How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

by Lydia Netzer

  “Yes, I am prepared to give myself up for love. To love. Over love. Whatever.”

  The psychic stopped rocking back and forth and her fingernails bit into George’s palm.

  “What does your mother think about this?”

  George pulled back. “Are you seeing something, about my mother? Are you reading something there?”

  The psychic resumed her rocking. “I see your mother. She is standing in the canyon, and her body becomes a wall, becomes a wall hard and high, and the canyon is dry and parched, waiting for water, but the water is behind the wall of your mother, and she is holding it away from you.”

  “She’s holding water away from me?”

  “Water is love,” said the psychic curtly. “In this story water is love.”

  “What can I do?” asked George. “Do I need to perforate her in some way? Dig under her? What?”

  The psychic dropped his hands.

  “Do you want me to look into my crystal ball?”

  “You can do that? I mean, that’s a real thing?”

  “Yes, of course it is a real thing,” said the psychic. “You don’t believe in it?”

  “I believe, I believe,” said George. “It’s just my canyon-wall mother, she thinks this kind of thing is all ridiculous.”

  “But you don’t think it’s ridiculous?” she asked him.

  “I believe in everything,” said George. “I can’t deny much. I probably have crystals in my pocket right now. I talk to cloud formations. I’m like, your ultimate demographic. Trust me.”

  The psychic rose, and in a swish of silk she settled into a chair across the low table from George. She took a deep breath and smiled at him. Her face was sad, ruined by wrinkles. The silk wrap distorted the sides of it, pulled the skin back from the bones. Her eyes watered. She put her hands on both sides of the crystal ball and began to turn it, rotate it, twist it back and forth. Finally she left it alone and stared into it, only her fingertips touching it, her nose inches away from it.

  “I see her,” she said at last.

  “You see who?” George practically leaped across the table.

  “I see your love. She is here in the ball. I see her.”

  “What does she look like?” George asked. “Does she see you? Can she see me?”

  “She is beautiful. George, I cannot help but love her, too.”

  “I need details,” said George. “How can I find her?”

  “She has brown hair,” said the psychic. “Beautiful brown hair.”

  “OK,” said George, “That’s helpful. That’s actually very helpful. Thank you. I need more though.”

  “You will find her in Toledo,” said the psychic.

  “Good, also good,” said George. “I am in Toledo right now. So that is very convenient. Do you—”

  “She is a dreamer,” said the psychic. “A dreamer of dreams.”

  “Great,” said George. “I love that, because a dreamer of dreams is so much better than a dreamer of, like, roadside fruit markets. No quality girl would ever dream a—”

  “She is an astronomer,” said the psychic.

  “NO,” said George, suddenly finely attuned. He leaned in close, as if he could look into the crystal ball, too. “An astronomer, you say? But that’s—did you know that I’m an astronomer?”

  “That is all,” said the psychic. “That’s all I can tell you. I can see her plain as day. And she will find you. She will. I believe. Do you?”

  George nodded emphatically. “Well, let’s just say I will find HER. I’ll find HER. Do you have any idea when I’ll find her?”

  “I don’t see,” said the psychic, “But I can tell you what I feel. You will be young together, you will be loved, and it will be more beautiful than either of you could have imagined. Because this is the least that she deserves. Do you see this? The least that she deserves.”

  George stumbled to his feet. He felt moved, on the spot, with an urgency he could only partially attribute to the liquor he had ingested, to find the girl and to experience the beauty that he himself and now the psychic also knew to be waiting for him.

  “What do I owe you?” said George, suddenly anxious to leave. “Do I cross your palm with silver? I’ve always wanted to do that.”

  “You don’t owe me anything, George,” said the psychic. “I have seen that we will meet again. Your debt will not be to me, but to the stars. They don’t need your money. They want your spirit. Are you ready to give it?”

  This was exactly the kind of hokey bullshit that made his mother snort with contempt.

  “Go easy on your mother,” said the psychic sharply. “She’s often wrong, but she loves you.”

