Stargazing
Posted: August 25th, 2026, 9:09 pm
I didn’t need the brass-plated number on the front door to tell me this was the place, because they’d said it was at the end of a dead-end street, and I was there, and there it was: an old two-family house, dark brown with tan shutters, in a neighborhood of such houses converted to apartments. I checked the number anyway, not to make sure, but because it’s just who I am.
Number 127. This was the place.
The tenants’ gravel parking area was already filled with more cars than could possibly belong to the residents, so I moved a little further on and eased off the street alongside a narrow strip of woods buffering the neighborhood from the highway beyond. Satisfied that I was sufficiently out of the way, and had enough room to turn around when it came time to make my escape, I sat for a minute before killing the engine. I liked the song that was playing – a moody, jazz-rock rendition of Lalo Schifrin’s “Pampas” – but mostly because I was in no particular hurry to do what I’d come for.
Office parties aren’t really my thing. Okay, maybe this wasn’t the stereotypical water-cooler farce of 1950s cinema – this was more of an informal “department gathering” in someone’s apartment, for a half-dozen coworkers to share a few beers, a little loud music, and some unfiltered trash-talk about the company. But it was a social event all the same, with people I barely knew, in a tribe I’d only recently joined, after two years of living in another. And two years is a long time when you’re 25 – a long time to drive a forklift while your technical degree languishes in a drawer at your parents’ house, a long time to be immersed in a culture you’d only briefly encountered as a tourist during summer jobs. In those two years I’d earned my blue collar and the respect of my comrades; and while grateful for the IT position, becoming “office” had felt like desertion under fire. And I was back to being the New Guy again, facing a whole new set of initiation rites. Were it not for one detail, I might have made my excuses, or at the very least invented a plausible deadline to ensure a timely exit.
Her name was Kimberly Adams. She went by Kim.
She’d been in the floor-turnover queue for a while, waiting for the next packer on the fulfillment line to say “fuck this” and walk out. She’d taken her seat alongside a handful of other girls several weeks before the IT programming job had been posted, and had immediately caught my eye.
She was pretty, somewhere in her 20s, long blond hair usually worn pulled back, and soft facial features not yet hardened by the realities of paycheck-to-paycheck. Something in her manner suggested that the loose, bulky clothing she wore was probably chosen to hide the fact that she was a tad on the heavy side, unaware that she was only calling attention to something that required neither hiding nor fixing. This self-consciousness lent her a gentle physicality I found endearing, and more than a little intoxicating; and I’d said as much to one of the forklift jocks down in shipping. He’d just glanced at her, shrugged, and said “I don’t really dig fat chicks.”
I hadn’t thought of her as “a fat chick”, and for a moment wondered if I should have. Now I realize that he and I just had different spec sheets; but at the time, it felt like I might be violating some bylaw of Manhood. Once I realized the notion was nothing but dogma, it didn’t take me long to dismiss his remark as casually as he’d dismissed her. By the time I’d begun interviewing for the IT slot, she’d been moved to the warehouse and recruited to learn the new inventory system – which would require frequent interactions with IT.
Two refugees from the shop floor sharing the same life raft…
The song ended. I killed the engine, unbuckled, and stepped out. Into the fray, I thought, and reached into the back for the sixpack I’d brought for the occasion. As I trudged along the street back towards the house, a street light flickered on, even though there was still an hour or more of daylight left. I wasn’t sure whether to take it as a welcome or a warning. I reached #127, stepped up onto the porch, and finding the door unlocked, I opened it. The muffled thumping of music that had been faintly audible from the street now clearly pointed the way to the upper floor. At the top of the stairs, it was easy enough to tell which door was the one to knock on, so I did. Twice. Eventually, it opened, and the sounds from within poured out unfiltered, like water from an overturned bucket.
It was Graham, our systems programmer. Like all such, he’s a bit of an odd duck – it seems to go with the job. He’s likeable enough, but his off-the-wall brand of humor isn’t always recognized as such by those raised on sitcoms, and a lot of people find his manner inexplicably unnerving. I could never be quite sure where he was coming from, but I was beginning to like him all the same.
“Could you point me to the nearest party?” I asked.
