The wind kept becoming more audible as we neared the side of the mountain that had loomed ahead of us the whole way. Now his voice struggled to rise above it. I watched his hair blowing chaotically while he talked. “I always wanted to make it out of New York,” he said. “Right from day one. I mean, I hated it — the goddamned Upper East Side.” He snorted. “I didn’t even realize it, though, for a long time. I mean, we all had it pretty good. Our parents all did a pretty good job of making us not see that there was a ‘rest of the world,’ if you know what I mean.”
“I think I do know,” I said. “But how’d you realize it? College? Ski trip? Class-five rapids? Smack your head and see the light?”
I watched him get this far-off look, but it was like he was straining to see something really close, peering through some bifocal in midair. “You know, of all things, I think it really had to do with the Planetarium Club,” he said. “Did you know about that?”
“I heard about it,” I said.
“Did you say Planetarium Club?” inquired Lena. She was trying to listen and pay attention to the kids, who were immediately behind us but fighting to keep up the pace, Emmett in particular. It was uphill after the initial descent. I figured I’d be carrying him at least part of the way back.
He laughed. “It wasn’t really a club, exactly. Let’s face it, not school-sanctioned. Not something I was exactly putting on my ‘college transcript.’” As he said this the trail narrowed a bit, and I naturally fell back a couple of steps, so I was with the kids.
“Tompkins Tech,” I could hear him explaining to her, “had a planetarium. In the school. I mean, that’s the kind of school that it was. Some schools, I didn’t know any at the time, but I’m sure they barely had books and chalk, but we had a planetarium. You guys ever been to a planetarium?” he turned back to ask Kelly and Emmett.
Kelly shook the negative decisively.
“Yes, you have,” said Lena. “Remember the time we went to see the star dome in Manhattan? And, pumpkin, you went with your school.”
“Sure, the old Hayden Planetarium,” Scully recalled fondly. I was really glad that Scully didn’t bring up going there to smoke weed and watch Laser Zeppelin, not with my kids right there. I gave him credit for that omission.
He went on: “Only problem was, from my perspective and that of several of my peers, the only way you could see the planetarium in action was once a year when they opened it up and showed it off on Open School Night, and then it was really mainly for the parents, and students were asked to ‘make as much room as possible’ for parents. So my dad and mom got to see the planetarium once a year more than I did. Then the other way you could get a gig in the planetarium was to take astronomy with Millert. Problem A: Millert’s class was killer, a sure-fire GPA sinker. Problem B: Millert himself was completely insane. I mean, the guy used to spend half the class talking about how the Earth was eventually going to get swallowed by the sun, and how that made everything meaningless.” He looked back at me. “Only Fettis could debate him, Fettis with his Portable Nietzsche.” Now this was sounding more and more like the Scully I knew and sort of disdained — griping, judgmental, grade-conscious. I didn’t know if I was conjuring him back or if he’d been lurking there all along, just waiting for an excuse to come storming out.
“So, the Planetarium Club — that was what we called ourselves, a bunch of us forward-minded individuals. We made a copy of a key to the planetarium — some kid whose dad was a locksmith. God, I couldn’t even tell you his name just now.”
“And you broke into the planetarium?”
“Broke into the planetarium,” he said, throwing in “not a good idea” to the kids, as if he felt obligated. “About nine or ten of us. And not only did we break in there,” he said; “we had ourselves a real sleepout there. Somebody — gosh, I think it was Carl — who’s our valedictorian?” He turned around as he said it.
“That would be Brian,” I said.
“The other one, then, the salutatorian. He knew how to run the equipment there like a dream. He’d been Millert’s sidekick for years. Heck, he must’ve gone on to work for NASA. Anyhow, basically the two of us got the thing fired up, and. . it was amazing. I can remember the first time. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before in my life. I’d been to the country only a handful of times. I mean, in my life I figure I’d seen at most a handful of stars, and suddenly just splattered across the sky were thousands of them, most beautiful sight. I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t know what a star was, but honestly, I thought of them as being the little pointy things, like stickers you get for good behavior. I don’t think I was the only one, either. I mean, Sammy Rusa — that guy who worked in his parents’ ‘restaurant,’ which you know was a front, right? You think that guy had ever seen stars? Except when he got into a fight.” He gave that barrelly laugh again.
“So you stargazed inside the school,” Lena said.
“That’s precisely what we did. And not just once, a few times. We had the complete getup. Learned to spot the constellations. Good for romantic purposes, heh. Told stories. Just like we were a thousand miles from the city, in the middle of nowhere. I remember I never wanted to leave that place. Knew I’d been born in the wrong place or the wrong time or somethin’, knew it truer than I’d ever known anything.”
“So what happened to it?” asked Lena.
“Guess. Someone took it too far. We were going to do it every month, was the idea. We’d even imitate the position of the stars across the sky; remember, this was a science and math school. But then one kid—not a rocket scientist, this one — decides he’s gonna make s’mores, and tries to light an actual fire in a wastebasket. Freakin’ idiot, pardon my language,” said Scully. “Set off the smoke alarm. Duh. We had to clear out of there, which we managed to do before the fire department shows up. The next week, there’s a new electronic alarm system on the planetarium door, like nothing you’ve ever seen. It’s like Area 51, ‘Closed to the General Public.’ I doubt if even the parents got to see it again after that.”
“How sad,” said Lena. “I mean, there’s something so innocent about what you were doing. It’s not like you were. . up to no good.”
“Well, it wasn’t entirely pure,” said Scully. “We did everything — I mean everything—that you do while stargazing.” Suddenly he drew up.
“This is it,” he said. By now I’d almost forgotten why we were out here. The trail ahead hugged the side of the cliff for about a hundred feet. You could see the road below like an ancient riverbed. The bare exposure meant that the sides did not look so steep, because you could see if you slipped the several places where you might cling to a flatter patch if you slipped. But I thought that might have been illusion. Scully strutted out onto the ravine. He looked remarkably like one of those goats. I examined his cable. It looked like a bike lock that had been uncoiled and stretched out and every few feet secured to the rock. He gave it a yank. “It’ll hold. Most of the time, you don’t even need it, but it’s there for you just in case.” Emmett shied back, and Kelly looked like she wanted to approach it, like the cage of a dangerous animal. She put her hand out from afar. Lena had her hand on Kelly’s shoulder. She reached for the cable and he pulled it toward her, but it did not quite meet, and she leapt back. You could hear the wind moving things, shifting rocks. “I think this is as far as we go, Scully,” I said.