The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  I looked up across the bayou to our house. It squatted there like a fishing shack behind the trees. The lights were off, the windows dark. I saw my own window, a tiny black square jutting off the roof. I turned to look over my shoulder at Gabriella’s room up in her house. Her balconies were decorated with Christmas lights, her bedroom lit behind the yellow curtains. I looked back and forth between our two rooms, and they seemed farther apart than ever tonight.

  What was I thinking, imagining there could’ve been something between us? Some cruel god or fate had set me down on one side of the water, her on the other side, and no wish, no prayer could ever alter that unfair fact of life.

  That was the problem with expectations: they were good only as long as they lasted. Better not to expect anything at all. Better to join the cold-blooded, big-eyed creatures slithering in the mud at the bottom of the canal, animals that didn’t have to worry about love and hope and expectation. Because as soon as you grew two legs and learned to walk upright, you were pretty much doomed to a lifetime of disappointments.

  I looked down at the water, black and slick as oil. The stars blinked invitingly at my feet. How easy that would be, to throw myself in and slip away from all this. I imagined myself tipping over the edge of the dock, tipping, until I fell, plunging head first into the stars. The night sky splashed around me, cold and dark as the sea, and then the black, airless space rushed in to fill my mouth and lungs—

  “Don’t jump!”

  I looked up from the water, startled out of my reverie. Giggles came from a clump of skinny pine trees at the corner of the yard.

  “No, no, no.”

  “Shh. Leave him alone.”

  I stepped down off the dock and walked along the edge of the water toward the voices. A group of shadows huddled in the grove, their bodies barely distinguishable from the tree trunks.

  “Who is that? Who’s there?”

  “Oh, man. Why’d you have to—”

  As I came into the trees, the shadows revealed themselves to be my sister and the members of the band. A faint red dot floated between them, and a sharp, sweet odor hung in the air.

  “Is he cool?” one of the boys asked.

  “Never,” Megan said.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Oh, man,” one of the boys said.

  “It’s okay. We’re just enjoying a little smoke,” another said. I recognized him as the leader of the band. “You want some?” He held out what looked like a twisted-up cigarette.

  “Is that— No. No way. I don’t think so.” I took a step back.

  They laughed. “He thinks we’re demons.”

  “If you tell anyone, I swear I’ll kill you,” Megan said.

  “Aw, he’s cool. You’re not going to tell anyone, are you, man?”

  I’d only ever seen marijuana in movies and in documentary films at school, so to come across it here, in real life, with my sister and this shadowy band of college-aged musicians, was frightening and strange. They passed the joint, sucking on it in long, deep breaths and clamping their lips shut. I glanced over my shoulder at the Martellos’ house.

  “Relax, man. It’s safe,” said the leader.

  “You remember Greg, don’t you?” my sister said. “My old guitar teacher?”

  “Oh, right.”

  Greg had wavy, shoulder-length hair parted down the middle. He held out his hand for a soul shake. “Hey. Little Alan, right? Junior. How’ve you been? What’s up, man?”

  I was introduced to the other members of the band, the bass player, the keyboard player, the drummer. In the dim light, they were little more than long hair and pale faces bobbing above skinny bodies hunched in jackets.

  “You enjoying the party?” Greg spoke gently, his voice fluid.

  “It’s okay,” I said, but then added, more truthfully, “Not really.”

  “You’re like the only kid here.”

  “I’m not a kid, exactly.”

  “Your age, I mean.”

  “It’s like an old folks’ home,” agreed the bassist.

  “Rich old folks,” said the keyboard player.

  “There were those two comet kids,” said the drummer.

  “That was kind of funny,” said Greg. “The Comet King and Queen. With the sparklers.” They joked about the march they had to play for the procession—pah-rum pah-rum pum pum.

  “Junior’s in love with that girl,” my sister told them.

  “What?” I said.

  “Gabriella.”