He took his cue immediately. “I’ll have to check,” he said without showing the least recognition. “If you could wait here a moment, I’ll find someone you can ask.”
If Graham were an ordinary person, this would be both the joke and the punchline, and would be answered with a laugh, followed by an invitation inside. But he’s not. He’s Graham, and requires a more elaborate ballet.
“Be quick about it, my good fellow,” I snapped. “Else I be forced to sigh heavily, and shake my head in dismay.”
He stepped aside and gestured that I should enter. “That would be most unfortunate, most unfortunate indeed. Do come in, and feel free to pose your question to any of my co-hosts.”
“Thanks, I shall.” Feeling at last free to break character, I grinned and lightly slapped his arm with the back of my hand. “How ya doin’, man?”
“Not bad, not bad ‘tall,” he said. “Hope you found the place OK.”
“Found it on my first iteration.”
His expression seemed to flicker back into that inner world he occupies. “Newton’s method, or steepest descent?” he asked.
“Simulated annealing, actually,” I said. “You can never be sure that your response function is differentiable.”
“The power of a well-aim shotgun blast, eh?” he laughed, returning the arm-tap and gesturing towards the sixpack I carried. “Why don’t you pop those in the fridge and grab yourself a cold one?”
I walked past him into the living room, where Paul and Debbie were dancing to the pop tunes blaring from the sound system. She was a trainee for accounts payable/receivable, quite attractive in her own right, but a little louder than I care for. He was the programmer/analyst for those systems. He carried himself with a self-assurance bordering on an arrogance not quite to my taste either. It struck me as unsurprising that their relationship was no longer merely that of student and teacher, and it was clear they had no intention of pretending otherwise. It was also clear they’d been freely partaking of the chilled refreshments, or more likely, their distilled equivalent. “Hey, Russ, ya made it!” he called with a grin and wave. She said nothing, but gave me a little twirl and a wave in greeting. I couldn’t help but notice that the uppermost button of her blouse had come undone, and though it revealed little, it sent the intended message.
I gave them the prescribed smile and nod of acknowledgment, and continued past them to the kitchen. Keith, the lead programmer, was there with a beer in his hand, talking with Jen and Kim. Keith was my mentor – a no-nonsense sort, maybe 10 years my senior, every bit as good as he thought he was, but a little remote. I had enormous respect for him, as well as an implicit trust, but couldn’t really say I liked him. Jen was Kim’s mentor – another ferociously talented programmer. She was as hard-nosed as Keith, but possessed a cynical edge, as though nursing a buried anger or resentment over the fact that her capabilities exceeded her responsibilities. I shared her suspicion that her progression up the corporate food chain had been slowed by her biology as much as her temperament; but I didn’t know her well enough to make that call. Now she seemed relaxed and sociable in her corner of the conversational triangle I was interrupting. She held a small glass of what I presumed was grocery-store merlot – as did Kim.
They all turned at my arrival, and we exchanged greetings while I set my sixpack on the table and began transferring its contents to the fridge. Besides an opened wine bottle, there was a partially-depleted whiskey fifth on the table as well, which more than likely had contributed to Paul and Deb’s abandoned gaiety.
Once my cargo was on ice, I extracted one that had already been so for a while, and began the small-talk patter – rather, invited them to make the opening move. “So,” was all I said.
Keith advanced one of his pawns. “So,” he replied. Then, “How’s that old wreck you drive holding up?”
I assumed he was alluding to the exhaust system issue I’d let go on longer than I should have, and answered with a half-smile, half-laugh: “It’s holding,” I said. “For the moment, it seems satisfied with the kilobuck I threw at it. I’m sure once it’s digested that, it’ll be ready for another feeding.”
“Getting there is half the fun,” Jen said, quoting an old advertising slogan long since passed into meme-hood. “Paying for it’s the other.”
“I would question that ratio,” I said, twisting off the bottle cap and tossing it into the trash.
