The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  “Okay, Alan, that’s enough! Nobody wants to hear all that,” she said, and laughed anxiously.

  “No, no, I’m curious,” Frank said. Sitting up, he asked my father if he’d seen much improvement in the local schools, because to be honest, they’d had some concerns about that when they moved here.

  Barbara Martello, joining in, said that if it was up to her, they’d have sent Gabriella to a private school. It was a question of “standards,” she insisted. Everyone knew that a private school had higher standards than a public school.

  My mother agreed. She said something about my father’s work being “charity,” and if it were up to her, she’d do the same with her children.

  Frank argued that the nearest private school was over forty miles away, and anyway, if public schools were good enough for him growing up—

  “But things were different when we were kids,” Barbara said. “Schools were safer then.”

  “Now they’re just big zoos!” said my mother.

  “Oh, let’s just say it: my wife’s afraid of the blacks,” said Frank. “She thinks they’re all savages.”

  “This has nothing whatsoever to do with race,” Barbara protested. “I’m talking about standards.”

  I stole a peek at Christine to see if she was hearing any of this. She’d become very preoccupied with a spot on the edge of the sink, frowning as she scrubbed it with a washcloth.

  “Ask him. Let’s ask him,” Frank said. “Hey, Junior!”

  “Oh, no, don’t bother him.”

  “Sure, why not? We’ve got an expert right here. I just saw him go into the kitchen. Junior!” Frank called again.

  “Go see what they want,” Christine told me.

  “Yes, sir?”

  The adults looked up as I stepped into the room. They all held drinks or had drinks resting on the coffee table. Except for a small mess of chocolate and strawberry stems in front of my father, the fondue hadn’t been touched.

  Barbara turned to my father. “I believe he looks just like you, Alan.”

  “That’s why we call him Junior,” my father said, and snorted a laugh.

  Frank Martello bounced nuts in his right hand, like they were hot, before popping them one by one into his mouth. “Your folks and I have been talking about the local schools. My wife’s worried about what kind of education Gabriella will get here. She’s afraid the high school isn’t safe. She thinks it’s a jungle of sin and vice—”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “That’s not what she said,” my mother echoed.

  “Poor standards. You said you thought the school had ‘poor standards,’ ” my father said, diplomatically.

  “And I agreed,” my mother said, nodding.

  “And so what we want to know is,” Frank said, going on, “from the student’s point of view, whether you think you’re getting a quality education.”

  They watched me expectantly. I hesitated, not sure what they wanted to know. I tugged my shirt from my chest.

  “What kind of quality?”

  “Well, you know, the school, the facilities, the curriculum …”

  “The teachers,” my father said.

  “The teachers,” said Frank.

  “They seem all right, I guess,” I said. “Not too bad.”

  “Would you call it a rigorous education?” Frank asked.

  “Well—” I said.

  “What about the students?” asked Barbara, sitting up. “How are they? Your classmates?”

  “She means the blacks,” said Frank.

  “I do not. I mean all the students.”

  “They seem … fine. Mostly,” I said. “They’re friendly enough.”

  “A mixed bunch,” my father put in.

  “No student unrest, that kind of thing? Agitation?” asked Frank.

  “No.… Things seem pretty quiet now.”

  My mother spoke up. “What about drugs? Do you see a lot of drugs at school?” She added in an aside to Barbara, “They all go to school high on drugs.”

  “Marijuana, for example,” Frank said.

  “You know what marijuana is, don’t you?” my father asked me.

  “Everyone knows what marijuana is!” said my mother.

  “Well?” Frank asked. “You see much of that?”

  In fact, I’d heard rumors that a few kids in my class smoked pot, but I had never seen it. I wasn’t even sure what it looked like.

  “Not much,” I said.

  “Not much?” Barbara asked, worried.

  “I mean hardly any. None.”

  “There, you see?” my father said. “It’s not as bad as you think, Barbara.”

  I expected that next they would ask me to look after Gabriella while she was at school—to take her under my wing and make sure she was safe there—but they didn’t. Instead, they went on to talk about the problem with kids in general these days, and the generation gap, and who knew what the world was coming to. Soon they seemed to have forgotten that I was even there, but I stayed just in case I was needed to verify anything else.

  The music played. My father nodded eagerly and dipped strawberries in the fondue. My mother’s nervousness seemed to be wearing off; she became excited as she spoke, her hands fluttering up from her lap and then settling back down to play with the hem of her skirt. She looked overjoyed to finally have company in our house.

  For her part, Barbara attended politely to my mother without appearing to actually hear her; I caught her glancing once or twice at the front door, like she was impatient to leave. Frank, though, looked genuinely happy to be here. He ate nuts, and hunched forward, and joked and argued with my mother, and teased my father about the difficulty of pleasing the womenfolk.

  “Oh, Frank, you’re terrible!” my mother said, and playfully slapped his knee.

  I saw Frank’s eyes drift to my mother’s legs. They slid from the hem of her skirt, to her knees, down to her ankles, and back up again, as though he were painting her legs with his eyelashes. Then he looked up at her face and smiled, prompting my mother to redden and smile in return.

