Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

I feel dizzy, like I do when I stand too close. Then I’m running like a child up the basement stairs having banged the lid of the clothes dryer closed, and I burst through the door and out onto the porch, and George’s country house is straight ahead of me and I run, run, run across to it and up onto the porch of it, and there’s George again, and he’s sleeping still. I lie down next to him in the bed, put my cheek on his arm, and curve my spine into him, and it’s warm.

I’m looking at the place where my mother’s box of ashes used to be before I threw it into the center of Dark House, and I know that now I can’t wake up, because if I do, I will open my eyes, and it will be back there, that black terrible box. So I’ll lie here, and sleep forever.

George woke up. His first instinct was to not open his eyes; the headache was that bad. He gently extracted his arm from under Irene’s face, replaced it with a pillow, and left her sleeping there on the white cotton. He pulled the sheet up around her body and padded across the faded carpet and out of the room. In the bathroom, he closed the door so that it would be dark. He opened the medicine cabinet and by feel identified and took out a spray bottle, which he squirted into each nostril, sharply inhaling. He shut the medicine cabinet and looked at where he knew the mirror was, except that he was in the dark.

“This is a love story,” he said. “Act one, boy meets girl. Act two, boy loses girl. This is act two.”

He could feel the painkiller entering his headache and wrapping it up in cool plastic, pushing it back into its container, closing the lid. He stood there in the bathroom in the dark until he could roll his head around on his neck and not feel like he was going to pass out. Then he opened the door and went out. He pulled some jeans on from his dresser, thought about making a sandwich, and leaned over Irene and kissed her on the temple.

“Sweetheart,” he said. She opened her eyes and stared straight across the room as if she’d seen a ghost.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.” But when she turned to face him, she was pale.

“Come and let me make you lunch,” he said. “I have a way with meat and bread. We need to get going, because I have something at the institute I’m dying to show you before my lecture.”

She nodded. She reached for the sheet and pulled it up around her chin.

“Come on, don’t you want to see your supercollider?”

Irene and George stood in the elevator, going down. There were only two buttons on the wall: M and S. They’d started out in main and they were going to sub.

“This is the world’s biggest scientific instrument you’re about to see,” said George.

“I managed alright with one the size of a large bathtub,” said Irene.

“This one is bigger than the one you had,” said George. “Therefore better.”

“Hmm,” said Irene. “That remains to be seen.”

Once they stepped foot on campus, Irene had gotten tough again, as if her combative exterior went on like a uniform when she was near science. George looked at her now, her jaw set and her eyes seeming to try to pierce through the elevator doors. She was a little dynamo. He felt a pang of love for her, watching her cross her arms and tap the toe of her ugly boot. This is a love story about astronomy, he thought. Twin souls collide and love each other forever. And no one ever goes crazy. And no one ever dies. And the universe folds back on itself and clicks into place, and the pylons holding up the electrical wires are really trees. And the trees are really gods.

When the elevator stopped and they stepped out into the cavern, Irene’s eyes got wide, and she said, out loud, “Whoa.” It had astonished George, too, when he first saw it. A tunnel, several stories high, was lined and laid with brightly colored wires, plastic tubes and disks, and it echoed amazingly, like a never-ending tiled bathroom, or a canyon, or a cave. Halfway to the ceiling was a tube, where the supercollider was being built. All around the opening on each side of the cavern were bright tiles, scaffolding, wires, and lights.

Dr. Bryant rattled down a flight of metal steps he had been climbing and came toward them with his arms open.

“Welcome, Dr. Sparks,” he said. “Welcome to your new domain. I’ve got several appointments for you this afternoon, with engineers and fabricators, electrochemists and a couple of structural guys—I think your designs are going to fit right into our model.”

Irene shook hands with Dr. Bryant and then turned to George. He knew immediately that she wasn’t going to kiss him or give his crotch a good-bye pat or smooth his hair away from his face and look longingly into his eyes or anything. She was going to work, and she had probably said, if he had been paying attention, that at work they wouldn’t be allowed to be together. Not yet. Dr. Bryant was looking at him expectantly, as if he wanted George to leave.

“Have you?” said Dr. Bryant.

“Have I?” asked George.

“Have you seen her?” said Irene.

“No,” said George. “Unless you mean her?” George pointed to Irene.

“No, George, I mean Kate—Dr. Oakenshield. Your friend? Have you seen her? She didn’t show up for her class this morning, and she hasn’t tweeted. I thought maybe she had spent the night with you?”

“What?!” said George. “Of course not! Because fraternizing with other astronomers is both wrong and terrible.”

Irene’s face was inscrutable.

Dr. Bryant winked knowingly at George. “We all know you’ve been trying to get next to Dr. Oakenshield for months,” he said. To Irene he added, “Of course as a policy we don’t encourage our faculty to intermingle, but we work in such close quarters, there are some inevitable relationships that develop. I’m sure it was the same at your old lab.”

“No,” said Irene sagely. “We never fraternized. We also thought it wrong and terrible.”

“Dr. Sparks,” said Dr. Bryant, “this world is merciless. You must take love where you can find it.”

Irene stared at him. He went on, “Anyway, George, I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. But I’m afraid there might be trouble at home for her, if you know what I mean. I’ll give you a ring when I’ve gotten to the bottom of it.”

Then George walked away. It felt like there was ripping, like anyone could have heard it, when they separated. He didn’t want to separate from Irene. It felt really wrong.

George’s class was over. He waited another hour, doing some paperwork. He made some calls, looking for Kate Oakenshield, then dialed the Euphrates Project switchboard and got through to Irene.

“Sparks,” she growled.

“Hey,” he said. “There you are.” The sound of her voice was like a hand on him. He felt it.

“It’s amazing down here, George,” she said.

“Great,” said George. “I’m glad you like it.”

“But I’ve had a lot of meetings this afternoon, now some things have to get done before we can proceed … if you want to…”

“Yes,” said George. “I do want to. I need you, for something that might be a little awkward—”

“Can’t be more awkward than stealing my mother’s ashes from the funeral home.”

“Right,” said George. “Can’t it be? Maybe. I’ll come and get you.”

George’s car seats were awash with papers and books, and the floor was covered in empty Coke cans and coffee cups. In the back, an incredibly large ivy plant spread its many limbs around the trunk and over the backseat’s headrests, having no trouble breathing.