The Stone Loves the World

by BRIAN HALL

  Her eye lingers on Mark a hundred yards away, talking to the men. Yes, he’s twelve years older, and there’s still a part of her that’s slightly embarrassed by that. But it’s a free fucking country, right? It works well for her that they live 230 miles apart. They’ve been seeing each other every second weekend for about a year now, alternating between Ithaca and New York. He still works all the time, but let’s face it, she does, too. And Mette doesn’t seem to mind his occasional intrusions. Saskia was surprised at first, but probably shouldn’t have been. They invited Mette to come with them to see the eclipse, but she declined. “I’d just be in the way of the two lovebirds,” she hooted. That word is a source of never-failing mirth to her.

  The glare out here is ridiculous. Saskia wanders back to hunker down in the narrow strip of shade at the bottom of the fire station’s rear wall. The young men announce that the eclipse has begun. The three young people are taking turns looking through the telescope and Mark is holding a rectangle of welder’s glass in front of his eyes. He gave Saskia a piece to call her own, so she leaves the shade to look up. Sure enough, in the ghostly pale image in the midnight window, there’s a neat round bite in the sun’s side. What perfect teeth the Moon has! Eat everything on your plate, little Moon!

  She sits back in the shade and after a few minutes Mark joins her. “It’s good of you to come with me for this,” he says.

  “Not at all. I’ve always wanted to see a solar eclipse.”

  “Still, aren’t rehearsals starting tomorrow?”

  “I’ll be there in time.” She’s flying back to New York City tonight. He’s taking a train to Syracuse. She takes hold of his hand. (She has always loved his hands.) “We’re coming up on our first-year anniversary.”

  “Unless it’s our twenty-third,” he says.

  “Hm. Let me think about that. I have to decide which is less depressing.”

  He looks pained. “Why depressing?”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean—” She has no idea what she means. After a moment she says, “It’s a strange path, is all. But it’s not like I value conventional paths.”

  He waits for her to go on. One advantage of his halting conversational style is this ability to wait. She often gets the sense he would wait for her forever.

  What she is thinking: it is her nature to be ambivalent, and it is his to be ardently attached. This worries her. She fears she will hurt him. Of course she can’t say that. (If he were thinking it, he would ineptly say it. But he wouldn’t think it.) She wonders if her comment sprang from a regret for lost time. If so, it’s mainly regret that she’s getting older. Maybe regret that their twelve-year age difference doesn’t mean anything, now that she’s no spring chicken. Regret that no fellow old codger will look at them in a restaurant and grossly give Mark the thumbs-up for scoring such a young hottie.

  She considers the possibility that, as she’s getting older, she values sexiness less. Sexiness always has an element of mystery, and there’s nothing mysterious about him. Maybe what she values now is crystal clarity, rather than the soft blur of romance. She’s grown impatient with mating games. Spit it out! Time’s a wastin’! She trusts completely that he will always tell her whatever he’s thinking, that he will never lie to her. It makes her feel safe. Someone might say—maybe she would say it herself—that that’s what a father figure does. But she would like to think that that’s also what a partner should do. There’s something so unsexy about it, it’s kind of kinky.

  She says, “I’ve wondered if Mette, when she took off like that, had an ulterior motive without being aware of it. You know, the heart has its reasons, which Reason knows not.”

  “Isn’t that Pascal?”

  “Yeah, you know him because he was a mathematician.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “Anyway, speaking of Mette’s reasons, you can pick your movie version. Would you rather be Brian Keith or Dennis Quaid?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “ILYGTFY.”

  “Still lost.”

  “I’ll Let You Google That For Yourself.”

  “Hey, Professor,” one of the young men calls. “How long did you say totality will be?”

  “Two minutes, thirty-seven seconds.”

  “Why does it vary?”

