Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
Chester went first, and then Ben, and Rainey, Santiago, and Norty, each walking with me to the edge of the woods, where I captured their greeting and the voices of the others in the background, plus crickets, plus rustles in the underbrush, plus Norty asking for a snack.
Lily was last. I could pretty much guess what she’d say, and I wasn’t wrong. How she said it, though—as if it were just to you. Staring hard into the vast black, up toward the sparkling unknown. As if you could actually hear.
This night hadn’t been like the other one at all.
Everything had changed, and yet it was all still universe-huge, a gift.
I was still surrounded by people who didn’t forget to look up.
And I was trying to do that, as well. Trying so hard.
Even with only my own eyes, the stars were astonishing, a glow-in-the-dark mural of magic, a sparkling carpet sky, but still, where were you, you know?
Where could I find you, so you could forgive me?
So I could make sure we were okay? Maybe I was going to work hard at this puzzle my whole life long and never have an answer.
“You all right? You need some water?” Lily asked. “Or food? Or a chair?” She pointed down to what was left of a fallen tree.
I couldn’t tell her what was weighing on me so heavily.
I just couldn’t let it go, how I’d let you go.
I couldn’t confess how I’d let you down, broken your heart, actually broken it.
It was too terrible. What would she think of me?
What would they all think of me? I doubted they’d love me anymore.
Sandrine still did, but she carried her own weight of wrongdoing.
That Taco Time call, the way she might have saved you, she was sure.
“I just really miss him,” I told Lily. That was maybe the simplest truth in all this.
I missed you. I just missed your voice being a voice and your eyes being eyes and your whole self being you.
“I keep looking for signs in everything. Like tonight. I just wish there were some way I knew for sure we were still connected, you know.”
“Up there, you see so many signs.” Her old blue eyes squinched at the stars.
“You do?”
“Oh, for sure. Ophiuchus, the direction he always had his telescope focused on? The constellation where Voyager is now? The guy with the snake?”
“Yeah?”
She sat down on that log, and I sat beside her.
“He’s the god of health and healing. And that snake he holds—some say it represents the Ouroboros, another snake that winds itself in an endless loop.
” She swirled her fingers in a figure eight, just like you used to do.
Like I used to do, too. “It’s a symbol that shows up in every ancient culture, and it—”
“Infinity,” I said. “It was…” Too personal. Too important to Mars and me to explain.
“Infinity, right! A symbol of the everlasting. Those loops are everywhere in space. The Milky Way galaxy. The sun’s path, viewed from above. The Hubble telescope took images of MyCn18, the Hourglass Nebula, and it looks just like one. You want signs…” She lifted her chin upward.
“It’s…” I wasn’t sure how to explain it, or if I should even try. “Like, hard to know whether I even deserve signs. Or if it’s my place to even do this.” I held up my phone, indicating my project. “I mean, we were together such a short time.”
“You were. So short.”
Man, that hurt me, but it was true. “Did it even matter? Love for so short a time coming from, like, small me?”
“So small,” she agreed.
I knit my eyebrows together, went silent.
“Don’t you think it’s strange,” she asked, “how people think it’s the huge, long, loud things that matter?
We’re sitting here surrounded by the immense universe, so in that way, I get it.
But the small…The small is where things get even more interesting.
Look here.” She stomped one sneakered foot on the ground.
“Our Earth. This rotating beast that seems so enormous to us? So small! Absolutely minuscule! In that universe out there, we are less than a dot. Our sun and all our planets are about as wide as an atom, in terms of the universe. We are unseen, we’re so small.
And then there’s this mountain we’re on right now, smaller yet, and you and me right now, us together, even smaller yet.
On this Earth, we’re an unseen dot on another unseen dot.
This log—invisible. My hand”—she reached for mine—“in yours. Infinitesimal. My eyes, yours. These words I just spoke, my, yours, us, together, tiny, tiny, tiny. The molecules inside us, in the breath I’m using to say these words, vanished.
Nonexistent. Poof! Our time here—your time with Mars, with me, tonight, on this log…
In the grand timeline of human existence, in the long, forever history of the cosmos… Nothing. And yet, and yet…”
She paused. She held me there with her eyes, but there was no way I was going anywhere. She had me riveted in place, forgetting about the hour and the cold that was beginning to creep into my fingers and toes. No wonder she had a reputation as an amazing professor. No wonder she’d captivated you.
