by Lydia Netzer
“Are you telling me she’s lying on the floor at the bottom of the stairs?”
“Yes, but the coroner will take her away soon. I want you to know that I’m going to take care of whatever needs to be taken care of here. Don’t worry about anything like that.”
Irene paused. She felt like there was too much oxygen in the room. Her lungs just kept filling up and replenishing her oxygen supply and then going back, inexorably, for more oxygen. It was like the damn brooms at the well. She could see her mother, curled innocently on the floor next to the bottom step, one hand closed under her chin, one fist open, palm exposed, as if to say, “Come with me.”
“Is she broken? Did she break—” Irene began to cough.
“We don’t know the cause of death. She may have had a stroke at the top of the stairs, a heart attack, we just don’t know.”
There were times when her mother would say, I’m dying. I need to get a haircut and make a will. Irene would just roll her eyes at that. That was before Irene had said, I am leaving Toledo and I will never come back. I will never speak to you again.
“I’m so, so sorry. I know you and your mom were not close,” said the rector.
“We were close,” said Irene. She choked back a sob.
“Of course, of course. She spoke of you so often.”
The rector said a few words to someone else in the room there in her mother’s house in Toledo. She imagined him stepping nimbly over the corpse of her mother, trotting adroitly over to the front door, stepping out onto the porch. She could hear traffic sounds. He was probably wearing a bespoke suit. He was such a natty dresser.
“I don’t want to come home,” said Irene stupidly. She didn’t know what else to say.
“Really?” Blake Allen wanted to know. “Your mother always said it was your dream to come back to Toledo.”
Her dream was to come back to Toledo, and work at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy. But it was not something she could ever do while her mother was there, or while her experiment was unsuccessful. But now …
“I don’t—” Irene began.
“Irene, excuse me for one moment,” said Blake Allen. He put his hand over the phone and Irene waited, listening to the silence on the line, feeling her heart tap against her ribs in an irregular rhythm. I need to sit down, she thought. I’m going to have a heart attack, too. I’m going to fall down some stairs.
“Irene, I’ve just talked to the coroner. From what he was able to determine, sweetie, there was no suffering in the end.”
“Was she just tired or was she confused or was she—” Irene wanted to say drunk, but that was not something she would ever say out loud. Still, her mind would not comply: Was she blasted? Wasted? Hammered? Was she? Was she like, “Whee! Down we go!”
“Sweetie, we just don’t know. We don’t know. Listen, I need to speak to some people here that have just arrived. I will call you again later.”
Irene turned the phone off and put it down. There was a dense, strange feeling in her chest, like the residual joy at having successfully observed results in her experiments had collided with the grotesque horror of having her mother die of a broken neck, and a black hole had been created in the center of her chest, sucking in all her feelings and her will. She began to cry. She sat down in her chair and put her hands in her lap, coughing and sobbing.
Does death always make you feel sad? What do you do when someone dies? What if the person was a terrible and unsolvable lifelong problem for you? What if the person was your mother?
Irene cried and cried, in spite of herself. Her mother had been a bad mother, yet she was sad anyway. She couldn’t make the sadness stop, just because it was reasonable to feel relief. She tried to figure out what she would say to someone else in this situation. Maybe the years of awfulness dissolve, when a bad mother dies, so that all you really have to feel is sadness. Or maybe Irene would say to the person, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and that would be the end of it.
Exhausted from her tears, Irene finally looked up and saw her gleaming machine. She remembered the good thing that had happened to her, and what she must now do. Then she gathered her backpack and keys and went outside the lab and up the stairs. She did not fall. She did not die. She locked the door.
Outside, she saw it was midafternoon. The blue autumn sky seemed to hover just above the colorless buildings. The breeze felt cool but there was warmth radiating off the pavement all around. She felt sure it was a Monday. A rumbling of shouts came from the stadium, and she knew there was a sports practice going on there. A group of men shouting rhythmically as they ran forward, sideways, backward, or hunched in squats. Irene opened her phone and placed a call to the Toledo Institute of Astronomy. On the phone, her tone was full of spirit.
