About a Girl (22 page)

“Do pissy gods turn women into birds and stones and flowers? Do inventors build wings out of wax and wood and fly too close to the sun? Do kings cut out the tongues of the sisters-in-law they’ve raped, and shut them away in houses in the woods?”

“Any of it,” I said. “Is any of it real?”

“There are historical sources, certainly.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean—the things that don’t seem possible.” He waited. “Look,” I said, “I met this girl here and I—she—I think she—” But I faltered and could not finish my sentence. I think she what? I think she’s put me under a spell? I think I can’t remember anything for more than five minutes at a time? I sounded like a lunatic. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Never mind.”

“You look unhappy,” he said.

“I’m not crazy,” I said. “I know I sound crazy. I’m the most rational person—” I raised one hand and dropped it with a helpless gesture.

“This is a strange place,” he said. “Stolen land—I mean, of course, all the land we live on is stolen, but some of these places are more full of ghosts. Out there”—he waved his arm behind him—“is some of the last wilderness in this country, and I mean real wilderness, not some game park. You wouldn’t be the first person to see a few strange things in the woods.”

“She told me she came out here to forget,” I said. “And Kate, too, at the bar—Kate said that. And Jack.”

“Then perhaps there is something that ties them all together,” he said. “All your friends. A quest in which a glamour has been placed upon the key constituents.”

“What?”

He smiled. “Why have you come here? To forget, as well?”

He was a stranger; I had barely exchanged a handful of words with him, and I had no reason to trust him with my secrets and wild imaginings. But there was something about him that invited confidence, and all the things I had meant to tell Raoul but hadn’t were still built up in me, threatening to spill over, and I thought if I did not talk to someone ordinary, or at least wise, I would burst with what I had been carrying around. I did not tell him the whole story, not by a long shot, but I told him how Jack and Maddy seemed to know each other, except that they didn’t, and how I could no longer go outside without being followed by a bevy of crows. I told him that I had been having very, very bad dreams. He did not interrupt, although I had to go back several times and start over when I left out something important, and sidetracked, as was my wont, into a rather more elaborate explanation of the early moments of the universe than was probably entirely relevant to my narrative. I am sure I made very little sense, but it was such a relief to unburden myself that coherence seemed a tertiary goal. “You think I’m out of my mind,” I said when I had talked myself out.

“Not at all,” he said.

“Really?”

“I think there are different kinds of stories, and different kinds of knowing. And different kinds of sailors, too—you know, the native peoples of this peninsula were great navigators.” I thought about the morning Maddy and I had gone to see the canoes land. “They had a lot of stories about Raven, for that matter,” he added.

“My crows.”

“Perhaps. I think you are in the middle of a story whose ending you cannot yet see; but that’s true for all of us, isn’t it?”

“But none of this—I mean it can’t be—it can’t be
real
.”

“What is
real,
exactly? You of all people should know that real is relative—we’re barely even here, any of us, we’re just empty space and particles flying around—”

“That’s not exactly—” He cleared his throat. “It’s more complicated than that,” I said, unwilling to let him get away with an inaccuracy.

“You are willing to make space for mystery in the universe. Why not mystery closer to home?”

It was a valid question, and one I couldn’t answer. I could have said any one of a dozen things I’d have said at the beginning of the summer; I could have quoted Shakespeare:
They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless.
I could have pointed out that science was based on empirical evidence, not baseless conjecture. If he’d known his stuff, which he seemed to, he could have quoted Shakespeare right back—
we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear—
and, more relevant, he could just as easily have pointed out that if the empirical evidence is so wild only the impossible theory fits it, the impossible might just, as it had done time and time again in the history of cosmology, turn out to be the truth. I went out again into the sunny afternoon no less confused than I had been when I’d gone in to see him, and a lot less sure of myself, too.

