Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

Irene sat on the plane on the last leg of her journey from San Francisco back east. It was a little plane, hopping from Chicago to Toledo, and Irene was again in a window seat, but with no one sitting next to her. The curved hull of the plane made an arc around her body. Irene refused a gin in favor of an orange soda, and quickly read two article abstracts written by people she’d met at the convention. Her heart felt sick, her head thick and clouded. She found as the plane made its way east and the night deepened that she could not take her eyes off the window, could not help but look ahead to where she knew that he would be. She leaned her forehead against the cool plastic of the window and looked out into the night.

Up above, she saw all the fixed stars. The same ones Aristotle had seen when he imagined them lodged in perfect crystal spheres, hung sparkling above the dead, decaying earth. How beautiful they were, these perfect points of light, spread wide over the messy, fragile humans down below. How perfect were the gods. Irene looked down toward the earth and saw the bright streets outlined in shining lights, the clusters of houses, buildings, long stretches of parking lots, and here and there a lonely beam, a point of light in an expanse of darkness, like a single star. It reminded her of standing with George on One Seagate and looking down over all of Toledo, when he asked her how to tell the difference between the stars above and the earth below. Now it made sense to her, looking up at the sky rippled with constellations, and down at the black earth crisscrossed with roads and sparkling towns. And she knew the answer to the question: what is the difference?

Irene closed her eyes and felt the movement of this little plane. A bump, a silence, and then a shift, a deep shuddering. She felt herself slipping under that familiar fog of sleep, letting go of her senses as she crossed that grand chasm that was really as quick as a breath, as light as the flutter of a wing, between herself and what lay beyond, that stunning outerwhere: she lost herself, the plane thumped, shook, and she began to dream.

She was outside the plane and falling, falling into the city of Toledo. It was lit up and alive, cars buzzing along, boats motoring up and down the river, little clumps of people on the sidewalks, crossing streets, running to meet each other in the dark. And when she turned her head up, looking into the night sky, and all its distant perfection, all the majesty of its timelessness, its immeasurable depth, she knew. This is the difference between gods and humans. This is the difference between divinity and what exists on earth: Toledo is moving. It’s alive and changing. The myths, the stars, the fixed stories—these are static, measured only by math and memory. The men, the science they make, the roads they travel—these move, they change and grow, they cannot be mapped. It moves, she wanted to say to George. That’s the difference between Toledo and the night sky. It moves.

I love it, thought Irene. Her heart froze with happiness. Her arms spread out, as she fell down through the air, her body the shape of a star, plummeting, sailing downward into Toledo. I love what I am, this human, even if this is where I cross over, bleed, and die. This is where I become human. This polluted, human town, this love, this is what I am, more than the stars, even though they are so big, and so vast, and so perfect. They’re just so far away.

Irene fell down into the orange constellation that was Toledo, that shape that was moving, dirty, changing, alive. She closed her eyes, and passed through.

Irene’s eyes were closed, and her head was on George’s stomach. She could hear his stomach noises, gurgling and popping. That made her feel a little bit better about his prognosis. His face was still, completely still, and his whole body seemed dormant and strange. From the side of his head, a drainage tube emerged from the bandage on his wound and looped around into a small reservoir. There was also a tube coming out of his nose that ended in a bag, and there was a tube taped to a needle in his arm, where they were dripping things into him. His head was neatly shaved.

Irene had been sitting here for hours, leaning against him. The nurses had come in to check him, to take readings from his body, measuring his pulse and looking at the readings on different machines around his bed. He was in the ICU. This meant to Irene that he was going to be fine. The care he was getting was intensive. His life, at Toledo General, had meaning and was being intensely cared for. There had been no discussion of throwing Irene out, even though in the ICU there were severely limited visiting hours. No one would have thought to make her go. She was so sad and serious, so deeply attached to him. It was as if they hadn’t noticed she was there.

The important thing to her was that she stayed focused on him, so that any little movement in his eyelids, of his lips, would not escape her, and she could shout for the nurses, shout for the doctors, alert the authorities that he was back. What he was back for, they would not know. If he was back for starting over fresh from the beginning of his life, if he was back for stepping in exactly where he had left off, or if he was back for being a pants-wetting vegetable from now on, no one knew. Irene hoped, and Irene imagined, that George would open his eyes, look up at her, and say, “You came back.” This would mean that he knew her, that he remembered everything, that he forgave her, and that he was going to get better. Or maybe he would just say, “Irene.” Or maybe he would say “Ouch” and then vomit. Really, Irene had started to believe that anything he said was better than him just lying here silently, retreated into his own head.

The nurses coming in and out seemed progressively less cheerful. The doctor had come around and had checked George several times. He did not respond to having his feet scratched sharply. He did not respond to having light shined in his eyes. He was unresponsive. Irene wished the doctor would pat her on the shoulder and say, “He’s going to be fine. The tumor is gone. I think he will make a full recovery.” But the doctor said nothing to her. No one said anything. She was invisible. So much sadness, concentrated into one person, can make a darkness no one wants to touch. So it was with Irene, miserably pressed against George, believing so much that he could come back to her.

The doctors and nurses waited to see whether his brain was ruined. Whether he would be himself, or wake a total stranger. Irene lay across him, holding his hand, stroking the sleeve of his hospital gown, and crying a little bit now and then. She did not eat or drink. She didn’t answer phone calls from her lab. She stayed and waited, and George’s mother came and went but did not disturb them. His father came and went and did not say a word. The ICU was bright and quiet. It seemed to go on forever.

Then Irene felt George take a big breath in, like a man coming up from deep underwater takes a gasp of air that fills his lungs with life.

“Curvature,” said George. He said it loudly, urgently. Irene sat upright, still clutching his hand.

“What?” she said. But George said nothing else, and when she examined his face, she noticed no change. Then his brow wrinkled up, his hand grabbed hers tight, and he said, again, “Curvature.”

“Curvature?” she said. His eyes were still not opened.

“It’s curvature!” Now he was smiling, and his chest was shaking with laughter, as if he was having a beautiful dream.

“George, what’s curvature! Be still! You have tubes all over you!”

He opened his eyes. He looked at her and their eyes met, and he said, “It’s curvature. That’s why I can’t find the plane of symmetry.”