by Mark Salzman
Dad’s dream of retirement had finally come true, thirty-five years after he’d entered the workforce, and long after the last of our Volkswagen buses had rusted out and been towed away. For this comet-viewing trip he drove a Plymouth Voyager that tended, in spite of sharing its name with the highest-flying NASA probe of all, to stall at high altitudes. He’d brought this problem to the dealer’s attention many times without any positive results. The day before the comet was to hit we tried taking it up Mount Wilson on a dry run to find a good place to set up our telescopes, and sure enough the Voyager quit voyaging before we reached the top.
“Buy American,” he grumbled as we coasted back down to L.A. “I’d like to shove this car up Lee Iacocca’s ass.” The next night we played it safe and took my Toyota Corolla. This meant we could only take his more compact telescope.
Fifteen years had passed since Dad had delivered his memorable “Welcome” speech in Connecticut. As rites of passage go, it could hardly compare in terms of sophistication or drama to such time-tested ceremonies as First Communion, the bar mitzvah or adult circumcision without painkillers. Still, it worked; that moment had proved to be the watershed experience of my adolescence. As a child I could always count on my father to understand me, to know what it was like, to put himself in my shoes. On that afternoon a cycle was completed: he had let me know that I had finally managed to get his shoes on. Like the Wizard of Oz pinning a medal to the Cowardly Lion’s chest, my father merely drew attention, in his streamlined way, to what I already knew.
Another circular aspect to our exchange on that day was that after I’d tried, in a psychological sense, to get away from him for so many years, it was both ironic and cheering to run into Dad at the farthest point of my journey. If Norman O. Brown is right and we really aren’t ourselves, if we really are just masks representing our ancestors, my experience shows that there is a positive side to discovering that your individual soul is actually more of a corporation: being possessed means never having to say you’re alone.
At the same time, standing in my father’s shoes made it clear to me that while we had a lot in common, I was not entirely like him after all. The shoes didn’t quite fit. In fact, most people who know our family insist that in terms of personality, I resemble my father’s oldest brother, Ray, the wildly extroverted interior decorator, more than my wildly introverted father. But that’s another story.
I am a synthetic pessimist, not the real thing. I was seriously depressed over the pointlessness of existence for a year, but after I’d reached the point of exhaustion and knew there was no use going any further with it, I got sick of thinking about pointlessness. I didn’t solve the problem; I simply lost interest. I’d had enough of staring out the window of my apartment. I went back to college the following year and tried to switch my major to English, only to learn that I didn’t have enough credits to do so; I had to finish up in Chinese. I took the attitude that I would do so for the diploma and not take it too seriously, and as a result ended up enjoying myself more than I would have predicted.
For a senior project I translated a group of Tungli Shen’s vernacular Chinese poems, which gave me the opportunity to meet with him once a week for a whole year and chat over pizza and coffee in a restaurant across the street from the Asian languages building. It was a low-stress project; I liked the poems, and I could relax knowing that if I had any questions about any of them, I had access to the world’s undisputed authority on the subject.
Once he retired, my father was able to devote all his energies to his three major interests: painting, astronomy and getting angry whenever he reads in the paper or sees on television that public interest in the supernatural is on the rise.
“Did you hear that, Martha? Colleges are offering courses in astrology.” This was the afternoon of the comet crash, and he was anxious about our trip up Mount Wilson. Would it become cloudy? Would we get a flat tire? What if a carjacker figured out that there might be a few astronomers on the dark, lonely road up to the famous observatory?
Dad switched the channel, only to get coverage of a Christian youth rally to welcome the pope. The vein on his forehead looked ready to blow. “This guy! This is the guy who only now admits that Galileo was right, four hundred years after everybody else gets it straight. Yet he insists that there is no question that God thinks birth control is a bad idea. What is the matter with people?”
“Oh, Dad,” I said, knowing it wasn’t really a question but falling for the bait anyway. “Lots of people find it comforting to think there’s a Plan, and a Planner who cares. Why should people like us spoil it for them?”
“Well, sure it’s comforting, but that doesn’t mean they should believe it! I mean, if some people want to believe the Bible, or tarot cards, or those pathetic hustlers in the infomercials for Dial-a-Psychic, fine, but at least let ’em keep it in the privacy of their homes. Why does it have to make the news? If I wanted fairy tales, I’d get the Fairy Tale Channel. This is CNN, dammit. Why don’t they have anything on about Jupiter? The event of the century is about to happen and I have to watch a man who thinks he’s qualified to speak for God ride around in a motorized, bulletproof soap bubble with a dumb hat on. Bullshit!”
I tend to agree with Dad on these matters, but my sense of shame forces me to tone it down; it would be a little cheeky for a guy who used to wear a baldhead wig to make fun of the pope’s hat.
The hours crept by. We started driving right after dinner and got to the top of Mount Wilson just as Jupiter and Venus became visible in the evening sky. There were no clouds, fortunately. We set up Dad’s telescope and had a look. There was nothing on the surface of Jupiter that either of us could see.
