The Wide Night Sky

by Matt Dean

  Chapter 31

  The way the gaps and margins of the venetian blinds glowed with ash-colored light, Leland could tell that the clouds hadn’t broken, but he went to the window anyway. Gloom gathered under the piazza roof. A spot of damp, the last tiny residue of a halfhearted rain, lay on the driveway. The sky was as flat and gray as old asphalt.

  No matter. The transit of Venus would stream live to his laptop. He wouldn’t miss it. He wouldn’t want to miss it, even though he’d abandoned his book on Franz and Kobold.

  He’d been crazy to think of writing fiction at all. His books were souvenirs of Charleston rather than proper histories—anthologies of ghost stories, roundups of two-hundred-year-old gossip, collections of Colonial puff pieces, aggrandized postcards. His book about the Preservation Society had turned out to be a series of hagiographies—and that was what everyone had wanted it to be.

  His year so far had been spent preparing new editions of his earliest books. It was easy work, easy to do on autopilot, easy to fit in among the days when he felt bubble-wrapped and dumbfounded. When widowhood deafened and blinded him, he thought of Anna Grace, but also of Scott Cable, of high summer in San Francisco and buying light bulbs at Cliff’s Variety.

  As if the thought had summoned the man, Scott himself strode into the driveway. He moved with such heedless urgency that, when he lost a flip-flop, he appeared to consider not going back for it. After a moment’s hesitation, he did go back, and when he did, his messenger bag slipped sideways and dropped toward the ground. Scott caught it just before it struck the driveway. Whatever was in there, it had to be something he valued. He clutched the bag to his chest and took a series of deep, calming breaths.

  By the time Leland got to the front door and opened it, Scott was just raising his hand to knock. He flinched, stepped back, smiled. He was still breathing heavily. “You’re here.”

  “I’m here,” Leland said. He could’ve hidden under his desk, he thought. He could’ve pretended no one was home. Why hadn’t he thought of that?

  “You shaved your head.”

  In December, after he’d gotten home from the hospital, Leland had had no choice but to finish what the ER nurses had started. He’d buzzed himself bald. He’d resigned himself to wearing a lot of hats, but as it turned out, baldness made him look tougher and more shrewd than he really was. He liked it. Jutting his chin toward the topknot at the crown of Scott’s head, he said, “And you didn’t.”

  “Nope,” Scott said, and he touched the hair at his nape. “I didn’t. But. Um. It’s just that I don’t have a car, see, and I got Kate Popyrin to look on the Internet and see where the clouds are right now, and at the moment, it looks like we have to go to Columbia, which is obviously too far to go on a bicycle, and I know I could’ve rented a car, but I accidentally let my license lapse, so…”

  “What?”

  Scott pointed upward. “The transit. It starts in an hour or so, and the clouds…”

  “Oh. Of course. The transit. Come on in.”

  Nearly bursting with relief, Scott stepped past him. They went into the study. Motioning toward the sofa, Leland said, “I have a projector and screen around here somewhere.” He stroked the stubble at the back of his head. When he was thinking about something, he often searched for the bare place, the longish scar that nearly matched Ben’s. “Let me just think where.”

  Scott hadn’t sat. “What are you…? I don’t…”

  “We can watch it more easily that way,” Leland said. “Rather than hunching over my laptop.”

  “I was hoping we’d…” Scott took a deep, deep breath. “Is there some way that we could actually— I mean, if we—you—actually drove us up there…? I’ll reimburse you for gas, of course—and dinner, maybe.”

  If they had to drive as far as Columbia, that would mean a minimum of three hours in a car with Scott. The transit itself could take another hour. Add at least thirty minutes for dinner. That was a long, long, long time to spend with a guy you’d inappropriately kissed in a hospital room. Leland cast about for alternatives, escape routes, patsies.

  “A hundred and five years,” Scott said. “The next transit is in a hundred and five years.”

