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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619021464 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2006 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 513 KB |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
The house where I live with my husband and son is in a forest of pine, dogwood, and oak on an island in the North Carolina Outer Banks. It's a good place to live on a storm-lashed coast, on a high ridge safe from all danger of flood, short of a biblical deluge. In spring heaps of dogwood blossoms surround the house like foaming ocean breakers. Oak tassels and tiny white holly flowers rain on the cars. During heavy winds the loblolly pines are raked by gusts but anchored by their roots, so that their crowns circle overhead in a constant, mesmerizing motion. Together the trees protect our home from maritime storms — but they also splinter the night sky.
Ever since we moved into the house in 1986, I have made a point of walking outside most evenings before bed to say goodnight to my world. Back then the sky over our part of the island was still very dark. I loved going out to look at the bright points of light scattered through the blackness beyond the pines. They made me feel as if I could see forever, as if I would be forever. On nights when there was a moon, I'd stand quietly in its watery light, taking in the trees, the blue-black sky, the faded stars. After a few minutes I'd climb the stairs to bed, deeply contented.
That first spring, when we needed to purchase a new light for the kitchen, we chose an antique ceiling lamp etched all around with pines and stars.
I never cared to know the names of the stars in my backyard or to trace their positions in the constellations. I was pleased just by the sight of them. But times change, and as people grow they require different things of their worlds. For me the shifts came within a single year. One spring a decade after I first walked out to that starry grove, I found myself obsessed with shapes in the sky.
* * *
Hyakutake was the stealthy comet, the surprise visitor, the fireball that appeared without warning, as if tossed into our skies by an angry Zeus. It hurtled straight toward us, coming within 9,375,000 miles of Earth, a remarkably slender miss. Yet no one even knew it existed until a few months before its spectacular appearance in the spring of 1996. On January 30, several hours before dawn, an amateur astronomer named Yuji Hyakutake set out to scan the skies above his favorite observation post, a mountain on the south Japanese island of Kyushu. A photoengraver by trade, Mr. Hyakutake had chosen to live in a village on the island because of its unusually dark skies. He had a single ambition: to find a comet. And he had done so, in December 1995, when he discovered a faint, distant torch that became known as 1995Y1.
Mr. Hyakutake's main purpose in going stargazing on January 30 was to photograph 1995Y1. As some lingering clouds began to disperse, he set up his giant binoculars (150 power, with lenses six inches across) and trained them on a clear area of sky near the constellations Libra and Hydra. He had first found 1995Y1 in this area, but it had moved; he was scanning the heavens, really, just as a form of exercise. To his surprise, the binoculars settled on another luminous ball, an unusually bright comet. Momentarily disoriented, he checked his bearings. "I said to myself," he told reporters, "I must be dreaming."
At the time of the comet's discovery, Jeff and I were entangled in a shroud of constant, low-level stress. His mother had been battling cancer for several years, and recently new tumors had been discovered on her liver. As Yuji Hyakutake was peering into his oversized binoculars, Jeff was driving the thousand miles to Mississippi for the third time in six months.
I remember the tone of his voice during that visit as oddly lighthearted. The only phone in his parents' house was in the kitchen, so it was difficult for us to have a private conversation. "Mom's doing incredibly well," he said. "She's in a great mood; she's even been telling jokes."
"Jeff," I said, "call me back when you can talk."
"No, really," he said. "She's very present. She seems to be feeling pretty good. We went out to dinner to a new restaurant, and she ate a whole lot and had a great time."
It seemed difficult to believe. Jeff's mother was not very jovial or energetic even when she was in good health. Maybe she wasn't really dying — or maybe her dying would unfold more slowly than we feared. She was not the type to suffer in silence, so I knew she must be doing well. I knew also that this good spell was not likely to last.
* * *
The men and women who study the stars believe there may be hundreds of billions of galaxies spread through the dark expanses that we call the Universe. Considering that our own Milky Way holds an estimated 100 billion stars, it stands to reason that at least a few of the stars besides our Sun have planets with enough warmth and moisture to nurture life. Maybe, maybe not. But I like to imagine the odds — a gazillion to one — against my ending up on this planet, in this country, this seaside patch of ground. Even if the Earth is the only heavenly body that plays host to living beings, I find it amazing that Jeff and I managed to encounter each other in a world of several billion people. Why him and not someone else? The chances of us coming together were, well, astronomical.
Yet find each other we did. There is a telling photograph of us taken by a friend shortly before our marriage. We are standing in the kitchen of Jeff's office in Atlanta, where he worked as a magazine editor. A reception is under way, with punch and cookies. Jeff has just played a small, silly trick on me or told a joke at my expense. I have spun toward him, holding part of a cookie, my cheeks full. On my face is an accusatory grin: "You —" Jeff grins too, and his hand is pressed against his chest as if to say, "Who? Me?" His face is striking — tapered eyebrows above two large eyes, angular cheekbones, a perfectly straight nose. His hair is fashionably shaggy, even a little bohemian. Looking at that picture, I can still feel the spark that passed between us.
