Astronomy for the Lost

The first thing I know for sure is that they are trying to pull me from the car. I am lying on my left side, pressed against the driver’s door, and the road has broken in through my side window, leaving a framed square of pavement that is littered with chunks of dirty snow. If I could just move this airbag I would be able to breathe much better. I am spinning still, almost awake, but not really. It reminds me of when I had my tonsils out as a boy, and the doctor put a rubber mask over my face and said to count backwards from a hundred. By ninety-five I was sleeping, but with my eyes still open, as if I were watching myself while the doctor spoke in long, groggy syllables, go to sleep, go to sleep.

Glass breaks above me and a rush of cold air shoots in through the sunroof. Someone cuts my seatbelt and pop—the airbag deflates with a hissing sound. Two yellow sleeves reach in, lock on my arms and try to lift me, pulling me sideways towards the center of the car where Katie is missing completely and the door is crushed in over her seat. It is exposed in a mechanical diagram of levers and pulleys and locks, and this would really interest Katie if she were where she is supposed to be.

My father used to say that bad things happen when you’re where you’re not supposed to be, like if you go someplace you wouldn’t normally, but I’ve never believed in that. For starters who’s to say where these wrong places are, and you could worry about it your entire life, never going anywhere, and then have a heart attack in your own backyard while pruning the roses like my father.

You will not move me anywhere while I am pinned down like this. Somebody’s legs are caught under the dashboard and that must hurt to have the steering wheel jammed into them like that.

A hard, ball-like lump is protruding several inches below my left shoulder. It moves around underneath my skin as they pull me stretching until I can see a piece of bone pushing towards the surface. I am screaming now but cannot get the sound to leave my body. Soon I will have no limbs. I will be a plastic doll left unfinished on the assembly line. Torso. Head. Mute lips.

But I am outside of things now. I’ve become someone else entirely. I am a fireman on my knees reaching into an overturned car. I can see my body trapped inside and I am trying to save it, and everything else is indistinct except the pounding of winter. There is another man trying to help lift out my body.

His arm is broken, I say to him in a stranger’s gruff voice.

He is pinned under something, the other man yells. Stop pulling! We both let go.

The arms fall back into the car and me along with them. I am myself again. Mangled metal forms a confetti-like cave of darkness around me. The windshield has shattered into millions of tiny cubes and the hood has taken its place, folded over in sheets like an accordion. There is a giant metal rail I cannot think of what it is called but it is part of the road and there are sections of it everywhere, jutting through the back window and snaking around in the rear of the car. We totter slightly as if we are hanging, and I can hear things ricochet off rocks I think they skip, skip, splash.

I move my right hand back and forth, examining the twisted space where Katie used to be. It is a jagged vortex that steals and condenses matter; my fingers streak around its coordinates in languid, trailing lines. I haven’t seen anything like this since high school, when I used to hang out in Rob Briggs’ basement listening to Pink Floyd records and smoking pot from a honey bear bottle. We were never much into school, either one of us, and did the best we could without studying, which was usually pretty well. After Rob’s parents got divorced, his mother used to go out on dates with doctors from the hospital where she worked. While she was gone we would raid her medicine cabinet, looking especially for these long, cylindrical pills that made the air a viscous ether, holding the impression of objects long after they had passed. Once Rob and I were supposed to be watching his little sister, but forgot her during a game of hide and seek. We left Katie hiding in the upstairs pantry for hours, and finally found her eating a giant bag of chocolate chips. Her tiny face was smudged a creamy brown like mud, and she smiled at us triumphantly because she had hidden so well.

Katie is hiding from me now. I don’t know where she is but I wish she had not left me here with all this blood inside my mouth. Her body has dissipated, as if she has been sucked inside of some magnetic hole. The pull around it is so intense that not even light can escape it.

I am in high school astronomy class, and at the blackboard my teacher drones on about the speed of light and relativity.

An event horizon, he says, is the boundary marking the limits of a black hole. Anything that enters the event horizon is drawn in by its gravity.

