Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

What is my emotional connection to the dead person that was my mother? Irene wanted to know.

She picked up her own keys and drove to her favorite bridge for the first time since her return to Toledo. Maybe standing on the bridge, in the quiet space before the fall, everything would make sense.

Toledo’s Anthony Wayne Bridge is blue and white and wide. Two tall towers are draped with huge suspension cables, and the bridge rises in a high arc over the Maumee River. It is ninety years old. In Pittsburgh, Irene had spent many moments on the George Westinghouse Bridge, an arch bridge made of concrete, staring down at where the train tracks crossed the brown water of Turtle Creek.

Now Irene parked her car in a back corner of the Owens Corning lot and walked up the bridge’s long ramp toward the river. Cars went whizzing past her, decelerating as they left the bridge, and Irene felt her body relax a bit. On the Anthony Wayne Bridge, there is a tall cyclone fence along the walkway. This fence is too high to climb without attracting attention and curves inward at the top for extra safety. Irene always found it funny that when you get farther along and the bridge is over water, this fence just stops. Between the two towers, you can lean over the railing as far as you like. If you lean far enough, you can fall right in. It is as if the people who define the safety regulations for bridges did not consider the idea that a person would ever go near the railing of a bridge over water, that they would only be in danger of spilling off a bridge over land.

Irene knew that Bernice had killed herself—maybe not through a tumble down some stairs, but through an intentional consumption of a poisonous amount of alcohol, over days, hours, or years. She knew the impulse that led her mother down to death. Or did she? Where did it start? With the fire? With the birth of her daughter? What was the moment that led to the rest of her life, and how could Irene steer past that moment, guide herself to safety?

Suicide has an event horizon, Irene thought. Death does not . Death can take you quickly, and you are gone, but suicide has a slow approach. It takes years sometimes, or it takes a whole lifetime. But there must be some pivotal moment, a moment that goes by as quickly as any other in your life. A point of no return: the trigger is pulled, the body tips forward or backward off the bridge, the chair is kicked. After this moment has passed, you keep on living, but it’s a different kind of life. A life in which nothing you decide or think or do can change what is happening. Time stretches, as you pass through it. Some say you see your life pass before your eyes. That would take a long time. Longer than the four seconds it takes to fall from a bridge and be crushed on the water’s surface. But because of the special behavior of light and time around the singularity of a death, there is enough time. There is unlimited time. And then you are dead.

If you crossed the event horizon of an actual black hole, and your friend was standing safely outside the event horizon, watching you, it would be the same. You pass an invisible threshold. You cannot tell when you are beyond hope. There’s no signpost. You might be saying something, like, “I can’t handle this pain anymore. I want to die.” To you, traveling toward the singularity, the words would come out like normal, and you would hear them coming out of your mouth one after the other, a perfectly rational explanation for what you were doing. But to your friend, outside the accretion disk, the words would come at increasingly perplexing intervals. The gaps between the words would stretch and stretch, until years passed between “I” and “want” and then decades until “to,” and maybe your friend would age and sicken and die herself before the word “die” managed to reach her. At which point she would have already found out what you wanted to do.

Some physicists had written about how a person entering a black hole might experience the entire future history of the universe, wrapped around that endless last moment of life. Irene just wanted to know … when did her mother begin to want to die?

“I see you falling,” Irene’s mother had told her. “I see you falling to your death. It’s happening, almost every time I close my eyes.” This was when she had forbidden Irene to travel by air, insisted Irene drive everywhere, never visit Europe. They had been to South America by boat. “Airplanes are not for you,” her mother said. “Trust me.” And while Irene had nodded and complied, she had privately thought it was all part of the same bullshit. And yet when your mother tells you you are going to die, and how, can she really be ignored? What kind of mother tells her daughter this, and then dies falling down the stairs?

I don’t miss you at all, Irene thought to her mother. Whenever I start to think I’m missing you, I remind myself that it is nonsense.

Irene passed the first high tower, and a jogger went huffing past her, going toward the center of the bridge. She slowed and watched him go, and then she went up there herself, stood in the middle, where the suspension cables dip down to the bridge’s deck. From here you can hoist yourself up onto the main cable, and using the guide wires you can walk your way up it right to the top of the tower. Most jumpers think they have to climb these cables to get high enough to die, but Irene knew that this was not the case. You could die just as well from the drop at the center of the bridge. Everyone knew that climbers didn’t really jump, and real jumpers didn’t climb. Irene stood there at the center of the bridge, listening to the cars hissing past behind her. A whiff of the harbor reached her nose as she leaned on the railing, her body pressing out into the air, probing for the transition between standing and falling, the point at which impact becomes inevitable.

She looked down at the shallow water on the west side of the river, where a pair of fishermen had managed to upend their boat. They struggled with it, sinking into the sand, trying to get it right.

The Max Planck Memorial Ballroom was sponsored by the Hamburg Plancks, in honor of their progenitor’s contribution to the world of science. It inhabited its own gorgeous building at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, and on this night it was lit up like the Horsehead Nebula on the Fourth of July. Chandeliers sparkled in the lobby, leaded glass windows glittered up and down the façade, and a stunning brass astrolabe decorated the lobby, surrounded by cocktail waitresses spinning in a bright, bubbling orbit. The night of the annual welcome banquet was truly a night of a thousand stars, and the party was thrown in honor of the glamorous new acquisitions the institute could boast about in brochures and the incoming students, who dreamed of becoming such celebrated guests.

George and Kate Oakenshield emerged from his wagon, and George tossed the keys to the valet along with a twenty-dollar bill. He wore gray jeans, a white shirt he’d already opened at the throat, and a gray striped tie he’d already untied. When he got out of his car, a couple of undergraduates fluttered to the sidewalk and then shyly hid under a tree as he came around the vehicle, collected Kate Oakenshield on his arm, and strode into the building. No, he was not the star of the evening, nor was he even any longer the brilliant ingenue. He needed a breakthrough, and he needed it soon. But he still commanded a modicum of respect among the gentlemen, and the ladies still found he brought color to their cheeks. Kate drifted along beside him, in a droopy and romantic lemon chiffon.

Inside the lobby, George immediately spotted Father Oakenshield, wearing a clerical collar and pacing thoughtfully up and down one wall.