  He gets up and goes to them, happy as a clam. She stays where she is. The heat seems slightly less intense, but not enough yet. She thinks ahead to the rehearsals for Joan, Maid, which (egad! fuck!) she is indeed directing at the SoHo theater whose artistic director she calmly convinced, or maybe cajoled, stalked, and overwhelmed. In the movies, long-gestating artistic endeavors by the protagonist are always rewarded. The excruciatingly squeezed-out first novel becomes a best seller, the edgy smartphone movie made on a shoestring conquers Sundance. Whereas in this sublunary world she’s still not sure whether her play is any good, and even if it’s good, critics may dislike it for capricious or malicious reasons, and even if critics like it, it will probably not run long, nor make any money, as few plays do. The fact is, artistic careers are an uncertain trudge, with no discernible narrative arc.

  * * *

  • • •

  The bright light is fractionally lessening. One of the young men says, “Listen, you can hear crickets. They’re getting fooled by the eclipse.”

  “Those are cicadas,” Mark says. For the umpteenth time he marvels at all the simple things people don’t notice. Cicadas sound nothing like crickets. These fellows remind him of many of his students nowadays: polite, breezy, uncaringly ignorant of their ignorance. But that’s yet another old-fart thought, so he banishes it and peers again through the welder’s glass. The sun now looks like a crescent moon. Approximately twenty minutes to go.

  He adores solar eclipses. He spoke unkindly of eclipse chasers to Saskia this morning, but he’s one, too. He has unblushingly finagled half a dozen free rides on ocean eclipse cruises as the eminent lecturer. His only difference from most other chasers is his desire to be alone when the event happens. To hoard it all to himself, he supposes. He glances briefly at Saskia, then returns to the crescent. Well, no, now he’s being unfair to himself. His desire to be alone at important phenomenological moments arises, he’s pretty sure, from the fact that he can’t concentrate properly on external events when he’s in close proximity with another person. This is especially true when the person in question is someone he cares about. He hopes Saskia understands that. When he’s near her, most of his thoughts revolve around her.

  It pains him that his mother died with a bad opinion of Saskia. “I’ll never understand what’s wrong with that woman,” was the way she invariably phrased it. How could anyone not love her Marky-lark? He’s thankful that his mother loved him, but her doting locked out Susan, and it might have also locked out Saskia, even if she and Mark had become a couple twenty-three years ago. How could anyone be good enough for her Marky-lark? His mother tended to see everything as absolutes of light and dark.

  As far as he knows, she never got to witness a total eclipse. He remembers being ten, standing on the back porch of the Massachusetts house with a pinhole camera made out of two sheets of paper. It was the eclipse of March 7, 1970, and his family could have experienced totality if they had only driven the ninety miles to Woods Hole and taken the ferry to Nantucket. But he can easily imagine his father expressing horror at the thought of all those cars backed up at the Sagamore Bridge, with another traffic jam waiting outside the gates of the Steamship Authority. “It’ll be the biggest mess you ever saw,” he would have said, and that would have ended discussion. So they stayed in Lexington and he and his parents—who knows where Susan was—stood on the back porch with their punctured papers, and although the eclipse at that location was 96.5 percent of totality, Mark was astonished, and crushingly disappointed, at how little difference it made in the general light level. Equivalent to a sto
rm cloud passing. Looking back, he wonders whether, or how much, his mother shared his disappointment. Whenever anything related to astronomy came up, she always said she was glad she had chosen motherhood over a career. As a kid, he swallowed that hook, line, and sinker.

  By viewing eclipses, one can, in a way, travel back in time, since nearly identical eclipses happen every eighteen years, eleven days, and eight hours. He’ll have a chance to view the 1970 eclipse properly on April 8, 2024. The path of totality, looking virtually the same in the shape it will inscribe on the Earth’s surface, will have shifted slightly to the west, so instead of driving to Nantucket, he and Saskia will be able to see it in western New York. He doesn’t want to curse the luck that he doesn’t believe in, but he can’t help imagining that they will still be together. He wishes his mother could be there, partly to see the eclipse that she missed, and partly to give her a chance to change her opinion about Saskia. As an adult he became his family’s failed peacemaker, and he realizes he’s still trying to carry out that mission, even though everyone else in his family is dead.

