We began silently making our way back. Sure enough, I was lofting Emmett onto my back before long. In my mind, I started cross-examining Scully on how the drilling had been done to stabilize the cable, how the core samples might have been taken. I figured he probably didn’t know the first thing about how it had been done. I pictured him aiming a drill bit at that rock and gouging it again and again. I pictured him flustered by my questions, trying to dance his way through them, or sidestepping and changing the subject.
For a while, there was nothing but the sound of our sneakers crunching gravel and thumping on dirt. Then Scully said, “So how come you never joined the Planetarium Club? I mean, you must have known about it. Carl, John Paul. You were friends with those guys.”
I squinted. “I think I remember hearing something about it. But I don’t think I ever got the word, the signal.”
“You had,” said Scully, “maybe you’d have cleared out of the city, like me. Maybe you’d have gotten a yearning for remote places.”
“It’s certainly possible,” I said. “Then again, it’s possible that I wouldn’t have. You never know how something is going to affect a person.”
“That much is true,” said Scully, shaking his head, looking off again, like he was grateful anew for something. Suddenly, Scully elbowed me and said loudly, “Now wait a minute, you were there, weren’t you?”
“Nope,” I said. “If only I had been.”
Lena said, “But then maybe you wouldn’t have stayed in New York. And you wouldn’t have met me. And you wouldn’t have these lovelies.” She patted the backs of their shoulders, and the pair of them looked up as if right then I was deciding whether or not to keep them.
We kept going up the trail, and even though I didn’t want to stop, I had to put Emmett down. “You’re getting too big for me to do that for very long,” I said.
As if no time had elapsed, Scully said again, “You were there.”
I denied it again.
He paused, suddenly, hands on his hips. “Well, maybe you don’t remember.”
“That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you ‘don’t remember,’” I said.
Lena said, “I would hope not.”
We continued up the trail, and I could hear Kelly, bored by now with plain old walking, break into her little rhyme. It went, “Dah, dah, DAH!” sounds that kept almost forming themselves into words, but falling short. It sounded like a story that she was telling only herself. For a couple of minutes, it was just that and the rustle of our feet and Emmett’s sneaker-flickers. We all fell into a rhythm. So it took me by surprise when Scully stopped short and pinched the flap of my shirt pocket, like he was grabbing for the compass, and said, “Come here for a second, I want to show you something. Just you.” He called out to my wife and kids, “It’s just an old Tompk tradition. I’ll have him back in a jiffy.” I hadn’t heard that mpk sound in a long time.
Lena, her eyebrows raised, glanced tellingly at her watch. Kelly skipped in a circle, but Emmett stood forlornly. I shrugged to them. I said, “Be right back,” then added, “Holler if you spot more mountain goats.”
Scully led me just off the trail, through patches of scrub and taut branches. He was just a step in front of me. The crunch of scrabble and dry grass below and the hiss of the wind created two discrete strata of sound. He bent back a branch, a real gentleman, so I could pass. It snapped back behind me. As it did, I found myself on a narrow rock that jutted out sheer into space. In a Western, our horses would’ve had to rear back, whinnying. I aligned myself with the rock’s width, what there was of it, checked my footing. The drop was precipitous. The Skull came out onto the rock, so he was facing me. Then, with his hands turned sideways, he touched my shoulders, so that the lower edges were resting right on my scapula.
I panted. “What are you doing there, Scully, hanging up a portrait?” I could hear the pounding of breath, as though one of us had just hoisted the other one up, right over the lip of the ravine.
He stared at me. “Admit it now. You were there.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. I meant it.
He shook his head. “Why won’t you just admit you were there?” He was all throat now.
“Let’s just say I was, Scully. Then what?” I heard my heartbeat. “But of course I wasn’t.”
His mouth was tight. I could see the imprint of his tongue on the inside of his cheek. “I can’t figure it out,” he said. “It’s not as if it’s something to be ashamed of.”
