by BRIAN HALL
He drives west across town. He’s lived here for almost thirty years. Since the downtown streets form a rectilinear grid, there are dozens of alternate routes of identical length to many destinations, and he’s staved off the boredom attendant on trivial errands by clocking different options. Thus he’s ended up knowing, without even trying, the timing of all the downtown traffic lights. It has given him insight into how traffic planners work. For example, the north-south street that runs directly from the high school and just misses the bolus of the pedestrian zone to connect with the east-west state route at the south end of town becomes predictably congested every day at 4:30 p.m., when the late-schedule school buses and the early commuting traffic coincide. As the problem worsened over several years, growing numbers of drivers, like Mark, shifted west one block. This alternate street was more residential, and had fewer traffic lights than the streets on either side of it. Suddenly, one of its lights was shifted from a 30-second red to a 75-second red. The street residents had probably complained to the city about the increased traffic, and the engineers had responded. With the longer red, the heavier flow on the street abated. But Mark waited, figuring that even the residents didn’t want a 75-second red at the end of their block. Sure enough, after three months, the light was reprogrammed to 45 seconds, and it has stayed there ever since.
Driving west, as he’s doing now, is easier because the lake starts at the north edge of town and three of the four state routes cross town laterally in order to reach the opposite shore. Mark flows along with the one-way traffic through the timed lights, marveling as always at the large fraction of people who run reds, and the 100 percent of cops who witness it and do nothing.
Tonight he’s eating at Leslie’s Cafe. He crosses the tracks and the inlet, parks on the small street paralleling the state route. Locks the car, circumambulates to note the inarguably unlit head- and taillights.
He’s never been inside Leslie’s Cafe, though it has been in business since before his arrival in town. It occurred to him about three years ago that he was always returning to the same few restaurants, and all of a sudden it seemed ridiculous that after living here for so long there were still so many places he had never tried. He decided that once a week he would make a point of eating in a new place. His choice would have nothing to do with expectations that the food might be good, he would just work his way exhaustively through every establishment, including all the chains he’d never eaten in, like Applebee’s and Chili’s.
“Just one? Sit wherever you’d like.” The waitress swings past him with four bottles of beer on a round black tray. The place is nearly empty. He goes to a table in the far corner next to the sliding glass doors that look out on a deck, closed for the winter. He examines the room. A dozen tables with wood-grain Formica tops and scarred rims. Wooden chairs with turned legs, worn pale at the tops of the backs where people have grabbed them to pull them in or out, or upend them on the tables for shift-end cleaning. The floor is yellow linoleum tile over an uneven substrate. A gleaming bar, untended, backed by shelves sparsely populated with bottles, and a cluttered counter near the door with an old-style cash register, also untended. Only one waitress that he can see, five other customers, four at one table, all men, drinking rather than eating, the fifth a woman working through a platter of french fries with a large hairy dog at her feet. A drop ceiling of fire-resistant fiber tiling, stained brown here and there, as custom seems to require. A stale smell of standing water coming from the kitchen, which he can glimpse through a swinging door next to the bar.
He is happy. He’s probably doing what they call “drinking in.”
The waitress brings him water and a menu. “Anything to drink for a start?”
She’s a slender middle-aged woman with an oval face, teaspoon chin, long straight nose, corded neck with a deep hollow just above the clavicle. Her blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail, but a number of wisps have worked free to curl like smoke around her ears and peek up from her crown. Her forehead and the hollow of her neck glow with perspiration. She’s wearing jeans that bunch at her knees, sneakers, a blue polo shirt with a collar faded to aqua.
“No, thank you, water is fine.”
“I’ll be back for your order in a minute.”
He watches her retreating back and tries to discount his feelings of attraction. He’s read somewhere that many men are attracted to waitresses, the hypothesis being that it stems from male desire to have females serve them unquestioningly, even constrainedly. He finds it disturbingly plausible.
The menu lists clam chowder, cream of tomato soup, baked haddock, meat loaf, N.Y. strip streak, etc. It could be from his childhood. He has a feeling that in a place like this the fish would not be good. Maybe not the meat, either. When the waitress comes back, he orders eggplant parmesan, chooses salad for the side. Can’t resist watching her walk away again, tucking the pencil behind her come-hither right ear.
At some point during his elementary school years, his class was shown a travel film about the island of Corsica. All Mark later remembered was an aerial shot of a car on a narrow road rounding the flanks of a vertiginous coastline. That one image remained in his mind, and for years afterward whenever he or his equally studious, unadventuresome friends idly speculated about traveling in the far future, he invariably said he wanted to go to Corsica. The world was a big place, so he liked having a specific plan. The last thing he wanted to do was investigate other options, still less find out more about Corsica, as either of those things might undercut his decision. (Only much later did it occur to him that the film clip in his head looked very much like a Matchbox car negotiating curves in a mountainous blanketscape.) So when, after four years of hard study intercalated by working summers, he finished college and saw that he had enough time before graduate school to carve out three weeks, he bought panniers, a tent, and a camp stove, packed up his ten-speed, and flew to Nice, where he caught a ferry to the fabled isle.