THE RETURN VOYAGE

All my life I had let my own stubbornness carry me, that and the gifts I was sure of, the strength I’d been born with. I knew what languages were spoken in the world I wanted to inhabit, and if I was not yet fluent in them, if I needed years still to untangle the grammar and syntax of thermodynamics, the poiesis of astrophysics and particles and the movement of light, I understood nevertheless the alphabets in which they were inscribed. I had thought that I knew exactly what I did not yet know: unlearned equations like missing volumes on a shelf, to be slotted in neatly as I acquired them. I had been unable to bear anything like disorder, and no wonder—the word
cosmology
itself comes from the ancient Greek
kosmeo,
which means “to order,” “to organize”—the universe is worthy of study because it operates in patterns, and our understanding of them is, fundamentally, a kind of organization, a fact which suited my tidy nature well.

And then I had come here, and all I had brought with me seemed now nothing like what I needed, what was necessary to make the world clear. I had arrived with a star chart of a cosmos I expected and landed instead in a universe whose physics were nothing like the physics of the world I knew; I had tumbled into a landscape without polestar or cardinal direction, where the tools with which I’d flawlessly navigated my previous life—my memory, my history, my experience of love—were as useless as a compass held over a magnet until its needle spun in circles. Our universe has been expanding since the moment of its fiery birth, and for decades, cosmologists thought that there were only three possible ends to its story: it might balloon outward forever, at an ever-slowing rate; it might one day stop altogether; or its expansion might finally be reversed by the gravitational pull of its heart, leading to its long, slow collapse inward. And then astronomers studying the recessional velocities of supernovae discovered something extraordinary: the expansion of the universe was not slowing down at all, it was
speeding up
. Propelled by some force whose nature we do not understand, the universe is flinging itself outward like a runaway train. The history of science is a history of those moments in which a single piece of information has torn asunder everything that came before. “The years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels, but cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding, are only known to him who has himself experienced them,” Einstein wrote; it was something I had underlined without taking to heart years ago, but now its truth was sunk into my bones.

The obsession with order and elegance at the expense of the truth is a fatal flaw that goes all the way back to the Greeks, who were the first to propose a cosmos constructed out of a set of concentric spheres wheeling about the earth: graceful, harmonious, and totally inaccurate. And the truth—Kepler’s discovery of the planets’ elliptical orbits around the sun, the elegance of the equations he wrote to describe their sweeping arcs—is itself unimaginably beautiful. But the beauty of the truth does not mean that all beautiful ideas are true. I had wanted desperately to believe in order, but I had learned, in the last month, that order was invariably subjugate to its underlying architecture, and the truth was more, and bigger, than I had ever imagined; that uncertainty can be beautiful too, and the unknowable—like dark matter, like dark energy, like, dare I say it,
magic
—is far greater than the known. If before my mind had been like a warehouse of file cabinets, tidy and organized, Maddy had come along like a cyclone and pulled all the drawers from their casters, scattered the folders to the wide world, and kicked the doors open, and I did not know, any longer, how to put things back in order.

After she took me to the party in the woods, Maddy and I went out more. She drove us back to the ferry, and we took it into the city and wandered around the old downtown. We ate clam chowder from a stall on the creosote-scented wharf, wheeling seagulls shrieking demands at us all the while; we visited the mummies in the touristy curiosity shop on the waterfront, and Maddy bought me a piece of polished quartz on a cord that was meant to bring good luck; we climbed the hilly streets to a big open-air farmer’s market—which must have been the one, I thought, where Aunt Beast and Raoul had once worked—and found underneath it a warren of shops. Maddy spent a long time in one in particular that reminded me of the witch store in the East Village where Aunt Beast bought her candles and herbs: rows of tinctures labeled in neat cursive, glass cases displaying tarot decks and silver pentagrams and crystals, shelves of books on Magickal Thinking (witches, apparently, being averse to copyeditors) and Guiding Your Dreams. The woman behind the counter had crescent moons tattooed at the corners of her eyes and runes inking her knuckles; though her face had a kind of ageless, serene quality to it, I thought she must have been nearly my grandmother’s age. She watched us both intently as I loitered uneasily by the door and Maddy more enthusiastically perused the herbs and made her selections, reaching for me as the woman measured them out into paper bags; I came to stand beside her at the register and she put her mouth against my ear and her arm around my waist, and I felt her smile at the shudder her breath at the whorl of my ear sent through me. The woman rang her up and then looked directly at me. “Tell Cassandra that Raven asked after her monster,” she said, and I said, “Excuse me?” But she only smiled, her keen dark eyes glittering. “Well met, sisters,” she said to us as we left.

