidney. He ducked into the kitchen, grabbed the first sleeve of crackers he encountered in the pantry and then made his way to his room.
Jack had at least had the decency to pick up the remains of Sidney’s telescope. It was on the desk with an apology note from the students who had broken it, ‘in an attempt,’ it said, ‘to better appreciate the finer points of campus architecture.’ Which meant they were trying to look into the all-girls house across the back alley. It didn’t matter, in the end. What was done was done, and Sidney had a star cluster to chart.
The scope worked beautifully; the image perhaps even crisper than what his own telescope had provided. He got the telescope set to the same angle and quickly found his purplish star cluster.
Sidney made notes for at least an hour. The star cluster moved in the ways that it had been moving, which was heartening, and Sidney took a break to climb down and fish his bottle of scotch out from beneath his bed.
Alone in the dark, under the sky, Sidney tried not to let his mind wander toward any of the horrible things that had happened in the last five hours. He was small in the vastness of the cosmos. And so were Mark Heaney and Sidney’s father. And so was the fact that his research wasn’t yielding results that made sense. Maybe it shouldn’t bother him that he was no closer to understanding why no one else had charted this cluster than he had been six months ago when he first saw it. But it did.
And he was still lonely. Leo used to tell Sidney that if Sidney could get one piece of it right the rest would fall into place. But if this night was anything to go by, even one piece wasn’t going to fall into place any time soon.
With a heavy sigh and thinking longingly of bed, Sidney leaned forward again. He held his eye to the telescope and let the cosmos come into focus. Sidney yawned, reaching for the levers he’d previously ignored, and pressed down on the first one, just to see what it did.
A lens slid into place, coloring his vision a light teal. The celestial bodies remained, hued differently, shining brightly. Sidney let it go and the lens clicked back down. Then Sidney pressed the second one. It was a blackened lens, or something like it. Sidney’s vision faded almost entirely, only the brightest stars still visible. Not a particularly useful addition to a telescope. He released that one as well.
Sidney took a drink of his scotch, stretching his back before bowing over the eyepiece again. He pushed down on the final lever, holding it steady with the pad of his forefinger, seeing the sky through a bold magenta hue.
And the sky was different.
The stars were not where they should have been. Or perhaps they were different stars altogether. For a moment, he’d thought they’d reversed. But then, his purplish cluster, what he’d thought was a spiral, was suddenly bright and clear. It was a curl of celestial bodies. Seven perhaps, or eight? The center one might have even been a planet.
Sidney removed his finger, the lens clicking down, and he looked through the eyepiece again. The same stars he’d been watching for months. Cautiously, as though he was approaching a wild animal, he pressed the furthest lever down again. And everything was different.
Sidney stayed up until dawn light and exhaustion began to cloud his vision. He had to teach in the afternoon and he should have been in bed hours ago. Instead, Sidney had followed the stars for hours. Were they coming toward him? Which would mean they were moving in a different planar direction than they ought to have been, but might have explained why, after six months his star cluster hadn’t dropped out of the sky yet. It was more than unusual. It was unnatural. Wasn’t it? Even the flimsy veneer of predictability, of understanding, that he’d thought he’d had over the world around him, had been peeled away. Maybe he really had lost his mind.
Sidney taught that day’s lessons in a daze and stumbled back to the house in the early evening, taking the telescope with him everywhere he went. He wasn’t going to risk it getting broken by his housemates. Sidney slept for a couple of hours and set an alarm for eleven. There must have been football practice early because the house was largely deserted when Sidney went down to grab a bowl of cold leftover pasta. He brought the food back up, gathered the telescope and his notebook into his arms, and climbed out to the widow’s walk again.
Through the magenta lens, several of his stars were more clearly defined, and were larger again. Sidney made more notes and drew pictures of what he was seeing through each of the lever-triggered lenses. He packed everything up that night, telescope and charts, putting them all in a bundle at the foot of his bed.
His advisor, Karolina, had been on a research trip, then a sabbatical, then a honeymoon. Sidney had been chomping at the bit to get an appointment to see her, and that afternoon he didn’t even bother calling ahead. He saw that her light was on and bustled into her office, charts under his arms, the mysterious telescope flung on his back.
