Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

“Who are you?” asked Irene.

“I’m Sam Beth,” said the girl.

Irene reached out to the wall and flicked on a light. Fluorescent bulbs overhead came to life, and the room was bright.

“Ugh, switch to LED, for the love of god,” said the girl without raising her face from the computer screen.

“What?”

“It’s the switch on the left,” she said. “So move your hand a bit to the left, and there it will be. Or, you can read the label. It’s spelled L-E-D.”

Irene switched the LED lights on and the fluorescent ones off. Then she frowned and wished she hadn’t been so obedient. So automatically compliant.

“Who are you?” asked Irene again.

“I’m Sam Beth,” said the girl again. Irene set her laptop bag on a table and walked toward the girl. She was Korean. Her hair was braided up into a bun on the top of her head. She wore a tracksuit—blue with white stripes running up the arms and legs.

“Yes, but who are you, what is your capacity here, what are you doing in my lab?”

“I’m your RA,” said Sam Beth. “Your graduate student.”

“Oh,” said Irene. “I thought I would be able to interview for an assistant.”

“Not assistant. Research assistant.”

“Still, I should be able to interview—”

“Trust me, there’s no one better,” said Sam Beth. She looked up from the laptop finally, and stared down Irene. “That’s why you got me.”

“Oh, I see,” said Irene. She noticed, seeing Sam Beth full on, that the girl had tattoos or face paint under her eyes, three red dots marking each cheekbone.

Sam Beth rolled her eyes and went back to her laptop.

Irene continued her inspection of the room. The tables were clean and bare, but there were holes drilled in a circle in the floor, holes that appeared to have been recently vacated, as if the room had been recently rearranged and something had been taken out.

“What was here?” Irene asked.

“Oh, the universe,” said Sam Beth.

“What universe?”

“This one,” said Sam Beth. “A model. The best model we could make anyway. It rotated. It had axes.”

“Where is it now?” Irene asked.

“It’s getting set up in his new lab. In the basement. It barely fits.”

The sourness of Sam Beth’s tone folded in on itself and became hatred.

“Whose lab was this?”

“George Dermont,” said Sam Beth. “My old boss. He was a physicist. You’ve heard of him?”

“Yes, yes,” Irene said. “My mother sent me clippings. I know who he is.”

“Awww, that’s cute,” said Sam Beth. “Your mother sent you clippings out to Mississippi, so you could read about real astronomers and what they do? Your mother must be a nice lady.”

“She’s dead,” said Irene, biting the word off tight and savoring it in her mouth, like a cherry.

Sam Beth snapped her laptop shut. “Oh, sorry,” she said.

“You can go,” said Irene. “You won’t work. I’ll interview for an assistant.”

“So emotional,” said Sam Beth on her way out the door. “Did you get to be a big important scientist like that? I doubt it.”

The door closed behind her. Irene switched back to fluorescent lights. “This is how we do it in the basement,” she muttered.

Irene had not gotten to be a big important scientist by being emotional. Nor by opening doors smoothly on their hinges, walking through those openings, head held high. Rather, she had got in by chewing relentlessly at the place where the wall met the floor, chewing from the outside always in the dark, chewing and chewing while the spit ran down her chin, until there was a hole big enough to pry at, and then prying relentlessly until she could squeeze inside. It was relentless, what she did.

She walked around the lab, circling the holes in the floor. She imagined a body outlined in the center, sketched in with masking tape. Outside the body and inside the circle of holes, there would be words where someone had scribbled, “Mysterious body found on this spot. Cause of death unknown.” The scientist who had worked in this lab, did he feel defeated and wronged? Did he feel like, Fuck it, I’ll never get it right . Or was he right on the verge of something, too?

Probably Sam Beth would go and tell him now what a bitch she was. Irene should have been more authoritative.

“You’ll never make friends by being such a smart-ass, Irene,” her mother had said. “Be lovable. Be small. You’re so small, you’re barely alive. Can you stand to be nice to someone at some point in your life, just to be nice?”

Irene rewound the conversation with Sam Beth in her head. She imagined how the conversation would have gone if her mother’s body inhabited the imagined masking-tape outline on the floor in the center of the universe.

“Hello, who are you?” Irene would have said.

“Oh my god, it’s a body!” Sam Beth would have said.

Not better, just different, thought Irene. She still runs from the room, and I am still here alone .

“I’m sorry,” said Sam Beth from the doorway.

“For what?” Irene asked.

“For being bad,” said Sam Beth. “It’s just that I’d rather work for George.”

“That’s fine,” said Irene. “I’m not bothered.”

“If you weren’t here, he would be,” said Sam Beth. She threw one booted leg up on the door frame and pushed at it, her back pushing against the other side.

“Yeah? Hey, it says here on this sheet that I’m supposed to work with an RA called Patrice.”

“That’s me,” said Sam Beth.

“Your name is Patrice?”

“My name is Sam Beth. That’s my Chaldean name.”

Irene looked up at her with a measured stare.

“Chaldean?”

“Babylon. The Persian Sibyl? Don’t you know anything about the Daughters of Babylon?”

“No,” said Irene. “Do they all have eye dots?”

Sam Beth did not get angry. “If you read those articles your mother sent you, and the work of Dr. Dermont”—she coughed a little bit—“of George, you would know about the whirlwind, and the stormwind, and the significance of the mystic called Sambethe to the room you are standing in, the universe you are inhabiting.”

She pulled the hood of her tracksuit around her face as if it were a monastic cowl. Irene put it together then. This nutbag Dermont, whom her mother kept trying to impress her with, had grand ideas about the shape of the universe as defined by ancient concepts of transformative symmetry. It was stupid stuff, the kind of thing that gets lapped up by pop culture magazines and young people who don’t really understand math.

“Doesn’t he believe that Toledo is built on the ruins of ancient Babylon or something? Like, the Maumee River is the Euphrates?” Irene asked with a gentle sneer.

“The Maumee River is the Tigris,” said Sam Beth. “On an axis of asymmetry defined by the prime meridian, Toledo and Babylon are phenomenological twins.”

“That is just utter bullshit,” said Irene, looking at the paperwork in front of her. “Utter and complete drivel. We need a scouring pad and a bucket, right away. I can smell the ridicule of such a nutty idea still bouncing around in here.”

“It’s OK,” Sam Beth purred. “I know it’s hard to understand. Maybe when you meet him, you’ll discover—”

“Wow, so this is what sycophantic opportunism looks like from the front,” said Irene, staring down Sam Beth who was still standing in the doorway.

“I will always take care of him,” Sam Beth replied. “But how will I take care of you?”

When Irene got back to her mother’s house, Belion was already there, sitting on the sofa, his laptop on his knee.

“I went ahead and set up a hotspot,” he said. “Your mom didn’t have Wi-Fi.”