The Stone Loves the World

by BRIAN HALL

  The clouds have continued to break up and the light has strengthened so that the stars are now invisible and the clear parts of the sky are turning a bluish white. She looks across the bright mirror-plane of water, the moiré-like pattern of grays and mauves and pinks on the liquid surface fractally receding toward the molten horizon. As a programmer of visual effects for computer games, she is often struck by the beautifully designed and rendered detail of the world. She stands there for fifteen minutes, her mind more or less a blank, or maybe crammed so full of half-formed thoughts jostling each other that the cumulative result is white noise. Maybe this is her life passing in front of her eyes.

  She stands some more.

  In Oops!, this would be the moment when two options would appear on the screen, waiting for a mouse-click: (Jump In) (Don’t Jump In)

  She stands some more.

  She doesn’t jump in.

  She turns around. She had an inkling last night, when she regretted that she would never finish Newman. Goddamnit, the old man’s idea about having a project. She walks back toward the shore. She has a feeling, though, that the real decision happened earlier, sometime during the bus or the plane rides. She gave up the idea without acknowledging it to herself. The blow to her trivial ego grew older and less interesting each day, while the great world kept renewing itself.

  She picks her way back across the band of seaweed and driftwood, regains the beach. She turns to look back across the ice. In Seattle, when she wondered if she was play-acting, she felt self-disgust. But maybe she needed to play-act in order to discover how she really felt. Her mother would understand. She’s also reminded of something her father once told her about his own father, this Vernon fellow. Vernon liked to say (her father said) that if you’re ever unsure about a choice, the smart thing to do is flip a coin, because the moment the coin is in the air you know which way you want it to fall.

  She walks back east along the shore. The sun is about to rise. She’s hungry. Maybe the old man forgot to tell her to eat first, maybe she’s confusing hunger for life with hunger for a french fry. As she approaches the mill, there’s a moment when a sail catches sunlight on its tip at the top of its sweep, then thirty seconds later the whole face of the building is lit and across the ice and water the top edge of the sun blazes in her eye. She doesn’t really want to talk to the old man, but she should at least say goodbye.

  As she comes around the side of the mill he sticks his head out the door. “Breakfast is ready.” He waves her triumphantly up the steps. Inside, there’s fresh coffee, eggs, oatmeal, yogurt, biscuits, butter, cheese. The table is set for two.

  Of course he would win either way. If she came back, she’d be amazed at his foreknowledge, and if she didn’t, who would know? Lila would never tell.

  He stands beside her, beaming as though he gives a shit whether she lives or dies, as though by “predicting” her survival he somehow conjured it, and now her life is his. She turns on her heel. “Goodbye, old man.” She goes back down the stairs and keeps on along the path through the marsh.

  He calls after her, “I called from the depot last night when I went to buy coffee. I left a message for your mother. She’s probably on her way here. You don’t want her to travel all this way for nothing, do you?” Mette keeps walking. He calls again, “Don’t prove all the people right who say that those who contemplate suicide are selfish!” But his voice is already fainter.

  New cloudbanks move in as she crosses the island, and by the time she arrives at the landing, the sun is gone. So is the morning ferry, which is fifty yards from the slip and chugging in the wrong direction. The afternoon ferry doesn’t leave for seven hours. The little depot, which Mette would call a convenience store, opens at 9:00 a.m. In addition to basic supplies and a wide array of candy, it serves simple hot-food items, including french fries. Mette polishes off a greasy basketful, then tries the soft-serve ice cream. Reads Newman and Wishner at one of the two Formica-topped tables. She keeps expecting to look up and see the old man coming down the road waving a wand at her. But presumably he’s the type who rejects you so fast after you reject him that later nobody can remember the order.

  If her mother’s on the way, she probably sent a text, but Mette hasn’t bothered to download the app that would let her access it. Or maybe she’s trying to sneak up on her, worried she’ll move farther off if she sees the butterfly net. There always has to be so much drama.

  She gets on the 3:30 ferry with the one other passenger—could it be the same woman?—and stands in the back and watches the island recede. She would like to put the old man out of her thoughts, but is finding it difficult. It annoys her that for all his cheap tricks to impress her, he actually did impress her. Still, he will fade, since she has no intention of ever seeing him again. Alex will be harder.

  The ferry arrives at the quaint half-timbered town at 4:30. The train station is a fifteen-minute walk away, and there’s a train back to Copenhagen at 5:02. Mette buys a ticket at the kiosk. There are only two platforms. Mette stands on one of them, and at 4:55, a train from Copenhagen stops along the other. After a few moments of humming and hissing, it slides to the left like a piece of stage scenery, and behind it she sees, among the crowd of dispersing passengers, a tall thin man and a short curvy woman standing together, the man looking lost, the woman getting her bearings. Her parents.