She laughed, and now that I’d successfully merged into traffic, it felt safe to allow a moment of silence to settle over us. I glanced over at Kim, who’d said nothing during this. She seemed to be studying the glass in her hand, an air of hesitancy about her, as of one gauging the speed of a carousel before jumping on. And I felt the familiar tugs of ambivalence – right-brain wanting to engage her in conversation, left-brain reminding me of my inexperience in the art, and what rejection has felt like. I dropped my gaze back down to my shoes while the two hemispheres debated, until, with apologies to left-brain, I looked up and said, “So Kim, are you missing the packing line yet?”
She seemed unprepared for her turn to speak, and smiled a bit defensively as she got her reply in order. “Not yet, no. How about you? Almost didn’t recognize you outside the cage of your lift.”
“No hardhat,” I said, tapping the top of my head. “I’ll see if I can get one from the supply closet.” I found her apparent willingness to engage encouraging. “Can’t say I miss hunting for skids already pulled from stock that no one bothered to write inventory tickets for.”
She laughed graciously enough, though it had an obligatory ring to it, which I should have expected, since we’d seen the place through different eyes - while I’d been wandering around the warehouse searching for misplaced inventory, she’d been suffering her own indignities chained to the packing line. I was trying to put myself into her reference frame when she did it for me: “Sometimes you were gone so long, we figured you and Kenny were out back sharing a joint.” Her eyes were still smiling at me when she raised the glass to her lips.
She wasn’t too far off the mark, but I just gave a little shrug. “Sounds like something Linda might say,” I replied. ”And maybe Marge.”
“Could be, could be,” she said coyly. “Not me, of course.”
“Certainly not,” I said. It was the first time we’d actually bantered. Her physical appearance had drawn me in for a closer look, and these first casual exchanges hinted at wit and intelligence held in reserve. I was starting to like her a lot, and hoping to present myself in a way she’d find equally pleasing.
Keith and Jen in the meantime had gotten deep into a philosophical debate over operating system protocols, and it was clear that she was making him earn every point he scored. Kim and I paused our dance to watch theirs, a little dizzied by the rarified air they were breathing, a little intimidated by the sharp precision of their arguments. We found the virtuosity more engaging than the tune itself, at least until Graham’s appearance in the doorway reminded us why we were there.
“So there you guys are!” he said. “Deb and Paul sent me out here to make sure you weren’t passing their bottle around.”
“We hadn’t gotten to it yet,” I said, hoisting my beer. “Never drink the hard stuff on an empty stomach, I always say.”
“Sound advice,” he said. “But just to make sure you don’t, why don’t you join us around the fire?”
It made sense to me, and a quick glance around the group seemed to say it was the majority opinion as well; so with drinks in hand, we followed him to the living room. The stereo still played, but at a more modest level, and Deb and Paul had retired to the overstuffed chair beside it, presumably because the two-seater loveseat nearby offered neither adequate intimacy, nor sufficient proximity to the volume control. Fortunately, Graham had taken some pains to provide seating for everyone, and to that end had enlisted some mismatched patio furniture for the purpose. Keith, Jen, and Kim converged on the two wicker chairs beside the loveseat. Keith and Kim got there first and staked their claims, so Jen seated herself on the side of the loveseat nearest Keith, and I took my place beside her, facing Kim a decorous distance away.
Graham retrieved a plain wooden chair from the bedroom for himself, and set it beside the stereo. Before settling onto it, he gestured to the tuner and asked, “Any requests?”
The response was the usual round of “Doesn’t matter”, “Anything’s fine”, “Whatever you like”; and while I could have joined in, I always felt a little on the outside whenever surrounded by enthusiasts of the latest in mass-produced pop, so – since he’d asked - I said as indifferently as I could reasonably fake, “maybe a little jazz?”
He gave me that insider’s grin, and turned to scroll down the list of genres until he found a promising rabbit hole to dive into. I didn’t want to seem like I was dictating what the room was to hear, and was too far from the screen to see it clearly anyway, so I let him wade through the details, and make the final selection. He grandly declared, “And the winner is… “, and tapped the screen. A gently strummed electric guitar murmured from the speakers, and I recognized it immediately.
“ ‘In a Silent Way’ !” I exclaimed. “Great choice, man – Miles Davis’s first collab with John McLaughlin!”