We only went to the city once, but now we went often to Kate’s, and to potlucks in ramshackle houses in the woods, full of people who wore a lot of down vests and had beards and made foods I barely recognized even after a lifetime of Aunt Beast’s cooking. They were fond of banjos and washboards and something called “old-time music,” which involved a lot of whisky and stomping on the floor and shouting, and not, as far as I could tell, making much effort toward bathing regularly, although I was in no place to pass judgment, since my own hygiene regime consisted largely of sponge baths at Maddy’s sink and the occasional shower at Jack’s when I got so filthy I could no longer stand myself. The hippies were not friends of Maddy’s, exactly; they seemed to regard her in much the same way I did, with a kind of quiet and respectful awe. Her company conferred upon me a kind of invisibility, and I was content to remain so: I ate the hippies’ roots and tubers and grilled fishes, avoided their liquors, eschewed their dancing, and fielded their occasional and largely disinterested enquiries as to my nature and ambitions with a discretion that bordered on sullenness. They were the sort of white people who wanted to talk to you earnestly and at length about their compost. “In New York, we put things in the garbage,” I said once, when I had gotten tired of this line of disquisition, and this riposte proved so effective that none of them ventured conversation with me again. And anyway, next to Maddy I dimmed into nothing: she was the singularity, and I was just another particle in her orbit.

A few years after the night in Central Park that had made me into an astronomer, Raoul and Henri had taken me to Cornwall to see a total eclipse of the sun. We stayed in a bed and breakfast in Perranporth, booked up months in advance by people who, like us—well, like me—were obsessive enough to travel halfway round the world or farther in pursuit of a single observation. In the morning the landlady made us toast and sausages and coffee and we ate them, blinking sleepily, with the other guests at the bed and breakfast, all of whom were there for the same reason. “All this way,” the landlady said, her accent thick and burry, “for a little spot across the sun.”

The morning of the eclipse we went down to the beach. The sky was scuddy with clouds and I wondered unhappily if I had come all this way for nothing, if I’d be standing on this crowded shore with hundreds of other strangers staring up at a patch of grey instead of the miracle of physics and luck I’d come to see. It’s only because we are here in this time, this moment out of all the billions of years our solar system has gone flying around the sun’s hell-hot ball, that we get to see eclipses at all: The moon is gradually spinning away from us, out into the dark of space, and only at this point in the history of the solar system does the moon’s distance from us make its size in the sky appear equal to that of the sun. A handful of millennia earlier or later, and we’d never have known that a lifeless lump of rock and dust whose only glory comes from a light not its own could suddenly wipe the sun out of the sky neat as a gunshot. How cruel it would have been—all this confluence of chance, to bring me to the time and place where such a thing was possible, only to have it veiled by something so dumb and everyday as a rain cloud.

But at the last moment a wind rose up and swept the clouds away, and a ragged cheer rose up from the beach as the sun came out. I’d read about the moments before the moon blocked out the disc of the sun, the way the colors around me would grow richer and more saturated, the way shadows would go crisp and keen-edged; I knew a hush would fall, animals nervous and silent, the whole world still and strange. But being there—thousands of crescents winking into life, glowing like half-moons in the trees; shadow bands, shimmering lines of black dancing around us; the stars flaring into life in the daytime sky—was so alien, so wonderful, that even Raoul and Henri were looking around with their mouths open.