But where does the matter go?

It spirals through distant cosmic spaces, finally spit out into some other galaxy, some other time. The hole closes up behind it into a single, shining speck—a pixel in the center of a black screen that twinkles slightly, like a star. She is trapped there is no way back. A tiny face like a little girl.

She still makes that expression sometimes while she is sleeping. It warms me. Throbs heat from my stomach into my throat stabbing me, and there are no words to describe that feeling I can never think of anything close. Sometimes a face is all that matters in the world. Not like this cold coming in on me she is gone and my breath is freezing into clouds of icy vapor.

If I were ever going to be something other than an architect, I would be an ice fisherman with a grizzly beard and tall galoshes, scoring holes in sheets of ice as if I were cutting glass, then popping out the circles to explore the blue water below. A cold and bottomless blue that circulates through my blood until I am frozen.

The gloved hands can hear what I am thinking. They cram a thick, plastic blanket through the sunroof and spread it awkwardly over me, and as the yellow arms begin to recede I reach back for her desperately grabbing hold of a gloved finger and trapping it in my fist. A voice murmurs back at me. Sorry, it says, or soon. I can make out we and waiting. We are waiting for something. I let go of the finger and close my eyes, my arm still stretched out behind me. We are waiting now and it is best not to move.

I was thinking the other day that if you really want something to work, I mean really, the best thing to do is leave things be and not make any drastic changes, even if change is what you really want, or at least progression.

A person can be marooned alone for only so long. Before he goes insane. Robinson Crusoe built a boat in the sand, spent months fashioning boards out of trees, and then when it was finished realized that it was too heavy to get to the water, and he pushed and pulled for days before leaving it there to rot on the beach. My car is stuck in the sand stranded outside of civilization. And I am sure that if I had the time I could make something out of it, design a different body or maybe add another door, and even if it were not functional at least it would be aesthetic because that’s what an architect is I tell Katie a scientist who’s also an artist.

She must come back soon or we will never get where we are going, and I am late enough already late and dense and small. I must call Peter at the office we are running out of time.

You can cut off my legs if you want to if it will get me out of here. I cannot breathe and the car is getting smaller crushing in on me and I used to have more teeth I think those legs will not stop twitching. They are hard to escape, these steel trappings—dark cages with lonely curves and hot serrated edges. Cut off my legs please.

Something is piercing now vibrating the world with a steady noise. Hydraulic noise like in a factory—pistons and presses and engines. A pair of steel blades are tearing through the roof, gigantic bolt cutters that chomp and spread until it folds open like a flower. Snowflakes are falling inside I am so close they melt down my cheeks. A loud bang sends the dashboard tumbling forward and someone pulls me hard, just once, lifting me out of my shoes. I need those shoes I want to say but I cannot speak, not yet.

Outside it is bitter and bright and light comes at me from all directions. Red lights. White lights. They shine one directly into my eyes and when I blink a voice says “good, good,” and there are people crowded all around me.

I can see Katie sleeping a few yards up in the road. I am relieved to see her because we have to be someplace very soon. She is covered up to her neck with a sheet to keep her from getting cold. No one stands around her because she does not need their attention. She hasn’t a single scratch on her but is perfect, white and pristine.

A doctor puts a mask over my face and I can hear myself breathing.

“Don’t go to sleep,” he says. And all I can think is how clear things are. When did everything become so clear? The sky, the stars, and the air have all at once become transparent.

“I didn’t see this coming,” Katie says as I accelerate uphill. It is nearly midnight and we are on our way to a wedding in the Poconos, where a storm that began as rain is turning to ice as we move up the mountain, and thick drops pelt our windshield and then fan out into a web of frost.

“Is this what it’s going to be like now, all of our friends getting married?”

Julia is not my friend. During the year that Katie and I have been dating, I’ve never heard her name mentioned, not until the invitation arrived and Katie groaned as if to say, dear god, not another wedding.