  “NASA is streaming images from space.” Leland motioned toward his laptop. “I’ll set up the projector and—”

  “Please. Please, please, please.” Scott clasped his hands together, as if in prayer. He eyed the rug, and for a second, it looked like he might literally drop to his knees. “Dammit, man. I ain’t too proud to beg.”

  Leland knew he was going to agree, but he so very much didn’t want to—that was the thing.

  “If you don’t say yes,” Scott said, “I’ll be forced to remind you that I spent the entire last semester tutoring your son in theory for free, not to mention teaching him the Rachmaninoff Études-Tableaux and the Brahms Third Piano Sonata and—”

  “I’ll just go get dressed,” Leland said, putting up his hands.

  “You look fine,” Scott said.

  Leland was wearing a shirt with a hole under the arm and a pair of gym shorts he’d owned for thirty years. “I wore this to sleep in.” He plucked at the frayed hem of one leg.

  “You look fine,” Scott said again. He sounded like an impatient, overtired six-year-old.

  “Two minutes,” Leland said. “Two minutes.”

  He hurried up the stairs, stripping off his shirt as he went, and rushed to his bedroom. In spite of himself, he let Scott’s impatience govern him. He grabbed a not-quite-clean pair of dungarees from the top of the hamper and the first shirt that came to hand in the closet. He was still pulling on the shirt when he stopped at John Carter’s bedroom door.

  He knocked softly and waited for an answer. Doris had come over, and they were studying—but there was always a chance they were “studying.”

  “Come in,” John Carter said.

  Leland opened the door and leaned in. John Carter and Doris were sitting sideways on the bed, entirely clothed. Music was playing, something that sounded like small, untamed animals clomping up and down a piano keyboard, and John Carter was following along in the score. Doris had the Charleston tour guide training manual spread across her lap. She smiled and waved hello.

  “Hi, Doris,” Leland said. “How’s the studying?”

  “So much to remember,” she said.

  “Right?” Leland said. “I was in maybe the fourth or fifth group to take—”

  “Dad,” John Carter said. “I’m listening to Shostakovich. Did you have something to ask me or what?

  “Oh,” Leland said. “Sorry. Yes. I’m going out for a while. No idea how long.”

  “Okay,” John Carter said.

  “It’s transit-related.”

  “Okay,” John Carter said again. “I have to leave for work in, like, thirty-five minutes.”

  Since January, he’d been working at the Starbucks nearest to campus. He’d gotten the job on his own and worked as many hours as he could get. Maybe at first he’d only wanted some task to fill the time, some mechanism by which he could order his days. Leland had books to edit, John Carter had espresso shots to pull.

  But a little order did John Carter a lot of good. He hadn’t missed a class all semester. He volunteered as accompanist to two voice majors and a trumpet major, meaning that he had five lessons to attend lessons every week, instead of only two. He took to carrying a Day Runner, long after Leland had assumed Day Runners had ceased to exist. By the end of his second semester, he’d raised his GPA three-quarters of a point.

  “Happy studying,” Leland said to Doris. And to John Carter: “You’ll lock up? Yes?”

  “Sure, Pop.” As Leland was closing the door, John Carter called out, “Did you take your Synthroid?”

  “Yes,” Leland said, as if it were just the most absurd question—and then he dashed across to the bathroom and took his Synthroid. His thyroidectomy scar, near the base of his throat, had faded to a thin white line.

  In the entryway, Scott wa
s huffing and grumbling. Leland hurried down the stairs. While he scooped up his wallet and phone and keys from the console table, Scott hurtled through the door. Leland paused halfway across the piazza and patted his pockets, but he had everything he needed. The feeling of having forgotten something came from the absence of Anna Grace’s urn. It had sat on the console table for so long that it had become a fixture. Now that it was gone, the place where it had been had become a kind of worry spot, like the missing piece of a chipped tooth.

  Scott was already in the passenger’s seat of the Prius. Leland got in and drove them north to the Crosstown. As they crept through construction traffic, the Prius’s tires buzzing on the milled pavement, Scott clenched his fists and ground his teeth.

