The Smallest Lights in the Universe

by Sara Seager

  Mike had been something of a hoarder, and I could be sentimental about objects, too. We had fifteen different canoes and kayaks. We also had pieces of boats—boats that had been torn in half by rapids, fragments of shattered boats that hadn’t even been ours. Mike had closets full of old clothes that he never wore, and the garage was filled with rusty tools. There were piles of old manuscripts, the blueprints for textbooks long obsolete. Now I looked at our bedroom furniture and couldn’t stand it anymore. The cats had torn apart the fake-leather frame that held a battered futon. The bedside tables and dresser looked banged-up and worn.

  I began throwing his things into the Dumpster in a frenzy. I didn’t have Mike anymore; I certainly didn’t need his stuff. A Dumpster can hold a lot. I filled a big chunk of it. The contractors worried that they wouldn’t have enough room left for their needs, but they didn’t dare stop me. I threw away our entire bedroom set. It felt as though I was shedding an unbearable weight, in what was part eviction, part exorcism. I had no desire to live in the past; no part of me felt in need of reminders. I had an insatiable appetite for space.

  * * *

  ●

  That November, I went to Newbury Street in Boston to get a haircut. It’s funny, the things that come to feel like luxuries. I wanted to sit in a chair and zone out for a little while. A haircut was a good excuse to do it.

  On Newbury, rows of old brownstones have been converted into stores, one on each floor. I’ve always found the entrances and stairways confusing. Instead of going into the hair salon, I walked up the wrong flight of stairs. I found myself in a messy room, filled with stacks of white paper and yellow file folders. A tall woman with blond hair and glasses approached me and asked if she could help.

  “I was trying to go to the hair salon,” I said.

  She was about to point me in the right direction when I figured out that I was standing in a lawyer’s office. I hadn’t taken care of the legal affairs that follow the death of your husband. They seemed insurmountable and, honestly, not all that pressing. Death has a way of making everything seem urgent and unimportant at the same time.

  “Do you know anything about wills and stuff?” I asked the woman.

  Her name was Freya. She took me in with her eyes and nodded. Then she led me into an adjacent room, small and tidy and private. She told me that she handled all aspects of family law, because her clients, mostly businessmen, were always getting divorced. She somehow sensed that I wasn’t getting divorced. I was staggered when she volunteered that she had been widowed ten years earlier. Freya had been through the process as both the lawyer and the client. Of course she would be happy to help me. By then I had almost stopped listening, stuck trying to figure out how she knew that I was a widow. I wondered whether she might teach me the secret handshake.

  “How have you been doing?” she asked.

  “Extremely well, actually,” I said. I told her that life wasn’t always easy, but I had been feeling empowered. Even my temper felt like a kind of justice. As much as I missed Mike, I didn’t miss the last eighteen months of his life. “Liberated, almost,” I said.

  Freya smiled. She said that my euphoria wasn’t unusual. I had earned my almost manic approach to life. It was a bubble of self-protection, she started to explain. A routine psychological response to trauma. Oh no, I thought. I don’t need to be hearing this. I started backing away, literally, the way you retreat from a crazy person who wants to pray for you on the subway. Freya was not dissuaded. She started telling me her own story. Ten years ago, she had felt like a superwoman for months. Then her feelings of release were replaced by a withering aimlessness. She said that would happen to me, too. There would be a moment, as inevitable as death itself, when I would feel not just alone but lost. She wanted me to be ready for it. I had a better chance of surviving if I knew it was coming.

  I didn’t really know what to say. I know how I felt: I felt as though there are some things you don’t tell people, partly out of common courtesy, and partly because they will never believe you. Widowhood, the birth of a baby, death itself—you have to let people experience those things for themselves, in their own particular ways. I understood better how Mike must have felt when I needed him to accept his own reality, when I needed him to reconcile his defiance with his odds. There was nothing about my experience that was boilerplate. Why would all widows be the same? Why would our passages be universal? We weren’t the same before our husbands had died. Surely our stories were as diverse as we were. Maybe Freya had fallen into an impossible blackness—that’s what she called it: “an impossible blackness”—but that didn’t mean I would. Why couldn’t I be fine? I wanted to be fine.

  I stammered out a thank-you and said I would be in touch. She smiled at me, a little sadly, and shook my hand.

  “I’m going to leave now,” I said. I was going to get my haircut. I was going to sit in a chair and zone out for a little while.

  I stepped outside and felt my legs go out from under me. Whoosh—it was as though I’d stepped back onto the street and been lifted into the arms of a storm. I somehow knew in the instant that I wasn’t going to be one of those miracle babies, deposited by a tornado into the branches of a welcoming tree. I wasn’t going to be set down gently. If the storm ever did put me down, it was first going to carry me far from the new world that I had been trying to build for myself, far from my illusion of happiness.

  Or maybe it had already picked me up months before, in the moment when Mike had died. Maybe it had taken Freya to point out that I had never been defying gravity: I was the victim of it. Maybe she had known that I was a widow the second I had walked through her door because I had mistaken down for up, floors for ceilings. I had confused falling with flying. Surrounded by an impossible blackness, how could I have figured out the difference on my own?

