Black Holes and Other Mysteries
by Sara Chiarotto-O’Brien
I never liked waiting. And Dad never liked being on time. I should have expected that I’d be watching the numbers on Terminal B’s flight departure board creep toward one o’clock, but the optimist in me couldn’t help but think he’d changed since I moved away. At half-past one, I saw the red Buick pull up in front of the Taxis Only sign. Tardy and breaking the rules? He was still the same.
The grinning face came bounding out of the car in a sweatshirt two sizes too big. He’d lost weight in his old age, but his face held the same stubborn enthusiasm that had embar-rassed and encouraged me through childhood. The wind nipped my sides as he spun me around in a hug.
“Been a while since you saw snow, eh Emmy?”
“Ten years and not long enough.”
He rolled his eyes at me, but smiled nonetheless. He and I rarely disagreed, except about the weather.
His boots churned up a grey powder where he shuffled over the ice. He kicked them hard against the back tire of the car before throwing my suitcase in the trunk and hopping round to the driver’s seat. I sat down across from him and he turned on the radio. The voice was familiar. Saturday afternoons were still for “Quirks and Quarks” apparently.
“How’s Granola Land been treatin’ ya, kiddo?”
Dad did not believe my life in Berkeley was permanent, or legitimate. Despite the fact I’d gotten two degrees, a husband, and a house there, he always spoke as if California was just some place I’d gone to find myself, and not where I’d built a life. My sister said it was because he missed me.
“I’ve been good, Dad. Busy with a new project. You might like it, actually.”
“Would I?”
“I was down in Houston last week. Had a meeting with your old boss, Mr. Burton.”
“Freddy? Is he still at NASA, that old man?”
“Well, I didn’t fly to Texas to interview him about his garden.”
“So you’ve finally seen the light? Gonna’ become an astronaut at long last?”
Somehow our conversations always came around to my becoming an astronaut, or an astrophysicist, or some occupation, other than a psychologist, which would put my “knack for numbers” to better use.
“No, but you should be flattered. We were sent to study ‘the best brains in the country.’ ” I put on my best baseball-announcer voice.
“Damn right you were!” He puffed out his chest. “You know, Emmy, if you really want to get inside the best brains of the country, you gotta talk with Neil. Let me give him a call for you.”
I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic. Neil Armstrong had been a good friend of my Dad’s, but he died seven years ago.
“And how do you plan on doing that? Can the guys at NASA commune with the dead now?” I pushed my arms out toward the windshield like a zombie.
He went real quiet after that.
“Want to go out for Thai food tonight? Our old place is still open.”
I said sure.
⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪
The woman at the restaurant greeted us both by name as we walked through the double doors. You’d never find it listed in the pages of a Michelin Guide, but the faded red tablecloths and tattered menus were the mark of the finest spring rolls in the city. There were no available tables, but the server, Emma, cleared a table topped with a pyramid of glassware from the back corner and brought us menus.
I expected Dad to object when I asked if we could order the red curry, but his agreement was enthusiastic.
“Of course! It’s tradition.”
Actually, we usually ordered green curry, but I’d already gotten my way and I wasn’t going to risk him changing his mind.
When Emma came back to the table, I looked to Dad to place the order. He got as far as the curry, then flipped through the pages, passing all the dishes we usually ate like it was his first time at the restaurant and not his hundredth. I could see Emma growing impatient, and a small line of cus-tomers developing at the door, so I took over.
“One order of spring rolls, glass noodles, and basil chicken with eggplant, please.”
“And two rice?”
“And two rice.”
She smiled at us both and took the menus away. Dad took a sip of water and smoothed out the creases in the tablecloth. I put my elbows on top of it and leaned forward, a habit that usually earned me a scolding from my mother.
“How have you been, Dad?”
“Good, Emmy. You know I’m always good.”
“Yes, but that’s just what you’re supposed to say over the phone. I feel like I don’t know about your days anymore.”
“Well, you’re very busy with your job, sweetheart.”
He was trying to ease my guilt over the rarity of our phone calls, which was sweet, but unnecessary.
“Well, I’m not busy right now. What’s going on? What’s new at work?”
His answer was delayed by the arrival of our spring rolls. I ate the parsley garnish first, and he ate the orange slice.
“Work is pretty much the same.”
His reservation was unfamiliar to me. His work had always consumed him, bubbling over into every personal conversation and relationship he had. It bothered me as a child, but now that I had my own career, I understood.
“You’re telling me nothing new has happened in six months? I find that hard to believe.”
“Well, we’ve gotten new data back from 3712D, which some people find exciting. It’s a lot of the same samples, though.”
So he was working in analysis again. He hadn’t told me he’d switched roles.
“Oh, and last week—” he interrupted himself with a burst of laughter, but managed to carry on. “Last week, Mary brought her son to work, and the kid set off the model rocket in the foyer display and wrecked the entire solar system. You should have seen it!”
He was finished talking, and laughing harder than before. It was a funny story, but he’d told it to me over the phone last week; only it had been Linda’s son, not Mary’s.
After that, we talked mostly about the documentaries he’d been watching, rather than his work. I paid the bill when Dad realized he’d brought his subway pass instead of his credit card, and we laughed about it on the way home.
⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪
The red stove light was still on when I walked into the kitchen the next morning. Dad was sitting in his Lazy Boy reading the paper with a cup of coffee in one hand. The percolator sat on the rear element, emitting a stench that reminded me of the diner we used to stop at on our summer trips to Tobermory before Mom and Dad split. I turned the stove off and poured out the last of the pot anyway. The bottom had taken on an ugly yellow hue. Maybe I could drown the flavour with cream.