We had met three years before in western Oregon, where we held jobs as reporters for a newspaper. Jeff had been working in Oregon for several years when I arrived. I was twenty-three, brash, younger than the other reporters, and more certain of my capabilities than I had any right to be. I was also not a corporate player. Decidedly not. When I learned that a total solar eclipse would take place in Washington State during the middle of a workweek, I couldn't understand why everyone wasn't taking the day off. "I'd give up a whole week's pay to see something like that," I announced. The woman I was talking to gave me an astonished look and turned back to her work.
One evening I finished covering a city council meeting and returned to the newsroom to write my story. As I walked in I saw a half-dozen other reporters chatting around a cluster of desks. At the sight of me, the conversation abruptly stopped. One man shot a guilty look my way. "Time for work," a woman said breezily. As I walked to my desk my colleagues sat down and started typing.
Every morning around ten-thirty most of the reporters would file out of the newsroom for coffee at a local restaurant. I stubbornly refused to stay behind. One day I seated myself at a booth with a woman and two men who I knew didn't like me. Halfway through my blueberry muffin I became aware that none of my companions would look at me. They joked with each other, gazed out the plate-glass window, or stirred their coffee.
The door to the coffee shop opened, and Jeff came in, wearing a beautiful tweed jacket and a pair of jeans. He pulled up a chair and swung confidently into it. Part of the group. When I smiled at him, his eyebrows lifted. He hooted and pointed at me. "You've got a blueberry stuck to your front tooth." He touched my arm. "It's huge."
I blushed deeply. With my index finger, I pried the blueberry skin off my tooth. "Whoops," I said.
"We're going to have to start calling you Jan DeBlueberry," he said and smiled.
I had never talked to him for more than thirty seconds. We didn't seem to have anything in common. Late one Friday afternoon, on my way out to the parking lot, I met him in the stairwell. He said a quiet hello and continued walking carefully down the steps.
I couldn't stand the silence. "What do you have planned for the weekend?" I blurted. I hoped it sounded more casual to him than it did to me.
Jeff looked at me, surprised, and shook his head. "My idea of a perfect weekend," he said, "is to unplug the phone, pull down the blinds, and spend two and a half days reading."
It was my turn to be taken off guard. "Completely alone? Without ever going outside?"
We had reached the parking lot, and he unlocked his car. "I might go out to the backyard to get some firewood," he said. He got in and drove off.
But he wasn't really a hermit, and he began finding excuses to spend time with me on weekends. We took occasional hikes and bird-watching trips. After work we sometimes went out for Mexican food. In his preppy button-down shirts and penny loafers, he wasn't like anyone I had ever befriended (dated? I wasn't sure what we were doing). He liked to dress nicely for work, but on days off he wore faded wool sweaters and ragged jeans. No matter what he threw on, he looked well put together. His apartment, with its spare furnishings, polished wood floors, and framed art, was far classier than the cottage I rented, where moss covered the roof and most of the baseboards.
He painted, I learned, as a hobby; several of his acquaintances were artists. He didn't have many close friends. Once or twice a month he would go fly-fishing, alone, in a rushing mountain creek. "When you stand in the water, with the currents all around your legs, you can feel what it's like to be a fish," he said. "You get a different sense of the world."
I wanted to learn more about his many ways of seeing the world, which seemed so different from my own. We talked and talked. I found I could be completely open with him. Bobby Kennedy, he said, was one of his heroes. Growing up in Mississippi during the 1950s and '60s, he had seen a particularly ugly side of the human story. He had gotten into the newspaper business because he thought being a reporter was a good way to fight social injustice — but he didn't believe much in that anymore. "Newspaper stories are just fillers between the ads," he told me one night, with a cynicism I hadn't seen before.
I was a little shocked. "No they're not. Not entirely," I said.
"Sure they are. This is just like any other business. The bottom line is making money."
I didn't understand how his mind worked, how it opened and closed. His tastes in literature and art ran toward the bleak, toward stories of hopelessness and heartbreak. In the evenings he would often go to films, but only foreign ones. And he read voraciously — nothing trite, but poetry, nature essays, and dark works by writers like Camus. He could pass entire afternoons in a local bookstore.
Yet his seriousness was tempered by a quirky sense of humor that blended well with my own. In Jeff I had found a fellow scoffer. He was one of the few reporters at the paper who didn't approach his job with an overblown sense of gravity and privilege. One day the head of the news department, a pompous man, hung a six-foot-long photograph of a school bus wreck on the newsroom wall. He was clearly proud of it; the paper had won an award for its coverage of the wreck. Late that evening Jeff and I sneaked into the newsroom and rehung the photo upside down.
