Sixteen
“What if the comet is actually coming?” Keith said.
Peter did not stop looking through the telescope. One hand reached up to the fine-focus control, turning it carefully and then hovering there, frozen. “This is real question you ask?” Peter said.
“Well, yeah,” Keith said.
“I do not know how to answer this question.”
Keith remained sitting for a moment and then rose and stood near the telescope. “Let’s have a look,” he said.
Peter stepped back from the eyepiece and Keith leaned in and pressed his eye to it and reached up to the focus control and turned it carefully and then turned it back again. A blurry disc. “So what’s this?” he said.
“M81,” Peter said. “A galaxy. Simple to find. Simple to see.”
“M81,” he repeated. He waited for Peter to resume speaking and when he did not he said, “Aren’t you going to tell me some story about it?”
“Why did you ask me about comet before?” Peter said.
“I don’t know. I guess I was thinking about it.”
“Yes,” Peter said, “it is something to be thinking about.”
The image in the circle of the telescope’s lens was an insubstantial blur of color. “I don’t know. What else is there to talk about?” he said.
“Yes, this is something,” Peter said. “You know more about these things than I do, I think.”
“I don’t know anything about it at all.”
“I mean about what might happen. They would send something into space to stop it maybe. Or missile. The technology parts of this you know about more than I do.”
“Yeah, my knowledge of that stuff doesn’t amount to much.”
“You know though how this works. NASA and government. Space agencies and how they work together.”
“Lots of meetings,” he said. “That’s how they work.”
“Yes, I know something of meetings,” Peter said. “This was so even at Golosiiv. Meetings and then meetings to make sure we have enough meetings. Never ending.”
“That’s how the world works.”
“We had Dr. Vanekov at least. He was one to move things forward. Meeting too long. This is what I decide. Next item.”
“That’s good.”
“Yes, good for meetings. Less good for those who are not agreeing with decisions. The scientists are angry sometimes. No, not angry. Wrong word.”
“Frustrated?”
“Yes, that,” Peter said. “Frustrated. Good word for this.”
Peter’s first words to him that evening had been to ask him for help moving the sofa back to its place in the center of the field and the simplicity of the request had done much to dispel his misery. They went immediately to the behemoth and hefted it across the bare dirt to the center between the two tractors and then dropped it roughly to the earth again, both of them collapsing into it simultaneously. Even the short walk had left them both winded and they sat there for a time in silence, having shared no words apart from the initial brief exchange. The two tractors flanked them on the north and south sides as if walls for some strange, open-air observatory, the big machines dim and blocky in the reflected light from the streetlamps at the end of the cul-de-sac. The simple act served to clear away the sickening feeling that had settled upon him and he realized that perhaps for the first time in his life he had grown to value human companionship and that the overarching feeling that had come to dominate his endless days and nights in the cul-de-sac was loneliness.
They had set the sofa facing west, directly away from the end of the cul-de-sac so that their backs were to the neighborhood. He wondered why they had not situated the sofa in that direction from the beginning as it created a sense of solitude simply by its geography: the flat open space before the more distant darkness of the oak trees, the cinderblock wall of the next neighborhood all cut into silhouette from glowing backyards and, above them, occasional squares of lit windows that hung suspended in the warm summer night. The stars spun over everything as they did forever and always, although the view above them was no longer familiar. Cassiopeia, the constellation that remained the most recognizable to him, was visible now only if he craned his neck to the right. Instead there was a large and mostly unintelligible sky before him.
He had not yet asked Peter what constellations and astronomical features lay in his new view but realized with some surprise that he was actually looking forward to doing so. He wondered if this was a mark of how far his mind had slipped, that he sat on a sofa in the dark and sought distraction in the names of the distant stars and did so with little care for the work he might have been doing. There was a time when he at least would have thought of angles and distances and energy and light. At least that. But now he felt content simply looking up into the sky and listening to Peter’s discourse. The stars patterned in a way he would never truly understand but which was magnificent in its beauty. The distinction might have troubled him, but at the moment he did not feel troubled at all.
They talked at some length about Golosiiv again, about the kind of work Peter had done, about the landscape outside Kiev: horse-drawn carts and fields tilled by hand, lines of men and women bent over their work, each swinging the blade of a hoe and walking slowly backward in an ancient rhythm.
“Sounds brutal,” Keith said.
“But so beautiful,” Peter said. “Not like this.” He pointed over Keith’s shoulder at the cul-de-sac and then turned his hand and waved it generally around, encompassing everything around them. “So beautiful I cannot even describe. You would need being poet.”
Keith said nothing. He opened another beer and then settled back into the sofa. Peter took a moment to relight his pipe and puffed at it, the coal glowing red as he sucked at the smoke and then fading as Peter held and then exhaled.
“Where do you buy that?” Keith said.
“The smoke? From my nephew. He is … how do I say … kind of bad.”
“Kind of bad?”
“Mmm … I’m not clear. He does things that would be bad to talk about. Maybe not to talk about them, I think. That was not good English sentence. I apologize.”
“OK,” he said, chuckling. “Probably not a question I should ask anyway.”
“No, this is fine to ask question. I am not clear.” He paused a moment. “Some of my family, the young boys from my wife’s brother, they are like Mafia. They buy and sell sometimes things that are not for buying and selling. It was this way in Ukraine so this is what they know to do here.”
“At least they found a way to make money.”
“Yes, maybe true. I worry police will take them away.”