The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  I came out of the neighborhood at the end of the block and turned right toward town. There were no cars at this hour on Franklin Street; there was no sign of life anywhere. The street, with its cement sidewalk, the drainage ditch along the side of the road, the overgrown weeds, the dark trees—the street looked strange, at once very familiar but also foreign, as though it were a street I’d visited once in a dream, and now I was running down the same street in what was either real life or, quite possibly, another dream. The wind rustled the leaves of the trees, and I looked up to check that everything was where it was supposed to be, that the stars and planets were all still in place.

  Up ahead, the blue-green tank of the water tower rose on its four spindly legs above the trees like some alien spaceship that had landed at the edge of our town. I was still some distance from it, half a football field away, when I spotted the wooden stepladder from our garage toppled on the ground below it. That’s when I looked up and saw—

  But I knew he’d be there. He was wearing his black Sears McGregor raincoat over his blue-striped pajamas, his coattails flapping behind him as he scaled the tower. His bony white ankles flashed above his shoes. His elbows jutted out, his head was twisted to one side, his glasses hanging at the end of his nose. I halted in the road to watch, hugging myself as I stepped from one foot to the other. I still didn’t quite believe what I was seeing, although at the same time, I knew exactly what was happening.

  When my father reached the top of the tower leg, he disappeared under the belly of the tank and reappeared seconds later standing on the catwalk. He steadied himself with a hand on the railing and began walking carefully to the left. At the hip of the tank, he stopped, turned, and looked directly at me.

  “Hey!” I shouted, and jerked a hand up to signal to him.

  But he quickly began moving again, looking back from time to time over his shoulder as he circled around to the dark side of the tower.

  I stepped to the left, tracking his orbit from the street. When I caught sight of him again he was no longer standing on the catwalk but was hanging on the outside of it. He had somehow crawled under or over the railing so that he was now balanced with his toes on the edge of the catwalk, gripping the handrail and leaning in awkwardly toward the water tank.

  All at once he threw out his right arm and leg, flipped around, and grabbed the rail behind his back so that he was facing the air with his heels hooked on the edge of the catwalk. I gasped; at the same time, my father made a small exclamation, as if he was pleased and a little surprised at having been able to execute this tricky maneuver: “Ha!”

  But the abrupt motion had jarred his glasses from his nose. We both watched them fall end over end through the air. There was a faint cracking sound as they landed on the sidewalk below the tower.

  When I looked back up, he was staring out at the night sky. For a moment we were both perfectly still, my father watching the sky, me watching him. An unnatural charge began to fill the air, an electric premonition that raised the hairs on my arms. I wanted to cry out a warning, I wanted to do something, but I couldn’t move or speak, struck dumb by the awful knowledge of what was about to happen.

  My father leaned out from the railing and lifted his head, like he was trying to touch his face to the sky. He stretched out his arms behind him, opened his mouth wide, and squatted. Just then the wind stirred, lifting his black raincoat behind him, and for one breathless instant he appeared not to fall, but to float up into the air, hanging as if suspended between earth and sky, between the past and future, between wish and reality, between all that we want and all that we can’t have.…

  “No!” I screamed. “No! Don’t!”

  I ran across the grass and stopped directly below him, shouting and waving my arms, trying to rouse him from whatever nightmare he was trapped in. He leaned out from the rail, a hundred feet over my head, and looked down at me.

  “Get away! Go home!”

  He swung around so that he was facing the tower again. Then, hanging on to the rail, he began sidling around to the back of the tank. I followed him below. When I ran into some bushes, I pushed through them and kept going, me shouting up for him to stop, he shouting down for me to get away, go home, leave him alone.

  When I came around to the wooden stepladder on the ground, I grabbed it and propped it against the nearby leg. It was a difficult stretch from the stepladder to the ladder on the side of the leg, and then the metal rungs were awkwardly spaced and hard to climb. The tower was much higher than I’d thought, too; I stopped once to look down and saw that I was only halfway to the top. I kept climbing, shivering in my slippers and pajamas and trying to keep an eye on my father, who was watching from the rail, hollering at me to go back down, it wasn’t safe.

  By the time I reached the top, he’d crawled back under the rail and was crouched on the catwalk. He watched just long enough to see that I made it up okay, and then he ducked out of sight around the side of the tank.

  “Hey—!”

  I pulled myself to my feet and jogged around the catwalk after my father, keeping one hand on the rail. The tower felt as if it was swaying in the wind; the platform seemed to float above the town spread out below—the lights along Franklin Street, the red sign of the drugstore, the dark trees of the square, the black patches of swamp and sugarcane fields beyond.

  I found my father at the back of the tower, starting to climb yet another ladder that ascended the curved belly of the tank.

  “Jesus. What the hell—”

  I grabbed at his pants. He tried to kick me away, and so I hugged him around both legs, pinning him to the ladder. He looked down at me with a sickly, guilty expression as he groped for the rungs above his head.

  “You think this is a joke? You think I’m kidding around?” he said.

  “I don’t think it’s a joke.”

  “Let go of me, damn it!”

  “I’m not letting go.”

  “We’ll both fall.”