  “Really? That’s cool,” Greg said, nodding and taking the joint. “She looked kind of cute. I mean, it was hard to tell with the crown and all.” He took a hissing drag and then asked through pinched lips, “Where is she?”

  “Who?”

  “Your girlfriend. The comet girl. You should bring her over.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Oh. I thought you were being serious.”

  “He wishes she was his girlfriend,” explained another.

  “That’s tough, man,” Greg said, shaking his head. “That’s a hard one. Watching from the sidelines.” He offered me the joint again. “Sure you don’t want any?”

  I hesitated. We’d been warned in school about just such a situation: a friendly older fellow would try to offer us drugs, and before we knew it we’d be hooked, addicts.

  “No?” Greg shrugged, and the red dot floated to my sister.

  He asked Megan if she still played guitar. “I remember you used to have a real sweet voice.”

  “Used to,” she said.

  “You don’t sing anymore?”

  “Nope.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  Megan brought her hand to her lips; the red glow lit her face, then she pulled the joint away suddenly from her mouth and stifled a cough.

  “Dude’s freaking out,” the bassist said, eyeing me.

  “He’s waiting for her to do something crazy,” the drummer said. “Start speaking in tongues.”

  “Spitting fire.”

  “Levitating.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said.

  “We’re just teasing you, man.”

  Noise from the party spilled over the wall around the backyard, but in the trees it was quiet. The joint went around. Although I knew what they were doing was criminal and quite possibly dangerous, these boys didn’t strike me as threatening. They seemed quite friendly, actually. They asked me and Megan about our father. “The science dude,” they called him. They all read his newspaper column, apparently. Greg asked if they’d seen his last one.

  “All about Pythagoras and the music of the spheres. What was that?”

  “ ‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’ ” said the drummer, remembering the title.

  “Oh, right. That was dumb,” I said.

  “I thought it was pretty interesting,” said the keyboard player. “Like, there’s music in space only we can’t hear it.” They talked about that for a while. Greg wondered if he could tune his guitar to a Pythagorean scale, what that would sound like.

  “Tune it to the stars, man,” said the drummer.

  “No, I’m serious,” Greg said. “I’m going to try it.”

  “I like astronomy,” the keyboard player said. “I wish we had a telescope right now.” He shaped his hands into a tube and looked up at the sky.

  “I have a telescope,” I said.

  “Yeah? You do? That’s cool.”

  They asked me about the comet. I told them what I knew.

  “You know a lot.”

  “Not really.”

  I’d been keeping my eye on the joint, and when it came around again I impulsively reached for it. I glanced at my sister. She acted surprisingly unconcerned about this, my momentous decision.

  “Just a little puff,” Greg said as I brought it to my lips. “That’s right.” I coughed, spitting out all the smoke. There were some chuckles.

  “You’ve got to do it easy,” said the drummer, and demonstrated how I should inh
ale.

  I tried it again. They watched. “Hold it … hold it,” they said, but I coughed out all the smoke again. I shook my head and passed the joint along.

  “Takes some getting used to,” the drummer said, and they went on talking and smoking.

  I swallowed, tasting the residue of the smoke in my mouth. I waited for some strange sensation to take hold of my body—weightlessness, maybe, or dizziness. I thought I might go crazy and start laughing uncontrollably; I would see giant spiders, or run and leap off the dock, believing I could fly. Nothing seemed to be happening, though.

  The others had shifted and were looking up at the stars between the trees, talking about space.

  “You ever wonder what’s behind the stars?” Greg asked.

  “Nothing, man,” said the drummer. “More space.”

  “I mean, what’s behind the space?” Greg wiped his hand across the sky, like he was cleaning fog from a window.

  “It just ends. Stops,” my sister said. “Like a … like a crystal ball.”

  “Heaven. Angels.”

  “Demons.”

  “We are stardust. We are golden,” said Greg.

  “We are billion-year-old carbon,” replied my sister.