  I felt hot-faced and queer for having witnessed such a thing, if indeed I had witnessed anything at all, because immediately Frank was again laughing and popping nuts into his mouth. My mother shyly touched her hair. My father, oblivious as usual, only sniffed and pushed his glasses up on his nose and checked his watch. But then he sprang up from his chair, and everyone leaned back to look at him.

  “Oops! It’s time. Let’s go.”

  “What’s time?” Barbara asked.

  “The comet. It’s here. Twenty-one hundred hours. We should be able to catch it in Leo now if we’re lucky.”

  “Let’s not keep the comet waiting, then,” said Frank. “Hi dee ho.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MY mother clutched Frank’s arm as he helped her down the wooden steps from the kitchen into the backyard.

  “Wowser, what was in that drink?”

  “Steady, girl.”

  “I can’t see anything.”

  Barbara looked on as my father consulted numbers on a piece of paper and adjusted the telescope with the aid of a penlight. He had turned off the houselights so that we could see the sky better, and the darkness added an extra intimacy to our yard, causing everyone to huddle in closer and talk more softly, as though we were gathered around a campfire. The bayou lay still and black, and the water was filled with stars.

  “That’s an unusual-looking instrument you’ve got there,” Frank said, leaning in.

  “It’s Junior’s, actually. A Celestron C8.” My father explained how the telescope worked, how you focused it. “What you really want is elevation. A high, dark place, away from the ambient light of the city.”

  “Reflection, refraction, half the time I have no idea what he’s talking about,” my mother said.

  Barbara asked about the comet. “Will it really be as big as everyone says?”

  “My opinion? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was even more s
pectacular than what people expect. I haven’t seen the scientific community this excited since the Moon landing.” He explained how scientists were usually quite conservative in their predictions, so if they said that something was, to use the layman’s term, “big,” you could very well expect “enormous.”

  Frank gave a low whistle. Megan and Gabriella clomped down the steps to join us. Gabriella halted near me and shoved her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. She gave a quick smile. I smiled in return and immediately looked away. A swampy-sweet smell hung in the air, and the Spanish moss draping the trees waved in a slight breeze.

  We all watched my father working the telescope for a moment, until he breathlessly announced, “Yes. Yes. Yes. There it is. I’ve got it. That must be it. Oh my goodness. Comet Kohoutek.”

  We looked from the telescope to the sky, expecting to see something moving up there. Even Frank and Barbara were excited by the sighting. They peered curiously at the stars while my father, hunched at the telescope, made small, panting noises of astonishment.

  “Okay, okay, let someone else have a peek, Professor,” Frank said at last.

  My father pulled himself away from the eyepiece and helped each of us take a turn at the telescope. As he did so, he repeated a version of his classroom lecture on comets: their origins, their composition, their appearance and trajectories. He reminded us how Kohoutek was a relic from the birth of the solar system, likely older even than the Earth itself, and that already it had been traveling for millions of years across space to reach us. It was thought to be a virgin comet, he said, making its very first pass through the solar system, so we should get to see some really spectacular displays of outgassing as it came closer.

  “A virgin comet, you say?” Frank said, amused.

  “Now, Frank—” my mother warned.

  “What? I wasn’t going to say anything.” He moved in for his turn, and my father helped him get adjusted at the eyepiece. “There? Is that it? That’s the comet? That’s just a little bitty sucker. You can barely see it.”

  “Don’t let it fool you,” my father said. “It’s still over two hundred million miles away. That little sucker is about four times the size of our Earth.”

  If, as he expected, Kohoutek continued to grow in magnitude as it approached the Sun, and if its nucleus remained intact and didn’t break apart, then by December it could easily outshine the Moon. It’d be the brightest thing in the night sky. At Christmastime we’d be able to read our newspapers at midnight by its light.

  Barbara asked about the scary predictions some people were making: how the gas from the tail would poison our drinking water, or how the radio waves would disrupt electrical systems and shut down power stations. There could be blackouts all across the country. Trains would stop running, planes would crash to the ground. There was a preacher in Shreveport who was saying that the comet had been sent by God to wipe out sinners from the Earth.

  “Seriously—we’re not in any danger, are we, Alan?”

  “ ‘And a great star fell from heaven to smite the sinners of the Earth! And the name of the star was Wormwood! Woe, woe, woe!’ ” My father laughed lightly and pushed up his glasses. “You always get that with comets.”

  The problem, he said, was when emotions overtook reason, causing people to behave irrationally. The same thing happened with Halley’s. People went crazy, buying gas masks and stuffing wet towels under their doors. Some wackos even leapt to their deaths from the roofs of buildings, believing the world was coming to an end.

  “People tend to become overly excited concerning things that they know little about,” he explained. But there shouldn’t be anything to worry about with Kohoutek. Its trajectory was such that as it crossed the Earth’s orbit—twice, coming and going—it’d miss us by a long shot. At its closest, it’d still be some 60 million miles away.