  Leland couldn’t think of the urn without thinking of Ben. The Nickel and Dimed project with Jimmy had never materialized, but Ben had bought a car and taken off on his own. He had the urn with him, and he planned to spread a bit of his mother’s ashes at every opera house he could find. From Mobile, he’d sent a sketch of a tallish, vaguely deco theater surrounded by hedges and sago palms. On a narrow scrap of lawn at the front, there stood the figure of a woman—Anna Grace—in a wide-skirted gown.

  Anna Grace had been a materialist through and through. She’d believed that her essence, whatever it was that had made her Anna Grace, would perish with her last heartbeat, her last breath, the last synaptic transmission. She wouldn’t have cared what became of her ashes. Still, Ben’s plan wasn’t entirely absent of poetry.

  At last, on I-26, the traffic began to flow. Scott hadn’t said a word since they’d gotten into the car, but the drumming of his fingers and the bouncing of his knees spoke well enough. Leland’s foot grew heavy on the accelerator. On the far side of Summerville, where rows of tall pines lined either side of the freeway, he kept the speedometer in the high eighties. Head against the window, Scott squinted up to the sky.

  Leland slipped his phone out of his pocket and passed it over. “Take another look at the satellite map. See how far we have to go.”

  Scott stared at the phone as if it were something with sharp teeth. “I don’t know how…”

  Steering one-handed, navigating one-eyed, Leland switched on the phone, unlocked the screen, and opened the browser. He glanced at the signal strength. Good enough. “Tap there.” He pointed at the browser’s address bar. When the QWERTY keyboard scrolled up to cover the bottom half of the screen, Scott recoiled as if the teeth had bitten him. “Type in what I tell you.”

  After a couple of false starts, and not without mistakes and misunderstandings along the way, Scott found a satellite map of the Carolinas. It showed that they might not have to go as far as Columbia.

  “Something just popped up,” Scott said. “Is this what a text message looks like?”

  Leland glanced at the screen. He’d gotten a text message from Corinne. “Do you mind reading it?”

  “‘Got a three thirty-nine. Your job is to talk me into or out of retaking.’”

  “She’s trying to get into Duke.”

  “Oh,” Scott said, “so this is the GRE? She’s talking about her GRE score?”

  “I don’t think she’s taken a breath since she left the testing center,” Leland said. “Tell her three thirty-nine is—” But Scott had turned very white. “Never mind. I’ll call her later.”

  In the distance, Leland already saw a lightening in the sky, a band of apricot clouds here, a clot of pinkish mist there. No blue yet.

  “You have Holst on here,” Scott said. Somehow he’d opened up the music store, and somehow he’d figured out how to work the search.

  “That’s where you’d buy it,” Leland said. “If you wanted to buy it.”

  “Oh. And then what? They’d send you a CD?”

  “No, it— Never mind. Give it.” Leland took the phone. He tapped a couple of buttons and put in his password. Holst’s Planets began downloading. He returned the phone to Scott.

  “Can I play it now?”

  Growling in spite of himself, Leland snatched the phone away and plugged it into the stereo. He tapped the screen, and the first track began to play. To Leland, it sounded as if a battalion of cellists were striking their strings with mallets instead of stroking them with bows. He slipped the phone into a cup holder.

  “I guess ‘Venus’ would be more appropriate,” Scott said. Leland reached for the phone, but Scott clasped his wrist to stop him. “No, no, leave it. I love ‘Mars.’ It makes everything seem like an emergency.” He laughed. “Going to see the transit—emergency. Filling up at the gas station—alert the authorities. Going to the grocery store—crisis.” Scott raised his fist. “Bloodshed in the produce section. Call the heavy infantry. Someone’s choosing”—he gasped—“a cantaloupe.”

  As if on cue, the horns reached a crescendo. Leland trod a little harder on the accelerator.

  “Holy shit,” Scott said, pointing. “Look.”

  Off to the right, the sky was blue. They passed an exit. It occurred to Leland a second too late that, if he’d taken it and followed whatever meander of country blacktop it led to, in time they might have come to a clearing. Too late now.

