Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

“You can do that? I mean, that’s a real thing?”

“Yes, of course it is a real thing,” said the psychic. “You don’t believe in it?”

“I believe, I believe,” said George. “It’s just my canyon-wall mother, she thinks this kind of thing is all ridiculous.”

“But you don’t think it’s ridiculous?” she asked him.

“I believe in everything,” said George. “I can’t deny much. I probably have crystals in my pocket right now. I talk to cloud formations. I’m like, your ultimate demographic. Trust me.”

The psychic rose, and in a swish of silk she settled into a chair across the low table from George. She took a deep breath and smiled at him. Her face was sad, ruined by wrinkles. The silk wrap distorted the sides of it, pulled the skin back from the bones. Her eyes watered. She put her hands on both sides of the crystal ball and began to turn it, rotate it, twist it back and forth. Finally she left it alone and stared into it, only her fingertips touching it, her nose inches away from it.

“I see her,” she said at last.

“You see who?” George practically leaped across the table.

“I see your love. She is here in the ball. I see her.”

“What does she look like?” George asked. “Does she see you? Can she see me?”

“She is beautiful. George, I cannot help but love her, too.”

“I need details,” said George. “How can I find her?”

“She has brown hair,” said the psychic. “Beautiful brown hair.”

“OK,” said George, “That’s helpful. That’s actually very helpful. Thank you. I need more though.”

“You will find her in Toledo,” said the psychic.

“Good, also good,” said George. “I am in Toledo right now. So that is very convenient. Do you—”

“She is a dreamer,” said the psychic. “A dreamer of dreams.”

“Great,” said George. “I love that, because a dreamer of dreams is so much better than a dreamer of, like, roadside fruit markets. No quality girl would ever dream a—”

“She is an astronomer,” said the psychic.

“NO,” said George, suddenly finely attuned. He leaned in close, as if he could look into the crystal ball, too. “An astronomer, you say? But that’s—did you know that I’m an astronomer?”

“That is all,” said the psychic. “That’s all I can tell you. I can see her plain as day. And she will find you. She will. I believe. Do you?”

George nodded emphatically. “Well, let’s just say I will find HER. I’ll find HER. Do you have any idea when I’ll find her?”

“I don’t see,” said the psychic, “But I can tell you what I feel. You will be young together, you will be loved, and it will be more beautiful than either of you could have imagined. Because this is the least that she deserves. Do you see this? The least that she deserves.”

George stumbled to his feet. He felt moved, on the spot, with an urgency he could only partially attribute to the liquor he had ingested, to find the girl and to experience the beauty that he himself and now the psychic also knew to be waiting for him.

“What do I owe you?” said George, suddenly anxious to leave. “Do I cross your palm with silver? I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“You don’t owe me anything, George,” said the psychic. “I have seen that we will meet again. Your debt will not be to me, but to the stars. They don’t need your money. They want your spirit. Are you ready to give it?”

This was exactly the kind of hokey bullshit that made his mother snort with contempt.

“Go easy on your mother,” said the psychic sharply. “She’s often wrong, but she loves you.”

George had made it safely back to campus, back to his lab, where he slept off his liquor on a fine leather sofa and woke refreshed.

Ever since that night, in his mind the girls of Toledo were arranged in the shape of a target. On the outside ring, girls in Toledo. Next ring, girls in Toledo who had brown hair. Inside that, the rings got more and more specific until at the very center there was a spot so dear that his dart would not stick in the board, but would fly straight through and never stop flying, until the end of the universe. George had thrown a lot of darts since that morning he awoke in his lab, ready to hunt, but had never struck the middle.

After class on the second day of the semester, George packed up his lecture notes and swung out through the doors of the lecture hall without glancing up at the ceiling at all. No sex goddess. A boring lecture on the Egyptians, another headache, and that’s all.

A friendly grad student approached him on the sidewalk outside the building, but he swung his light backpack onto his other shoulder, grinned, waved, and kept moving.

“Hi, George! What are you doing? Teaching?”

“Hey, Lucy! Great! See you later!”

Lucy was blond.

George believed, since that visit to the psychic, that true love was waiting for him here in Toledo. One by one he had narrowed down the field, and all the brown-haired astronomers who could reasonably be described as dreamers were tested and tried. His hopes were, like a photon traveling out of a gravitational sphere, growing dimmer.

He was still searching for love. But he had not yet found it.

Then, last spring, just when it seemed he had worked his way through all the likely candidates and there were no more girls within range, he met Kate Oakenshield. She was a brunette, obviously, an astronomer of the highest order, and a dreamer, one would hope. He had been after her all summer, and he was still after her. He intended now to go up to her office and make himself very charming. Are you the one? he would ask. Kate Oakenshield might respond, audibly, I am .

But maybe not. Because Kate Oakenshield had been raised a mute. She had only been allowed to hear musical sounds until she was five years old, at which point the state intervened and took her away from her insane father. As a result of her limited exposure to language, she had become a math genius, just as her father had planned. She did not respond to George’s advances like other girls did, but, if anything, this made him more convinced that she must be the one, the center of the target.

Part of Kate Oakenshield’s difficult childhood was that she had been locked up on her father’s rural estate. George had sometimes fantasized about bursting into a tower room, lit with the sun’s afternoon rays, where a little girl was chirping out the window to a sparrow or some other more colorful bird that chirps. He would ask her name, and she would turn, bemused but friendly, suddenly twenty years old, and warble a tune in her throat. He would scoop her up and gallop down the stairs, past the father who would be in the process of being arrested by the police and out into what would have become suddenly night. Then he would commence teaching her to talk.

She had, of course, been rescued and taught to talk already. Kate Oakenshield, though raised a mute, could talk alright given the circumstances. She could also do math like nobody’s business. She must have had an amazing brain, all untainted by nursery rhymes and reprimands and television. The mind that fugues built, said Psychology Today. Science loved her, and George thought he might, too.

So far, he had managed to make her officially his girlfriend, at least as far as he could tell. At least he had told her she was, several times, and she had seemed to hear him. Next, he would get her in bed. This wasn’t the way things usually went for George, but Kate Oakenshield had been raised mute, and things were different when she was involved. George took it as a promising sign.

Another colleague approached him as he took the stone stairs up to Herschel Hall. The guy was coming down the stairs and George almost knocked into him.