He replied in a hoarse imitation of the trumpeter’s well-known rasp, “Played like he don’t know how to play the guitar…”. The others in the room said nothing, looking a bit bewildered, like students on their first day of Introductory Music Appreciation. He nodded. “You nailed it right away. You’ve got a good ear.”
Kim looked from him over to me; maybe the others did too, but I wasn’t watching them, so couldn’t be sure. I just said “Thanks,” and gave him that trying-not-to-smile smile while fingering one of my ear lobes. “Which one?”
“Not that one,” he said. “The other one.”
“Ah. Actually, I’m rather fond of them both.”
“They are quite charming. For ears, anyway.”
“As ears go.”
“Precisely.”
We let the musical ambience speak for us during the gentle minuet between the guitar, electric piano, and soprano sax until the start of the vamp, where Miles & the drummer break into a jog. Then the reverie dissolved – the party seemed to undergo some kind of phase change, where the wordless immersion in the music began to feel uncomfortably awkward. Keith said something about how it was nice to see the team assembled even on a weekend, and Deb said something about time and a half, and Kim seconded the motion, and Paul wondered what job code it would fall under, and a collective ripple of laughter traveled through the room. It hit the Reset button, rebooted the party, and restored the music to the background. The conversation drifted inevitably from there into office politics.
Then Jen emptied the last bit from her glass, and excused herself to get a refill. When she’d left, Kim realized her own glass was empty as well, and followed suit. Jen returned a short time later, but instead of resuming her place on the loveseat beside me, she took the wicker chair next to Keith that Kim had just vacated. When Kim reappeared, she seemed a bit nonplussed to find her seat taken; and, in a familiar flash of self-doubt, I assumed she was uncertain about the prospect of sitting so closely to me, and hoped her hesitation was from bashfulness and not antipathy. So, in need of a refill myself, I rose, thinking that momentarily removing myself from the picture might ease the task of claiming her seat by making it simply a logistical choice absent any social undertones.
In the quiet privacy of the kitchen, I allowed myself an exaggerated exhale and a weary eye-roll. I dropped my empty into the trash with a clink, pulled a replacement from the fridge, and tossed its cap in after it. Grateful for the backstage solitude and the opportunity for my feelings to settle into something I could articulate, I took a sip, looked idly around the room, and noted that darkness had begun to fall outside. I wandered over to the window for a closer look. The trees could still be seen – barely - silhouetted against a dark gray sky, but a few stars were visible as well. It surprised me that they weren’t lost in the glare of the streetlights; the house’s shadow was apparently deep enough to let a few peek through. I raised the bottle to my lips again and wondered how long it would be before I could decently make my escape. I wondered if, when the time came, I would even want to. I wondered where – if anywhere – Kim and I might be headed,
I wondered who the hell I thought I was to even harbor such foolish conceits.
Yet the thoughts kept coming.
I returned to the living room, where Paul appeared to be quarterbacking an animated discussion, with Deb cheerleading, Keith and Graham on the opposing team’s offense, and Kim and Jen rooting from the bleachers. It wasn’t clear what my role was until Paul made it clear I was to be the ref. “Here’s Russ!” he exclaimed. “Let’s ask him.” To me he said, “Russell! What do you think about this thing?”
I recognized this as a variation on the knock-knock joke, a little put off by the game’s obviousness. So instead of asking “who’s there” as scripted, I replied, “Well, it’s a perfectly serviceable idiom, as long as we interpret ‘this’ as a definite article, and ‘thing’ as a gender-inspecific pronoun whose antecedent is understood beforehand. Which in this case, I’m afraid, it is not.”
Graham laughed as I’d hoped, and I was especially pleased that Kim seemed to enjoy the turnaround as well. Paul was clearly chagrined by his loss of conversational momentum. “The comet!” he said in exasperation. “We’re talking about that comet! It’s been all over the news, how it’s not behaving the way comets should, and no one knows why… You must have heard of it.”
So that was it – Wilson-Pike, the latest extrasolar nomad to wander through our cosmic neighborhood. Media outlets greedy for viewership were spinning lurid tales twisting the unusual into the bizarre, targeting their snake-oil mostly at those resentful over the relentless discrediting of their favorite conspiracy theories, and of being proven wrong more often than not.