2
The Toledo Institute of Astronomy was founded in 1837 as the Stickney Library of Almanacs (or al-manakhs) by Angelica Stickney, whose family’s fortune had been made in shipping, and whose lifelong passion was observing the night sky. She employed two full-time academics in her library. The more elderly of them, Dr. Claude Pooley, had been hired to study and catalog the information in Mrs. Stickney’s astonishing collection of almanacs, from a tablet of Sumerian origin depicting planetary movements to a document from the sixteenth century that was believed to have been penned by Francis Bacon. The other scientist in her employ, self-taught female prodigy Esther Birchard, was charged with studying stars and weather patterns in order to better inform the decisions made by the Stickney family’s transportation business, which operated largely on the Miami and Erie Canal and its Wabash extension. Birchard’s husband was an elevator man. He was a naturally suspicious person.
Pooley, the librarian, enlightened by the study of ancient texts and tables, became involved in light experiments postulating the chemical composition of the sun. He had such success with his observations that he began to publish his work and bring in other researchers to work with him. On the other side of this dual operation, Stickney Carriers laid unfortunate claim to the record for most vessels lost in the river to storms, mechanical failures, and crime. Esther Birchard, whose job it was to advise the captains of these boats, grew more and more reclusive, as her predictions increasingly failed. Year by year, she found herself relying less on her anemometer and more on fervent prayer to improve the fates of the company. Eventually, she lost her job. When pressed to account for this, Angelica Stickney calmly explained that Esther Birchard was a weather witch, and had accordingly been banished from the company. Her husband almost immediately fell down an elevator shaft and died, leaving behind a curt note to his children that his wife was not to blame. Esther Birchard was not seen or heard from again.
Angelica’s son Harold Stickney, a prescient man who anticipated both the decline of canals and the importance of the scientific work being done at the library, wisely sold off the family’s interest in the shipping industry and poured the family’s fortune into establishing a college of science in the swampy country north of the river. He dreamed of founding a mecca of learning and culture to rival the East Coast universities. They had a two-hundred-year jump on him, but no more zeal for learning and truth. His motto was Scientia vincere tenebras, or “Conquering the darkness through science,” and at this humble academic outpost on the Maumee River, Stickney and Poole planted a flag for reason. Deep in the woods, Esther Birchard whistled up a wind.
Almost two hundred years later, the Toledo Institute of Astronomy had fully emerged as the epicenter of knowledge and research that its founders had imagined. Its lecture halls and laboratories were well funded by interested corporations, its trust well endowed by generous individuals, its campus a glorious example of frontier classicism, and in 1992 its reach even extended into space, as the first Toledo Space Telescope had been launched into orbit via space shuttle. The city of Toledo was proud of its astronomers, proud of its status, standing shoulder to shoulder with Brussels or Shanghai or Sydney in the quest to unlock the secrets of the universe and plumb the depths of
the history of stars.
*
George Dermont, third-year postdoctoral research fellow and favorite instructor of most female undergraduates at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, stopped in a stairwell of Stickney Center, looking for a vending machine that would take his dollar. George had a headache. A bad one. It felt as though the fibers of his brain were full of ice, and every thump of his heart was a hammer, shattering them over and over. It felt bad.
From the vending machine, he could get some headache pills. He could get some caffeine gels. At the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, the vending machines were stocked with sundries geared specifically to the young scientist. One could find lens cleaner, superglue, clamps, Altoids, and rubbing alcohol. One could certainly find migraine medication: vasoconstrictors, sumatriptan, even opium nasal spray. But George’s dollar was so wrinkled and old that it seemed he might try all the vending machines on campus and have no luck. The dollar kept coming back out.
