Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

Up above, she saw all the fixed stars. The same ones Aristotle had seen when he imagined them lodged in perfect crystal spheres, hung sparkling above the dead, decaying earth. How beautiful they were, these perfect points of light, spread wide over the messy, fragile humans down below. How perfect were the gods. Irene looked down toward the earth and saw the bright streets outlined in shining lights, the clusters of houses, buildings, long stretches of parking lots, and here and there a lonely beam, a point of light in an expanse of darkness, like a single star. It reminded her of standing with George on One Seagate and looking down over all of Toledo, when he asked her how to tell the difference between the stars above and the earth below. Now it made sense to her, looking up at the sky rippled with constellations, and down at the black earth crisscrossed with roads and sparkling towns. And she knew the answer to the question: what is the difference?

Irene closed her eyes and felt the movement of this little plane. A bump, a silence, and then a shift, a deep shuddering. She felt herself slipping under that familiar fog of sleep, letting go of her senses as she crossed that grand chasm that was really as quick as a breath, as light as the flutter of a wing, between herself and what lay beyond, that stunning outerwhere: she lost herself, the plane thumped, shook, and she began to dream.

She was outside the plane and falling, falling into the city of Toledo. It was lit up and alive, cars buzzing along, boats motoring up and down the river, little clumps of people on the sidewalks, crossing streets, running to meet each other in the dark. And when she turned her head up, looking into the night sky, and all its distant perfection, all the majesty of its timelessness, its immeasurable depth, she knew. This is the difference between gods and humans. This is the difference between divinity and what exists on earth: Toledo is moving. It’s alive and changing. The myths, the stars, the fixed stories—these are static, measured only by math and memory. The men, the science they make, the roads they travel—these move, they change and grow, they cannot be mapped. It moves, she wanted to say to George. That’s the difference between Toledo and the night sky. It moves.

I love it, thought Irene. Her heart froze with happiness. Her arms spread out, as she fell down through the air, her body the shape of a star, plummeting, sailing downward into Toledo. I love what I am, this human, even if this is where I cross over, bleed, and die. This is where I become human. This polluted, human town, this love, this is what I am, more than the stars, even though they are so big, and so vast, and so perfect. They’re just so far away.

Irene fell down into the orange constellation that was Toledo, that shape that was moving, dirty, changing, alive. She closed her eyes, and passed through.

Irene’s eyes were closed, and her head was on George’s stomach. She could hear his stomach noises, gurgling and popping. That made her feel a little bit better about his prognosis. His face was still, completely still, and his whole body seemed dormant and strange. From the side of his head, a drainage tube emerged from the bandage on his wound and looped around into a small reservoir. There was also a tube coming out of his nose that ended in a bag, and there was a tube taped to a needle in his arm, where they were dripping things into him. His head was neatly shaved.

Irene had been sitting here for hours, leaning against him. The nurses had come in to check him, to take readings from his body, measuring his pulse and looking at the readings on different machines around his bed. He was in the ICU. This meant to Irene that he was going to be fine. The care he was getting was intensive. His life, at Toledo General, had meaning and was being intensely cared for. There had been no discussion of throwing Irene out, even though in the ICU there were severely limited visiting hours. No one would have thought to make her go. She was so sad and serious, so deeply attached to him. It was as if they hadn’t noticed she was there.

The important thing to her was that she stayed focused on him, so that any little movement in his eyelids, of his lips, would not escape her, and she could shout for the nurses, shout for the doctors, alert the authorities that he was back. What he was back for, they would not know. If he was back for starting over fresh from the beginning of his life, if he was back for stepping in exactly where he had left off, or if he was back for being a pants-wetting vegetable from now on, no one knew. Irene hoped, and Irene imagined, that George would open his eyes, look up at her, and say, “You came back.” This would mean that he knew her, that he remembered everything, that he forgave her, and that he was going to get better. Or maybe he would just say, “Irene.” Or maybe he would say “Ouch” and then vomit. Really, Irene had started to believe that anything he said was better than him just lying here silently, retreated into his own head.

The nurses coming in and out seemed progressively less cheerful. The doctor had come around and had checked George several times. He did not respond to having his feet scratched sharply. He did not respond to having light shined in his eyes. He was unresponsive. Irene wished the doctor would pat her on the shoulder and say, “He’s going to be fine. The tumor is gone. I think he will make a full recovery.” But the doctor said nothing to her. No one said anything. She was invisible. So much sadness, concentrated into one person, can make a darkness no one wants to touch. So it was with Irene, miserably pressed against George, believing so much that he could come back to her.

The doctors and nurses waited to see whether his brain was ruined. Whether he would be himself, or wake a total stranger. Irene lay across him, holding his hand, stroking the sleeve of his hospital gown, and crying a little bit now and then. She did not eat or drink. She didn’t answer phone calls from her lab. She stayed and waited, and George’s mother came and went but did not disturb them. His father came and went and did not say a word. The ICU was bright and quiet. It seemed to go on forever.

Then Irene felt George take a big breath in, like a man coming up from deep underwater takes a gasp of air that fills his lungs with life.