He still knew nothing about Corsica beyond the fact that it had mountains, a coastline, and roads (plus Napoleon). Using his terrible high-school French, he bought food and a map in the port town, then biked into the hills. With the aid of his map he chose the narrowest and wiggliest roads, biked over mountain ridges and down valleys filled with maquis, through small stone villages that seemed largely abandoned. The landscape was arid, but for the first week it rained every day. His tent was too small and his sleeping bag got wet and free-range cattle wandered into his unofficial campsites at dusk. The palms of his hands went numb from the handlebars and his ass hurt. He wasn’t unhappy, but he pondered his inexplicable foolishness at expecting some sort of magical encounter or revelation based on nothing but a decade-old image in his mind from a travelogue.
There came a day halfway through the tour that he spent battling headwinds, fixing a broken spoke, and getting run off a dirt road by an old priest in a battered station wagon. He stopped in a town to buy food and gauze bandages, waited out an afternoon shower under an awning, then biked higher into the hills. The clouds in the west were breaking up. As he looked for a possible campsite on either side of the rural road, he felt tired, out of sorts, bored. He came to a smaller dirt road that diverged to the right. He had learned by now that the best campsites in this steep and stony landscape were to be found along unused byways that once led to fields or hamlets now abandoned. He leaned his bicycle against a rock and walked up the side road, trying to determine if it was indeed unused. After about fifty meters he found a flat grassy patch that would make a fine sleeping spot. He turned around. He had a view all the way down the craggy mountain-slope to the sea in the west. Just above the horizon, the sun had broken free of clouds. He looked at the burning orange orb, the bruised purple clouds flanking it, the glittering sea, the rosy broken rocks of the Corsican mountains, the dark green vegetation glowing in the light, the one-lane rough mountain road curving along the contour line leading toward his bicycle, which also glowed, looking t
rustworthy and workaday with its loaded panniers, its bungee-corded sleeping bag and festooning water canisters. He was “hit between the eyes,” as they say, by the unaccountable beauty of everything.
He had to sit down for a minute to sort out what he was experiencing.
He realized that if he had seen this exact scene on a poster in a travel agency over the caption “Bike through an ancient land,” he would have been overwhelmed with desire, he would have yearned for that bicycle to be his, for that trip to be his. And what struck him now was that his principal feeling was still yearning. The paradoxical thought underlying his appreciation of how beautiful it all was, was still I wish I could be there. It occurred to him that beauty, maybe, is always a thing you can only see from the outside. And he has wondered ever since if the key to a happy life is to learn ever more deeply to be satisfied with standing off to the side, perceiving the beauty that is separate from you, but nearly everywhere.
His eggplant arrives, along with one of those metallic-green canisters of grated parmesan cheese (Kraft) and a smaller red-capped vial of pepper flakes (McCormick). It’s not particularly good, with the usual watery “red sauce” of cheap restaurants, devoid of discernible herbs, but it’s edible, and it would be unfair to condemn Leslie’s Cafe for serving him indifferent food when its cuisine had nothing to do with the reason he chose it. When the waitress returns to refill his water glass and asks him how he’s finding everything, he says, “Fine,” and means it.
As he eats, he studies the outdoor wooden deck on the other side of the sliding glass doors. It sags so much in the far left corner he wonders if it’s structurally stable. Judging from the arrayed tables and chairs under winter tarps, he assumes it’s still open in the warmer weather. Since it abuts the inlet, it’s probably the only tourist draw this shabby place has. He remembers reading in the local paper that the five-mile waterfront recreation trail, which the city has been piecing together from municipal and private land for years, was complete except for these few feet right here. The owner of Leslie’s Cafe (Leslie, presumably) adamantly refused to sell, or to allow a public right of way, saying the business wouldn’t survive the loss of the inlet frontage. Mark has seen letters in the paper decrying the owner, citing the rundown nature of the property and calling for the city to take the land through eminent domain. Mark gazes at the quasi-wreck of the deck, glances around the near-empty room. He disagrees with the letter writers. It has been the woman’s (the man’s?) property for many years. Leslie, he assumes, pays taxes, and has every right to serve soggy eggplant and mountainous platters of french fries to eccentric lone diners, with or without dogs.
The waitress pops through the swinging kitchen door and Mark glimpses behind her a perspiring man in a white shirt with a big belly, darkly grizzled. Perhaps the stubborn citizen himself. Good luck to him.
“Can I get you anything for dessert?”
“No, thank you.”
She scribbles on her pad, rips, smacks the slip down. “You can pay at the register.” Her name tag says “Fiona.” She smells like vanilla and frying oil. Her hands and forearms are long and sinewy. Her nails are unpainted, well cared for. She trots back into the kitchen, tray under arm.
He puts the tip on the table, threads through the room’s empty chairs. Two of the four beer drinkers—men in their forties, reddened by sun and maybe drink—follow him with impassive eyes. (Who’s that loon?) He stands at the empty register for a minute until one of the men behind him yells, “Fiona!” and she comes back out of the kitchen to ring him up. “Thank you,” he murmurs over his shoulder. They rumble a chuckle at him.
