Mary Estrada's Pick:
The Astronomer's Wife
by Timothy Green
"Lovers gaze into the night sky of a not-too-distant future. Wonderful poignant details. This story haunted me."
Hal and I lie on the blanched blacktop of an abandoned parking garage, staring up at the tired neon sky. We're somewhere out in the open desert, but I don't know how far; I fell asleep on the drive.
"Do you ever see shapes in the aurora?" I say. My grandmother told me they used to daydream into clouds and see all sorts of things. Fantastic animals, vehicles, whole scenes playing out in the sky like it was some lucid tapestry, like it was the slow-scrolling canvas of the gods.
"I see ionization of gasses," Hal says. "I can imagine the particles of the solar stream slamming into upper atmosphere. It is stunning when you stop to notice."
"That's not what I mean," I say. "I mean things that aren't there, things you just invent, like the Virgin Mary in your mashed potatoes or the vice president in your peas." I try to see shapes shifting and emerging in the lights — a snake, a tree, a flowering petal in bloom... When you start to see a string of them it's hypnotizing; you can lose yourself.
"I see ions," he says. "Sorry, Rachel."
I pat him on the thigh, leaving a white handprint on his suit. The pavement is covered with the chalky silt of cremated weeds and other organics that had been left here in the sun.
"Do you think anyone's been to this place since?" I ask.
"You mean up here on this garage? Probably not. Did you notice the cars?" He gestures above us and to the left. I can barely make out two hulking shapes like gray slugs in the aurorean glow. Hal looks at his watch. "Thirty seconds," he says.
Above our heads the lights have already begun to dim, the horizon at our feet becoming duller, duller, and then nothing, fading into a bruised blue-black. The coiling and uncoiling patchwork of variegated hue has become a flame against the true black of space. We clutch hands through our gloves and watch in awed silence as those pink and green shimmerings recede above our heads like water drawn to a sponge, but still dancing — a conga line of color retreating backward out of a vast and darkened room.
"When you see the first star," Hal says, "don't forget to make a wish."
But I don't care about stars or wishes, or even this wistful, exotic act — I'm here for the constellations. Orion's great bow as Taurus charges, and Cassiopeia, her big W looking nothing like a queen, those impossibly mute guides of navigation. In my mind I superimpose the star map onto the sky above, still a blue-black sheet — either from a residual glow in the magnetosphere or my eyes having not yet adjusted.
"Okay, are you sure you want to do this?" Hal says, but already he's on top of me, nervous and rushed, his big hands working the metal clasp at my waist. "The lunar diameter is 3,500 kilometers," he says, "and at 33 degrees south latitude, the umbral shadow's ground speed will be 2.3 km/s, giving us 2 minutes and 26 seconds of shield effect. We have to work fast." Of course he went over these numbers countless times in the car, and before that when he proposed this trip. The world is mass and orbital velocity; time is minutes, seconds, and picoseconds.
This has always been the way with Hal. When I met him at the bar he'd been scribbling tiny equations onto his paper beer coaster. "Do you see this?" he said, holding up a maze of matrices and Greek letters to the nth power.
"That better not be your phone number," I told him.
"If I could fold this lengthwise just fifty times, its thickness doubling each time, the stack would be so high it would reach the sun," he said. "Then if I folded it again one more time we'd come right back home." He was a rock under his gray blazer; he could have been a football player or a wrestler. I thought of Atlas, the Earth his abacus, forearms taut, sweat glistening.
"It's true," he said. "One one-thousandth of an inch times two to the fiftieth is over 95 million miles. That's exponential expansion. I think love works that fast."
Hal is the worst kind of geek — the hopeless romantic, who secretly collects Star Trek 2-Ds for their love story sub-plots. The kind of geek who studies the conformation structures of his girlfriend's DNA, wants hair samples for his electron microscope. But he's reckless with his science; life is an adventure to Hal, something to explore, and what the hell, maybe love is hyperbolic.
My suit unclicks in a rush of naked air, hot and dry like I've never felt between my legs, down to my feet where even my shoes bulge next to Hal's. He's managed to unseal himself, too, hard and unprotected under the open, empty sky.
But not empty — as Hal works his awkward and wild way inside me I see my first faint star, Sirius or Betelgeuse or Canopus, I don't know; I don't know where I'm looking as two minutes tick away, but at that one point of light, that one point that's been there, shining down unseen, all our lives.
Timothy Green lives in Los Angeles and works as editor of the poetry journal RATTLE. Poems are forthcoming in Confrontation, Connecticut Review, Florida Review, Mid-American Review, Nimrod, Pearl, and others. His first book-length collection, American Fractal, won the 2006 Phi Kappa Phi Award from USC.