“I knew it,” Dad said, nodding.
“It’s still early.”
We looked for several of our old summer favorites like the Lagoon and Ring nebulas, but the moonlight drowned them out. We had to be satisfied wandering through the thick parts of the Milky Way, marveling at the incomprehensible number of stars in our local arm of our spiral galaxy. If we could somehow view the whole galaxy at once, we would see more than four hundred billion of them. And the distances! If we could build a rocket that traveled a million miles an hour, it would still take us three thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri, the star closest to us. And the other stars? If a group of people could travel at the speed of light—a million miles every five seconds—they would have to celebrate thirty thousand birthdays together before reaching the center of our own galaxy. What about the other galaxies? There are at least a hundred billion of them out there; imagine how long it would take to put together even a modest tour.
Those of us attracted to astronomy look at the stars because we can’t help it; when we look at the night sky we are reminded that we are staring into the unknown, and that bothers us, leaves us feeling anxious and incomplete. We feel compelled to try, by gazing through our telescopes, to make the unknown known, to bring it into the realm of the familiar. We know that the astronauts and cosmonauts who have actually seen with their own eyes the earth from space all agree on one thing: concepts such as the brotherhood of humanity, the interdependence of all life and the fragility of our planet suddenly became much more real for them than they had been before. For them, this island earth went from being an intellectual experience to a personal one.
Astronomers would like to make the universe a personal experience, even though they know it cannot be done. To hope that any of us could experience the emptiness beyond the farthest galaxies, not to mention what might lie in universes entirely separate from our own—or, for that matter, the worlds hidden within each subatomic particle—is unrealistic given the very real limitations of time and space and our own senses.
Yet we keep looking through our telescopes and microscopes. Why, if we know we cannot be satisfied? Perhaps this question is related to the one I put to my father: How do we live if we know we must die? Why bother with any of this, since none of it will matter when the sun burns up and the earth turns
into a cold cinder? Why bother with anything?
The provisional answer to this question is: Because bothering is still the best game in town. I would even argue that for human beings, bothering is the only game in town. Stephen Hawking, the physicist, was asked if he thought everything in the universe, including our thoughts, behavior and sense of free will, was determined by the fundamental laws of physics. Yes, he answered; the universe is determined, but the equations are so staggeringly complex that no one can ever hope to solve them. He wrote:
I have noticed that even people who claim that everything is predestined and that we can do nothing to change it look before they cross the road.… One cannot base one’s conduct on the idea that everything is determined because one does not know what has been determined. Instead, one has to adopt the effective theory that one has free will and that one is responsible for one’s actions. This theory is not very good at predicting human behavior, but we adopt it because there is no chance of solving the equations arising from the fundamental laws. There is also a Darwinian reason that we believe in free will: a society in which the individual feels responsible for his or her actions is more likely to work together and survive to spread its values.
If this is true, then the theory of natural selection would explain why so many of us do care, why so many of us find that the struggle to understand ourselves and the world is worthwhile: because over many generations, we have been bred to be insatiably curious. Those of our ancestors who gave a damn and learned to understand the world a little better survived to reproduce more often than the ones who didn’t. So here we are: people who are genetically designed to wonder how things work, born into a world far too complex and far too chaotic to ever be completely understood.
Half an hour passed before Dad and I pointed the telescope at Jupiter again. This time we both thought we saw something coming into view on one of the edges, but we couldn’t be sure. The minutes crawled by. As Jupiter turned on its axis, the far edge of the planet slowly came more clearly into view, and sure enough, there was a round, dark spot on the surface that hadn’t been there before. We were exhilarated.
“Wait a minute,” Dad said, coming back from the car where he had checked a packet of the information he’d sent away for from Sky and Telescope magazine. He looked back through the telescope. “Shit,” he said. “This isn’t it.”
The spot we were looking at was on the wrong hemisphere! We’d heard on the radio before we left the house that several of the comet fragments had hit, and had landed on the northern hemisphere as predicted. Together we checked the packet of information; no doubt about it, the comet would strike the northern hemisphere. We looked back through the telescope. Now there were two of the dark spots, but they were on the southern hemisphere.
“Are you sure that couldn’t be the northern hemisphere?” I asked. The uncertainty came from the fact that reflecting telescopes show their images in reverse; when I looked at the spots they were on the top of the planet, so it felt as if they were on the northern hemisphere, even though I knew better.
“Nope. I know what these are,” Dad said, sighing.
“What?”
“They’re shadows. Two of Jupiter’s moons must be in front of the planet. Look how round and distinct those spots are, and how huge. There’s no way that the comet could have done that. They’re just shadows.”
We were both disappointed, but the night was still young. We searched the northern hemisphere for hours, even making sketches every fifteen minutes in case something came up that we didn’t notice immediately, but there was nothing. Both of us kept looking back at those two dark spots; what if we were wrong somehow, and they were the real thing after all? We wanted to believe this, but wanting something to be true isn’t the same thing as believing it is true. At midnight, feeling tired and realizing we had a long drive home, we gave up.