“Curvature,” said George. He said it loudly, urgently. Irene sat upright, still clutching his hand.

“What?” she said. But George said nothing else, and when she examined his face, she noticed no change. Then his brow wrinkled up, his hand grabbed hers tight, and he said, again, “Curvature.”

“Curvature?” she said. His eyes were still not opened.

“It’s curvature!” Now he was smiling, and his chest was shaking with laughter, as if he was having a beautiful dream.

“George, what’s curvature! Be still! You have tubes all over you!”

He opened his eyes. He looked at her and their eyes met, and he said, “It’s curvature. That’s why I can’t find the plane of symmetry.”

“OK,” said Irene. She was beginning to laugh, too. She didn’t know if he recognized her or if he knew his name, but his brain was clearly working, and he was trying to sit up. “Lie down, George,” she said. “Lie down. You have to rest.”

He lay back obediently, but turned his head to face her, and with a very George-like twinkle in his eye, he told her, “The reason I can’t find the plane of symmetry is because it’s not a plane; it’s a lens. Babe, it’s a lens. A lens! Why did you not see this? Why did I not see this? If we’re so smart, why in the hell did we not see that it is a lens! A LENS!”

He was getting loud. The nurses were coming in. The machines around were beeping and blaring. Doors flew open and doctors barked orders. But George was past all that. He had his hand behind her head now, and he was pulling her in for a kiss, and when she kissed him she knew that he knew her, and that he remembered everything, and that it was all going to be fine.

* * *

Spring had wakened up Toledo with flowering trees like lanterns and lights across the city. On a beautiful morning in April, George and Irene were taking a walk through the quad, as they habitually did for George’s health, once a day. Irene did not allow him to bury himself in calculations and models, imaging and sketching, nor did she let him work himself to death on the satellite telescope that he was still pouring his time into. She forced him out into the air, because this is what she knew that he should do, to rest his brain periodically, like a man who’d had a thousand concussions waits in the dark, in the quiet and calm for his mind to heal before he can try on something new. George wasn’t waiting, but he was taking breaks, following Irene’s orders.

They walked together hand in hand around the quad, looking at the tulips that were emerging from their bulbs, bulbs that had been planted last fall. They were trying to talk about nothing. Taxing his brain was the opposite of what they were supposed to do during his rest periods. So sometimes they recited poetry they both knew well, or hummed songs they both had memorized, or just walked in silence.

Irene’s work in the collider was just beginning to take off. Construction was nearly finished on her experiment site, and when the other teams were up and running and the collider was set in motion, the world of astronomy could expect big things of her and her detector.

“I’m so glad you had your surgery,” she said to him. “This day wouldn’t be as beautiful if you were still doped up on opium nasal spray.”

“I’m glad, too,” said George. “Because now I get to constantly laugh at you for doing things like appreciating a beautiful day.”

“I’m a new woman,” said Irene. “Now I do things like that. Why not?”

“Why not is right.” George squeezed her hand. “I’ve never loved you more.”

“What was it that your father said to you that made you decide to do it?” She had asked him this before, many times, as if she thought she could trick him into a different answer. But he always came up with the same one.

“I can’t remember,” said George. “I can’t honestly remember much that he said to me at all.”

“Would you tell me?” she asked him. “Would you tell me what he said, and what else you forgot? It seems like that’s the only thing that you forgot.”

“I don’t have any secrets from you, Irene,” he said. “I do recall him saying that if I agreed to it that he would try to be a better dad. And he has been. He really has been.”

They walked on in comfortable silence for a while. Then Irene spoke up.

“You know what I just now noticed, George?”

“What?” George wanted to know.

“This is stupid, but it’s going to annoy the piss out of me now.”

“What is it?” he said. “Nothing mathematical now—you know my synapses are in rest mode.”

“It’s nothing mathematical. In fact, it’s the opposite of mathematical. These tulips are all so randomly planted, there are clumps of red and white all scattered around this quad, in no apparent order.”

George looked at the tulips and nodded. There was a ring of them, all around the quad, and the arrangement of white to red was neither symmetrical nor a regular repeating pattern. It appeared to be random.

“Wow, that is true,” he said slowly.

“What idiot did this? I mean, obviously, whatever. It doesn’t matter, right? They couldn’t have known. But really they’re going to be there for years now, all clumped and irregular. What the hell? I’m tempted to just tear them up.”

“Strange,” said George.

Irene kept walking, her arm through George’s arm, but now her pace was more brisk.

“Maybe we should walk over in the ruins from now on,” she said. “Avoid this mess.”

“Maybe it’s Fibonacci,” said George, looking at the tulips. Irene stopped in her tracks and frowned, glaring at the tulips. She put her hand up as if she was counting, arranging them differently in her mind.

“No, it’s not a Fibonacci sequence,” she said. “Look at it—come on, that’s not even a good guess. Go back to sleep, synapses.”

She began to walk again, dragging him along, but then she stopped again and said, “Wait a minute.”

She looked at the tulips, all around the ring, moving her finger up and down as the color changed from red to white and back.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she said. “It’s not some random dumbass gardener; it’s a very specific dumbass coder. I know what it is now.”