  Ten more minutes. There was a contrail in the sky that was worrying him, but it has drifted south. The sky around the sun is completely clear. This eclipse is going to be a beauty. Saskia’s first! Humans are so fortunate to have such a large moon. As is all life on Earth, probably—such an unusually massive satellite has prevented the Earth from undergoing occasional chaotic motion in the tilt of its axis. A plausible theory proposes that complex life might not have arisen if the seasons had been as unstable as they would have been without the Moon. And for humans, who love to look skyward and dream—and surely their dreaming gave birth to astronomy—there’s the sheer coincidence that, while the Sun’s diameter is 400 times that of the Moon, the Moon is 400 times closer to Earth. Thus this nearly perfect alignment. What are the chances? The Mediocrity Principle goes out the window again.

  It won’t last very long, cosmically speaking. The Moon is moving away from Earth about four centimeters each year, so in 600 million years, there will be no more total eclipses. Solar radiation will have increased by 5 percent, leading to an increase in global mean temperature of ten degrees Celsius. There’s no way to predict greenhouse warming from this remove, but there’s a good chance life will have retreated to the oceans by then. If not, then probably during the next 200 or 300 million years. Complex life on Earth is about halfway through its allotted span. What, too, are the chances that his life would occur at this halfway point?

  At that thought, all of a sudden, just as it happened to him last year when he was driving to the recycling center, his awareness suddenly blooms. An elation, an inflation—something firing ecstatically in the brain. He feels, really feels, that he is alive on this Earth, that he is standing at a fulcrum. This place is important, this moment is precious, something momentous is about to happen. One order will collapse and another, possibly a better, will arise. He feels as if he can actually sense the stretch of billions of years. Life on Earth has a new chance every few million years. It has dozens more chances to get it right. His nanosecond life means nothing, yet he feels incredibly lucky to be alive.

  He looks at Saskia, sitting in the shade. She stands up and comes to him. She kisses him. “I know you want to be by yourself for totality. There’s a great view from the far end of the field. You should go there.” She points.

  “Do you want to come with me?”

  “No, it’s fine. Go on.”

  He gives her a grateful glance and squeezes her hand. “Remember not to look with the naked eye until—”

  “I remember.”

  * * *

  • • •

  She watches him execute his little-boy wave in the direction of the young people and start off, periodically walking backward with his head up and the slot-shaped welder’s glass glued to his eyes. He looks like Gort, in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

  She waits a few seconds, then also moves away from the young people, to the point where the pavement ends and the field begins. The darkness is rising faster. She looks through the glass and sees that the Moon is now covering almost all of the sun. She thinks of the Fenris Wolf and Ragnarok.

  “Here it comes!” one of the young men calls out.

  Saskia looks to east and west, north and south, to the ground at her feet. The light is failing uncannily, like a rheostat being turned down. It’s nothing like a sunset. The Moon’s shadow is approaching at 1500 miles per hour. Mark told her that if you stand at a high enough vantage point you can see the edge of the darkness racing toward you. It’s thrilling to feel how huge the Moon is, how fast she moves. You can almost imagine a roar.

  Through the welder’s rectangle she sees the thinnest sliver, then a single strand of hair, then nothing. She takes away the dark glass and looks face to face. The total eclipse is a furiously glaring eyeball of deepest black, something sinister and evil. Or maybe it’s a wondrous black hole, shining at the edges with Hawking radiation.

  She has two minutes. She gazes at the crystalized ebony vegetation all around, at the weird sky of glistening iron, at the black hole she has journeyed millions of miles to see. She is standing on an alien world, where the native intelligent life form is not self-destructive, where an insignificant creature such as herself has the luxury to worry only about her art and her loved ones.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to Sarah Chalfant and Paul Slovak, for their support through the dry years. Presumably it’s a cognitive bias, but I’m convinced I have the best agent and the best editor in this solar system. Also thanks to Elizabeth Kim and Madeleine Moss, for multiple readings of the manuscript and invaluable advice. And to two old friends, Paul Cody and J. Robert Lennon, for additional feedback, plus a shout-out to the latter for wisely suggesting a different chapter order.

  About the Author

  Brian Hall is the author of the novels The Dreamers, The Saskiad, I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company and Fall of Frost, in addition to three works of nonfiction, including The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia and Madeleine's World. His journalism has appeared in publications such as Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

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