“Yes Katie,” I answer in my most adult voice. “This is called growing up.” I smile and she makes a face at me, the one that says I’m talking like her father. She leans over and turns up my windshield wipers, flipping her head from side to side as she sits back. She has a new short haircut, which layers her brown waves so that the ends curl up cutely, and I like it very much, although it makes her look younger, and my own hair is slowly starting to marble with fine strands of gray. I examine the top of my head in the mirror, fingering sections that I am convinced are thinning, though Katie says no. I focus my attention back on the road, enjoying the way it turns without any anticipation, forcing me to twist the wheel suddenly as if I am playing an arcade game.

I wouldn’t mind living in a place like this, where the houses are all nestled behind thick rows of trees, so that even in winter the snow catches on their branches and the sheer abundance of them, miles and miles of white wooded lines, makes it impossible to see anything but mailboxes from the road, and we wind sharply passed each post and small red flag, curving abruptly as our car soars up and down, barely aware that all the while we are climbing continuously, ascending until the trees part and the stars come barreling down at us.

I remember what it was like though, when I was Katie’s age and all of my friends were getting married.

“It’ll be different now,” I tell her. “Wait and see. It’ll be all Christmas cards and school photos, like that whole life before never happened.” That’s how it was with my best friend Rob, Katie’s older brother, who comes to town with his family once a year at Thanksgiving. I buy his boys action toys and take them to a Jets game, where they eat lots of hot dogs and call me “Uncle Andy.” It gives Rob and Heather some time alone with his family, and there’s really never that much for the two of us to catch up on anyway. They adore Katie though, Rob’s boys. She holds them by their arms and spins them until they are red and dizzy. They cling to her legs as she walks, asking, “has anyone seen Tom or Stevie? I can’t find them anywhere!” She finds the boys much more fun now that they are older, instead of babies with creepy eyes and blank expressions, squirming around in her arms.

“You know, it really isn’t so bad. That’s just the way things happen.” I give her chin a little pinch. I know that Katie hates vague explanations, and prefers to get to the source of things, to explain people’s thoughts and behavior based on what’s happened in their lives. I do not make such allowances, and gave up trying to understand other people years ago. I find that the better I know a person the greater capacity they have to shock me, to say something that takes my well-chiseled conceptions and wears them down to faceless rock. Just the other day my mother told me that as a girl she once tried heroin. Heroin! My mother! My Mom in a pressed librarian skirt tapping at a protruding vein and then shooting it up with a needle. It kept me up all night that thought as most things tend to.

But it didn’t shock me at all when Rob said he was getting married. You could see right away where things were going with Heather. Three semesters into college and they already had a joint bank account, their names spelled together in calligraphy on flower-printed checks. Some people are born to get married young like that, but not me. My mother is still angry that I did not marry Susan, a nice Lehigh girl who I dated for five years and then dumped after an ultimatum was issued. At the time I wanted much more than to live in Short Hills and take trains into the city, complaining about my property taxes and calling the police about noisy neighbors. Instead, I quit my job as a banker and sublet my apartment, because a nice, rent-controlled place like that is something you can’t let go of. I bummed around Europe for several years, living briefly in Paris with a girl named Clarie, a pretty, pouty thing who called me “On-dee” and threw my clothes out the window whenever she got mad. But that was a long time ago. Whole lives before I found Katie.

I crack my knuckles against the steering wheel, admiring it’s wood-polished finished. I am not one for cars, really, but over the past few months I’ve grown to like this Lexus, especially the smell of new leather, which is all the more enjoyable when that smell belongs to you. I take a sip of stale coffee and light a cigarette. I feel dirty and scratch at my scalp compulsively in between puffs, carefully watching the lit end as ashes scatter onto my shoulder. I must call Peter at the office tomorrow and tell him I need more time. Seventy hours at work this week and the blueprints still aren’t ready. If I could just come up with something better—if I could create a design that really astounds it could be the break that I need, and then hopefully I will not end up like Peter, bald and disillusioned, popping pills for chronic heartburn.