  George had made it safely back to campus, back to his lab, where he slept off his liquor on a fine leather sofa and woke refreshed.

  Ever since that night, in his mind the girls of Toledo were arranged in the shape of a target. On the outside ring, girls in Toledo. Next ring, girls in Toledo who had brown hair. Inside that, the rings got more and more specific until at the very center there was a spot so dear that his dart would not stick in the board, but would fly straight through and never stop flying, until the end of the universe. George had thrown a lot of darts since that morning he awoke in his lab, ready to hunt, but had never struck the middle.

  *

  After class on the second day of the semester, George packed up his lecture notes and swung out through the doors of the lecture hall without glancing up at the ceiling at all. No sex goddess. A boring lecture on the Egyptians, another headache, and that’s all.

  A friendly grad student approached him on the sidewalk outside the building, but he swung his light backpack onto his other shoulder, grinned, waved, and kept moving.

  “Hi, George! What are you doing? Teaching?”

  “Hey, Lucy! Great! See you later!”

  Lucy was blond.

  George believed, since that visit to the psychic, that true love was waiting for him here in Toledo. One by one he had narrowed down the field, and all the brown-haired astronomers who could reasonably be described as dreamers were tested and tried. His hopes were, like a photon traveling out of a gravitational sphere, growing dimmer.

  He was still searching for love. But he had not yet found it.

  Then, last spring, just when it seemed he had worked his way through all the likely candidates and there were no more girls within range, he met Kate Oakenshield. She was a brunette, obviously, an astronomer of the highest order, and a dreamer, one would hope. He had been after her all summer, and he was still after her. He intended now to go up to her office and make himself very charming. Are you the one? he would ask. Kate Oakenshield might respond, audibly, I am.

  But maybe not. Because Kate Oakenshield had been raised a mute. She had only been allowed to hear musical sounds until she was five years old, at which point the state intervened and took her away from her insane father. As a result of her limited exposure to language, she had become a math genius, just as her father had planned. She did not respond to George’s advances like other girls did, but, if anything, this made him more convinced that she must be the one, the center of the target.

  Part of Kate Oakenshield’s difficult childhood was that she had been locked up on her father’s rural estate. George had sometimes fantasized about bursting into a tower room, lit with the sun’s afternoon rays, where a little girl was chirping out the window to a sparrow or some other more colorful bird that chirps. He would ask her name, and she would turn, bemused but friendly, suddenly twenty years old, and warble a tune in her throat. He would scoop her up and gallop down the stairs, past the father who would be in the process of being arrested by the police and out into what would have become suddenly night. Then he would commence teaching her to talk.

  She had, of course, been rescued and taught to talk already. Kate Oakenshield, though raised a mute, could talk alright given the circumstances. She could also do math like nobody’s business. She must have had an amazing brain, all untainted by
nursery rhymes and reprimands and television. The mind that fugues built, said Psychology Today. Science loved her, and George thought he might, too.

  So far, he had managed to make her officially his girlfriend, at least as far as he could tell. At least he had told her she was, several times, and she had seemed to hear him. Next, he would get her in bed. This wasn’t the way things usually went for George, but Kate Oakenshield had been raised mute, and things were different when she was involved. George took it as a promising sign.

  Another colleague approached him as he took the stone stairs up to Herschel Hall. The guy was coming down the stairs and George almost knocked into him.

  “Hi, George,” said the guy, “Did you, ah, get a chance to look at the numbers on that new lens?”

  “Sure, Ken.” George waved him off and galloped on up the stairs. “I’ll absolutely take a look at those numbers on that new lens as soon as I get back to my office. Great work. Great times.”

  “It’s Frank,” said the guy. But George pulled the door open and entered the building.