“Actually, Russ,” Keith said, “given your background, I’d be interested to get your perspective.” His quiet professionalism momentarily muted the room’s dynamic energy. “Physics, wasn’t it?”
I didn’t relish the thought of being deputized, but just nodded. “Yeah. I’ve always had a thing for astronomy. Did my senior thesis in orbital mechanics. But I haven’t read too much about this comet.”
Kim looked over at me with an expression of surprise. “I didn’t know that,” she said. “One of the girls told me you were a math teacher.”
I laughed. “Common mistake. Our plumage is similar, but we occupy different ecosystems. Math teachers find it easier to get jobs.”
“What have you read about it?” Jen asked. “I’d like to hear a physicist’s take on it.”
I cringed when she said “physicist”. It felt like when someone finds out you’ve taken a few music lessons, and seats you at the house piano, expecting you to play a sonata for them. On the spur of the moment, I was supposed to integrate a 4-year salad bar of college courses into a single koan, and I just wasn’t sure I was up to it. Even if I was the only one in the room who could tell a differential equation from a differential gear, I didn’t want to be That Guy, performing for a crowd that mistook a few classroom sessions for mastery. Nobody likes an ad-hoc expert on a soapbox. I felt myself beginning to blush.
So I figured it made a lot of sense to emphasize what I didn’t know at least as much as what I did. “Well,” I said, “there was a paragraph about it in last month’s Scientific American – not an article, just a news brief. Said it’s rich in iridium, which is a bit unusual, but not unheard of. Its path is way out of the ecliptic, which isn’t that surprising either, since it’s not from around here…”
“And by the ecliptic, you mean…” Keith said, ellipsis and all, like an examiner prompting a student during an oral exam. I was pretty sure he knew what I’d meant, but was reminding me to speak to the rest of the room as well.
“It’s the imaginary tabletop the earth’s orbit sits on,” I said. “Most of the stuff in the solar system orbits more or less around the sun’s midsection, including us. But this thing’s on a path that’ll take it over the sun’s north pole.”
Keith nodded, smiling. “What else?” He was no longer the examiner, but the student, requesting information from someone he trusted; and I found that trust both flattering and daunting.
“Like I said, I haven’t read a lot about it,” I answered. I was leaning forward now with my elbows on my knees, a posture that felt less vulnerable than sitting back with one ankle resting atop my knee. “Like any comet, it’s picking up speed as it falls toward the sun, and it’ll swing partway around it. I expect it’s going too fast to be captured, so it’ll just keep on going, back out into deep space. I suppose we’re saving the theory-building for later, and just collecting data while it’s still in range.” I knew that unless raised on it, dry science is never as tasty as the juicy tabloid variety, but you’ve gotta eat your vegetables.
I glanced around to gauge the reaction, hers in particular; she was looking down at her wine glass, idly swirling its contents, with a distant, mysterious half-smile I hoped indicated some kind of approval. Keith and Jen appeared satisfied without being unduly impressed. Paul, as I expected, appeared to be neither. I wasn’t as concerned about Graham, who was just nodding slightly, lips compressed into an expression I read as “Yeah, what you said.”
“Well, that’s all well and good,” Paul said at last. “But what about the tail?”
I frowned. What had I missed? “Its tail?” I asked. “What about it?”
He was all too eager to fill me in on what the popular press had been saying about it. Apparently they were all agog that it wasn’t trailing along directly behind it, like smoke from the stack of a steam train, but off at an angle, interpreted by some as anomalous and “a possible indication” of intelligent control – specifically, as rocket exhaust generated by attempts to alter its course, or some such poppycock. I tried explaining that cometary tails rarely point directly behind the body itself because they’re wispy enough to be blown off-course by the incessant solar wind; that a civilization advanced enough to travel between the stars would probably possess technology a little more sophisticated than the brute-force rocketry we’ve had for thousands of years; and the rationale for disguising their vessel as a chunk of rock would require baroque explanations without a shred of supporting evidence. But it brought us at best to a stalemate.