  “Fine, we’ll both fall then. That’d be good.”

  “I’m warning you—”

  I gave a heave and pulled him away from the ladder. We teetered on the catwalk for one heart-stopping second before collapsing together onto the metal grating. Then he got to his hands and knees and began to crawl to the edge of the catwalk.

  “Jesus Christ. What the hell’s wrong with you?” I grabbed his leg, dragged him back, and threw myself on top of him. We lay there belly to belly, our heads pressed together, panting into each other’s ears. I could smell his aftershave, his hair oil, his body odor—all scents as familiar to me as my own bed.

  “Where do you think you’re going, huh?” I kept saying into his ear. “Where do you think you’re going? You’re not going anywhere. I’m not letting you. You’re staying right here, damn it. Right here.”

  After some time, after he’d calmed, I rolled off my father and lay on my back beside him, holding on to his shirt with one hand just in case. We both rested there, recovering. The red warning light pulsed on and off above our heads. A light breeze blew. All around, stars shone in ridiculous profusion, like someone had taken handfuls of diamonds and scattered them across the heavens. And close—so close I might have reached out, plucked one from the sky, and put it in my pocket. Beside me, my father let out a long, heavy sigh, as though he were resigning himself at last to a life on Earth.

  A few minutes later our Rambler came rolling down Franklin Street. It swerved in, bumped over the curb, and braked to a stop on the sidewalk. Megan got out from the driver’s side, my mother from the other, and they ran around to the front of the car and stood in the beam of the headlights, calling our names.

  “Up here!” I shouted down.

  “Alan? Alan! Where is he? Is he up there? Is he with you?”

  “Yes!” I answered, and my father added his own grim “I’m here.”

  We lay there a moment longer, enjoying our nearness to the stars, until my mother’s worried shouts roused us from our backs. And with that,
we both pulled ourselves to our hands and knees and crawled carefully to the ladder.

  “Light and elevation,” he used to say. Those were the two most critical factors when it came to stargazing: light and elevation.

  Riding home in the car that night, sitting in the backseat with my father, I told Megan and Mom everything that had happened. I explained how you needed to get above the ambient light of the city to see the sky. I told how we’d taken the stepladder from the garage and carried it to the tower, Dad and I. Yes, it had been stupid of me to go out with no coat, but it was all kind of last minute, and anyway, we hadn’t planned on being out long, we just wanted to get one last look.

  I didn’t think my mother believed a word of it. How could she? She knew everything that had preceded this; she’d witnessed her husband’s awful public humiliation in the square earlier that evening. She must’ve realized right away what he was up to, and had there been any doubt at all in her mind, she’d only had to look at our stunned, frightened faces as we climbed down the ladder to know the truth.

  But she didn’t challenge my story, not then, and Megan, driving, held her tongue. My father didn’t say anything either, only stared straight ahead as I weaved my clumsy story, hastily inventing bits and switching other bits around, adding details and explanations, until I had almost convinced even myself that what I was saying could’ve happened.

  And through some unspoken family understanding, my sloppy lie became the version of events that we all agreed upon. It was the story that we would repeat to friends and to one another, not just over the following days, but for years to come—at birthday parties, holidays, weddings, anniversaries: how, on the night of the comet, my father and I had been so eager to see Kohoutek that we climbed the town water tower to look for it, and, good lord, what a shock it had been for my mother to find us up there in the middle of the night. “Crazy,” she would say, shaking her head. “These two …”

  An outright lie, yes, but it was easier than trying to explain what had really happened. Because that could’ve only been a long, sad tale that implicated us all, and involved sex and betrayal, failure and despair, and ended with a forty-year-old man running to a water tower in the middle of the night to kill himself. And, really, who wanted to hear that? And which one of us would have had the courage to tell it? Certainly not me, not then.

  As Megan turned into our driveway, my mother had one last question, and despite what we all surely knew to be the case, I believed I detected a lingering note of hopefulness when she asked, in a soft voice:

  “And did you see it? The comet?”

  I glanced at my father, sitting beside me. With his glasses missing, his hair disheveled, and his pale, scrawny neck jutting up from his rumpled raincoat, he looked old and frail, like someone’s grandfather. I answered for us.

  “Yes. Yes, we did. We saw it.”

  “And what … what did it look like?”

  “It was … it was amazing. One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

  Beside me, my father began to blink rapidly. I rested my hand on his leg. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. In the dim light of the backseat of the car, he put his hand on top of mine and pressed down hard.

  EPILOGUE

  SOMETHING we would remember for the rest of our lives, he used to say. Something we could tell our children and grandchildren about. We were there. We were there when Kohoutek came.

  I still watch for it. I know I’ll never see it; it’s 5 billion miles away by now, won’t return for another 10 million years. But even today, a quarter of a century later, I find myself scanning the dark spaces between stars, half hoping I’ll catch a glimpse of something unexpected flickering up there in the sky. It’s what draws me out into the backyard on a night like this, when the neighborhood is quiet, and the stars are clear, and my wife and boy are getting ready for bed inside the house.

  “Alan! Are you still out there?”