“I’m starting to think it isn’t worth it,” I say, but Katie is not listening. She is mesmerized by the dark, narrow curves of the pavement, the way our car outruns the headlights as we turn more and more sharply.

“What Andrew?” I shake my head to indicate nothing. Katie is the only one in the world who calls me by my full name. Perhaps she does not want to confuse me with the Andy of her youth, the one who once told her to touch a burning stove, not thinking that she would do it really, although of course she did—slapped her palm down firmly as if she were giving it a high-five. When Rob and I were into building things, Katie was into destruction. She would stomp on our fortresses like a baby Godzilla, and once knocked over a room of Dominoes that had taken us three days to erect. I glance over at her and smile before turning back to the road.

I have come to believe that places like this are better than the city, which isn’t nearly as exciting as people imagine, especially my married friends, who still call my apartment a “bachelor pad” because I used to date a lot of girls. Instead of remodeling my old place, I should design us a house somewhere out here. Katie could even have a chemistry lab with pipettes and beakers and Bunsen burners, where she could create unstable compounds made of letters and lines. She can get her PhD anywhere, really, and if I’m promoted I can always relocate.

“Did I tell you that she’s only twenty-two?” She turns the radio station from classic rock to bad pop.

“That who is twenty-two?”

“Julia! And she’s only known this guy for five months!” There is a look of astonishment on her face as if such things are incomprehensible.

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe they are in love?”

“What does that have to do with it?” Her words are chilly and flat. Sometimes Katie reminds me of myself at her age, but in the worst possible way. Two weeks ago, she found a diamond ring in my dresser and I had to convince her that it was my grandmother’s.

I feel claustrophobic. I am sweating through my crumpled dress shirt and Katie keeps turning up the heat. She insists that she is cold, even in a coat and sweater, and whenever I try to switch it down she leaps on it as if we are trapped in the Arctic and I just stole the last blanket. I crack open my window and a rush of snowflakes pelt my face. Impulsively, I pull off the road onto a steep dirt driveway.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know.”

At the top of the hill, one lone house is elevated above a small cluster of trees. We have been jacked up over the earth, into an observatory where space arches bright and clear.

“Where are we?” asks Katie, as I open her door. I am shivering and the air rushes through me with a lethal sense of pureness. “It’s snowing so hard!” she yells.

“Shhh…” I place my finger over her lips. “You’ll wake them.” I lift her chin up towards the sky. The stars are gleaming intensely, so close that we could burn our fingertips on them and sink our stinging hands into the snow. It’s like a candlelit vigil that the universe must hold for itself; each star blazes watchfully, mourning as lights sputter and explode in the distant dark.

“What is that dusty stuff there?”

“You mean The Milky Way?” In the city we have a balcony but the sky sits blank and hazy, and on the clearest nights the constellations peak through as a cluster of lightly drawn dots.

“It looks like a double helix,” she says. “Like DNA, but with stardust.” Katie is transfixed, dangling from strings hung high in the atmosphere, and it occurs to me that maybe she is right—that life must always exist in chains. Nucleic acids. Cells. Entire galaxies twisted together clinging to randomness, forming a plan. And now I can see the whole universe: rocks hurdling through space, some chaotic circular energy sweeping over a map of the earth; and Katie leans in close to me, burying herself deeper and deeper until I think she might climb into my chest and grasp my heart, the naked muscle of it, beating bloody and veined.

But I am smart enough not to say what I am thinking. That is, I know Katie well enough to remain quiet at times like these. Instead we stand silently as the snow builds up on our hair and shoulders, and then I kiss her softly, cupping her face in my hands.

Back on the road, the snow is getting thicker. It mixes with a dense fog, creating a sheet of precipitation that hits the windshield horizontally.

“What is that?” Katie asks. Outside a white vapor is stirring in misty streaks, weaving like a ghost around the car, never catching onto the glass, never turning back into water.

“I’ve never seen snow like that,” she says. “It’s hypnotic the way it moves.”

“I’m not sure it is snow.” But I can see the flakes, so it must be.

