Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

He opened his mouth and out came, “What is history but a list of kings?” He decided that was the end of the lecture. It wasn’t safe to say any more. He gave a final emphatic nod.

Silence hung in the room. The students picked up their books and left, whispering to each other, glancing back at George in amazement. The History of Astronomy class at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy was required for all incoming students. He was its most popular teacher, and this fall was his sixth time teaching it. Usually on the first day, there were no gods in attendance. Usually he stayed in control of his language. And his head didn’t hurt as much.

“You’re wasting your talents there,” his mother had said. “Take a hundred dollars. Get a haircut.”

His mother didn’t like him spending his time teaching freshmen. She didn’t like his car. She didn’t like the girls he typically pursued. His mother actually wanted him to leave Toledo entirely.

“You’re not happy here, George, and you never have been.”

“But I will be,” he would say.

“But you aren’t,” she’d respond. “I just need to point that out.”

His mother was a lawyer. Pointing things out was her specialty. But George knew she was wrong. He would be happy.

The professor at the back of the room strode quickly up to the podium, as the students filed out.

“Dr. Bryant,” said George, by way of greeting. What more could he say?

Dr. Bryant had been much published, quoted, and admired. Dr. Bryant had never been asked to teach the undergraduate History of Astronomy class, or lecture from a textbook, or speak to freshmen. He never would have done it, either. But now the older astronomer was panting, sweating, and rushing down the aisle.

“George, she did it.” Dr. Bryant gasped.

“Really, well, here’s to another happy twenty-five years then, sir. That’s—”

“No, no, no,” he stammered on. “I’m talking about that strange young woman in Pittsburgh. Irene Sparks.”

“Oh, yes,” said George. “As I recall, she was determined there are black holes in tea.” George began to pack up his bag.

“That’s right. That’s her,” said Dr. Bryant. “Not tea, though. She was here for an interview, years ago. She had schematics for a microcollider.”

“Well? Has she collided something?”

“George, she has. She’s got—you know—what you might call black holes. In a collider she fabricated in Pittsburgh, can you imagine? The whole experiment is the size of a small truck! Hawking radiation, detectable with a human retina. Apparently … it actually glowed.”

“That’s not possible,” said George. He picked up his briefcase and made for the door, his office, his pain medication. But Dr. Bryant followed him.

“She’s got numbers. The radiation loss has been charted. And I’ve seen an image. With my own eyes.”

George frowned. He stopped short of the door. “So what does this mean for … downstairs?” He dropped his voice to a whisper and pointed toward the floor. Dr. Bryant came close.

“I think we’re going to be able to get her here, George. She could be the crown jewel of the whole project!”

“I see,” said George. “So, is she going to be teaching?”

“Who cares about that?” Dr. Bryant said. “Teaching? What does that even mean? We were the first call she made, George. That’s something, isn’t it?”

“Interesting,” said George.

“Oh, wait until you see it,” Dr. Bryant said. “I want to get her here before … Discover … Time … you know what a frenzy this will cause. When she talks to the media.”

George put his hand on Dr. Bryant’s shoulder. The old man seemed about to keel over.

“Are you alright?” he said. “You seem … crazy.”

“I’m going down to admin,” he said. “I’m going to put in a proposal right now, this minute. I’m going to have her here by the end of tomorrow,” said Dr. Bryant. “It’s imperative. How could we have been such fools to let her slip away?” He was looking at George as if he could hardly remember George’s name.

“OK, doc,” he called after him. “If you say so. Just don’t give her my office, alright?”

“Oh, George,” Dr. Bryant turned and called back. “I can’t believe I forgot—that’s what I really needed to see you about. We are giving her your lab. And you’ll need to be out of there by tomorrow. Thanks for understanding.”

As he watched Dr. Bryant bustle out into the hallway and away, the pain in his head almost forced George’s right eyelid to close, and George could suddenly think of nothing else but to get to his office, turn out the light, and die. But then he had a sudden thought. A different thought, and his hand shot out to push the door open so he could call down the hall.

“Dr. Bryant?” George bellowed. “What color hair does she have?”

“Hair?” said the older man. “Hair? It’s brown, I think. Brown hair. How can it possibly matter?”

And then he was gone, leaving George to wonder if it could.

Irene walked home. She felt light, strange, evacuated, like she was already having her breakthrough article translated into Czechoslovakian. When she had sent her data to Toledo, they’d asked her to come immediately. Looking at her numbers, they were already sure, like a coroner standing over a broken neck, sure it was broken.

What would her mother have said about this, had she not fallen down the stairs and died this afternoon? What would her mother have said if Irene had turned up on her doorstep. Oh, Irene, she might have said. You’re back in Toledo. It’s everything I ever wanted. Would she even have been able to go to Toledo, if her mother had never fallen in the first place? If she had never wandered out into the upstairs hall, taken a misstep, taken a tumble.

She opened the front door to her apartment and a rush of cool air escaped. Irene’s apartment was spare. There were no houseplants; there were no Parisian advertisements on the wall. Irene was not a decorator. She was not a homemaker, nor was she a person who was comfortable in rooms that were collected into an idea called: home.

Irene tossed her backpack on the kitchen counter, picked up a plastic cup, and drew a pint of water from the fridge door. She drank, and let guilt wash into her. She should have stayed with her mother so that her mother was not alone. No one should die alone, not even drunks. She set the empty cup down on the counter. “Come back,” her mother had said, on a postcard that Irene had thrown into the trash. Because she knew that if she did come back, it would be, “Welcome backits beautiful beautiful beautifulbyerful,” and when the words all ran together in her mother’s mouth, Irene would have to fall off a bridge. Sometimes you just have to keep away from the things that are trying to kill you, even if they’re the same thing that gave birth to you. Sometimes those two things are the same, and their name is mother.