  Fumbling around in the back seat, Scott found his messenger bag. He took from it an enormous pair of binoculars, a roll of black electrical tape, and two small ziplock bags. Each of the bags contained a black disk the size and shape of a hockey puck. Unlike hockey pucks, though, the objects seemed to have no weight at all.

  Scott laid the binoculars in his lap with the objective lenses aimed more or less at the windshield. Prying open one of the little bags, he took out a black disk, which turned out not to be a disk at all, and certainly not a hockey puck, but rather a cap. Scott reeled off a few inches of tape, bit it, tore it free. He aligned the cap with one of the binocular’s lenses. A solar filter, then, of course—but the wrong size. He taped it in place. He repeated the process with the second lens and cap. Grinning, he held it up.

  “Trailer park astronomy,” Leland said.

  Scott held up the binoculars as though to use them, but instead he looked over them. His mouth hung open. He pointed. The lower half of the sky was blue.

  “Next exit,” Scott said. “How far?”

  “I don’t—”

  Leland scanned the road and his mirrors. There were no signs anywhere. After four or five miles that seemed like a hundred, they came to an exit. The sun broke through the clouds. Happy to see it, Leland flicked his eyes up at it and stared until it stamped a dancing purplish-black afterimage on his vision. He signaled and exited the freeway.

  At the top of the ramp, there was a stop sign. An Exxon station across the road. To the left, another station, this one closed, the windows boarded up. Leland turned right and found a weedy field surrounded by chain link. A steel sign, lopsided and faded, warned against trespassing on school property. There didn’t appear to be a school anywhere in sight.

  Scott leapt from the car while it was still moving. When Leland got out, Scott already had the blank black eyes of the binoculars trained upward at the sky. He let out a gasp and then a whimper. “My God,” he said. “My God. It’s…”

  Thoughtlessly, on heedless impulse, Leland glanced up toward the sun. But he’d already blinded himself once, and the spots were just fading. He shielded his eyes with his hands.

  “Come look,” Scott said. “Come. Come look.”

  Leland went around the car. Scott offered the binoculars. His eyes were wet.

  Taking the binoculars—heavier than they looked—Leland raised them and pointed them toward the sun. Black. All black. A lightless hole.

  “I don’t see anything,” Leland said.

  Standing close behind him, Scott put his hands on Leland’s and guided them by tiny increments. Something flashed through the black.

  And then there it was. A perfect orange circle, dark at the edges, brighter and yellower in the middle. A few flecks of black at its center. And in the upper right quadrant, there was a half-circle, far large
r than Leland had expected. Venus. It didn’t appear to be a sphere. There was no sense of distance or dimension. The planet might have been a sticky dot pasted to a construction-paper cutout. A fat bug crawling across a round lamp.

  But it wasn’t any of those things. It wasn’t. It was a planet—a planet almost the size of earth crossing in front of a star. Standing here at the edge of a plot of scrubland behind a rumor of a school, tiny Leland Littlefield found himself watching a planet pass in front of a star. He could see it move. Right before his eyes—and yet nearly unfathomably far away—one astral body moved across another.

  When his neck ached, he returned the binoculars to Scott. He meant to say something—but what was there to say?

  Scott looked again. He looked and looked and looked and looked. “What time is it?” he said in a whisper.

  Leland reached into his pocket for his phone, but it still sat in the cup holder. Holst still played on the stereo. It must be “Venus” now, “The Bringer of Peace.” Quiet and lovely music, though a little mournful. Leland poked his head in through the window. It was a little after five-thirty, and he said as much.

  “I didn’t think…,” Scott said. “They said it’d start at five. I thought by the time we got here—” He lowered the binoculars and looked at Leland. “You know, when we got to where we could see—” Some weighty emotion seemed to come over him, stopping him.

  “What?” said Leland.

  “I thought we’d miss the black drop.” Scott gave Leland the binoculars. “Look.”

  Nearly all of Venus was visible now, all but a sliver.

  “Just before the smaller body is entirely within the larger body, there’s an illusion. A teardrop.”