“Maybe it is fake snow. Maybe someone is shaking it over us.” She yawns and closes her eyes, breathing deeply in and out.

The road plateaus and then plummets down suddenly, letting us hang for a moment before falling blindly down the pavement, so that our stomachs sink deep like stones dropped into still, shallow water; and I am absorbed by Katie, the way the white air dances around her in a tornado of frost while leaving her warm, her red lips exhaling into the car’s blistering heat. The fog is hanging in chunks now, like stretched out balls of cotton.

“Where did the stars go?” I ask. “They were here just a minute ago.”

Katie is sleeping. She has never fallen asleep so quickly. Maybe it is the lack of bed or objective, the thought that she must stay awake for me, but whatever it is, she is sleeping and mascara is rubbed across her face.

It reminds me of the first time I saw her, I mean really saw her. It was a little over a year ago, when Rob’s father died and I drove into New Jersey for the funeral. I hadn’t seen Katie in years and I didn’t even recognize her. Her hair fell down to her waist and she had chosen pink, of all things, to wear: a black shirt and a long, pink linen skirt that clung to her and made her tall. I asked her who she was and she laughed loudly until everyone turned. She hugged me, her mascara leaving such an awful stain on my shirt that I told her she could go ahead and blow her nose on my tie if she wanted. Instead she grabbed me again and wrapped her arms around my chest, lingering.

It was a strange place to fall in love with someone—at a funeral, with her sobbing like crazy the entire time and my not knowing what to say.

“I used to have a crush on you,” she told me later that night. We were in her backyard after everyone had left, and it was just Rob’s family inside talking to his mother.

“So you don’t anymore then?” I asked. She blushed and looked at the ground and it was like that whole life before never happened.

I glance over at Katie, sleeping with an arm draped over her eye, and imagine all of the things that had to occur between that moment and this, each raw action building on another like a ball of snow gathering weight as it is rolled around a yard, becoming so big that eventually you can’t even move it alone.

Katie twitches. She unclicks her seatbelt and rolls over, making a small sleeping sound, a short, high-pitched sigh. There is a blue truck in front of us. Its faint yellow lights guide me as the road splits into two lanes. There are no houses now but only rocks and a thick, steel guard rail on the left that separates us from a fall. Things have grown quiet and I drive, static and dreamlike, watching the truck’s tires drive up the dry snow, leaving a thick, cloudy trail behind them that lulls me like a song.

My eyelids grow heavy, heavy. Down and then back up. Up and then back down.

The truck and the road have vanished. Whiteness has fallen in a bright wall and I cannot see around it.

God, this is really thick, Katie says. Have you ever seen fog this thick?

I am surprised because she is no longer sleeping but awake like it is afternoon and the weather does not make her frightened but seems to excite her even. I keep my eyes fixed ahead and say nothing. I cannot let her see that I am nervous not that I am I mean. It’s just that I’m used to seeing things. I like to know what’s coming. And here I drive into nothing. It is deep and without end. I’d gladly pull over, I don’t mind, it’s just that I have no idea where the side of the road is, if we are in this lane or the next. Or where we are going even. I cannot remember where we are going. We will get there quickly though. We are flying and hurdling and inertia says we will move until something stops us.

Maybe we should get married, Katie says. I know I always say that we can’t yet, but maybe we should do it tomorrow.

Tomorrow? I turn to ask. I am afraid to slow down. I cannot see the truck ahead but I know it must be close. Where did it go, that truck? It was here not so long ago. I wonder what it would be like if we never left this world, if we just sailed through this white forever, blind and calm, never braking.

I lurch awake for an instant. I open my eyes wide and there is an explosion. Metal and glass and clarity. Headlights shine and the fog is gone and our car is frail and malleable.

“Andy,” a voice yells, just once, like a gasp.

There is a flashlight in my eyes. “Wake up,” a voice says, “wake up.” I am lying on the pavement with a circle of heads leaning over me.

“Katie,” I say out loud as they lift me onto a stretcher. The world is so silent I can hear the strangers breathing.