The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  No wonder people wrote songs about this, I thought. No wonder people fought and killed and died over this. I could still feel her kiss tingling on my lips. I was like a man on fire. I was shot through with bullet holes. I was in love; I was in love, and I was dying.

  Rooms, rooms, and more rooms. The night wasn’t over yet.

  As I was passing a little later through the front hallway to get my coat and leave, I bumped into Frank Martello coming out of the library.

  “Ho ho ho!” he said, and laughed oddly. He clapped a hand on my shoulder and asked how I was enjoying the party. His face was red, his manner blustery. He asked if I’d seen my father. I said I thought he was out back.

  “Out there?” he said, pointing.

  “Yes, sir. I think so.”

  “All righty, then. We’ll see you later.”

  He clapped me on the back again and headed to the rear of the house, stuffing his hands in his pockets as he hurried away.

  I paused beneath the chandelier. The hall was quiet. The tall double doors of the library stood half open. Something was up. Some strangeness in the air, a whiff of deceitfulness trailing in the wake of Frank Martello, drew me toward the library. I peeked in through the doors.

  The room was empty—just the racks of coats, the leather armchairs, the desk, the globe of the world …

  And my mother, standing at the floor-to-ceiling bookcase with her back to the room.

  “Hello?”

  She turned around. “Oh. Hi. I was just looking at the books. They sure have a lot, don’t they?”

  She gave a quick, stiff smile. Her eyes glanced off mine as she moved away from the bookcase, touching her hair and walking shakily. Her shoes clicked across the polished wood floor and then were muffled by the corner of the oriental rug.

  She wasn’t looking at any books. The realization came to me slowly and then all in a rush. An hour ago I might not have even noticed it, but now her condition seemed as obvious to me as her red hair and green dress, as obvious as her yellow cape dropped on the floor over there at the base of the bookcase.

  My mother was a woman on fire. She was shot through with bullet holes. She was miserable and angry and elated, all at once. Her lips—I could practically see it as she drew nearer—her lips were still tingling from where he’d kissed her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  OOH love … Ooh love …

  In the morning the sky was low and yellow. A white fog rose up from the bayou and crept across the yard, transforming the scene outside my bedroom window into someplace strange and only vaguely familiar. Lines were blurred; trees had lost their shape, the ground its solidity. Here and there objects stuck up out of the fog, like junk floating in a flood: the corner of the picnic table, the side of the garage shed, the handlebars of my bicycle. Looking up, I imagined the comet hidden behind the yellow sky, streaming its vapors down onto the Earth, spreading its mysterious outer-space gases in a white cloud over our town, our home, our lives.

  Downstairs we shivered and paced through the rooms, looking at sections of the Sunday newspaper and then dropping the pages to the floor. My head hurt, my stomach ached. Our house seemed dimmer, grayer, more cramped than usual. At the Martellos’, workmen arrived early and began breaking down the tents and tables. We could hear the clank of metal and the exchange of voices on the other side of the bayou. My mother stood at the kitchen window with a cup of coffee, hugging her bathrobe around herself and staring across the water. Her eyes darted back and forth in her pale, sharp face; her red hair stood out messily around her head. She puckered her lips and blew across her coffee, complaining about the cold.

  In the afternoon it rained. It splashed on the sills outside the windows. It spread in sheets across the surface of the bayou, and beat the leaves in the yard into the mud, and streamed in rivulets under the house, sending damp cold drafts up through the floorboards. My mother turned up the gas heaters, my father turned them down. She turned them up again. He started to protest, but then he tightened his lips, sighed through his nose, and spread his student papers out on the table. He picked up his red pen and went to work, the fuzzy black cloud of frustration settling over his shoulders.

  My mother changed into old clothes and began fitfully cleaning the house. She shoved the vacuum around the living room; she snatched up pieces of newspaper from the floor and threw them on the couch and bent over to pull pine needles out of the carpet below the Christmas tree. When she knocked the vacuum cleaner against a leg of the table, sloshing my father’s coffee onto some papers, he snapped his head up and shouted furiously at her.