We all crave certainty, we dream of serenity, and we all want to discover our true identities. The Zen people like to ask, What was your Original Face before you were born? Who were you before your parents taught you how to be “yourself”? Most of us tend to feel that if it could be proved, once and for all, that we shall never know the answers to those questions, and that our species was simply not designed for serenity or certainty, then our whole human enterprise—the search for meaning and understanding—would be rendered futile and pathetic. But is this really true? Doesn’t it make sense that if we were designed to search, there could be nothing more horrifying for our species than to reach an end to all these searches? Wouldn’t this make all of us incredibly bored, not to mention boring? Can anyone imagine anything duller than not having anything to wonder about? The possibility of our being forever unable to know everything all at once may be the best design feature of this whole human experiment.
When Dad and I got home from Mount Wilson, Mom and Jessica were still up.
“Did you have fun?” Mom asked.
“We didn’t see much, I’m afraid.”
“Too bad! Jessica and I watched Tales from the Crypt. It was so awful, but I kind of liked it. Do we get that channel in Tucson, Joe?”
I had left my mother, the Bach specialist, alone with my wife, who thinks that Jason from the Friday the 13th movies is a postmodern antihero, for a mere six hours, and look what had happened! I imagined having to do an intervention, storming her practice room and finding her watching Hellraiser videos instead of playing the harpsichord.
• • •
The next morning I got up and found my dad sitting in the living room reading the paper. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, shaking his head.
“What?”
He pointed to a photograph of Jupiter taken from the Hubble Space Telescope. “We were looking at it last night. Those spots. That was it.”
“But …?”
“It’s the new telescope. It’s a Cassegrain, not like our old Newtonian. I forgot it has a prism right in front of the eyepiece to correct for the reversed image. I’m still not used to it, I guess.”
We had been looking at the spectacle of the century all night, but without being able to enjoy it.
“That’s not all,” Dad continued. “The weather forecast for tonight is clouds.”
“Oh. Bummer.”
“You could say that.”
We stared at the pictures splashed all over the front page. There the spots were, just as we’d seen them, each of them bigger than the earth.
“Astronomers all over the world were elated and amazed,” the article raved. “Few expected it to be this spectacular.”
“This is like the eclipse in Canada all over again,” Dad said.
“No, it’s not that bad. We did see it, after all. We just didn’t, you know—”
“Really see it,” he interrupted.
Which was when I saw the opportunity sitting there like a plump, flightless bird. It was hardly sporting, but I couldn’t resist. “Don’t be crushed, Dad. You see, not everything works out the way you want it to. You learn to live with it, though.”
He looked up from the paper and gave me a long, slow burn with his eyes.
“Smart-ass.”
For Joseph Arthur Salzman,
artist, astronomer, social worker, beloved father
and good-natured pessimist, whose reaction to this
book was to say that he enjoyed it, but felt that my
portrayal of him was inaccurate. I put him, he
complained, in an excessively positive light.
BOOKS BY MARK SALZMAN
Iron & Silk
The Laughing Sutra
The Soloist
Lost in Place
MARK SALZMAN
LOST IN PLACE
Mark Salzman’s previous books include Iron & Silk, an account of the two years he spent in China teaching English and studying martial arts, and two novels, The Laughing Sutra and The Soloist, the latter a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Mr. Salzman lives with his wife and their
various animals in Los Angeles. Besides writing, he practices the cello every day in the hope that one day he will be able to play so well that his cats won’t flee the room.
Though he enjoyed revisiting his past in this book, Mr. Salzman is grateful that so few photographs of him as a teenager survive.
ALSO BY MARK SALZMAN
THE SOLOIST
A mesmerizing story about music, meditation, and murder, The Soloist is the story of a once promising cellist who finds his life radically altered while serving as a juror at a murder trial for the brutal slaying of a Buddhist monk and as the teacher to a pupil whose brilliant musicianship reminds him of his own vanished past.
“Quietly powerful … both absorbing and touching.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Fiction/0-679-75926-3
IRON & SILK
Charming and marvelously evocative, this acclaimed bestseller recounts the true adventures of a young martial arts student in China—training under a ferocious master of wushu, trying to convey the plot of E.T. to a roomful of English students, and everywhere glimpsing the hidden face of China.
“Gong fu, or ‘skill that transcends mere surface beauty’ … no other term is as apt for a book that describes China and its people with such deftness and delight.”
—Time
Adventure/Travel/0-394-75511-1
THE LAUGHING SUTRA
In this beguiling novel, Mark Salzman follows the adventures of Hsun-ching, a naive but courageous orphan, and the mysterious Colonel Sun, who together travel from mainland China to San Francisco, risking everything to track down an elusive Buddhist scripture called The Laughing Sutra.
“A rich blend of fantasy, philosophy, history and romance.… Salzman [is] a master storyteller.”