“Well, let me interrupt myself and say that this is not one of those hideous lectures of someone claiming something awful about God’s will,” she said.
“Or how Mars dying was meant to be, because no. If God exists, and he created this”—she holds her hands out, indicating the up, the down, the everything—“then he is indeed loving. Too loving to take a beautiful kid like that from us, I’m convinced. ”
“Yeah,” I said. Yeah to all of that.
“What I am saying is that an unseen chemical connects with another unseen chemical, and there is a reaction. Or there’s the smallest connection like this…
” She holds up our clasped hands. “Or this…” She circles her arm, indicating all of us together on the mountain.
“And there is a reaction. There’s a change, the smallest, tiniest, invisible change, even, and that creates another change, and another, and all those tiniest shifts gather with all the other tiniest shifts, the most brief, indiscernible connections.
And then…something moves. It becomes something else that moves something else!
” She windmills an arm, releasing an ectoplasmic glow of neon yellow from her sleeve, which lingers in the black of night before disappearing.
“The connections—they go on and on. Him here, you loving him, us loving his, him loving us, it altered things. It will have never not happened. He will have never not been.”
My throat got too tight to speak. I squeezed her hand. Her skin was old and soft. It had seen some things.
“Everything is a chain, and a chain reaction.” She winds two fingers around each other like a cord, like a rope. A tether. “Wait! Mars and I talked about this before! Have you seen the images of the chain reaction that is DNA?”
“They’re amazing,” I said. “It’s hard to believe that’s in us.”
“In us. Is us. And do you know what it looks like?” I did.
I remembered the pictures of it, and understood where she was going with this.
I hadn’t even realized it before. “A figure eight connected to figure eight connected to figure eight. Infinite mattering. Isn’t it wild, how we can’t see some of the most essential things that exist? ”
I was feeling it right then, the connection, the chain reaction, the way this tiny, invisible, and brief moment had changed me. Like that first night, but different. Everything seemed unimaginable but possible. And then Chester called out.
“Where the hell are you guys? You better not have been eaten by a tiger.”
“We’re here!” Lily called, waving her glow-arms. Her tiny glow-arms, next to tiny me, on this small, small log that was once a minuscule tree, on an invisible dot of a planet.
“We’re right here,” I called, too.
We were. I was. Loss wanted to take me with it, but I was still here.
Before we headed back down the dark trail, Sandrine found it for me, Ophiuchus.
“Dark patch of sky,” she said.
“Dark patch of sky,” I agreed.
“Do you know the thing I keep forgetting but try to remember? We can’t see Voyager, but it’s looking back at us.”
And then Rainey appeared by Sandrine’s side.
“Hey.” She seemed hesitant. I realized that it was maybe more than the reluctance an average person might feel walking up to two grieving people on an important mountain under a somber and too-meaningful night sky.
“Hey, Rainey,” Sandrine and I said at the same time.
“I, uh…I never told you guys…” Rainey trailed off, like she wasn’t sure we’d want to know whatever it was she was going to say. But if it had to do with you, and it seemed like it was about to, we wanted. We wanted it all. Everything.
“Never told us what?” Sandrine said.
“It’s awkward. I feel a little funny about it, and I wasn’t sure if I should share it, and then I thought, I should just…I think, um…I was maybe the last person to talk to him. Or, communicate with him.”
“You were?” It felt like every dial in my body had suddenly been turned up. “What did he say?”
“It wasn’t much. It wasn’t anything. Something silly. It wasn’t like him at all. I mean, sometimes he’d send me some astronomy article, but never anything like this.”
“What, what?” I asked.
“It seems wrong that this is the last thing, and maybe that’s why I didn’t mention it. Because he was embarrassed. And he wanted a…female perspective. He said he tried to call you…”
She looked toward Sandrine, and now every dial in her body had been turned up. “He did try. But I…” Sandrine’s voice was high, squeezed as if she’d forced it through the narrowest opening. She couldn’t say it. “You know why he called?”
“Well, yeah. He’d gotten his hair cut.”
“He’d gotten his hair cut?” We knew that. But that’s why you called? Sandrine’s pitch went up another notch. It was hope and confusion. A haircut? She hadn’t even dreamed of that, I’m sure. A hundred other things, but not a haircut.