  “For crying out loud! Can’t you see I’m trying to work here?”

  “And can’t you see I’m trying to clean!”

  None of us wanted to be there that day, in our house, as we were. We’d seen joy and happiness and celebration, and the memory of that, the knowledge of how rich life could be, didn’t linger to warm and cheer us. Rather, it did just the opposite. None of us wanted to be us anymore. I wondered how long we’d be able to sustain ourselves, and I imagined, dramatically, the fumes of our dissatisfaction building up inside our house until they exploded, blowing out the roof and walls, leaving nothing but the burnt empty shell of a home.

  Upstairs in my room, I played and replayed the evening of the party in my mind, turning it this way and that, chipping off the rough edges and polishing my recollection of it until it took on the gemlike glow of a fable. It was like my parents’ own scientist-and-the-shopgirl story, except that mine and Gabriella’s began not in a drugstore but with a kiss in a yellow room floating above a black bayou.

  I squeezed my pillow between my knees and rolled back and forth on the mattress moaning her name, hot and sick with my desire to hold her again as the winter rain pattered against the window.

  The bad weather carried on into the week. The rain overflowed the ditches along the road and turned potholes into small ponds. At school the driveway was flooded up to the front door; the floors were tracked with mud, the classroom windows fogged over. Students slammed lockers and ran in the hallways; they shouted across the cafeteria and piled coats on tables and knocked chairs around. Everyone was wet and restless. We had only a week of classes left before the holiday, and everything—teachers, lessons, schoolwork—seemed like a tired and overly complicated joke, a great waste of our time.

  “You dog! You goddamn dog,” Peter said when I told him about the party. He banged his fist on the table and leaned in over his lunch tray. “You got her drunk and made out with her on the floor of her bedroom? At the party? Right there? When everyone was downstairs? Man.”

  Across the cafeteria, Gabriella sat with her usual group of friends at her usual table. Mark sat directly across from her. She turned her hair over her ear and picked up her fork, yanking the cords to my heart.

  “It wasn’t exactly like that,” I said.

  “That’s sure what it sounds like to me. It sure as hell does. You and Gabriella. You’re like my hero now. Tell me everything. Details, I need details.” He asked if when I’d gotten Gabriella on her back, I’d felt her up.

  “Not quite—”

  “Not quite? Not quite? What the hell does that mean? Man, I would’ve been all over that. I would’ve gotten me a handful of that.”

  I tried to tell him again how it wasn’t like that, exactly.

  “Then how was it, exactly? You made out with her, right? Or are you just making all this up?”

  “No, it happened, it did. It’s just hard to describe. I can’t describe it. You have to experience it for yourself.”

  “Well seeing as how that’s not likely to happen to me anytime soon, I just have to rely on you to enlighten me. Mr. Hugh Hefner. Mr. Playboy of the Western World.”

  But I couldn’t do any better than that for Peter. How to explain it to him? How to explain the thrill I had felt when I touched her eyebrows with my finger? Or how the walls had vanished when we kissed? Or how I had shivered all over just to stand near her? How could yo
u talk about those things with anyone? You couldn’t, not unless you lied and embellished and changed things, and so I didn’t even try.

  “She said she just wants to be friends,” I admitted at last.

  Peter sat back. “No. Oh, no. She didn’t say that, did she? That’s the last thing you ever want to hear from a girl.”

  I told him about Mark, about how her parents were friends with his parents, and how they went to the country club and played tennis together, and how she phoned him every night. Peter listened, and then dismissed it all with a wave of his hand.

  “You know what? To hell with that. Don’t worry about that. Girls always say that ‘friends’ thing. They have to. It’s like a test or something. She wants to be sure you’re serious about her before she sleeps with you.”

  I didn’t ask Peter how he knew this. His father’s Playboy magazines? He went on.

  “Sure. Look at the facts of the situation. Did you or did you not get drunk and make out with her on the floor of her bedroom? I ask you: did you or did you not? That beats tennis any day. It’s a clear and obvious sign. She wants you. She needs you. She’s saying, ‘Please, rescue me from this asshole Mark Mingis.’ That’s what she’s saying.”