  CHAPTER 10

  Impossible Blackness

  Astronomy forces you to look at the universe with different eyes. We normally find things by looking for them. When we lose something, we keep our eyes peeled and retrace our steps and search until we find it. That doesn’t always work in space. There is too much darkness, and there are so many places we have never been.

  Sometimes we identify things through the absence of something else, the way the missing pieces of rainbows betray the existence of certain gases. Other times we find things through their effects on something else, like that telltale gravitational wobble that an orbiting exoplanet might cause in its star. Nothing else could be massive enough to make a star move, so there must be a planet somewhere nearby.

  And sometimes we find things by studying that which can’t exist on its own. The thing you’re looking for must be there, too, because it had to have come first. If we find a table with four chairs around it, we can deduce that four people must sometimes sit around it, because why else would there be four chairs? Astronomy is haunted by the presences of things we can’t see. Astronomy is like loss that way. It’s like love.

  * * *

  ●

  My work sometimes suffered during Mike’s sickness. Even at something like my birthday party I was of two minds at once. I missed a deadline to extend my Kepler access that I didn’t even know was coming, and I lost my hard-earned rights to early data. I called my friend Riccardo. “Sara,” he said. “You will stop crying. You will move on.” Kepler was finding possible exoplanets at a rate of about one per day; in the time it took pioneers to conquer a few miles of the expanding West, astronomers saw whole new worlds. Now I would watch that progress unfold from the outside, feeling even more alone than I already was.

  But after Mike’s death, in that strange window of perfect clarity—in the right frame of mind, on the right rainy afternoon—I could escape again into the twin expanses of deep space and my dreams. My proposal to study exoplanet atmospheres using transit transmission spectra was now close to standard practice. Dozens of Hot Jupiters and their alien currents had been
observed using Hubble and other telescopes. It was gratifying to lay claim to such a tangible contribution to the field. I still sometimes heard the approving measures of John Bahcall in my ears. Yet those efforts also felt increasingly limiting to me. I had always been driven by the new, by the uncharted, by nosing my boat into an undisturbed lake, and that feeling had only grown with every new discovery, with every first. We weren’t going to be surprised by a Hot Jupiter. We weren’t going to find a life-form that can survive in flames. Surveying lifeless planet after lifeless planet…I could spend all the time I wanted in empty rooms in my own house.

  A few years earlier, I had seen a British scientist named William Bains speak at an astrobiology conference in California. He’d intrigued me from the start of his talk. It wasn’t his red hair and red beard that made him stand out in the room; it was his encyclopedic knowledge of biology and chemistry and the spaces where they interact. I loved the way he thought about life in the universe.

  William brought his biotech class from England to visit Boston each spring. In 2009, he’d stopped by MIT and talked to me and my students about his research, which at the time involved finding liquids other than water that might sustain life. That led to expansive conversations about the different forms that life might take. Could life survive in jets of sulfur? Could life be based on silicon instead of carbon? That visit had gone so well, I invited him to stay in Cambridge for a couple of months to explore the limits of astrobiology with me. I am not a biochemist by training, but I wasn’t about to concern myself with staying inside my field’s arbitrary lines. The physical world defies the borders we draw across it. If I saw something worth exploring, especially if it would help me find other life in the universe, I wanted to pursue it.

  We embarked on a brief, spectacular failure of a lab project, trying to cultivate a robust form of life on Earth—E. coli, in our case, the bacteria that finds our digestive tract a delightful habitat—in higher and higher temperatures. The biology professor who hosted us in her lab told us that our experiment was pointless: No, E. coli could not live on a planet like Mercury. She was right, it turned out. It was still fun to cook bacteria with William, playing mad scientists for a little while.

  William became a friend, and, after Mike died, he asked me what he could do to help me with my grief. “Come visit MIT to work with me on biosignatures,” I said. We reopened our efforts by pooling our imaginations. We talked about different gases that might be produced by life. We wondered what temperatures really did make life impossible, and what temperatures required us only to think differently about how life begins and survives. We knew science was just beginning to understand the incredible diversity of exoplanets: they come in every size and many colors; they orbit giant stars and dwarf stars and binary stars; they are made of combinations of solids, liquids, and gases. William and I made mental pictures of every conceivable world.

  I was still especially interested in the composition of alien atmospheres. I still believed that Bigfoot’s breath would give him away. When I wasn’t thinking about new space telescopes to help us explore, I thought about what we should be looking for with them. William and I took a closer look at planetary chemistry, at different combinations of rock, surface temperature, and atmospheric mass, and how they might combine to alter alien skies. A planet’s volcanism could also have a dramatic effect on its atmosphere. The highest mountain on Mars, Olympus Mons, is a volcano three times the height of Mount Everest. It’s possible that other planets have volcanoes that are even larger than that, or more numerous or more active than our own. William and I reminded each other constantly: Anything is possible.