Dad clearly hadn’t gone grocery shopping in a while, or else hadn’t been eating much. The refrigerator shelves were bare except for a jug of milk, a bottle of cream, and a bag of apples. I figured I’d make myself eggs, but the carton was empty save for a note stuck on with a piece of dirty yellow scotch tape.
“Buy eggs. Turn off stove.”
I emptied the cream into my coffee. It still tasted like dirt.
“I’m going to go meet Mom and Dolly for lunch soon. Do you want me to pick up eggs and cream on my way home?”
“Sure, that’d be nice of you, sweetheart.”
I stopped to fix my lipstick in the upstairs bathroom, and found that my makeup cabinet had been rearranged. Hopefully he hadn’t thrown anything out. I found the old vanity bag on the top shelf, sitting next to an orange canister dressed up in a Shoppers label. I pulled it down, feeling only a little guilty for snooping. Razadyne. Take twice daily.
I’d never heard of Razadyne before. I shut the cabinet doors and rubbed the pink into my lips and cheeks, hoping to hide the jetlag.
“Bye, Dad. I’ll see you tonight!”
“Okay. Have fun, Dolly,” he called after me.
⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪
Lunch passed in a flurry of champagne glasses and congratulations. Mother talked the whole time about her newfound artistic success: a gallery in Montreal had agreed to display her paintings for the spring season and she was over the moon. She left breathlessly, and didn’t even stay long enough to finish her Waldorf salad. (“I hate to rush off like this, girls, but such is the life of an artiste.”) Dolly and I were left with Cartier watches and invitations to the gallery opening as proof that our conversation with Mom had been more than just a daydream.
I didn’t take the subway home like I’d planned. The park looked pretty in the winter gloom, so I went and sat there until my fingers got cold. The people from the city were supposed to come by and clean the park, but they must have been late this year. A thin sheen of ice coated the sandpit and the leaves had frozen into brown bricks at the side of the path.
They would rot away slowly over the course of the winter and by spring you wouldn’t be able to tell they were leaves at all. They’d be part of the muck. And then summer would come and dry the mush to a powder; it would crack, disintegrate and blow away somewhere, and they would never be leaves again.
⧪⧪⧪⧪⧪
When I was twelve years old, my parents divorced, and my dad let me into his office for the first time. I’d only ever seen it through swinging doors or from behind the shadow of visiting grad students, so I was shocked by the mess of the place. Pages upon pages filled with numbers and symbols and blacked-out text littered every inch of floor space.
He wasted no time launching into a lecture: neurons and black holes and antimatter. This was the beginning of his tenure at the university, and he treated everyone like a student. I don’t remember much of what he said to me now, only that he’d finished by telling me that space and the brain were the same because we knew nothing about either of them. He couldn’t tell me why the Big Bang happened any more than he could tell me why my mother stopped loving him.
I think he’d wanted it to be a moment of peace and revelation for me, but I just thought he sounded really stupid for a guy who worked at NASA.
I found myself in his office again that evening for the second time in my life. The streetlights were off, and the house was dark when I got home. I would have sworn the place was empty if I hadn’t heard the scraping of a chair overhead.
“Ah, come on! You’re kidding me!”
I followed the voice and found Dad in his office, sitting on the floor beneath the skylight.
“Power’s out, Emmy. For half the city, it looks like.” He pointed up at the sky.
Through the window, I could see stars. And in the stars, I saw constellations—hanging in the sky like a thousand gilded fairytales come to life. They lit the room with a faint yellow glow, prettier than the purple haze of streetlights. He cleared the floor next to him, and I sat down where the corner of a rug peeked out.
“What are you working on?” He was trying, fruitlessly, to decipher a string of numbers in the low light.
“Data—from a new probe.”
“Oh? Where’s it from?”
He pushed a stack of binder-clipped reports out of the way and lay back against the hardwood. I followed.
“They’re from that little star. That one right there.”
He squinted one eye and pointed above us. There was no way for me to tell which one he meant, but I nodded anyway.
“It’s the farthest object visible from Earth, you know? But it’ll be gone soon. Black hole’ll get it in about a hundred million years or so.”
“That soon?”
He chuckled. “It’s not so sad, though. Everything in the sky will be gone relatively soon, give or take a few billion years.”
I thought that was funny.
“The only sad thing is the stories. I used to tell you Orion and Andromeda would be up there forever, but someday, someone somewhere is going to read about them and look up at the sky and they’ll be gone.”
Mythology was a strange thing for Dad to be sad about. He hated astrology. It was an explanation for the ancients, not an astrophysicist. But maybe he’d secretly liked the idea that something could be permanent. Maybe what he was really sad about was the fact that all his math and all his madness and all his stories would go flying down another kind of black hole. Not in a billion years, but in ten.
I heard him take a shaky inhale. “They took me off the Venus project.”
“I’m sorry, Dad.” The Venus project had been his brainchild back in the eighties, though it only launched about fifteen years ago.
He sighed. “It would be fine if they kept me busy, but I’m absolutely useless. I show up to work every day to watch Henry and the interns work on my projects, while I drink coffee and sift through—”, he sputtered for a moment, like he was trying to find the words. “I sift through papers that have already been looked at by six other people!”
His voice was desperate, and my face burned hot with his indignation. I wished he could see life beyond his work, recognize that he’d already accomplished so much.
“I’m tired of feeling small, Emmy.”
I wanted to cry, or shake him, or say something to let him know that he hadn’t lost everything yet. Maybe he couldn’t perform calculus, but he was still a giant to me. He could read the paper and tell funny stories and do so much more than just sit behind a desk. I didn’t say any of those things.
“You’re not small, Dad, you just spend too much time looking at the stars.”
“Maybe.”
He didn’t say anything else after that, so we stayed there on the floor until the power came back on and the streetlights killed the stars.