  Herschel Hall was a four-story building with an enormous atrium in front. The entranceway dazzled visitors with a giant oak door, marble pillars, and a thick chandelier. Farther on, huge arches of windows stretched to the back, and a vaulted ceiling claimed its shape in the pointed roof. Around the walls, under the windows, a giant mosaic-tile mural portrayed a colorful solar system, with comets and quasars whishing about. The floor was stone, and couches and tables were scattered about artfully among varied greenery, potted palms and fig trees for the most part. A fountain tinkled in the middle of the room, which took up the whole building. The fountain was a rough human form intended to be Hesiod, the Greek astronomer. Water came out of the top of his head in a gentle spray.

  Upstairs, Kate’s office was a mess of potted plants, and a birdcage in the corner housed a pack of finches. George breathed in deeply a couple of times. Was it pollen making his skull ache so much? The floor of her office was covered with a reed mat, and as he poked his head in the door, wearing his most radiant grin, he heard the sound of a flute. He saw that she was sitting in the open window, her legs outside, playing it.

  She was a tall girl, and willowy. She had long dark hair flat to her head and wore long fitted skirts that forced her to take small steps on her platform shoes. George felt immediate fear that she would fall out the window. George looked at the thin long fingers holding the flute. Her eyes were closed. She seemed far away.

  “Kate!” said George, “Kate Oakenshield! It’s nice to see you!”

  It was hard for George not to add “the girl who was raised a mute” to her name. But he refrained. For her.

  She jolted, and for a moment he thought she really was going to fall out the window. But then she hesitated, put the flute in her lap, and leaned her shoulder against the frame.

  “George,” said Kate. She said everything emphatically. Not like a foreign person. But with decisive pronunciation. George figured that the emphaticness was the only way she could talk in English instead of trilling a sonata or something.

  George came into the office, stepping onto the reed mat. “Hey!” said George, “Why not come back in the window? That’d be better, right?”

  Then he leaned against the wall, relaxed and unthreatening. Certainly not alarming enough to shock someone out a window. How many meters would it take her to reach terminal velocity, if she were to fall?

  “Hello, George,” she said.

  “I came up to see you,” said George.

  Kate Oakenshield nodded emphatically.

  “That’s a great flute. Great song. Would you like to read some of my new article? I wrote it for the Dark Star Review. I mean, I’m writing it. This is a draft, do you want to read it?”

  George pulled out a piece of paper from his pants pocket and unfolded it. It was one sheet, with small letters on the front.

  “Put it on the desk,” she said.

  “You don’t have to read it now,” said George.

  Kate Oakenshield barked at him, sort of a comforting shushing bark down in her vocal cords, and he understood that she really wanted to get back to playing the flute while hanging half out the window. Maybe in her brain she was calculating the mass of a neutron star.

  “Do you want to go to dinner?” he pressed. “Or something? A walk?”

  Kate Oakenshield coughed or hummed and shook her head. Dinner or a walk would be torment, he knew, for both of them. Him straining and trying to make her talk, her perplexed and frustrated with talking. He felt like that guy with the grapes in the water, where the grapes were a pretty girl who happened to be insane, and the water was his burning desire to make her fall in love with him. Or something.

  “Wait a second,” said George, “Maybe you could write back to me? Instead of talk! I mean, if it’s not too much trouble to write? You could show me, at dinner, your answer. We could write, back and forth, on paper!”

  Dear Kate, he thought of writing. Do you like me? Circle yes or no. Thanks, George. But she frowned. George dragged his fingers through his hair. Of course. Calling attention to her weakness like that had been a mistake. She was probably angry or sad, and would now go and cry over her computer, making whuffling sounds like a clarinet with a wet cotton ball in its mouthpiece. Now she was opening and closing her eyes rapidly. He didn’t want to be responsible for her having some kind of medical setback.

  Then the blinking stopped and he heard her call to him, loudly, and she was singing the whole sentence.

  “I am studying black hole accretion,” she sang, “It is Dr. Bryant’s main focus now.”

  George knew this. To him, black hole accretion had always sounded like pooping. But this was the longest thing she had ever communicated to him. Which made it very exciting, in terms of the seduction.

  “I have always been profoundly interested in black hole accretion myself,” he sang. He tried to sound like he was in an opera, the way they sort of sing without having a reason. And the lines kind of go up at the end. “My-SELF!”