  I looked up with them. There was a quiet pause as we all considered the possibilities. The Moon had lifted higher and it hung cool and familiar above our heads. I experienced a peculiar sense of déjà vu just then—like I’d stood here before, with these same people, in this same configuration of time and place and sky.

  “Maybe there’s another universe,” I said. “Behind the stars. Exactly like this one, occupied by people exactly like us, only doing what we wished we had done but never did. A universe filled with people’s wishes.”

  “I like that,” Greg said.

  “That’s trippy,” my sister said.

  “Junior’s stoned,” the bassist said. “He caught a, what do you call it, sympathetic buzz.”

  We all stood looking at the stars for a minute longer. I had been ready to go home, but now I wanted to run back to the party, into the lights and people, and find Gabriella. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe I wasn’t just imagining things; maybe there was something between us. Hadn’t we held hands? Hadn’t we promised to meet each other tonight? Hadn’t she tugged on my sleeve and said, “See you later, Junior”? The stars winked and chimed overhead, An auspicious night, an auspicious night.

  Someone let out a breath. “Man, I’m baked.”

  “Is it finished? Where is it? I’m holding it.” The drummer inspected the joint and stuffed the nub into his jacket pocket.

  “How long have we been here? We’ve been here forever. We should check the time.”

  They all began straightening themselves, sniffing and rubbing their eyes. “Rock and roll,” they said, and started shuffling toward the patio.

  “You guys sound good,” I said, walking a little off to the side.

  “Hey, thanks, man,” Greg said. “You should come and check out a real show sometime.” At the gate, he stopped and shook my hand again while my sister waited beside him. “Be cool, man.”

  “I’m cool,” I answered.

  My sister laughed out loud at this. But then she did something she hadn’t done in years—she reached out and rubbed my arm.

  “Little bro,” she said, her eyes glassy. “Wishes he was cool. Go find your girl.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  I hurried back to the party. I made a pass through the yard; I walked through the tent, circled around the patio, and went through the yard again, but I couldn’t find Gabriella. I did, however, run into my grandparents. They were putting on their coats in the library, getting ready to leave.

  “We haven’t talked to you all night,” Paps said. “Are you having fun? Isn’t this a nice party?” Grams asked.

  Paps helped her on with her coat, using his one hand to hold it up while Grams slipped her arms into the sleeves. My grandmother wore rouge and jewelry; my grandfather wore a tie, the knot crimped and off center, his hair combed flat with stray strands sticking up in the back. Outside of their own home, under this high ceiling, against the tall bookcase, they appeared small and awkward. They looked like two hunched, friendly rodents.

  “How about this house, huh?” Paps said as they started for the door. “Your folks are keeping some mighty impressive company these days,” Grams said. “Nobody’s hurting here, no sir-ee,” Paps said.

  I was opening the front door for them when Gabriella appeared at the top of the stairs. She was wearing her purple dress, her hair done up in ribbons again, looking resplendent.

  “Here she is, the belle of the ball,” Paps said. “The princess,” Grams said.

  “You’re not leaving, are you?” she asked, and hurried down the stairs to them.

  I hovered nearby while she chatted with my grandparents. I was surprised she knew who they were. She held my grandmother’s hand and said how nice it was to meet them. My grandfather told her how much they’d enjoyed the evening and what a fine Comet Queen she made.

  “Don’t be a stranger, petit garçon,” Paps told me, starting off. “Come visit,” Grams said, and she slipped her hand into the crook of Paps’s good arm as they turned and ducked out the door. Gabriella and I stood in the doorway and watched them shuffle arm in arm up the sidewalk, Paps’s empty coat sleeve waving a little as they walked.

  “When I’m old, I hope I shuffle just like that,” Gabriella said. “They’re charming, aren’t they?” It was a word I never would have used to describe my grandparents, but hearing her say it, I saw how, in a certain light, it might apply. They disappeared between some parked cars and then she abruptly turned to me.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “What? Nowhere. Right here.”

  “I thought you were avoiding me.” She spun on her feet, and I followed her back inside.