  It’s Miriam, calling to me from the house. Her voice hauls me back to the here and now. There’s the familiar ditch, the barb-wire fence, the pasture, the gleam of the cow pond in the distance.

  “Yes! I’m still here!” I call back over my shoulder.

  “Are you going to be out there all night?”

  “Nope!”

  A breeze stirs the leaves of the sourgum tree in the corner of the yard. The half moon has traveled halfway across the sky by now, and the Big Dipper has tilted up on its end, spilling out all its stars.

  What was it he used to say? “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars but in ourselves”?

  I’ve thought a lot about that night since then, trying to understand what made my father do what he did. The most obvious explanation is that he did it because of the comet. He’d already lost everything he had to Kohoutek, after all: his wife, his son, his daughter, his reputation in town, his faith in himself, and his hope for the future. He was ruined. With nothing left for him in this world, there was only one place left for him to go. And so he snuck out of the house in the middle of the night, climbed to the highest spot in town, where, with one glorious leap, he would free himself from the awful burden of life on Earth and join his beloved comet in the sky.

  Or maybe, I’ve thought, it wasn’t the comet that sent him to the tower that night, but the desire for revenge. His wife’s affair with Frank Martello had humiliated him beyond anything that anyone could’ve imagined, and in his tortured mind, he believed the best way to punish her would be by taking his own life. After that night, she would never be able to forgive herself; her life would be destroyed, just as his was.

  And I’ve blamed myself, too, of course. When I smashed the telescope he’d given me and cursed him with the worst words that any child could ever utter to a parent, I had effectively driven him to the tower myself and pushed him to the edge.

  But the way I prefer to see it now, after all these years, was that my father did what he did out of love. Yes, love. As crazy as it might sound, I believe it was love for his family that sent him running to the tower that night. He knew how completely he had failed us, as a husband, a father, a provider, a teacher. Our lives, he felt, could only be better without him. And so, on that disastrous night of the comet, he set out to do the bravest, most selfless thing a man can do.

  And I, moved not by logic or understanding or even obligation, but by something much more elemental, something I’d like to think of as instinctual to all human beings, did the only thing that I could have done.

  Behind me in the house, I hear Miriam and Ben arguing over the TV. It’s way past his bedtime. The kid hates going to sleep. I suppose it’s because of the nightmares he’s been having lately; he’ll wake up screaming and come running into our room and crawl into bed with us. Miriam blames it on the shows he watches, but who knows. He’s a perceptive kid, and there’s never any telling what gets stuck in that brain of his. As parents do, we coo over him and reassure him that all is well, that the Earth is a safe and benevolent place and there’s nothing for him to fear.

  That very same morning, by the way, the morning after the terrible night of the comet, my father did something that still never fails to humble and amaze me.

  He got up, shaved at the sink, slicked his hair, and knotted his tie. He lined up the pens in his shirt pocket, three colors, red, blue, and black. He repacked his worn-out brown leather briefcase, finished his coffee, kissed his wife on the cheek, and, wearing a ten-year-old pair of spare eyeglasses, headed out the door to his bike. He wobbled on the gravel drive, maybe a bit more than usual that morning, but then caught his balance as he turned down the road to school. Before the first bell rang, he was walking down the hallway to his classroom, swinging his briefcase stiffly at his side. He welcomed us back for the new semester, sniffed, pushed up his glasses, picked up the chalk, and, dependable as the Sun, turned to the board to begin his next lesson.

  If I had to put a word to that, I’d call it heroic.

  The following weeks weren’t all roses, of cour
se. It took many months for my parents to repair their marriage, to sort out all the blame and forgiveness they owed each other. I wasn’t privy to these negotiations; they took place mostly behind their bedroom door. But I saw the results. My father, over time, stopped making fun of my mother for her poor grasp of science, while my mother became less apt to complain about his absentmindedness. And neither one of them, from that night on, ever mentioned the Martellos again. They even managed to ignore their house, looking past it as if it weren’t there, as if it had vanished from its lot on the other side of the bayou.

  A few years later, in a rather satisfying retribution by the gods of fate, Barbara divorced Frank, on the grounds of, so the gossip in town went, Frank’s philandering ways. She and Gabriella—dear, sweet, blameless Gabriella—returned to Shreveport, while Frank kept the big house all to himself.

  My sister, Megan, having gotten a taste of independence and liking it, continued to live at our grandparents’ house until she graduated from high school. That fall she moved to Baton Rouge to start at LSU, where, after a semester or two of not being sure what to study, she settled on child psychology. She practices now in Lafayette, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.

  For my part, I grew my hair out, kept my head down, and generally tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible for the remainder of my high school years. After graduation I followed my sister to LSU, where I majored in English literature. I eventually fell into teaching English overseas, and over the next decade I hopped around from one country to another, from Greece, to Italy, to Austria, to Czechoslovakia.…

  It was during a visit home, when I went for a health checkup at a clinic in Terrebonne, that I met Miriam. She was just starting out as a new nurse. A pink smock, a cute skirt, a name tag, and a terrifying lack of experience with the syringe: it was love at first jab, as we like to joke to friends.