  July 4, 2016

  Data Set: Echo

  To S. W. on her birthday—left off the margin of a yearbook twenty-two years ago

  My father used to go out into the yard at night to watch Echo cross the sky.

  The year was 1960.

  I was a baby inside the house, with my mother.

  My mother was the one who had wanted to be an astronomer.

  * * *

  • • •

  Echo was the world’s first communications satellite.

  It was a balloon of aluminum-coated Mylar, 100 feet in diameter.

  It was beautiful, looking like a perfect sphere of solid silver.

  On August 12, 1960, a microwave transmission from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was bounced off Echo and successfully received at the Bell Labs horn antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey.

  The United States wanted to change international law to allow satellites, unlike airplanes, to fly over foreign countries.

  Highlighting a non-military purpose for satellites would help establish this new legal right.

  Echo transmitted the first ever live voice communication by satellite, a message from President Eisenhower: “This is one more significant step in the United States’ program of space research and exploration being carried forward for peaceful purposes.”

  Echo provided the United States with more-accurate astronomical reference points.

  This improved our military’s ability to target Moscow with ICBMs.

  My father hated the military.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next-generation communications satellite, Telstar 1, was put in orbit in 1962.

  Because the Telstar satellites required larger ground antennae, the Holmdel Horn Antenna was out of a job.

  In 1964, two Bell Labs scientists began to use it as a radio telescope.

  Arno Penzias studied intergalactic radio sources and Robert Wilson studied radio sources from within the Milky Way.

  Since Penzias and Wilson were trying to analyze extremely weak signals, they were bothered by background noise.

  Their tests showed that the noise did not come from New York City.

  Nor was it thermal radiation from the ground.

  Because it didn’t vary with the seasons, and appeared to be uniform in all directions, Penzias and Wilson thought it must be generated by the telescope itself.

  A pair of pigeons was nesting in the telescope.

 
Pigeon shit is dielectric.

  Penzias and Wilson captured the pigeons, relocated them thirty miles away, and scraped the shit out of the telescope.

  Pigeons are pigeons: they have a homing instinct.

  The mating pair came back and nested in the telescope again.

  Penzias and Wilson took a shotgun and killed the pigeons.

  Years later, Penzias remembered that it was Wilson’s decision to shoot the pigeons.

  Wilson remembered that it was Penzias’s decision.

  Scientists are human.

  * * *

  • • •

  Getting rid of the pigeons failed to get rid of the background radio noise.

  This noise had an equivalent temperature of approximately three degrees above absolute zero.

  It was driving Penzias and Wilson crazy.

  Penzias related his troubles to a friend.

  This friend had read a preprint paper from a Big Bang theorist named Jim Peebles.

  The Big Bang theory had not yet been widely accepted, partly because no one knew how to test for it.

  Peebles suggested in his paper that one way to test for it would be to look for the radiation remaining from the original explosion.

  This radiation would emanate from all directions and, after 13.7 billion years of redshifting, it would have an equivalent temperature of approximately three degrees above absolute zero.

  Peebles and his colleagues were planning to set up an experiment to test this theory.

  Penzias called Peebles and said, “Don’t bother.”

  In 1978, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

  * * *

  • • •

  Pigeons mate for life, and so, alas, did my parents.

  I am my parents’ son.

  But echoes can rebound in unexpected ways.

  At this moment, every cubic centimeter of space in the universe has approximately three hundred photons passing through it that are a remnant of the Big Bang.

  A poet might call this the leftover cry of the universe being born.

  In 1965, when my mother was stuck in the house with me, and my father was out in the yard hoping to see Telstar 2 fly over, I sometimes looked at the static on the TV screen when it was tuned to a dead channel.

  Approximately 1 percent of that static was the echo of the birth of the universe, dancing in front of my eyes in the form of tiny silver spheres.

  If only I had known.

  Instead, I turned the dial to watch Lost in Space.

  August 21, 2017

  On the interstate out of St. Louis, Saskia reads laughing the electronic message board set up on the verge. “Solar Eclipse Today. No Photographing While Driving.”

  “You’d think that would be obvious,” he says.

  “That’s why it’s funny.” Her mission, should she choose to accept it: train him to get a joke faster. They’re heading for the town of St. Clair. They had a number of choices, but the forecast called for clouds around the time of the eclipse and St. Clair promised luck. “You don’t believe in luck,” she said, when he suggested it.

  “I don’t, but there’s a great story about Niels Bohr, or maybe it was Freeman Dyson—”

  “The horseshoe. You’ve already told me that one.”

  “It’s a great story.”

  “It is.” She could tell he was dying to tell it again, but he’s getting better about that. Now she’s looking up the eponymous saint on her phone. (He’s driving. Being a passenger still makes him nervous. Her mission, should she choose . . . ) “Saint Clare of Assisi,” she announces. “Hm, different spelling. Maybe a French-English thing.” She skims. “Yeah, this is the right gal . . . Looks like she first had the idea of devoting herself to Christ right around the time her parents wanted her to marry.”