  “Of course,” he added cleverly, his shoulders twitching, “comets have always been wildly unpredictable. No one ever quite knows what they’ll do.”

  “Like women,” Frank said. “Wildly unpredictable. Isn’t that right, Lydia?”

  “Don’t say that,” my mother said, and slapped his arm.

  “She’s always hitting me. Why are you hitting me?”

  I finally got my turn at the telescope. I bent down to the eyepiece. The lens was dotted with points of light. In their center was a small, bluish star with a hazy bump on one side. It didn’t move, only hovered there, vibrating slightly, as though it were charged with some great but restrained power. As I continued to stare at it, the comet seemed to come alive, slowly swelling and shrinking, like it was breathing. I realized that it was moving in time to my own breath, as though it were somehow connected to my body. When I pulled away from the telescope, I felt myself still thrumming in time to the comet. And when I looked at our two families standing in the dark in our yard, I could easily believe that everyone had been similarly touched by the sight of the comet, so that our lives were bound together now in some strong but as-yet indefinable affiliation.

  “Someone go get Christine. She should see this, too,” my father said, and Megan went inside to fetch her. The maid came down the steps, quietly excited.

  “Good lord,” she said, hunched in an awkward squat at the eyepiece; she was trying not to touch the telescope with any part of her body. “Look at that. I see it. Oh, my gracious. Great God in heaven, here it comes.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  MY father was reluctant to leave the telescope, but eventually he was coaxed back inside to fix more drinks for our parents, leaving us teenagers alone in the dark yard.

  Bullfrogs croaked. We could hear jazz music start up again in the living room as my mother put on another record. I rested a hand on the telescope and swiveled it back and forth. Stars hung all around us, as distant and close as heaven itself.

  Gabriella stood not five feet away from me, standing on the same ground that I stood, breathing the same air that I breathed. I was almost paralyzed with nervousness to be so near her. This was another thing they failed to teach you at school: what to say, what to do when you were standing side by side with a beautiful girl. Gabriella broke the silence.

  “Do you know how to work it?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure. I should. It’s my telescope. What do you want to see?”

  “No more comets. Please,” my sister said. “I’m sick to death of comets.”

  Gabriella looked around. She pointed down the bayou to the left. “How about the Daigles’ house? Can you do that?” Her voice was low, relaxed.

  “Which one?”

  “There at the end. The last one.”

  I aimed the Celestron at the house across the water. As I did, I explained about degrees of declination and ascension, the finderscope and the focus control.

  “Oh my god, you sound just like Dad,” said Megan.

  “You guys must be really smart,” Gabriella said. “I mean, with your father a science teacher and all.”

  “Our father’s such a nerd,” Megan said. “It’s so embarrassing. I hate it.”

  I found the Daigles’ kitchen window and invited Gabriella to have a look. I stepped aside as she bent to the eyepiece, looping her hair over her right ear. Her lips fell open; her lashes brushed the rubber socket of the eyepiece.

  I felt a tug in my stomach. Everything about her was perfect. I wanted to reach out and trace her features with my finger: the fuzzy fringe of hair on her forehead, the rounded tip of her nose, the tiny dent above her chin. I wondered what she would do if I did touch her—just her hair. If I just touched her hair with my finger. She’d probably scream.

  “Oh my god. You can see everything. They had pork chops for dinner. And mashed potatoes. And wait—Mrs. Daigle just came into the kitchen. She’s talking to somebody in the next room. This is so cool. It’s like you’re right there with them. I can see the clock on the stove.”

  “Let me see,” Megan said, and Gabriella moved aside.

  We toyed some more with the telescope. T
he girls pointed out objects and I swiveled the instrument so we could examine each one: the lettering on the side of a batteau docked up near the Franklin Street bridge; the blinking red warning light on top of the water tower, its round tank rising like a pale green planet above the trees at the edge of our neighborhood. From inside the house behind us came a trickle of laughter. The water on the bayou rippled lightly, as if in sympathy with the sound. The reflected stars wavered and winked, and the moss in the trees swayed like seaweed in a current.

  As though touched herself by the gentle mood of the night, Gabriella said, thoughtfully, “I remember you wrote that poem. ‘I am the comet, far far away.’ ”

  “Oh, right. That was dumb.”

  “I liked it. What was it? ‘I am the comet, far far away …’ ”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “Junior wrote a poem?” said my sister at the telescope.

  “We all had to. Come on. Say it.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Say it.”

  I recited quickly: “Far, far away, sailing pale and quiet past the stars, I am the comet, you are the Sun, beautiful Sun, unfreeze my heart and see me shine.”

  “See? That’s nice.” Her voice was soft, almost a whisper.

  “Aw,” my sister said. “He’s the comet.”

  “Shut up,” I said, and took the telescope back from her.

  I stole a glance at Gabriella. She was watching me with a curious smile on her lips. Was it amusement? Admiration? Our eyes met for a second. I nodded quickly, as if to tell her, Yes—it’s you. You’re the Sun, and then ducked to the scope.