Lydia Netzer: How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

“Hey, what’s wrong, babe?” Belion’s prodigious brow was now furrowed with concern. “Are you OK? Are you sick?”

“My mother fell down the stairs,” she said. “And died.”

“What? She fell down the stairs? Where?”

“In her house. Belion, I have to move to Toledo now.”

“Why Toledo, though?” His face still pointed at the computer screen, and now he was looking at code.

“That’s where she lived, asshole, do you have any idea what I’m talking about right now? She lived in Toledo, and I was born in Toledo.”

“Yes. Yes, I knew that. Wow, I’m really sorry.”

He turned his eyes to her, and she saw his unibrow, his large brown eyes underneath it, large nose, large chin, large everything, like he could swallow the whole world. She told him about the whole day: the black hole in the collider, the neighbor’s discovery, the call to the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, the impending funeral, the house.

“I’ll kill that bastard neighbor for you,” said Belion, his voice rumbling deep inside him. “If you need. It’s always the neighbor. He probably killed her.”

“The neighbor is female.”

“Girls can be bastards, too. It’s science.”

“You’re not listening,” said Irene. “I have a chance to study and work and teach at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy. This is something that most physicists only dream of.”

“I don’t want you to go. You already work at a cool university, and it has the added benefit of being right here.”

“It’s not the same,” said Irene.

“It has a Cathedral of Learning, for Christ’s sake. How can Toledo compete with that?”

“For one thing, the Cathedral of Learning is at U Pitt, not Carnegie Mellon. But let’s leave the fact that you don’t even know what university pays me. It’s not just the job. There’s my mother’s house to deal with, which is mine now.”

“Nuke it from space,” said Belion, the side of his face lit from the glow on his monitor.

“Yeah, no,” said Irene. “That’s not something people actually do.”

“That sucks. Wasn’t, she, like, married?”

“BELION! Are you serious right now?”

“I can’t remember! I’m sorry! Hey, you never talk about her. I didn’t even know she existed!”

Irene got up from his lap, climbing out from under his arm and replacing his hand on the keyboard.

“No, she’s not married. Wasn’t married.”

“Oh. Sorry about the bastard comment earlier. I didn’t know you were—”

“A bastard?”

“Yeah, to put it, like, all Tudory.”

“Well, whatever. I need to go sleep. I’m exhausted. I think I’ve been at work for two days, and my mother—” Irene gritted her teeth together, afraid to start crying again.

“You want company?” he asked. He turned to her and held out a hand, beseeching, but Irene shook her head and walked away.

She took off her tank top and draped it over the bedpost, left her jeans on the mat next to her side of the bed. Pulling back the comforter and sheet, she slid into the coolness beneath them and lay flat. She pulled her hair out of the ponytail and flipped the rubber band off her finger toward the dresser.

She closed her eyes and exhaled, then her eyes popped open. She jumped out of bed and locked the door before lying down again. This was private. Like praying. If she had prayed, she would not have let anyone see her do that either. If you had asked her, “Irene, do you meditate or anything?” she would have said, “No.” She probably would have added, “And all that is crap.”

Irene was an empiricist. She believed in science, and math, and numbers. She did not believe in love, or any god. She did not believe, “Someday you will be happy.” She was opposed to novels, most poetry, and dance of any kind. However, she was also a lucid dreamer. She could control her dreams. It was because her mother had been such a dedicated hippie, astrologer, mind reader, tea drinker, nutcase, and had pressed the lucid dreaming on Irene before life had taught her suspicion.

It started with dispelling nightmares, the same way any mother teaches any child to take control of a dream and turn it away from horrors. But Bernice hadn’t left it there. She’d shown Irene how to make her body fall asleep and keep her mind awake, how to travel, unencumbered, in a lonely world behind the waking one. She hadn’t gone there in years, had sworn she was never going again. But now she had to go, to know for sure if her mother was really, really gone.

Irene blinked three times and closed her eyes. She said the words, “I’m dreaming and I’m aware,” three times under her breath, and then she began to regulate and count her breathing. In her mind’s eye she was focusing on a little curio shelf in her mother’s house. This was her old way in, like a portal. Just one shelf, dark wood, stuck to the wall in her mother’s house in Toledo, and lined with bells. She went down the row of bells, ringing each one in her mind. The small dark bell from a sheep. The little gold bell that was a souvenir from Galveston. The silver bell from a wedding reception. The crappy, bulbous one that child Irene had made in a pottery class. The porcelain one in the shape of a cat entangled in yarn. A blue bell commemorating America’s bicentennial.

She knew that before she reached the bell on the end, which was bejeweled and had no ringer, her body would be asleep, but her mind would be awake. She would be in the place she and her mother called the Hinterland, and dreaming. And her mother, her mother might be there, too. She had to go and see.

When I pick up the final bell and ring it, I hear a ringing sound. The sound tells me I am dreaming and aware. I walk away from the shelf of bells, and out of my mother’s house.

Astrology is the mad mother of astronomy. My mother is a predictive astrologer, and also a psychic. She does it all: tea leaves, wrinkles in your hand, whatever seems to make you trust her. I have watched her clients sit there on the sofa, stretch out their necks, and tilt their heads, all earnestly listening like so many fools. All her magic comes down to advice a good professional organizer could give them. It’s always easier to see someone else’s problems, she would say. I can clean your house better than I can clean my own. Then she would take a sip of gin. A swallow of gin. A glass tumbler of gin, full to the brim.

Mother and I have a complicated relationship. Outside the Hinterland, she is a drunk and I am ashamed and afraid. Inside the Hinterland, she is always sober. So here I come, to find her. I miss her. I can’t help myself. Even now, when her body is dead, I wonder if her mind is here still. Maybe in death she has entered a final dream. Maybe here I will retrieve her from the alcohol. The Hinterland is bleak and spare. I make it this way. I have never allowed it to become elaborately decorated because that’s foolish and a waste of time. So there are very few things, besides her house, the gray dust of the earth and the gray rim of the sky. There is only one other structure. I call it Dark House. From the outside, it’s a Victorian mansion of three stories.

When I first dreamed into Dark House I was very young, dreaming of exploring an old house, opening room after room. At the center of it, between all the rooms, with a rim of broken beams and torn wires around it, I came upon a whistling chasm in the floor. I almost fell in, and it scared me, sent me skittering backward, a cold wind in my face. I could not even look into it. That was the first time.

After that I ended up in Dark House again and again in my dreams, always coming in from a different direction but headed for the same sinking center, back to the same bad place. Putting it inside the Hinterland, giving it walls and some exterior structure, let me have some control over that awful hole. I have never been sucked into the center of Dark House. Monsters, grief, immolation are there. Always right there at the edge. Sometimes I dream I am clever and free, but I wind up in the Dark House anyway, teetering on the edge of the blackness. A good dream is when I can get out without falling into the black. So they are all good dreams, so far.