  “A familiar theme.”

  “Another fun fact, she’s the patron saint of television.”

  He’s silent for several seconds. Then he says, “We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity.”

  “The Outer Limits.”

  “Saint Clare, clarity—get it?”

  “I got it.”

  “That show scared the crap out of me when I was a kid.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  In St. Clair, the service station next to the interstate is packed. A farmer is hawking watermelons for five dollars apiece off a flatbed truck. It’s 10:30 a.m., ninety degrees. In the town center locals have set up booths in their front yards and are selling lemonade, baked goods, balloons, ice cream, eclipse glasses. The streets are packed with heat-stunned pedestrians trying to figure out how to have fun. “This is great,” Saskia says. “Let’s stop for a few minutes.”

  A church is charging $25 for Eclipse Parking in its lot. He makes a puzzled comment, then parks on the other side of the street for free. Saskia wanders around soaking up the atmosphere. “Eclipse cookies!”

  “Aren’t those just half moon cookies?”

  “Read the sign, dummy.”

  Saskia talks to a couple of people and finds out that the town council voted to hold a three-day music festival to take advantage of their position in the path of totality. Now they’re hoping to repeat the festival every year. “Good luck with that,” Mark says to them.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Saskia says, as they walk away, “traditions have to start somehow.”

  “This town is in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Says the man who lives in Ithaca, New York.”

  “From the vantage point of New York City I guess all towns look alike.”

  “From those giddy heights, yes.”

  They get back in the car and head east out of town. Mark wants to be in a place where they won’t be distracted by other people. “Eclipse chasers like to cluster together and compare telescopes and boast about how many eclipses they’ve seen. They hoot and holler at the moment of totality as though it’s a show staged solely for their enjoyment.”

  “Like the money shot in a porno film,” she says.

  He blushes. “I guess so.”

  “Oh man! It barely fits!”

  “Please, stop. Eclipses are wonderful.”

  “Sorry.”

  He google-viewed the area ahead of time and found a fire station along a county road eight miles east of St. Clair that had a paved open area on the off-road side. Saskia is back on her phone. “The media is calling this The Great American Eclipse.”

  He makes an unhappy sound. “That’s the kind of appropriation I’m talking about.”

  “We could sell hats. Make the Eclipse Great Again. It would be a MEGA-eclipse.”

  A silence follows. References to Trump’s election still tend to kill conversation. Then he says, “I’m taking the long view. In a million years, the continents will barely have budged and life will have started diversifying again.”

  “One generation passes away and another generation comes, but the earth abides forever.”

  “Isn’t that George R. Stewart?”

  “It might be, if he was one of the kings of Israel. It’s from Ecclesiastes.”

  “Another thing I’ve never read.”

  “You should. It’s Epictetus before Epictetus.”

  “My next assignment.”

  “You liked Epictetus.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t. I like assignments. Here we are.” He turns into the access area alongside the station and gets out to ask permission from the volunteer firefighters on duty. Climbs back in. “They say no problem, we should park in the gravel lot on the other side.”

  They leave the windows wide open so the seats won’t melt, carry knapsacks with water an
d lunch toward the back of the concrete-block building. As they round the corner, three young people setting up a telescope come into view. Mark hesitates for a fraction of a second, then continues toward them. It turns out the two men were college roommates six years ago, while the woman is a girlfriend of one of them. They rendezvoused in Chicago last night and got up at five this morning to drive down. One roommate majored in economics, the other in communications. The woman is a photographer. The men do most of the talking, about their roomie days, their corporate jobs, their ideas, their ambitions, while Saskia teases out from the woman that an exhibit of her photography just opened at a prestigious gallery in New York City. “Wow,” she says, “what’s your name?” She googles it. The woman’s a young star.

  The sky is mostly clear, but Mark must have mentioned the possibility of clouds, because one of the young men says, “I’ve heard the sky often clears right before an eclipse.”

  “Why would it do that?” Mark asks.

  “Something to do with the air cooling.”

  “If anything, that would have the opposite effect.”

  “That’s right,” the other young man chimes in, “cool air can’t hold as much moisture as warm air.”

  “It’s not a question of holding moisture,” Mark says, “it has to do with the kinetic energy of the water molecules—”

  Saskia wanders off before the two young men decide to beat Mark to death. The eclipse doesn’t begin for another twenty minutes, and then it takes ninety minutes to reach totality, so she’s got plenty of time. She walks to the edge of the paved area and continues across a grassy field until she comes to a line of trees. Turns to look back. She’s standing at the higher end of a long rise in the terrain, so she can see two or three miles westward. Bright green fields and darker woods, low hills. Ferociously hot haze. Hurry up, Moon, and show this fucking sun a thing or two.