  Leland knew about the black drop, but eighteenth-century observers hadn’t expected it. They’d been unable to mark the planet’s precise moments of ingress and egress into the sun. The illusion had wrecked the scientists’ attempt to calculate the astronomical unit. And now, hundreds of years later, here they were, these two amateurs with a pair of jury-rigged binoculars, dying to see it.

  Raising the binoculars, Leland found the sun again. The sun. The planet. The black drop.

  “This is—” Leland swallowed and drew a deep breath. His eyes were wet, too. “This is officially the most awe-inspiring thing I’ve ever seen.” People said that all the time, of practically anything. A picture of the moon could be awe-inspiring, or a sentimental quote on a calendar, or even a large room with a particularly high ceiling—but he meant it literally. He was fully in awe.

  “Now you know what Chappe saw, and Pingré, and Planman, and Captain Cook…” Scott spoke in a hush. He laid his hand on Leland’s shoulder. “Children born today or tomorrow probably won’t live to witness the next one. And think of all the people alive right now who could be watching but can’t be bothered. But you and I—we get to see it. We get to see it. All we have to do is look up.”

  Chappe, Pingré, Planman, Cook—they’d all traveled far and at great expense to observe the transit. But there’d been others, too—Le Gentil and Maskelyne—who’d sailed to the farthest edges of the known world, only to see the gathering of heavy clouds, the sky lowering itself like an awning.

  The world was so bewildering and cruel that you could forget how full of beauty it was—the Grand Canyon and Machu Picchu and the luminous blue of a parrotfish and emeralds the size of baking potatoes, sights and creatures and objects that demanded your attention and smacked the words right out of your mouth. But the simplest thing could hypnotize you, if you let it. A few pinprick stars glimmering in the indigo night. The fragrance of honeysuckle. The natural sweetness of really well-brewed iced tea. A blueberry or a cherry tomato bursting in your mouth. The illusion of infinite depth in a human iris. The simple warmth of human contact.

  All of this, Leland thought, all of this belonged in a book. Once long ago, as a young and ambitious man, he’d started to write because he’d wanted to make people love history. He’d wanted to make it feel alive and important. He’d wanted to cast whatever little bit of light he could on the hair-thin and nearly invisible threads that connected the past to the present and the present to the future.

  It was time again to find the hidden threads, time again to write. Fiction or history, it didn’t much matter—it only mattered that he had the power of words, and words had the power to stand a reader at Chappe’s elbow in San José del Cabo, or at Anders Planman’s side in his Finnish observatory, or on a deserted road somewhere in South Carolina, where two awestruck men passed a pair of binoculars back and forth.

  Venus seemed to be moving so quickly. Leland offered the binoculars again to Scott—he deserved to see the last few seconds of the ingress—but Scott had moved away. He was, of all things, dancing. Gobsmacked—and there was no better word—Leland glanced across the road, where there sat a brick ranch house, and across the empty field, where there seemed to be nothing but brush and sand, and back along the road, where cars uneventfully entered and exited the Exxon station as if nothing important had ever happened anywhere. And Scott danced and whooped and seized Leland by the wrists and hugged him tightly and waltzed him off the graveled shoulder of the road into a suddenly beautiful patch of wild bergamot. And above them, all the while, a planet crossed a star.

  ###

  Acknowledgments

  In this book, Scott Cable claims there’s no comprehensive history of all the transits of Venus, but of course there is at least one such history, if not more. I referred to The Transits of Venus by William Sheehan and John Westfall (Prometheus Books, March 2004). I also consulted and highly recommend Chasing Venus by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, May 2012), a compulsively readable and fascinating history of the 18th-Century transits.

  This novel would not exist if not for the encouragement and advice of my beloved husband, Todd; the insightful and candid members of my critique group, Amanda, Emma, Krysti, and Maddie; and my dearest friends in all the world, Sarah, Mina, and Angela.

  And finally, I must thank my mother, who bought me my first electric typewriter and fearlessly slogged through all of my ridiculous early attempts at writing. Without her, I would surely never have written a word of anything.