“On the contrary,” I said. “I’m ashamed to have missed out.”
His hands stayed wedged there. I couldn’t tell whether they’d begun pushing down or whether my shoulders were rising, but either way I could feel little balls of bone against his thick fingers on either side. It reminded me of a building I’d worked on. Prestressed cables to offset unknown load combinations. And I zeroed in on that building. I became it, poised between evenly spaced twinges of pain. Under his flannel, the road looked so far away and weirdly proportioned that it could have as easily been up or down. Looking back up at him, I caught menace moving quickly like a sheath of cloud. I imagined him explaining to my wife in a calm voice that I’d fallen, somehow.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” he said with disgust. I sensed that he wanted me to defend myself against this charge, but I didn’t say anything. He went on, “Okay. How about I don’t admit to something. How about I don’t admit I can see that you’re the same fucking competitive bastard you were in high school?” I tried not to blink. “No? Okay, or that in less than a half hour I can see that your wife is only somewhat happy. No? Okay, let’s say neither of us admits that if your wife goes on one of my tours, it’s a good bet she never looks back?”
I held his stare.
At once he released me. The same hand that had applied a viselike grip to my shoulder now wrapped around and squeezed the other one, almost affectionately, you might have said. I half-expected to see Lena poke through the underbrush and point a camera at us, call out, “Smile!”—immortalizing us, buddies against the backdrop of sky. I looked at his face to see if he had registered the tremor shuddering through me. He’d already moved on, though, chuckling, shaking his head. “You really shoulda been there,” he was saying.
I was still trembling a bit later that night when we’d settled down at last at our campsite, in our family tent. The others were fast asleep. Scully was long gone. I didn’t know if he’d ever get mentioned again. I doubted it, even though we’d eventually gotten a tourist to take a snapshot of us with him in front of the Visitor Center, before we shook hands amicably and parted ways.
The strange thing was, I had been there, in the planetarium. The very first night, along with the other nine people, except that there weren’t nine others, there were ten others, eleven total, and I had been among them. Maybe somehow I’d been quieter, or less obtrusive, so that in his memory Scully had edited me right out of the planetarium, right out of existence. And the ultimate irony was that I was the one who’d been responsible for one of the most memorable moments of that night, a moment that no one who was there should have forgotten. I mean, if you were looking back at what deserved to stick from that night and what deserved to fade into oblivion, my contribution should have certainly gone into the “preserve” pile.
You see, I’d actually taken astronomy with Millert, and we’d actually gone to the planetarium on several occasions, and each time I’d watched carefully and curiously while he set up the equipment before he dimmed the lights, and when my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I’d watched him operate the console as much as I’d concentrated on the starry sky it projected. While everyone else was enthralled by simply seeing the stars, I, who was going to be an engineer, knew I was supposed to be interested in things like how exactly the equipment worked, how it functioned. And when we were lying there in the dark after we slipped in that first night, the sky at first looked okay, but it had to be said that there weren’t a whole lot of stars. Not that most of the people there would have known the difference. But I knew, because I’d watched Millert run the show. I knew how it was supposed to look. So while others were laughing and calling out things like “Hey, that’s my hand!” I’d spent about ten minutes or so adjusting the computer and switching the modes, just like I’d watched Millert do. I was surprised by how hard it was to actually control it, even though I knew it by sight, and I was getting frustrated, especially since no one really knew what they were missing. I almost gave up. But then I toggled a certain switch. Instantly where there’d been maybe a hundred stars, there now were thousands upon thousands. It looked like scarves whipping through a snowstorm, and you could see that the sky wasn’t dark at all, nothing like the dim shroud we had all assumed it to be. I could forgive Scully for forgetting about this, though — it had been just an instant, and while there’d been a collective “Ahhhwwooh!” a few hoots and scattered applause, soon enough everyone had gotten acclimated to this new look and gone back to their business. Meanwhile, I had found a spot on the floor and lain back along with everyone else in the dark.