We moved well within each other's orbit, Jeff and I. The attention he paid me was profound, and mildly embarrassing at first. It didn't take long for me to become addicted to the feel of his fingertips brushing my neck, or the intensity of his gaze. We joked about everything — the paper's aging mainframe computer, the horrid coffee, the flatulent socialite who ran the morgue. Our humor brightened the rainy Oregon days. Occasionally, though, all the openness would vanish from Jeff's face. Without warning, a moody cloud descended, blocking the sparkle of his eyes. At such times he was beyond my reach. Unnerving though it was, it happened just often enough for me to drink in the bright moments even more.
Within a few months Jeff and I were spending almost all our free time together. As a couple, we were much different people than we were apart. That, anyway, was what we told each other. Neither of us wanted to stay at the paper, so we saved some money and left Oregon, settling in Atlanta when Jeff found a job as a writer and editor at a magazine there. We rented part of an old house in the heart of the city, met a half-dozen other young writers, and made enough money to live on, with care and cleverness. Our apartment had the same spare classiness of Jeff's in Oregon, but with a shabbier, more moth-eaten air (the contribution of my beat-up furnishings).
We threw parties. We spent quiet evenings curled together on an upholstered loveseat that Jeff had bought in Oregon. It was one of the few nice pieces of furniture we owned. After two years Jeff quit his job so he could enroll as a graduate student in philosophy. When he was growing up in Mississippi, such a path had not seemed remotely within reach. Now, living with me in a city filled with colleges, it did.
Another photograph from that era shows Jeff seated in a chair with me standing behind him, so that I curl over him like a breaking wave. My head is cocked to the side; my hands tenderly encircle his face. I am smiling slightly at the camera because — I think I remember this correctly — our photographer friend has just cracked a joke. My eyes are filled with mirth. Jeff's eyes, though, are round and sad. Within them is an ache he seldom revealed to anyone else, an emptiness that had plagued him far longer than the duration of his love affair with me.
* * *
Demons of the mind: they dwell at the core of this account, alongside the lighted angels that perch in the heavens, blinking down toward Earth. My story is about two distinct universes, the realm of outer space and the interior reaches of the mind. Examined through a purely scientific lens, each cosmos can be reduced to elementary particles and the interactions between them. But step back, and you behold a more nuanced and beautiful picture. Both the Universe and the human brain are capable of great creation, and great violence. We know little about the darkest reaches of space, and even less about how the particles within the skull combine to form emotion and personality. We strain as hard as we can to peer outward to infinity, and inward to the depths of our being.
For a year after I glimpsed the comet Hyakutake, I balanced on the thin edge between these two quests. When I finally found steadier ground, I credited my explorations of the Milky Way and beyond with saving my sanity, or helping to save it. Before 1996 I'd never thought much about illnesses of the mind. I don't think I'd had more than a small glimpse into the hell known as clinical depression — though Jeff and his family were intimately acquainted with it. That fact still surprises me: I had been married to Jeff for fourteen years before I realized how much power depression can wield over a person. Yet depression had shaped his entire life, first through the illness suffered by his mother, and later through his own.
* * *
As a young man, Jeff had moved west, settling two thousand miles from his family. But together his mother and father formed the hub of his world. If I was Jeff's sun, Alice and Thomas Smith (or T.C., as I would come to call him) served as the center of his galaxy, the core around which all else revolved.
I met the Smiths the year before Jeff and I were married, on a trip to their home in southern Mississippi. They lived in a simple ranch house out in the country, on five acres of red-clay pastureland that dropped to a vine-filled forest and a small creek. As soon as I was introduced to Mom, I realized she was as nervous as I was, maybe more so. Her face was deeply lined for her fifty-three years, and her smile, though warm, was thin. For most of the visit she sat straight-backed at the kitchen table, smoking endlessly, sleeves buttoned tight to hide her frail arms. Her eyes, large and blue behind thick, thick glasses, had a way of fixing on mine at odd moments.
There wasn't much to do at the house besides talk. And how do you talk to a woman who seems embarrassed by your presence? The first morning Mom and I sat alone at the scratched kitchen table, trying to make conversation. Jeff was taking a shower.
I asked Mom about her job as a special education teacher at a local school.
"I spend most of my time on paperwork," she said. "We have more paperwork than we'll ever get done."
"Do you like the students?" I asked. If I could get her talking about her students, she might forget her shyness.
"Some are real sweet," she said, tapping the ash from her cigarette. She took a draft from an oversized goblet of iced tea and sighed. "These are children from way out in the country. A few of them still have dirt floors in their houses. Their parents can't read, and they can't read."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Year of the Comets"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Jan DeBlieu.
Excerpted by permission of Shoemaker & Hoard.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Prologue,
PART I Hyakutake,
PART II Darkness,
PART III Hale-Bopp,
Acknowledgments,