George left the stairwell and turned down the corridor toward the lecture hall. He had five minutes to get to class and look over his notes from last semester, to try to remember what he was going to say to the new students. He pushed through the double doors and the class hushed their chatter. He pulled his notes out of his briefcase and pretended to look at them while he casually closed his eyes. It was the beginning of September. There was no need to panic.
He opened his eyes, turned his head to the left and right, and smiled down on the class. This is what they had come for. To learn the history of astronomy. And he would teach it to them, by the book this time: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, and the rest.
At times he tried to show his students extra stuff about the universe and give them a peek at what the Toledo Institute of Astronomy really had to offer. Then they would squint, shuffle their feet, cock their heads to the side. As if that lecture was not something they wanted to hear. As if it would slide off their brains at an angle, leaving a scuff mark. He knew that if he went off book too much, it would get harder and harder to get back to the textbook’s comforting pages. He would end up standing in a corner, facing the wall, ranting and raving at nothing. George Dermont was the bright young star of the cosmology department, the “it boy” for concerns of the whole universe and beyond. But if he ever really told them what was in his mind? If he ever fully expressed the depth of his beliefs? Would they keep on smiling, winking, waving? Or would they say to him, “Now what the fuck is that all about?” and denounce him as a fraud?
George began his lecture, and the students learned. They nodded their heads. Twenty minutes in, George eyed a girl in the third row in a tank top and khaki shorts, looking like a young Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, minus the pistols and with double the braids. There was one ropey braid on each side of her head, each draping down to decorate one bulbous breast. George almost thought he had seen her before. There was something about the braids that looked familiar. The way her eyes met his. The way she held his gaze. And just like that, George found he had departed from his lecture script. He had limbered up. He had remembered exactly what he had to say, and from an introduction to the first six constellations, George took a sharp turn.
“Remember the Assyrians?” he said. “They were the ones that came down like a wolf on the fold. They had gods. So did the Babylonians. The Greeks also had gods: commonly seen wearing white and having really smooth brows. Romans had gods. Hell, yes, everyone had them.”
The students nodded and chuckled. They remembered. This was something in the history of astronomy that they could comprehend: humans having gods. “Nowadays we assume there are pretty much three gods. Ours and the ones in other people’s religions.”
George smiled through the pounding in his skull. Lara Croft the freshman was tickling the tops of her breasts with one braid. The other hand was resting on her laptop, but she wasn’t typing. George looked at her, but found himself unmoved. Years ago, he might have let a girl like this come chasing after him with her braids knocking into her tits, might have thrown her down on a cascade of throw pillows, might have thought, “We’re in Toledo; what could go wrong?”
“Three gods. The world population is pretty much agreed on this fact, with the exception of Hindus, who remain belligerently polytheistic and Buddhists, who don’t even really have gods.”
George waited. The students still watched him, waiting for him to get back to chapter 1, “The Ancients,” and the book. Lara Croft nodded too slowly, like she was saying yes to a different question. Then, strangely, she began to glow. Her face blurred for a moment as George’s head contracted into stabbing pain, and then it reformed with redder lips and darker eyes. George blinked and squinted. Her hair grew down until her braids were coiled around her feet, and her limbs stretched and curved into pinup proportions. Now George saw she was wearing not a tank top and shorts but a bustier and a type of undergarment that George had once referred to as “spanking panties.”
“No one worships, for example, Zeus anymore,” he went on bravely, closing his eyes against the sight of her. “Or Ra. So where did all those other gods go?”
One of the young men in the class raised his hand.
“Yes,” said George. “Your name?”
“It’s David,” said the boy. “What page are we on?”
“Where did they go?” George pressed on. “Are they sitting somewhere in a retirement home for aging deities? Sipping tea and asking for their sons, who they know are coming to visit them today? Asking every day until the nurses must dress someone up as a son and make the fake son visit all the rooms? And the gods don’t even notice the difference? Because they are in their dotage?”
