Chapter Five
Gabe's voice carries across the darkness, bright with satisfaction because the telescopes are finally ready.
“Ladies and gentlemen, if you would please make your way down to the clearing. Watch your step. The stars are waiting for you.”
A flat space between the rocks has been transformed with four large telescopes standing at intervals, their long necks tilted upward, Gabe's team moving between them with efficiency.
The group clusters around Gabe in a loose semicircle and I locate a jagged rock at the edge of the clearing to lean against, which suits me considerably better than standing.
Above us, the sky is more than I was prepared for.
I tip my head back and look at it properly for the first time all evening.
I had thought I understood what was meant by a dark sky.
I did not. The stars are not just a scattering; they are layered, depth behind depth behind depth, and some have colour if you look long enough — a faint blue-white, a warmth at the edge of gold.
And they are everywhere, blanketing us. The band of the Milky Way moves across the whole of it like a living, breathing thing.
Gabe raises a laser pointer and a thin green beam cuts upward into the dark.
“Ladies and gentlemen — the North Star. Polaris. You see it — there, just there.” The beam settles.
“In the northern hemisphere this is your fixed point. Everything turns around it. If you are lost, you find this and you know where you are.” A pause for effect.
He is good at pauses. “Now, in the southern hemisphere, they cannot see it at all. A completely different sky. A different set of stars to navigate by.”
I think about this. A completely different sky depending on where you stand. The same universe; an entirely different view.
Gabe asks the group leading questions to see who knows where and how to find stars.
The French man has found his element. He calls out answers to Gabe's questions with enthusiasm.
He has been waiting all evening for this subject to come up.
His wife, I notice, is looking up with an expression that is no longer solely bored.
Gabe slowly moves the laser across the sky, drawing lines between stars, making shapes appear from what looked like scatter. Orion. Cassiopeia. The Pleiades — the seven sisters, he says, though most people can only find six. I count them without meaning to.
Gabe swings the laser to a bright point low on the horizon. “This one,” he says, with the air of a man who has been waiting to get to this part, “I have heard some things about.”
“What things?” someone calls.
He turns to face us. Pauses. Then spreads his arms wide. “KABOOM!”
Someone shrieks. Someone else laughs in pure shock. The group dissolves, a ripple of startled delight moving through us in the dark.
Gabe is laughing, possibly maniacally. “No, no, it’s fine, it’s fine. They say it will not explode for another hundred thousand years or so. Maybe more. Nothing to worry about.” He waves a hand, cheerfully unbothered.
The laughter settles. I look back at the star. Burning away up there, unaware of what it is slowly becoming. One hundred thousand years of looking exactly like itself before everything changes at once.
“And if you see anything moving”— Gabe sweeps an arm wide —“you tell me immediately. Shooting stars. Satellites. We have seen things from this spot that people carry with them for the rest of their lives.” He lets this settle.
“This spot, ladies and gentlemen. This is what we call in Tenerife — the path to heaven.”
The path to heaven.
I lean a little harder against the rock.
Heaven has been on my mind more than I would have admitted to anyone at home.
I was raised with it — the particular Irish Catholic version of it, all certainty and no comfort — and somewhere in the last few years, without announcement, I stopped being sure of it.
Stopped being sure of most of it. And then the marriage ended, and I had even less certainty and even more silence in which to notice the absence of it.
I wanted, when I read that phrase in the brochure, to come and look.
To stand somewhere that called itself the path to heaven and see if heaven looked back. To see if I felt anything.
The Milky Way moves slowly overhead; the dark is alive with stars, clustered and scattered, their light sharp against the vastness.
I do feel something. The shock of a world so much larger than the one I have been living in, and the realisation, obvious and enormous in equal measure, that I needed to see it to believe it.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the telescopes are ready. If you would please form four groups, one behind each telescope, we will begin. The first object tonight”— Gabe smiles, knowing the effect this has —“is Saturn.”
The group redistributes itself. I move to the nearest telescope and join the short queue behind it. One by one, people step forward, look, make small sounds of disbelief and step back. When my turn comes, I lean forward and reach instinctively for the sides of the telescope to steady myself.
“Please don’t touch.” One of Gabe's assistants — young, efficient, someone who has had this happen many times already — appears at my elbow and says it firmly and without apology.
I withdraw my hands immediately, smile by way of apology and bend as best as possible to look through.
Saturn sits in the viewfinder like an exhibit carefully cut out and placed there.
The planet itself a pale, perfect sphere, the rings encircling it with a neatness that seems almost too considered to be the result of nothing but physics and time.
It looks like a photograph. It looks like it’s lifted from a textbook.
It looks, I think, like something that cannot possibly be real and yet is sitting there, unambiguously, in the lens.
It is beautiful. It is extraordinary. It is both things simultaneously.
I step back and let the person behind me take their turn.
As the groups rotate, Emma is at the far telescope. I study the shape of her in the dark: that height, the bun, the oversized hoodie. She is looking through the lens with both hands clasped behind her back, which means she has already been told not to touch.
Gabe tells us there is a planetary parade tonight and announces Mercury next. The telescopes are adjusted. Mercury, he tells us, will look like the moon — cratered, close, enormous in the lens relative to what you'd expect.
I move to the back of my queue again. I am wondering, with more honesty than is comfortable, whether Emma ended up at a different telescope by accident or by design.
Whether I said something, or did something, or whether the tissue situation was simply beyond the point of reasonable recovery, and she has made a sensible decision to redistribute herself accordingly.
I always do this, I think. I always find the moment things are going well and locate exactly how I have ruined them. I tilt my head back and search for the North Star again, trying to fix myself to a constant point while I wait for the telescope to become free.
A presence beside me. Close. Warm, despite the cold. “You look lost,” Emma whispers, her voice low enough that it belongs only to me.
“I'm in a queue.”
“I meant up there.” She nods at the sky.
The group has settled into the hush that falls naturally in places this dark and this vast, where loud voices would feel like an intrusion. People move between the telescopes in near silence, speak to each other in low murmurs. Even the French man has quietened. Gabe himself has dropped his voice.
When my turn at the telescope comes, I lean forward. Mercury fills the viewfinder, scarred and vast, exactly as Gabe described.
“It does look like the moon,” I say, half to myself.
Emma steps closer. Close enough that when she speaks, her voice is barely above a whisper, warm at my ear.
“It does. But it's not very similar.” I am aware of the inch between her mouth and my ear.
“No atmosphere. No weather. Nothing to protect it, so everything that's ever hit it just... stays. Every crater is permanent.”
I keep my eye to the viewfinder. I am looking at Mercury, but I am not thinking about Mercury.
“The moon, at least, has a relationship with the earth,” she continues, her voice low and deliberate. “Mercury is just alone out there. Taking everything that comes at it.”
A feeling runs through me that I would prefer, for now, not to name. I straighten slowly.
In the dark I can make out the angle of her face tilted upward, the pale line of her throat, the way she is looking at the sky with an expression I recognise now — the same open and unguarded one she had at the viewing point before the sun went down.
“What else do you know?” I ask.
A small, private pleasure at being asked spreads across her face. “What do you want to know?”
I turn my face back to the sky. The Milky Way is still there, still moving, still more than I was prepared for. “All of it,” I say, which surprises me slightly.
Emma looks up too. Then, she begins to talk — softly, close, the cold and the dark and the rest of the group receding around us — and I listen with a quality of attention I haven't given someone in a very long time.