“I don’t know what it is,” Sidney said once all his charts, the drawings and the telescopes were laid out on Karolina’s formerly clean desk. Unlike every other professor in the department, she kept her office spotless, all her documents and charts neatly filed away in a series of massive cabinets along the wall. Sidney took a secret joy in making a mess in her space.
Karolina cocked her head to the side, looking over his sketches, her long, straight chestnut hair obscuring her expression. When she straightened up, she reached for the telescope, picking it up carefully with light brown fingers, extra tan from her trip to Bali. Then she turned it over and examined the other side, one eyebrow arched.
“Where did you get this?” she asked finally.
“It was the last one in equipment storage. I figured it was an old student’s or something.”
“I know who it belongs to.” Karolina set the telescope down, her gaze briefly fixed on it, like it might be about to jump up and scare her. Then she sat, folding her hands in her lap and peered over Sidney’s charts again. “You said you first noticed the cluster in Menelaus?”
“Yes,” Sidney said. “But now… with this telescope I don’t think it’s a cluster at all. And no one has notes on it. There’s nothing to?—”
“What did you get up to in Menelaus?” Karolina interrupted. Sidney frowned.
“Nothing,” he said honestly. “Just the same as here. Sleep all day and stars all night. But, Karolina, what’s really interesting is that there aren’t any notes on this thing anywhere and it’s supposed to?—”
“You didn’t…” she arched an eyebrow, “meet anyone in Menelaus, did you?”
“Meet anyone?” Sidney stammered. What was she talking about? “Like the other students, or…?”
“ Meet anyone,” she emphasized again. Sidney’s eyes widened.
“Oh! No!” Sidney shook his head. He’d only left student housing to walk down to the beach in the evenings, telescope in hand. He’d encountered a few locals. One a young woman who’d come around a few times, occasionally with her friends. But even still, they’d never done anything more than chatted amiably, a pleasant distraction as he watched the stars.Karolina still looked skeptical. “I didn’t. I was— Wait. Why?”
“Never mind,” she shook her head. “I think you need to talk to Jonas.”
“Why should it matter if I met anyone? And who’s Jonas?”
“Jonas Rookwood. That’s his telescope,” Karolina said, reaching for her desk drawer. She produced from it a small, black book. “Let me give you his address. You should take that back to him as well.”
“You really don’t know what this is? At all?” Sidney pointed to the chart. “Because I’m thinking it’s an uncharted open cluster, semi-spiral. And it’s shifting in a noticeable orbit, which is part of why it doesn’t make sense for no one to know about it. And these lenses?—”
“Jonas will have better answers than I would. And I’d rather not steer you wrong by making a guess.” She handed him a card that she’d scrawled an address on the back of as he talked. “Also,” she said with a smile, “this is all very impressive.”
“Impressive enough for a dissertation?” Sidney asked, hoping she’d ignore how desperate he’d just sounded. Karolina made a noise that was not a cough or a snort, but something in between. Sidney frowned at her.
“Talk to Jonas,” she said. Sidney looked over the card again.
“Elmmond House, Hindry. Where’s Hindry?”
“About five hours north, if you take the train.” She began to gather Sidney's charts for him. “It’s on the coast. Bittergate Bay. Has a beautiful view of the night sky. You should leave today if you want to get a few more decent looks at your cluster,” she added. “I don’t imagine it’ll be in the sky much after next week. Just following your patterns.”
“Right,” Sidney frowned down at his charts. This was not what he’d expected. “I don’t really think I can afford a train ticket at the moment. Or housing. Maybe I’ll just write Mr. Rookwood, and?—”
“The department can cover expenses if it’s for your dissertation.” Karolina winked at him and Sidney opened his mouth to protest. Karolina shook her head. “I’ll speak to the dean. And I doubt you’ll have to find housing. Elmmond House is large and Mr. Rookwood is one of only two occupants. I’ll write him a note. He won’t turn you out.”
“You know him, then?”
“Oh yes,” Karolina smiled. “I’ve known Jonas for a very long time.”