She left the kitchen and went back through the apartment into the back room, where the lights were dim and her boyfriend, Belion, was hunched over his keyboard. There were three monitors spread out before him, and his giant hands tapped aggressively. Belion was huge, both in literal frame and in personal aspect, the kind of person who sends out ripples into the room, seeming to bump into the walls even when they’re in the center. He had long, curly black hair that lay over his bulky shoulders like an animal. His hand shot out and moved the mouse around, clicked three times.

“What the hell, Irene,” Belion growled.

“What the hell, babe,” she returned. She walked over to him and leaned against the vastness of his back. It hulked up over the back of his rolling office chair.

“What the hell, for real, though,” he said. “This person is driving me batshit.”

“Where?” said Irene, looking around.

“In the game,” said Belion.

Belion was a game designer and coder for an online fantasy role-playing game. The name which his mother had given to him when he was born was Arturo, but he had it legally changed to Belion. His online name was Belion, Archmage of the Underdark, but he had not changed his legal name all the way to that.

Irene lifted up one of his arms and crawled under it and into his lap. She sat on one thigh, her arm around his collar, hand threaded through under the fall of his hair. She rested her head against his cheek. She pressed her forehead into the firm shape of his jaw.

“Dammit,” he muttered. “There she goes again. Somebody’s renaming all the bears around my L-shaped cottage. They’re all ‘Good-bye Silvergirl’ or ‘Farewell Silvergirl’ or ‘So long Silvergirl.’”

“Rude.”

“Yeah, rude.”

“Bears should just be called ‘a bear.’”

“Yeah, you know what, I’m lifting the rename command from players, unless the animal is a pet.”

“At least until this Silvergirl person kills herself and her account goes dead. Sounds like it might be any minute.”

This made Belion turn his big head around and frown at Irene. She shrugged, “It does!”

“Can’t have the fucking bears around my L-shaped cottage all wandering around like a pack of greeting cards or something.”

“What does she look like? This Silvergirl?”

“I don’t know. Never seen her.”

Irene began to cry again. Still in the circle of his arms, she put her hands in her lap and tears fell down her face.

“Hey, what’s wrong, babe?” Belion’s prodigious brow was now furrowed with concern. “Are you OK? Are you sick?”

“My mother fell down the stairs,” she said. “And died.”

“What? She fell down the stairs? Where?”

“In her house. Belion, I have to move to Toledo now.”

“Why Toledo, though?” His face still pointed at the computer screen, and now he was looking at code.

“That’s where she lived, asshole, do you have any idea what I’m talking about right now? She lived in Toledo, and I was born in Toledo.”

“Yes. Yes, I knew that. Wow, I’m really sorry.”

He turned his eyes to her, and she saw his unibrow, his large brown eyes underneath it, large nose, large chin, large everything, like he could swallow the whole world. She told him about the whole day: the black hole in the collider, the neighbor’s discovery, the call to the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, the impending funeral, the house.

“I’ll kill that bastard neighbor for you,” said Belion, his voice rumbling deep inside him. “If you need. It’s always the neighbor. He probably killed her.”

“The neighbor is female.”

“Girls can be bastards, too. It’s science.”

“You’re not listening,” said Irene. “I have a chance to study and work and teach at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy. This is something that most physicists only dream of.”

“I don’t want you to go. You already work at a cool university, and it has the added benefit of being right here.”

“It’s not the same,” said Irene.

“It has a Cathedral of Learning, for Christ’s sake. How can Toledo compete with that?”

“For one thing, the Cathedral of Learning is at U Pitt, not Carnegie Mellon. But let’s leave the fact that you don’t even know what university pays me. It’s not just the job. There’s my mother’s house to deal with, which is mine now.”

“Nuke it from space,” said Belion, the side of his face lit from the glow on his monitor.

“Yeah, no,” said Irene. “That’s not something people actually do.”

“That sucks. Wasn’t, she, like, married?”

“BELION! Are you serious right now?”

“I can’t remember! I’m sorry! Hey, you never talk about her. I didn’t even know she existed!”

Irene got up from his lap, climbing out from under his arm and replacing his hand on the keyboard.

“No, she’s not married. Wasn’t married.”

“Oh. Sorry about the bastard comment earlier. I didn’t know you were—”

“A bastard?”

“Yeah, to put it, like, all Tudory.”

“Well, whatever. I need to go sleep. I’m exhausted. I think I’ve been at work for two days, and my mother—” Irene gritted her teeth together, afraid to start crying again.

“You want company?” he asked. He turned to her and held out a hand, beseeching, but Irene shook her head and walked away.

* * *

She took off her tank top and draped it over the bedpost, left her jeans on the mat next to her side of the bed. Pulling back the comforter and sheet, she slid into the coolness beneath them and lay flat. She pulled her hair out of the ponytail and flipped the rubber band off her finger toward the dresser.

She closed her eyes and exhaled, then her eyes popped open. She jumped out of bed and locked the door before lying down again. This was private. Like praying. If she had prayed, she would not have let anyone see her do that either. If you had asked her, “Irene, do you meditate or anything?” she would have said, “No.” She probably would have added, “And all that is crap.”