Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

“How do you know this band?” he asked her.

“My mother again,” said Irene.

“Was she a violinist?” he asked. He wanted to know all about her. Every year, every hour. What she liked for breakfast, whether she liked her pillows hard or soft. “And what do you like for breakfast?”

“Just get in,” said Irene. “Before we get to breakfast, I want to hear all about your ‘plane of symmetry’ thing.”

“Are you sure?” George asked.

“Sure, but I might have to tell you why it’s not going to work.”

George buckled his seat belt. “Please do. I’ve been waiting for this all day. Without this information, I may stumble through tomorrow thinking I have a future in science.”

“If such a thing were to exist, it would have been found by now.”

“Not true. The more we work with the Toledo Space Telescope, the more we find all kinds of things we didn’t know existed.”

“But what you’re talking about, this axis of the universe, this gateway, it cannot possibly be known, even if it were to exist. Not for thousands of years, maybe. We just don’t have the instruments. We cannot measure this.”

“Who cares what you can measure? If you can think about it, it could be real.”

“It’s not religion, George. It’s measurements. It’s math, whether you like it or not.”

“You know, religion and astronomy and astrology all used to be the same thing,” George reminded her.

“Well, they’re not anymore,” said Irene. She waved her hand around next to George’s head. “Religion, astrology, hokey schmokey over here.” Then she slammed her hand into the steering wheel. “Astronomy, math, rulers over here.”

“My side of the car is more fun,” said George.

“Your side of the car isn’t even a car! Just saying something doesn’t make it real.”

George sat silently. He was watching her hands gripping the wheel. He couldn’t help smiling.

“How can you be like this when you’re working on the Toledo Space Telescope ?” she asked. “Astrometry isn’t about guessing, or writing poetry, or whatever.”

“Yes, yes, I know. But the box I was working on is at JPL right now. Undergoing thermal testing. I don’t have to think about it for a few months. I have the semester off thinking about it.”

“Oh, dear, you’ve finished with the TST, and your little side project isn’t going so well either, is it? Maybe I could talk to someone at the institute for you. You’ve only lost your office, your lab space, your assistant, and most of your funding. I’m sure they can find something for you to do, though. Maybe you can come and work for me.”

She flashed him a wicked little smile and his heart contracted. “OK, can you just point the car and drive?” he said.

“Back across the bridge?” said Irene.

“Yeah, downtown. We need to get up very high so I can show you what I need to show you.”

Irene frowned. “High? Are we going to One Seagate?”

“That’s right,” said George. In all the glass spires of Toledo, one lone “skyscraper” dominated the skyline. One Seagate was a thirty-two-story building with an exterior made all of glass. The tallest building in Toledo.

George and Irene stood next to each other in a glittering elevator booth, going up. His elbow touching her shoulder, carefully touching it, not pushing it. They were absolutely silent. George watched her pulse beating at her throat, and wondered what she thought of him.

When the door opened at the penthouse, a uniformed security guard at a small podium nodded dispassionately at George and waved them inside.

“Come on,” said George. “This is my mother’s office.”

George took Irene by the elbow and pulled her on past the granite reception desk and down the hallway. The office was beautifully appointed and lit for overnight from dim canisters in the ceiling. The carpet was rich and dense, Dean’s paintings on the wall looking strangely bold for such a conservative office.

“My father’s art,” George tossed to Irene as he swept her on toward the back of the suite, flipping on light switches as he went. She stopped in front of a painting, and he frowned. The last thing he needed was for her to dutifully inspect his father’s work and feel she had to say something horrific like, “They’re nice” or “I don’t get it.”

“My god,” said Irene, staring at the canvas. “I think my mother has one of his paintings hanging in her house.”

“Well, he’s kind of famous,” said George. “But whatever. That’s cool. Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”

They emerged onto the deck, and the city lay before them in lights. The patio was broad, running the length of One Seagate, and there were plants and trees up here, rooted into pots or huge dirt-filled holes in the floor.

“Trees,” said Irene.

“I do her gardening,” said George. “It’s part of why I get paid my exorbitant salary as son.”

Irene went straight to the edge. For a second, George had the terrible impression that she was going to go straight over, and fall to her death. He almost reached out to touch her, grasp her around the waist, pull her back into him, wrap her up tight. But she stood, instead, gripping the railing. When her face turned back to look at him, it was clouded. Her eyes looked wet, as if she were about to cry, or had just stopped herself from crying.

He went over to her and put his hand in the middle of her back.

“Are you afraid of heights?” he said.

“No,” said Irene. She bit her lip. George imagined her biting his lip. He wanted to kiss her, feel her teeth pressing against his mouth, her wide lips on his.

“Did you know,” he said, “that a fear of heights is actually not a fear that you’ll accidentally fall, but that you’ll be possessed by the desire to fall on purpose?”

Irene was silent, then pulled at a vine from a nearby pot and said briskly, “How do you maintain it? I mean, this vine here, it’s got to be some sort of jungle species. Surely it can’t survive out here in the winter?”

“We’ve got walls. Retractable walls. In the winter it becomes a sort of terrarium.”

Irene leaned dangerously far out over the rail, the vines and branches of the trees waving alongside her in the high breeze.

“It’s like the hanging gardens of—”

“Wait,” he interrupted her. “Really, to understand this properly, you have to close your eyes, at this height, and imagine this is still Mesopotamia. This is still Babylon. The sand, the oppression. Forget the space shuttle and satellite telescopes. This is like old . Irrigation is brand new here.”

“Babylon, you say?”

He waved his arms. “The Tigris River. The Euphrates.”

George pointed to the west, to show her where the Toledo Institute of Astronomy lay inside its brick wall, inside its gates.

“There’s the ziggurat at the institute, see it?”

Irene nodded.

“But that one’s just a model,” said George. “You are standing on the site of the ziggurat that Hammurabi built. That Nebuchadnezzar used to climb on a Saturday morning, with his hot cup of tea and bagel sandwich. Prototype for the Tower of Babel. Eighty thousand steps up or something ridiculous like that.”

“Right, something ridiculous,” she said drily.

“And you look down, over the side, Nebuchadnezzar,” he went on, “and there’s the world, spread out below you. Babylon. Toledo. All these sparkling lights from the windows of your citizens, and the roads they use to travel by, and the corners of the world. And you look up, and there are the stars, sparkling and marking out the corners of the sky.”

Irene sighed. “It feels like falling,” she said.