The only counterargument of any weight had actually come from Deb, who was less invested in scoring a touchdown than Paul. She seemed uncertain of her footing, but in response to my description of the dynamics governing the tail’s direction, asked, “Shouldn’t comets feel the force of the solar wind too?”
I had to give her credit for that. “They do,” I said. “But they have too much momentum to be affected much by it. They’re just too heavy, and moving too fast. I think the effect is measurable, but it’s very, very small.”
She looked down at Paul and gently punched his shoulder in solidarity, and he gave her a reassuring squeeze. Although beginning to realize he was outgunned, he didn’t concede, but just grumbled well-maybe, or if-you-say-so, and since this was a party and not a gladiatorial ring, I just let it go.
At one point during my argument, I’d needed to free my hands for gesticulating a point, and had cast about for a place to set my drink. Kim had picked up on it, and offered to hold it for me. I thought I’d sensed something when she did, something in her voice, something behind her eyes – but between the heat of battle and my own diffidence, I’d just filed it away as another probable if-only. Now that the debate seemed stalled, I turned to relieve her of it. My fingers happened to brush the back of her hand as they closed around the bottle; and she ever so lightly and briefly caressed my hand in return.
It was so soft, fleeting, and quiet that I wasn’t sure it was intentional; but something in her face seemed to be saying that it was. It felt like a gently welcoming breeze out of nowhere that ruffles your hair and makes you glad to be there. Her expression wasn’t openly inviting, but shyly hopeful somehow – eyes peering up from a slightly downturned face, the hint of a smile as she returned her hand to her lap, and raised her glass to her lips with the other. It was over so quickly I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t conjuring an entire mythology on a trivial, accidental encounter, like Paul was doing with that damned comet. We both saw something we wanted to believe, so believe in it we did. I couldn’t justify the rush I felt, but I felt it all the same, and it felt too good to explain away as misinterpretation, or wishful thinking, or the romantic inexperience of someone who ought to know better. I just wanted to connect with her, and to believe that she wanted the same from me.
Graham seemed to sense the moment as well – through a whiff of pheromones, a change in the room’s overall electric charge or center of gravity– whatever. Or maybe it’s just that systems programmers are so attuned to how their charges should be working, that they’re preternaturally sensitive to when they aren’t.
“Maybe we can see it,” he suggested. I looked up. He wasn’t looking directly at me, but the direction of his pan around the room suggested he might have been. “I’ve been stepping out at night to look at it. You can see it from the porch for a few hours after sunset.”
“I’m surprised you can see it from there,” I said. “I thought there’d be too much artificial light.”
“The lights are out front,” he said. “The porch is in the back.” He gave his patented Graham-grin. “That’s a long barrier for the light to tunnel through,” he said.
I didn’t bother acknowledging the allusion – I was in deep enough without getting into quantum mechanics I barely understood myself – so I just took him up on the suggestion. “I’m game,” I said. “Truth is, I haven’t seen it yet,” I added a bit ruefully. “I could provide you with a certified list of reasons, if so required.”
“Well skip the notarization for now,” he said. “Let’s go see if we can find that thing,” and rose to his feet.
I glanced around the room, where the consensus seemed to be that this might be a fun thing to do, so we all stood as well. I extended my hand out to Kim, hoping she’d take it; but she handed me her glass instead – which made a lot more sense – and I held it for her while she pushed to her feet. Then we all followed Graham out into the kitchen, where we left our drinks on the counter, and he held the back door open for us. After we’d filed out onto the narrow second-floor deck, he switched off the kitchen light behind him, leaving only the dim glow from the living room beyond to shine through the window. We were all jammed pretty close together, but I was beside Kim, and welcomed her proximity.
“Anybody got the time?” Graham asked.
Keith glanced at his wristwatch, then held it close to his face. “About 8:30,” he said.
Graham turned and pointed skyward, to a point just above the canopy of the wooded buffer strip beyond. “So it should be just visible over there somewhere.”
I followed his finger, then looked up towards the zenith. The Dipper hadn’t yet risen enough to clear the treetops, and for all I knew it might never climb high enough here to do so; but it had darkened just enough to make out the “M” of Cassiopeia overhead, which gave me a reference point. I thought I’d remembered that the comet was passing through Cepheus to the right; and sure enough, I could just make out a patch of haze between it and Draco.