The braided vixen before him was rising into the air now, shaking her head as if to say, no, no, no!
George got louder, “Does the fact that they did not survive mean that they were not real? Greta, do you think the gods were never real?”
“Well—” began a girl in the front row. She shook her head. Seemed about to say her name was not Greta.
“It’s too horrible to imagine.” He interrupted her. “Gods don’t die—they don’t just disappear. They can’t do that.”
Now the gorgeous, glowing creature in the air of the lecture hall was nodding, nodding, her sweet curves dancing a slow dance for him. This was the thing he could not tell anyone, in the lecture hall, in the office, in his weekly report to the chair of the department at their meeting in his office: “Hi, Dr. Sanji. My work on the latest astrometric project proceeds apace, and, oh, also I see gods floating around sometimes. I yield the floor to Dr. Jones.”
Religion is private. It’s a private matter between you and the dozen or so deities who visit you at the most inopportune moments.
George grasped the podium with both hands and squinched his eyes very tight. Then he looked around again at the class. They were sitting up straight, their eyes lit up, on full alert. Something was happening—they had figured out. A real astronomer was now speaking to them, here at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, where they had come to be educated by real astronomers. They leaned forward, eager to hear what he would say next. George looked all around the room, everywhere else except her curves and colors. “If they fall into disrepair, do we have to retroactively call ourselves unbelievers? Are we stupid? Are we duped? If it happened to Ra, it could happen to anyone! Ra was an ass kicker. Ra was the sun god! How could this happen to Ra?”
No one raised a hand. The girl who looked like Lara Croft had now fully changed into the brilliant, irresistible form of a goddess with whom he was quite familiar. She had appeared to him before, but never at work. Now she climbed astride the long fluorescent light fixture near the ceiling, swinging from side to side, using her long braids like fishing lines to dangle in front of unsuspecting students. She laughed silently, but George could hear her, could remember her voice, telling him exactly what to do. The goddess of sex. American pantheon. Contemporary era. His head creaked in pain and he smelled cinnamon, like a very strong exotic tea.
&n
bsp; “Maybe—” George paused. He began to move around on the stage, back and forth, trying not to gaze into the space above their heads. The god of sex swung her legs gleefully, biting her lower lip and waving at him. Hi, George, she seemed to be communicating. I’m up here.
“Maybe Ra was sucked into a wormhole,” George said. “Or maybe he just went back willingly into the wormhole from whence he originally came. Something has to happen at the other end of a wormhole, otherwise where the hell is your conservation of matter and energy? Nowhere, that’s where!”
Students were nodding. The girls were smiling. Someone’s book fell onto the floor and it wasn’t retrieved. A boy in the back row chewed a pencil between his teeth. “Could you believe that a wormhole might end in an ancient ziggurat?” George continued. “A cathedral in France? A human uterus? Maybe I’m asking for a looser interpretation of matter conservation than the one you’re willing to give.”
George was pacing faster now, and the sex goddess was swinging faster, his long limbs eating up the stage at the front of the hall, her body flowing over the light fixture and dripping onto the floor below. The students peered at him wide-eyed. Some of them had their mouths open. He would push the idea into the mouth, close the chin, stroke the throat. Even if the idea was blatant lunacy, they would try to swallow. He had that going for him: a certain charisma, a magnetic charm. But if he said, “Observe, above your heads: a modern deity. Observe.” Would they look up? Would they nod and smile, and write down points? He brushed his hair out of his face and turned a winning smile on them. He spread his hands out, long arms wide, a crisp white shirt illuminated in the stage lights over his khakis and loafers.
“George!” called the goddess from the ceiling. He ignored her. He tried to ignore the idea of her. “Tell them!”
“Maybe I’m asking you to believe in the conservation of gods and godliness. Is that too altogether impossible to believe?”
The class waited.
“Think about it. Nothing comes from nothing!” George implored.
