Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

“River dolphins,” she said. “Like on the Amazon.”

“They’re actually whales, not dolphins,” George said. “And don’t tell me you’ve been on the Amazon.”

“Actually, yes, my mom took me to Brazil when I was in high school.”

“No, that is not true! I have been there, too!”

Kate made a screeching, burbling sound, putting her face in the water. Belion orbited her like a big polite buoy.

Irene said, “I bet she’s a screamer in the sack.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said George.

“Really?” said Irene.

“You don’t need to be jealous,” said George. “Really.”

“Am I good at it,” she said. “You know, am I good at it?”

George felt his body tighten up like a spring.

“At sex?”

“Yes,” Irene said.

“You are the best,” said George, “that I have ever had. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t practice like ten times a day for the rest of our lives. Because you never know. You could get even better.”

She smiled and stretched. “It’s just that, I don’t understand how you could want her, and everything that she is, and then turn around and want me, and the person that I am—”

“Sweetheart, I only wanted her because she was a bad approximation of you. Don’t you see that?”

“No,” said Irene.

“Irene.” George pulled her into his side and put his hands around her, clutched her to him. “We are soulmates.”

“I don’t understand that,” said Irene into his chest.

“It doesn’t take you understanding it,” George explained. “In fact, if you’d stop understanding it so much, it might be a lot easier.”

“But I’m not—like her,” said Irene.

“You mean crazy?”

“I mean sexy.” Irene’s voice caught, and she coughed. “She’s like you, like all plants and freedom and music and such an artist, a dreamer, like you are.”

“You’re a dreamer,” said George.

“I am not,” said Irene.

“Well, OK,” he conceded. “If you say so.” He moved his fingers up and down her spine, going up into her hair and then down, down, into the waistband of her jeans.

“The truth is you’re not like her at all,” he said. “You’re prettier than she is. And you’re smarter. And when I’m with you, she seems like she’s made out of paper and feathers, and you, I’d like to take down into the cabin, and treat you in ways that only wild bears can treat each other.”

She smacked at him, and it felt good.

“George!” she said.

“You’re the faery that I imagined when I was six,” George went on, “I know what faeries look like. This is it. Why don’t you just try loving me? It might be really easy.”

“I—” Irene began. But George wasn’t done.

“You’re all I want, but you have to believe it, too.”

“I’m not a believer.”

“But you want to be,” he said. He knew that he understood, and he tried to make her see it. “You want to believe, and yet you want to be honest. You want us to be great, but you want us to be real. I want those things, too. This is where we are the same.”

She put her arms around him and held her face up sweetly to be kissed. He leaned into her, and their lips came together. It was as if George was spinning through her and back into himself, more rapidly than he could track. When she pulled back, he was dizzy.

“I love you,” he said to her.

“Love isn’t real, George,” she said, her voice low and strange. “It’s not real. It doesn’t make any sense. Not for me. I don’t believe in it.”

“Then this must be science,” said George.

“I don’t believe in marriage either,” said Irene.

“Fine,” he said, trying to make her smile. “Then we’ll be in science, and we’ll perform a futuristic sex alliance instead of getting married.”

“George! I just can’t do it,” Irene said. She looked sorry. Sorry that she couldn’t do it. “I’m not good enough.”

“We’re soulmates—look at everything we know, everything we’ve done. It’s like we were made for each other. That weird old folk music, what are the odds we would both have that same album? We’ve memorized the same poetry, you play the flute and I play the hand drum, you went to Brazil and so did I, we both loved Philip Pullman to the point of making Halloween costumes before it was a movie … For chrissake, you have one of my dad’s paintings in your house.”

“I don’t believe in fate,” said Irene. “Or destiny or things like that.”

“But it’s more than that, Irene,” he urged her. “What do you want, what do you want most of all, for yourself?”

He knew it was not fame, or to be right about black holes, or to be somewhere locked in a lab. He knew her better than this. But would she say it? Would she give this to him?

“To be loyal,” she said slowly. “I want to be loyal. Loyal like my mother never was. Or my father. I want to be loyal for my whole life. I think that would be great.”

“I want that, too,” he said.

“But that doesn’t mean we are in love,” said Irene. “That doesn’t make it true.”

He kissed her again. “You’re wrong,” he said. “You’re wrong about love. Maybe it’s not true, but it’s real. And it doesn’t have to be true to be real. Can you see—”

“What if I do give up,” she said suddenly. “What if I say, OK, I give up. What if I say I love you. I don’t know what to do after that.”

“I love you, too,” said George. “There’s nothing you have to do. It’s done.”

“George.” She held onto him, but turned to look at Belion and Kate, who were swimming out some distance away from the boat, as the sunset turned the water to gold. “I feel stupid. I have this really stupid feeling in my brain.”

“That’s not stupid,” said George. “That’s happy. You’re feeling happy.”

Irene smiled and he picked her up and held her, leaning back against the wall of the cabin. She put her legs around his waist and pressed her face into his neck where he could feel her breathing.

“OK, I’m happy, George,” she said. “I’m happy.”

And then it was done.

The phone in the underground cavern rang. Sam Beth picked it up.

“Toledo Institute of Astronomy,” she droned. Then she rolled her eyes and covered the receiver. She called out, “Dr. Sparks?”

Irene came riding down the walkway in the tunnel on one of the mopeds that the physicists used to traverse the sections of the collider between the insertion hubs and detectors.

She parked the vehicle and took the phone from Sam Beth’s resentful hand. It was an irony that in the vicinity of some of the most specialized and technologically advanced equipment in the world, they had to use phones plugged into wires because their mobile phones could not communicate from four hundred feet belowground, around so many magnets.

“Sparks,” she said.

Then she listened. Then she said, “This is unacceptable. How do you just lose a person from the face of the earth? I gave her to you. You were supposed to give her back to me, all burned up and stuff.”

“This has never happened before,” said the funeral home director.

Irene said, “That doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.”

“You’re right, you’re right,” said the man.

“You’re in big trouble, mister,” Irene told him. “You don’t just erase a person from the world. You don’t just twiddle your thumbs and throw some glitter in the air and whoops, she’s gone. You just can’t do that, do you understand?”

“I do,” said the funeral home director. “I do understand. I’m still hopeful that we will find her. It’s still possible.”