“Well, hello there, Traveler,” I murmured aloud.
Kim followed my gaze. “Do you see it?” she asked.
“I think so,” I said. “Right over… there.” I bent down to level my face with hers, putting a hand on her shoulder to steady myself, and pointed towards the spot. She seemed not to object, and peered upwards towards where I pointed. “That little fuzzy spot?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, straightening and dropping my hand back down to my side. “Graham? Is that it?”
“Sure is,” he replied. “Far’s I know, anyway. If it isn’t, I’ve wasted a lot of sage and incense this past week.”
“No cats, I hope,” I said.
“Not yet. My landlady’s been talking about raising the rent, though, so I’ve been thinking about sacrificing hers to the Aliens.”
Paul seemed less amused by this than Keith and Jen were, which I suspect had been Graham’s intention all along. “Very funny, you guys,” he said. “I’m just telling you what I heard, is all. Science can’t explain everything, you know.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t pretend to. All of its claims are provisional.”
“And,” Keith added, “they don’t come from shamanism or popular vote. They come from unglamorous plodding, mistakes, backtracking, and the occasional flash of insight.”
Even though he couldn’t see me in the darkness, I nodded quietly in assent, while Paul just gave a snort probably meant to be a derisive laugh. “Well, I’m convinced,” he said. “Whaddya think, Deb? Seen enough?”
She shivered and clutched herself with her bare arms. “Quite enough,” she said. “I’m heading back in.”
“Didn’t realize it’d gotten so chilly,” Graham said. “This time of year, it comes on quick after sunset. What say we all head back in? “
“Sounds good to me,” Jen said. “I left my sweater inside.” She turned to Kim. “You coming?”
Kim briefly leaned against me, then withdrew. “Pretty soon,” she said. Some kind of unspoken understanding seemed to pass between them for a few instants before Jen turned without a word and followed Paul and Deb through the door into the kitchen. Keith, apparently unaware of any subliminal activity taking place, trooped along behind her. That left Graham standing by the open door. “Should I leave the light off?” he asked softly.
Definitely, I thought, but didn’t quite dare to say so aloud. “Please,” Kim answered. “The sky’s so beautiful without it.” She leaned against me again, and this time didn’t pretend it was an incidental consequence of crowded conditions. “We won’t be too long.”
“Want us to switch it back on when… when we come in?” I asked.
“If you would,” he said. “I have a houseful of thirsty bears who might do God-knows-what to an unlit kitchen in their search for alcohol.”
“We’ll do our part to avert such a happenstance.”
“I’m sure you will,” he said. He stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
The silence wrapped around us like a down quilt on a cold night. “Look at that sky,” she whispered. She was still leaning against me, and it seemed only natural to put my arm around her in return. I followed her gaze upwards.
“So much out there to see,” I murmured. “So much we don’t understand – so much to learn…”
Her own arm had now found its way around my back. “Is that where you’re headed?” she asked.
“I thought so,” I answered. “Ever since I found a big picture book in the library with maps of the night sky for every season. By the time I was 15, I knew them by heart, and had seen most of them myself.” She was no longer just a silhouette; in the feeble ambient glow leaking through the kitchen window, I could see a faint gleam from her eyes. It occurred to me then that I didn’t even know what color they were. “What about you?” I asked.
She shifted position, transferring her weight from one leg to the other, holding onto me for support as she did. “Not sure, really,” she answered. “The packing lines were just a stopgap to pay the bills until…” and here she stopped, not so much as one catching her breath or a thought, but as an editor striking a line of text as “dele”.
“Until what?” I pressed. “I only signed on here for the same reason – to keep the lights on while I looked for something else. Second shift worked out because it kept my days free for job hunting. For the first 7 or 8 months, anyway.”
“And now?” she asked.
I gave her a little nudge. “You first,” I teased. “You told me the packing line was just a temporary gig, which I could have guessed. You dodged the question. Where are you headed? Software systems?”