  Kate Oakenshield writhed her way backward out of the window, somehow without showing a peep of her leg, and when she had gotten her feet on the floor she approached him, smiling. She put her hand on his chest, and through the crisp white shirt she pushed him backward. Would she drive him to the ground, mount him like a vulture, tear him to pieces, squawking and squawking? But she was pushing him out the door. The last thing he saw, before the door closed between them, was her teeth.

  In this manner, they had been going on for weeks, Kate making strange noises in her throat and George wanting to get her into bed, both working hard at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, waiting for a breakthrough. George wondered, in his heart, if she could really be for him. But categorically, given the words of the psychic, how could it be otherwise?

  8

  The avenue that led into the campus of the Toledo Institute of Astronomy was flanked with tall cedar trees interspersed with statuary representing the world’s famed telescopes and cameras, both orbital and terrestrial. Irene drove down its wide expanse with a faculty parking pass hanging from her rearview mirror for the first time. Inside the Fiat, the air-conditioning was on. She could not hear any sounds. She had turned the radio off. She was counting her breaths, marking the stabs of her heart against her rib cage, and how her organs turned inside her like marmots struggling to get out. On the seat beside her were some papers, all the materials she had printed off from the joyful e-mails the institute had sent her. There was a temporary ID card, a map of the campus, boat tickets for a cruise on the Maumee River for two, and a page of interview questions for the campus newspaper. Someone was writing an article about her.

  How did she feel when she first saw the black holes? Excited. How long had she been working with this experiment? Months. Who had designed the microcollider? She had. Who had built it. A fabricator. What were her plans for the future? To make black holes in Toledo. Apart from that, her plans were indeterminate.

&nb
sp; Don’t put this on Twitter, they said. Come to Toledo, and all will be explained.

  Driving down this treelined avenue with a faculty parking pass, she felt like she was leading a parade with brass bands and people marching in big head costumes. There might as well have been screaming fans packing the curbs, hanging from the trees, pelting her with roses.

  This is it, she thought. This is me. I am here. I have not failed. I have done the opposite.

  Alone in the cool silence of the Fiat, on the treelined avenue, she could be triumphant. It was finally all happening, and she forced herself to enjoy it. Many beautiful things were gone in an instant. A feeling, a memory, a black hole brightly glowing in a jar.

  Irene parked the Fiat and got out into the September heat. She walked across the sunny parking lot, breathing in that hot Ohio air. Her heart had yet to establish its own steady rhythm. It still beat and skipped and raced to find her mother’s heart beating. Walking up the sidewalk, she clutched her laptop bag to her chest. She read the names of the outlying buildings on their brass plaques: COPERNICUS POWER CENTER, THE PLANCK FOUNDATION, GALILEO HEALTH ATRIUM.

  She walked past three enormous animated metal sculptures and remembered learning about each one when she had visited the campus in elementary school. There was a gyroscope, spinning sedately on its axis. Next to that, two synchronized pendulums swung in a frame. Then there was the Tusi couple, a huge circle with a circle half its size inside it. The inner circle rolled around inside the larger one, and a black spot on its perimeter moved up and down, up and down in a line. She remembered her teacher explaining the function of these sculptures with a laser pointer. Now she was no longer a child on a field trip, or a tourist or a job applicant, hopeful and nervous, but faculty, on her way to examine her appointed laboratory for the first time. If she needed something, she could ask. She was even going to have an assistant.

  Irene approached the enormous wrought iron gate that stopped people from entering the institute without permission. There was a brick wall around the older part of the college, ten feet high, topped with crenellations and bird-repelling spikes. Beside the ornamental gate, which would open for cars, was a smaller door to the gatehouse. She put her hand on the door handle. It was silver and it felt smooth under her hand. She smelled the burnt grass smell of fall in Ohio, the smell of hard dirt and hot roads, and she heard the noise of a thousand insects in the fields and woods around the institute, humming.