“No more.”
“Yes, no more.” Peter leaned to the telescope and turned it on its tripod and then looked through the lens and then with his bare eye and then to the lens again, adjusting and readjusting. He looked and moved, looked and moved again. Occasionally he would say something to himself or to the telescope or to the stars themselves: “Oh” or “There you are” or “Beautiful” or “Where are you?”
After a time Peter too had seen enough and he sat back on the sofa and pulled a small black bag from the larger bookbag at his feet and unzipped it and removed his small glass pipe and a Ziploc and filled the bowl of the pipe and then clicked his lighter into flame and applied it to the bowl. The red glow rose and fell in light as he inhaled. Then the long, slow exhale. He leaned back against the sofa.
“This is Cassiopeia,” he said. “This W shape there. See?”
“You just don’t know when to quit,” Keith said.
“Yes, true,” Peter said. “My apologies.”
For a moment, Keith did not respond. Then he said, “OK, fine. Where’s the W?”
Peter’s finger in the darkness. “Just above houses there,” he said, tracing a shape in the air directly in front of them, as if that shape was hovering close enough to touch in the night.
“It’s all stars.”
“Look for this. Like a wide W, stretched out some. You see? Just above houses. Almost on top of them.”
A blur of stars everywhere and then yes he saw it: a jagged W as if scrawled by a child, the bottom points of which were nearly resting on the distant rooftops. “Shit,” he said, nodding. “I see it.” He sipped at his beer.
“Yes, good then,” Peter said. “That is called Cassiopeia.”
“I think I remember that from Boy Scouts.”
“Good. If you know nothing else about sky, you know that at least.”
“Cassiopeia the W,” Keith said. Then he added: “Shit.”
“Yes,” Peter said. “Shit.” A pause. Then: “You know Big Dipper?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
“I’m tired out, Peter.”
“Come now,” Peter said. “Show me. If you know what it looks like, find it. Show to me this.”
He sipped his beer, his eyes casting around the sky, the pinpoints of ever-twinkling stars like a veil. Where? He breathed out with a loud hiss and then rotated his head slowly, tracking from one side of the sky to the other, then again mumbling, “Shit,” and leaning back and there it was: the Big Dipper, tilted up on one end with the Little Dipper pouring into it. “There,” he said.
“Yes, good. Pretty high up right now.”
“I guess so.”
“Yes, because all your life you have seen Big Dipper and you know where to look. Yes?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes,” Peter said. “You do know. You know more than you think.” Keith silent now.
“And then bottom of cup of Dipper points up to handle of Little Dipper. That handle is Polaris.”
“OK.”
“It is star that never moves and it is north.”
“The North Star.”
“Yes. You already know this.”
“Not really.”
“You can see it?”
“Yes.”
“Then you can always find north.”
“I guess that’s good.”
“It is always good to know where you are.”
“Is it?”
“Yes,” Peter said.
He said nothing in response. Is it? Really? Another swallow of beer. He wished suddenly that he had something stronger, that he had a bottle of vodka or whiskey or something he could drink that would obliterate him, send him crawling home through a world spinning without control. But there was nothing like that in his house. Only beer. And he was already beyond driving.
To their left, the cul-de-sac glowed yellow and quiet in the night like a movie set. Walter Jensen’s black sedan was gone. Jennifer’s car likely inside the garage. His own rental car across the street: an increasingly filthy sedan. Perhaps it was finally time to open his garage and start the process of sorting through whatever boxes of personal effects Barb had deposited there. The sofa like a boat on slowly moving waves, a quiet rolling beneath him.
“I had a migraine a few days ago,” he said suddenly.
“You keep having these migraine headaches?”
“Yes.”
“You should come and ask me and I will give you some of this and you will feel better,” Peter said. He tapped at the pipe.
“You’re probably right,” Keith said. “They drug-test, though. I mean, not regularly but they could and that would be the end of that.”
Peter made a sound, something like “Ach!” and waved his hands around in the air in front of him. “Fools, I think,” he said.
“Maybe,” Keith said. “Shit. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“You have angry tongue tonight.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Not at me, I hope.”
“No, not at you.”
Silent for a moment. Then Peter: “Who then? The pretty lady across street maybe?”
“I don’t know.”
“Things not going so well with her?”
“It’s not that,” he said. Peter was silent, perhaps waiting for him to continue, but he could find no words for the simple desperation that had settled into him. After the migraine he had come to feel like he was at the end somehow, that he had come to the end of some equation the answer of which he already knew he would never find for indeed there was no answer possible and yet he had continued to move through it as if there would be a solution, that the numbers would do what they had always done for him: they would provide a way forward. He had known that this idea was a fiction or a fantasy and yet somehow it had remained with him for those weeks since returning to Earth but now even that fiction had departed him. He could not fathom what was left. Perhaps nothing at all.
They said nothing and after a time Peter set the pipe down and stood and began making adjustments to the telescope’s position. Night sounds around them. Occasionally the crunching or shuffling of an animal somewhere amidst the thistle. The crickets in their chirping. The more distant sounds of freeways and parking lots.
“What are you looking for?” Keith said.
“I do not know,” Peter said. “I was looking for Messier objects. But that is work for students. I do not know what to look for now.”
“Can you find that comet yet?”
“Not in this hemisphere.”
“I saw it in the paper again this week.”
“Bah,” Peter said. “Comet is not hitting Earth I think.”
“Too bad,” Keith said.
Peter stopped now, looked back at him. Keith could see only his silhouette. “Do not say this,” Peter said.
“I’m kidding.”
“It is not something to make jokes for.”
“You keep saying it’s not going to hit Earth.”
“How do I know that?”
“I figure you know these things.”
“Why? Because I have cheap telescope? I do not know anything. I work at Target. It’s not something to make jokes for.”
“Christ, OK.”
Peter said nothing, returning to the telescope, adjusting it, shifting the whole tripod slightly and then readjusting the base, leveling it. After a moment, he said, “I am sorry to speak to you like this. I apologize.”
“Don’t apologize. Shit.”
“I respect you too much to talk to you like this.”
Keith shrugged. His eyes were increasingly bleary as he finished his fourth beer in quick succession and opened another, leaning back on the sofa, watching Peter move and manipulate the telescope and then drifting back to the stars again.
Peter’s voice casting over those pinpoints of starlight: “Maybe I would have known something before, if I was still in Kiev at Golosiiv. I could not see this probably, but they would know about this. Not here.”