She hesitated, looked down, then gave that little laugh we do preemptively, so that whoever we’re confessing to won’t need to. “Health care,” she said. “Nursing, maybe. I was in pre-med, but biochemistry knocked me off my feet.” When I didn’t react negatively, she continued. “I still like the idea of working with people, healing somehow, as a therapist – even just an aide.”
“I think you’d be good at it,” I told her, with feeling. “You seem to lean in towards people. I’m more apt to run away from them.”
“You’re not running now,” she said, and I could see the gleam in her eyes narrow as she smiled.
I laughed, “Couldn’t even if I wanted to.”
“What DO you want to do?”
It was my turn to hesitate. “This minute? Better if I take the fifth. Longer term?” I paused, sighed. “I’m not so sure anymore. When you’re a boy, you want to be an astronaut, a secret agent, a martial artist. I wanted to be a Scientist. Now I know they’re not like they are in the movies. I still want to explore, learn, discover – but I’m not sure if I can afford it. Maybe it costs too much.”
She tipped her head to one side. “You mean tuition? Graduate school?”
“I mean Real Life,” I answered. “The day-to-day. When I was driving that damned lift, I was ashamed to admit it to former classmates.” I looked up at the stars staring impassively down at us. “Now I brag about it.”
“Not about that stack you knocked over, I hope.” She gave me a little squeeze to assure me she wasn’t trying to change the conversation as much as leaven it.
So I just laughed at the memory. “God, that was awful,” I agreed. “Once that top pallet slipped off the forks, it was all over.”
“All over the floor,” she agreed, and the shared memory warmed us both despite the evening chill. The quiet that followed wasn’t just congenial – it was intimate.
And then she softly reminded me, “We told Graham we wouldn’t be too long.”
I didn’t want the moment to end. “Did we?” I said. “I don’t remember. And if I did, I’d deny it.”
She rested her head against my arm. “You’re not talking to Graham now,” she reminded me. “We really should be getting back inside.”
“I suppose,” I sighed. “God knows what Paul and Deb might be making of our absence. They’ve probably got us halfway to Andromeda by now on that comet.”
“With all kinds of needles and tubes sticking out of us,” she giggled. “And being programmed to love electro-dance pop.”
I laughed. “You’re amazing, you know that?” I said. “I only wish…” and here I stopped. This was as far as words should go.
She didn’t ask, but just looked up into my eyes with an expression both questioning and answering, full of desire and uncertainty. Those eyes held me willingly captive for a few infinite seconds; then I slowly lowered my face to hers, leaned in, parting my lips and closing my eyes…
“No,” she whispered, and placed a forefinger on my lips. I pulled back, looking at her a little baffled. “It’s… too soon.”
Sadly, I knew what she meant.
I straightened, took her hand in one of mine, and kissed her fingers instead. “Yeah,” I said. “I just…”
“I know,” she said. “Me too.”
“When?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Someday… after we’ve…” She stopped and looked past me up into the night sky.
Now I put my finger across her lips. “It’s getting cold,” I said. “Let’s go back inside.”
So we did. I forgot to turn the kitchen light back on as I’d promised Graham.
The party pretty much wound down from there. Jen had to pick up her husband at the bus terminal, and Keith asked if he could bum a ride with her. Paul and Deb had arrived together – no surprise there – and like me, Kim had driven herself – so offering her a lift was off the table. Probably for the better - I wanted some alone time to digest what had (and hadn’t) happened. I made the solo drive home and wrapped up the evening watching an old haunted house movie from the 1940s, trying not to think about what had transpired.
A week later she was gone. She’d left without warning, as so many before her had done. I was told by one of the girls on the floor that she’d become an orderly at a nearby alcohol-rehab clinic, pursuing her desire to break into nursing. She’d left a generic farewell message, but I never saw her again.
Eventually, following my own compass, I followed suit, signing on as a lab technician for an engineering shop about an hour away. It didn’t take me any closer to astronomy – further, actually, with a whole new suite of mistakes to be made. But no matter. There was also a whole new suite of skills to be learned – in metrology, in materials science, in fluids and optics, and I’d get to show off my scientific programming chops again. Not all the mysteries of the universe lay beyond the Milky Way, or deep within the structure of matter – and those that weren’t could be every bit as impenetrable.