  Our goal was to shake ourselves of our Earth-based biases—our “terracentrism,” we called it, that peculiar blindness born of being human. Most of the scientists also at work on biosignature gases were using Earth as their model for other life-sustaining worlds. That’s an understandable response to living on such a beautiful planet, just the right size and distance from its star. If we want to predict how much methane might be produced by life in a year, of course scientists would start with how much methane is produced by life on Earth in a year.

  But William and I approached the math a different way. We knew that life-betraying gases are often destroyed by a cascade of atmospheric chemistry. That happens on Earth, too; the sun’s ultraviolet rays smash other molecules into highly reactive components, called radicals, which in turn bond with all sorts of chemicals. William and I calculated how much of a particular gas needed to be present in an alien atmosphere for us to detect it with a future space telescope. Then we determined how much biomass would need to be present to make that much gas, factoring in the destructive powers of those same ultraviolet rays. If a planet would need trees ten miles tall to accumulate enough oxygen for us to see it, then we could eliminate it as a place we might look for life. Well, probably eliminate it. Maybe there is a planet with trees ten miles tall. Maybe there is a planet with trees that walk. Maybe there is a planet where the trees are kings and queens.

  Next we asked another question: Can an atmosphere rich in hydrogen also betray signs of life? This was important to know, because hydrogen is a light gas. That means planets with a lot of hydrogen in their atmosphere look “puffier” than Earth does: Their atmospheres extend farther from their planet’s surface than our delicate envelope. (Helium-filled balloons rise on Earth because our gravity is too weak to hold on to the helium molecules within them. The same would be true if we filled balloons with hydrogen. But a more massive or much colder planet could anchor hydrogen, so balloons would sink rather than float.) Puffier atmospheres are easier for us to detect—using the Transit Technique, we can more easily watch the spectrum of light passing through a puffy atmosphere than a thin one—which means that planets bathed in hydrogen would make for simpler candidates in our nascent search. But we weren’t sure whether hydrogen might react harshly with biosignature gases, eating them up before we had a chance to detect them, the way Earth once consumed all of its oxygen. We used a computer to simulate every exoplanet atmosphere we could, trying to see whether their biosignature gases might survive hydrogen’s grip.

  They did.

  * * *

  ●

  I could feel my possibilities expanding, too—or maybe that’s how it feels just before you break apart. I felt almost every emotion except happiness, and I felt all of them deeply. Some days I woke up with my pillow damp and saw no reason to go to work. I saw no reason to do anything. There were other times when I felt almost limitless, as though I’d built up an immunity to further harm. What can possibly hurt me now? I stopped worrying if the boys played recklessly, if they wanted to climb or swing from something they probably shouldn’t. Let them try. What’s the worst that could happen? What could possibly compare?

  I told myself that I didn’t owe anybody anything; I only owed myself a chance to smile. I’d think about Mike, and remember our first exploratory days together, and will myself into believing that there might be even better days ahead. Someday I might even have a better best friend, I’d think over and over, like a mantra. Then I would fall to the floor. Hour by hour, I felt either broken or bulletproof. I could span the space between them in seconds.

  We had neighbors in Concord, an older couple, the Wheelers. I was walking home from the train station after a long day at work when they stopped me. “Oh, your kids are so sweet,” Mrs. Wheeler said, which confused me, because she had never met my kids. Her husband had always been kind, but she had a schoolyard meanness in her, defining herself with her disdains rather than her affections. I braced myself for the inevitable turn. “They’re leaving their toys in our space,” she said. “And your yard is a mess. You put your fall leaves in a huge pile on our property. In Concord, we just don’t do those things.”

  I exploded into sobs on the spot. Really? My yard? My husband died. It wasn’t exactly a town secret. Leaves? A few toys? I couldn’t muster a word
in response; I felt lucky to find my next breath. She regarded my despair blankly. I recovered enough to return her stare only when I remembered that I didn’t have to care about anything anymore, least of all what she thought of me. I walked away.

  * * *

  ●

  I moved out of the bedroom with the boys to the room across the hall. It was Max’s room at one time, before he and Alex had decided to bunk together. When we first moved into the house, Mike had asked Max how he wanted his room painted. Max had asked for yellow walls, and then he’d asked Mike to add a giant rainbow to one of them. Mike had indulged his blue-eyed boy. I liked the rainbow. In that rainbow, I could see my life the way it once was. Because of some strange imbalance in our ancient radiator system, the rainbow room was also the warmest room in the house. I set up a little single bed in there, where I could curl up and feel like I was in the safest place.

  I had a dream about Mike not long after I moved into the rainbow room. He hadn’t died after all. He was back, as real as could be. He’d just been on a long canoe trip through the wilderness. It must have been a hard journey, physically demanding, because he looked beat. He was wearing shorts, a worn-through T-shirt, and a battered baseball cap. But he looked good, too, tanned and strong.

  “Hi,” I said, shocked to the point of speechlessness.