  “Avoiding you? No! I was looking for you.”

  She smiled and greeted guests as we passed quickly through the house. At the back door she halted and looked out at the party, her hands resting on the doorframe. She sighed dramatically. “I don’t think I can talk to another soul. I’m absolutely exhausted.”

  She swung around and her eyes went to the kitchen. “Are you thirsty?”

  “Not especially.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Say yes.”

  “Okay: yes.”

  I followed her into the kitchen, where Christine and another woman were washing glasses at the sink. Stacked against the walls were cases of liquor. Gabriella slipped a green bottle of champagne out of one of the boxes and shoved it at me. “Psst. Here, take this.”

  I caught it under my jacket. “Hey—”

  “Mm-hm,” Christine said. “I see that.”

  “Come on. Quick.”

  Gabriella pulled me by the jacket through the house, looking for an empty room, but we kept running into other people, men and women in nice clothes standing around talking in groups. “In here … Wait … No, here … Excuse us … Mr. and Mrs. Daigle, how nice …” We came around again to the front hall and she jogged up the stairs ahead of me. “Up here. Hurry.”

  I followed her up the stairs, down a hallway, and through a door. She closed the door behind us, and then I stopped short, staring at the room.

  I knew her bedroom well, I’d studied and admired it, but to see it here from the inside was like tumbling into a photograph in a picture book. There were the French doors, the canopied bed, the painted trunk, the telephone, the door to her powder room, all of it very familiar but also slightly unreal, precisely because it was real and I was standing inside it now. Her silver costume and golden cardboard crown lay on the bed.

  Gabriella kicked off her shoes and followed my eyes around her room. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Nothing, it’s nice. You have a nice room.”

  “Why thank you, petit garçon. Sit down, you’re making me nervous.” I sat in an armchair. She took the champagne bottle from me, went into her p
owder room, and came back out. “No glasses. Can you open it?” She handed the bottle back to me.

  “How do you do this?”

  “You don’t know how to open a champagne bottle?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a boy. Aren’t you supposed to know how to do things like that? The twisty thing—”

  She sat by me on an ottoman and together we wrestled with the bottle until the cork popped out. “Yay,” she said.

  “You first.”

  “Cheers,” she said, and took a hefty swallow. “Oops. Too much. I might burp.” She handed it to me.

  I got a big mouthful and felt it sting my throat and swell up into my nose and eyes. “It’s bubbly,” I agreed. We passed the bottle, trading sips.

  “Is this your first drink ever?”

  “Not ever.”

  “It is, isn’t it? Oh, no. I’m corrupting you.”

  “I guess you have champagne all the time. You probably drink it for breakfast.”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “You probably wash your hair in it. You probably bathe in it.”

  “I swim in it. Every morning, for exercise. The swimming pool is full of it,” she said. “If you swim too long, you get drunk and you drown.”

  There was an abrupt lull in our conversation, as if the burst of energy that had carried us from the front door, to the kitchen, through the house, and up the stairs had run out, and now we were both a little surprised to find just the two of us sitting alone in her bedroom passing a bottle of champagne.

  She smiled quickly, suddenly bashful, and took the bottle from me. I rested my hands on the arms of the stuffed chair. My wrists stuck out of my jacket sleeves, bony and funny looking. I saw that the cuff of my jacket was missing a button, and I folded my arms over my chest to hide it.

  Nervous now, I got up and went to the French doors. I looked out through the curtains. The band played and the music thumped lightly against the panes of glass. People turned and mingled on the lawn. From this perspective, the party, with the lights, the people, the tents, appeared distant and magical, like it was an event that might have happened once long ago and I was seeing it not as it was now, but as I remembered it.

  I spotted Mark Mingis on the patio. He was talking to Gabriella’s father and a group of his business friends. His costume was off; he had one hand in his trouser pocket, his other hand holding a drink, the mirror image of the men standing around him—a junior oil man in training.