Outside, warmer air has blown in in gusts, scattering small branches on the pavement. He returns to his car, thinking about the tilting deck, and thus gravity again. Almost all the covers of the science fiction paperbacks of his youth had as their implicit theme the conquering of gravity. Their artwork depicted impossibly high and fragile towers, cantilevered platforms that would collapse without some anti-gravity field, ramps that rose and curved for glorious miles without supports. From glimpses he’s had of more recent movies, he’d say the impulse is still strong. He saw part of a movie that seemed to want to be taken as serious science—a sequence about time dilation in a strong gravity field was at least minimally plausible—but then the hero went to a planet where huge rafts of rock hung in the sky like clouds. Nearly everyone, it’s said, has dreams in which they can fly. Does some large fraction of all sci-fi stem simply from this? Those finned rockets taking off hourly from spaceports as easily as ships sailing from harbor, as though Earth’s gravity well were some piddling thing. In reality, the enormous energy expense of countering Earth’s gravity is at least as much of a limitation on space travel as the enormous distance between stars. Do people like to climb mountains because, when they look from the summits, they see what birds see? Or thrill looking into the Grand Canyon because the sheer rock walls seem to defy gravity? Mark read somewhere that in fancy restaurants the plating is all about getting the food to stand up improbably high.
Of course, Earth would not have an atmosphere without gravity. Earth would not exist. Without gravity, the universe would be an expanding formless region of hydrogen and helium atoms, salted with lithium. Mark wonders if defying gravity feels to humans like defying aging, defying death. (His increasingly saggy butt, his greater difficulty loping up three flights of stairs.) Maybe it’s no coincidence that angels are imagined to float in the clouds. In Mark’s dreams, in fact, he floats more often than he flies. He takes a deep breath, makes a delicate lifting gesture with his arms and rises an inch. Then with gentle undulating motions that have to be timed just right, he ascends another five or six feet. This usually takes place in his department offices, and he gets comfy just under the ceiling while his colleagues look up at him and marvel.
He drives home, zigging and zagging through the grid. He often likes to take the first left, then the first right, then the first left, doing it as long as the grid allows, and see where he ends up. Though by now he generally knows. His choice is constrained once he reaches the bottom of East Hill, so at that point he finds his street and ascends. People think gravity = death, when in fact gravity = life. The exorbitant demands of gravity may well defeat space exploration, but then, space = death. Life was made for planets.
He pulls into his driveway, cuts the engine. Gets out, circles the car. His house has once again not burned down in his absence. Enters through the kitchen door, disposes of keys and laptop in their proper places, keeps on his coat and shoes, grabs a beer and two towels, goes out onto his back deck (unsagging and, like the house, not in flames). When the trees are bare, as now, he has a good view of the sky. The temperature has risen into the forties and the clouds have been blown east. The gibbous moon is just past the zenith. Mark has always thought, for some reason he can’t articulate, that when the moon is like this, about 85 percent illuminated, it looks most like a face. A mother’s face, to be specific, looking in the direction of its shadowed edge. No discernible features, just something about the shape of the “head,” maybe the shadowed hint of an offside cheek. Actually, and he wouldn’t want to admit this to anyone, it seems so terribly sentimental, but he always thinks of a mother looking down into a crib. With love, actually. God knows why.
He spreads one towel over the metal-mesh chair and the other over the patio table, sits with his legs up, drinks his beer. 9:05 p.m. No spring birds yet, no crickets; the sound of water trickling downhill. He finds himself thinking again about the day’s lecture, all the things he wishes he could add. The only piece of evidence astronomers and exobiologists have to support the hypothesis that life arises easily on a habitable planet is that it seems to have arisen on Earth shortly after the planet’s surface cooled enough to make life possible, perhaps within 200 million years. But how robust is this argument? If you take the four billion years between the beginning of habitability and the present time and divide them into 200-million-
year intervals, you only get twenty. Therefore there’s a 1 in 20 likelihood, which is not insignificant, that life arose purely by chance in the first interval. And the argument is even weaker than that. Because the Sun is getting hotter, the Earth will be habitable for only about another billion years. It’s reasonable to assume that what we call habitable planets—Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars—have a similar window of approximately five billion years in which life might develop. On Earth, it took 3.5 billion years for prokaryotic life to figure out how to become eukaryotic and then multicelled. Then it took another 600 million to 800 million years for multicelled life to figure out how to develop enough intelligence to sit on back decks, drink beer, and mull over these questions. If those time frames are typical, then any planet that’s going to eventually host intelligent life has to get started somewhere within the first billion years of its habitable window. There’s a one in five probability that it will accomplish this within the first 200 million years.
He drains his beer, goes in, checks his email, talks Gerhardt off a ledge. Watches Fox News for an hour. Then sits at the piano and plays the middle ten variations of Goldberg.
Almost midnight. He meticulously brushes and flosses his teeth (his dentist heaps praise on him twice yearly), crawls into bed. This room, like his childhood bedroom, occasionally admits moonlight when the trees are bare. A rhomboid of light creeps just perceptibly across the floor. My discarded socks are bathed in moonlight . . .