  I knew Peter wasn’t the best person to take advice from; still, I was glad to hear him confirm what I already believed in my heart was true: that it didn’t really matter what Gabriella or I said. We could say whatever we wanted; all that mattered was our kiss. Our kiss—that golden, glorious kiss—told the real story. There was no doubt in that kiss, none at all. It was our pledge, and the proof finally that what I felt, she felt, too.

  “I’m going to ask her out.”

  “You’d better. That’s what you’re supposed to do. She’s probably waiting for you. She’s probably wondering what the hell’s taking you so long.” He shook his head and grinned at me across the table. “You goddamn playboy. There is hope in the world yet. You and Gabriella. Man. Go get her, you dog.”

  But try as I might, I couldn’t get near her. Mark trailed her everywhere she went now. He hovered at her side before and after classes; he escorted her down the hallway and then stood by while she changed books at her locker. All Gabriella and I could manage were quick exchanges in passing—innocent-sounding pleasantries about the party, the weather, our holiday plans. But even during those brief encounters, I felt our connection. We were like two spies who shared a great and thrilling secret. I marveled at her ability to move her lips, those lips I had kissed, and laugh and touch her hair, that hair I had stroked, and carry on as if we were just two ordinary people, talking and breathing and doing the things ordinary people did. But I was sure that anybody who looked at us would’ve seen what impostors we were. Even Mark could see it; that was why he was keeping her from me. There was no hiding it; our love shone all around us like a spotlight.

  In Earth and Space Science, my father turned off the lights for a slide show on cloud formations. He was excited about the bad weather; it coincided fortuitously with our unit on atmospheric precipitation, he said. As he clicked through the color photographs, I watched Gabriella from my desk at the back of the room, attempting to read her thoughts in the tilt of her head, the slope of her shoulders, the movement of her fingers in her hair. She turned to gaze out the windows at the rain, beautifully.

  “Cumulus,” my father said as a slide flashed onto the screen. “Look familiar? That’s what’s responsible for our rain today. Warm air rises up to meet a cooler layer of air in the atmosphere, where it condenses to form these thick, cotton-shaped clouds.…”

  This, I supposed—watching Gabriella in a darkened classroom, with the rain streaming on the windows and my feet growing cold in wet socks—this was what it meant to be in love. It was a wet, miserable, blissful feeling. I wondered if everyone who had ever loved had felt the same.

  A new slide. “Stratus. Got those today, too. Low, flat, hazy formations. It’s basically high-altitude fog. When we say ‘a cloudy day,’ this is usually what we’re talking about.…”

  I saw again my mother touching her hair as she walked shakily across the floor of Frank Martello’s library. Was this what she felt, too? This same wet, miserable, blissful feeling? I’d never thought it was possible for adults, parents like mine and Gabriella’s, to fall in and out of love like teenagers, at least not in any world that I knew. But what if they could? Then what?

  “Cirrus. What does that look like to you? What do you see there? … That’s right. Comes from the Latin word for ‘curly hair.’ Mares’ tails, they’re sometimes called.…”

  At the front of the classroom my father lectured on, crossing back and forth in front of the images on the screen, as though he were walking in clouds.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE comet was halfway between the orbits of Venus and Mercury, less than two weeks from perihelion. Scientists all around the world were tracking it, collecting data that had never before been obtained from a comet. Infrared photography showed that its temperature had increased dramatically as it approached the Sun, from -94 °F to 900 °F. Electrographic cameras revealed an immense, healthy hydrogen halo, and observatory photographs recorded a well-defined double tail (both type I plasma and type II dust tails), extending 20 million miles behind it in a graceful arc. In one recently published article that was attracting some attention, “Comet Kohoutek and Penetrating Rays,” a Russian physicist hypothesized that this was the first known visible specimen of an antimatter comet—a comet composed entirely of antimatter that, were it to come in contact with matter, would instantly annihilate both objects with an explosion more powerful than the most powerful of hydrogen bombs. It was suggested that more gamma-ray observations be made to test this hypothesis.

