Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

“OK,” said Irene. She was beginning to laugh, too. She didn’t know if he recognized her or if he knew his name, but his brain was clearly working, and he was trying to sit up. “Lie down, George,” she said. “Lie down. You have to rest.”

He lay back obediently, but turned his head to face her, and with a very George-like twinkle in his eye, he told her, “The reason I can’t find the plane of symmetry is because it’s not a plane; it’s a lens. Babe, it’s a lens. A lens! Why did you not see this? Why did I not see this? If we’re so smart, why in the hell did we not see that it is a lens! A LENS!”

He was getting loud. The nurses were coming in. The machines around were beeping and blaring. Doors flew open and doctors barked orders. But George was past all that. He had his hand behind her head now, and he was pulling her in for a kiss, and when she kissed him she knew that he knew her, and that he remembered everything, and that it was all going to be fine.

Spring had wakened up Toledo with flowering trees like lanterns and lights across the city. On a beautiful morning in April, George and Irene were taking a walk through the quad, as they habitually did for George’s health, once a day. Irene did not allow him to bury himself in calculations and models, imaging and sketching, nor did she let him work himself to death on the satellite telescope that he was still pouring his time into. She forced him out into the air, because this is what she knew that he should do, to rest his brain periodically, like a man who’d had a thousand concussions waits in the dark, in the quiet and calm for his mind to heal before he can try on something new. George wasn’t waiting, but he was taking breaks, following Irene’s orders.

They walked together hand in hand around the quad, looking at the tulips that were emerging from their bulbs, bulbs that had been planted last fall. They were trying to talk about nothing. Taxing his brain was the opposite of what they were supposed to do during his rest periods. So sometimes they recited poetry they both knew well, or hummed songs they both had memorized, or just walked in silence.

Irene’s work in the collider was just beginning to take off. Construction was nearly finished on her experiment site, and when the other teams were up and running and the collider was set in motion, the world of astronomy could expect big things of her and her detector.

“I’m so glad you had your surgery,” she said to him. “This day wouldn’t be as beautiful if you were still doped up on opium nasal spray.”

“I’m glad, too,” said George. “Because now I get to constantly laugh at you for doing things like appreciating a beautiful day.”

“I’m a new woman,” said Irene. “Now I do things like that. Why not?”

“Why not is right.” George squeezed her hand. “I’ve never loved you more.”

“What was it that your father said to you that made you decide to do it?” She had asked him this before, many times, as if she thought she could trick him into a different answer. But he always came up with the same one.

“I can’t remember,” said George. “I can’t honestly remember much that he said to me at all.”

“Would you tell me?” she asked him. “Would you tell me what he said, and what else you forgot? It seems like that’s the only thing that you forgot.”

“I don’t have any secrets from you, Irene,” he said. “I do recall him saying that if I agreed to it that he would try to be a better dad. And he has been. He really has been.”

They walked on in comfortable silence for a while. Then Irene spoke up.

“You know what I just now noticed, George?”

“What?” George wanted to know.

“This is stupid, but it’s going to annoy the piss out of me now.”

“What is it?” he said. “Nothing mathematical now—you know my synapses are in rest mode.”

“It’s nothing mathematical. In fact, it’s the opposite of mathematical. These tulips are all so randomly planted, there are clumps of red and white all scattered around this quad, in no apparent order.”

George looked at the tulips and nodded. There was a ring of them, all around the quad, and the arrangement of white to red was neither symmetrical nor a regular repeating pattern. It appeared to be random.

“Wow, that is true,” he said slowly.

“What idiot did this? I mean, obviously, whatever. It doesn’t matter, right? They couldn’t have known. But really they’re going to be there for years now, all clumped and irregular. What the hell? I’m tempted to just tear them up.”

“Strange,” said George.

Irene kept walking, her arm through George’s arm, but now her pace was more brisk.

“Maybe we should walk over in the ruins from now on,” she said. “Avoid this mess.”

“Maybe it’s Fibonacci,” said George, looking at the tulips. Irene stopped in her tracks and frowned, glaring at the tulips. She put her hand up as if she was counting, arranging them differently in her mind.

“No, it’s not a Fibonacci sequence,” she said. “Look at it—come on, that’s not even a good guess. Go back to sleep, synapses.”

She began to walk again, dragging him along, but then she stopped again and said, “Wait a minute.”

She looked at the tulips, all around the ring, moving her finger up and down as the color changed from red to white and back.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she said. “It’s not some random dumbass gardener; it’s a very specific dumbass coder. I know what it is now.”

“What is it?” said George.

“It’s Belion!” she told him. “That foolish, stupid oaf must have been trying to work out a way to propose to Kate Oakenshield, the girl who was raised mute, for months now. And I think he has finally done it. Or he did it last fall.”

“What are you talking about?” George asked.

“Well, look at the tulips. No, don’t look at them, because that’s like counting or whatever. Rest your brain, but I’ll just tell you they’re planted in binary. Like Morse code, you know, red and white for one and zero. And it says ‘Marry Me.’ Cute. Very cute. I mean, it’s super dorky and obvious, but she’ll fall for that kind of shit like it was wine and roses, you know? Dork that she is. Sorry, but she is.”

“Irene,” said George. “You have no idea how relieved I am you finally noticed those lousy tulips.”

He reached into the pocket of his khakis.

“I’ve been carrying this thing around for weeks, hoping you would figure out that binary before the petals rotted off and I had to start over with azaleas or pansies or something.”

“What?”

He went down on one knee, there in the quad, and she put her hands on each side of his face. He smiled at her, a perfect smile.

“Irene, will you marry me?”

“You did this? You did this tulip thing?”

“I did the tulip thing. Will you marry me anyway?”

“George, yes!” she said. She threw herself into his arms. “Yes, yes, yes. I will marry you, you dork. I will marry you forever.”

“I’m so happy,” said George. He lifted her off the ground. “I’m so happy, I must be dreaming. I must be dreaming.”

All around, the people of Toledo found their own happiness, with or without parental machinations, or they made terrible mistakes and rectified them, and went to sleep and woke up. They pulled out stupid things and wise things from their wishing wells. They learned the truth and forgave each other, or they never figured out how to do that at all, and died without redemption. Sometimes they looked into the stars with rulers and wrote down evidence, and figures, and used a straight edge to measure out their lives. And sometimes they stared into crystal balls, and found true love is a miracle, one they could never understand.