  Meantime, noting that the comet was coming from Leo and entering Aquarius, astrologers were forecasting cataclysmic events across the globe for the new year—international unrest, unusual weather, famine, blight, epidemics. In Egypt, bands of hippies had gathered at the Pyramids to welcome the comet, hailing Kohoutek as the Starseed that would bring an advanced new civilization of peace and love to the world. In Nevada there was a rash of UFO sightings, and in New York a cult called the Children of God gathered on the steps of the United Nations wearing red sackcloth to warn Americans to flee from the cities, the Doomsday Comet was coming.

  We saw them on the evening news the Friday night before the start of our Christmas holiday. Long-haired, skinny-armed, and staring, they waved signs for the cameras: THE GREAT DAY OF HIS WRATH HAS COME (REV 6:17)! BABYLON THE GREAT IS FALLEN. THOU SHALT KNOW VENGEANCE!

  “Crazies,” my father said, looking up from his work at the dining room table. “The Doomsday Comet. What idiocy.”

  He shook his head and went back to his writing. He’d gotten approval from the mayor for a town-wide viewing event. He’d already announced the date in the newspaper: January 6, the first Sunday in the new year. The Moon would be in a good phase then and the comet in optimal position for viewing. He was busy now with all the practical work of organizing the event: enlisting the cooperation of the various municipal departments, getting the word out to civic groups, and so forth. Never mind that we still couldn’t see it without the telescope; my father assured me that the closer it got to the Sun, the brighter it’d become, until by the end of the year it’d be shining like a giant star, the brightest light in the sky.

  I headed upstairs to my room, repeating to myself, “The Dooms-day Comet. The Dooms-day Comet.” I liked the ominous sound of it. I knew, because my father had said so, that there was no danger from this comet. I knew, too, that the astrological predictions and supernatural expectations surrounding the coming of Kohoutek were all nonsense—just crazy people saying crazy things, as my father put it. But all the same, I couldn’t help but feel that this comet was something more than just a comet. Changes were in the air. A jittery restlessness hummed through the streets of our town. Even the wind had a peculiar moan to it tonight. It whistled through the cracks around my window;
it blew across the yards behind our row of houses, rustling leaves along the ground and rattling the loose side of the garage shed. Dogs barked, as though they, too, sensed a disturbance in the atmosphere—the penetrating rays of antimatter, perhaps, trickling down from the comet.

  In her room next to mine, Megan was singing along to her stereo. Our mother had gone out for last-minute Christmas shopping with Barbara in Thibodaux, and Megan was waiting for her to come home so she could take the car to go see Greg’s band rehearse. Since the party, Megan had been talking to Greg nightly on the phone. She’d begun singing in her room again, too, for the first time in years. She was harmonizing now to an old song about love and promises. Her voice floated up and down above the melody, pleasant and light, sounding an odd contrast to the wind and noise outside.

  I turned off my light, stepped up to the window, and uncapped the Celestron. My heart jogged in my chest as Gabriella came into view in the lens. I was surprised to find her at home tonight; I was sure she would’ve been out with Mark or her friends, but there she was, crossing back and forth behind the French doors. I did a quick survey of her room. Clothes were scattered on her bed and furniture; two suitcases lay open on the floor. I knew the Martellos were leaving that weekend to go to Colorado; she must’ve been packing for their trip.

  I focused in tight with the Celestron until I was hovering right at her side. I followed her to her walk-in closet and waited while she disappeared inside. She came out with a blouse, changed her mind, and ducked back into the closet. She reappeared with another blouse and carried it to her bed, almost bumping into me as she passed. It was like being back in her room with her as I’d been on the night of the party, except that now she couldn’t see me. I was invisible to her, a ghost. And yet, I saw her so clearly, I felt so close to her that it seemed impossible for her not to know I was there. I wondered if in some special way she could sense my presence. Holding the focus tight to her shoulder, I whispered in her ear, “Hello, Gabby. Hello. I’m here. Can you hear me?”