A group of people surrounds him on the platform laughing loud. They wear name tags around their necks and matching t-shirts he can’t read for the folds. Probably some kind of conference. He occupies one of just three seats and it doesn’t seem sensible to offer one seat to a dozen people so he sits on. They eat cookies from brown waxed paper bags, bought from the bakery across the street. The cookies themselves are hidden. They break pieces off inside the bags and bring them quickly to their mouths. He watches them with his head lowered.
He is not the only one watching. The obsidian eyes of the city birds watch too. They know these bags. He notices these birds are of two persuasions. The larger pigeons are brave enough—or domesticated enough—to come and stand right under the mingled group waiting for the lucky crumb. They have no fear. But they are slow, waddling, and stupid. Smaller more skittish birds, pale brown in color, tremble at the periphery or high up in the struts of the shade structure. Quick and wary, they survey the platform. When one sees an opening it shoots in with speed and precision. It strikes him that these birds—so different in approach—are oddly equally matched. The quick and the brave. The pigeons walk among the people and feed leisurely on crumbs of opportunity. But as often as not speed and agility overcome distance and the small birds eat despite their cowardice. There is almost never a squabble. Each bird knows when it will win and when it will not before it makes any attempt, and it is rarely wrong. He thinks this scene must have played out day after day, year after year, and there is now no sport left in it. In a sense, each bird has chosen every crumb it will ever eat and now it only waits for time to catch up to what it already knows.
If ever God saw fit to create a bird that was both fast and unafraid it would dominate this trade to the detriment of all others. But God is a just god and so no such bird exists. Not here anyway. Not on this platform.
The train arrives. He passes through the car and takes a seat in the small section that makes up the hinge between cars. It is far from the noisy group. From here every time the train turns he gets a double-glimpse of that strange phenomenon. If he looks right, he sees the car ahead of him swing out of view and then back into view again. And if he looks left he sees the same thing in the reverse. But this time it is he that is turning, not the car. The illusion, though, is identical.
A young woman stands opposite him, looking away so that he sees just part of her face in profile, obscured by a wedge of fiber-optic pink hair. She wears an olive jacket, some army surplus thing, and white pants that hang loosely. She has a striking look about her. Pretty and unafraid. He watches without looking. Notices without being noticed. Is it the hair? It’s a wig, too shining, too shampoo-commercial square to be her natural hair. It’s cheap, not something anyone would call beautiful on its own. But the whole look together is unmissable. She is bold, carefree. Her hand holds the overhead railing and he notices it is small and undefined, childlike, with chipped white nail polish. She’s maybe twenty, if that. Just barely an adult. Full of promise. She begins to turn her head and he looks to the floor to avoid her gaze. Her feet are there, toe to toe with his. Her feet are so incredibly small. He thinks she could fit three of her feet into one of his shoes. Is it harder to stand on such small feet? Would she know? Would he? Perhaps it doesn’t even make sense to classify such a small part of a whole life as harder or easier, more or less.
He takes his phone from his pocket and slides his finger across the screen to distract himself. The news has recently been occupied by coverage of the flyby of a distant world by some robotic spacecraft. We are just now learning what it looks like. A small and silent world to be sure but a whole world as old as the Earth itself and never seen by humankind before. And if not humans, then who or what? A world that has never in four billion years heard so much as a sound. A new picture moves into his view, the world in profile, looking away, blushing in oranges and pinks, its small head on a slender neck. He feels a compulsion to turn from the naked impropriety of it, as though the spacecraft has walked in on someone stepping out of the bath. This cold and quiet world deserves a warning, a chance to get decent.
He’s not sure if its right to say we are just now learning what it looks like. Without an observer, it surely doesn’t look like anything at all. In a sense we are creating it in real time by the very act of observation. He turns off the screen but does not stop staring at it. The train is at another stop and the sun shines through the latticework of the platform structure and through the window behind him. This crisscross pattern is reflected in the blackness of the phone screen. He remembers his first encounter with a cold and dark distant world.
Halley’s comet, to the naked eye, does not look like the pictures. It’s just a fuzzy white star. But not a star, really, bound as it is to this rigid system to which we ourselves belong. He was eleven years old. He couldn’t even be sure, honestly, not totally sure that he was looking at the right fuzzy white star. It is so hard to point at the sky. His friend’s father took them out to see it. Not really a friend. A boy from school. When the boy asked he said yes but regretted it right away. This boy who was too desperate for friendship to be befriended, and too foolish and kind to be rebuffed. No, it was more than that. The boy had some kind of gravity too, in his bold unashamed enthusiasm. It didn’t seem right to just say what you meant all the time. It didn’t seem right to be right there in the middle of the world, not holding back, not watching, not waiting, not making sure. He was afraid sometimes to be too close to him. Afraid to feel him, or to feel for him.
Halley’s Comet will come back eventually. It has no choice. As a child he wondered if he would live to see it return. If so, he’d be an old man, 86 years old. As a child he marveled at the idea. It’s sad somehow. Eleven years old. Unformed. Afraid. A lifetime ago, looking up at a fuzzy white maybe-comet. And still that comet, the very same one, is somewhere out there in the cold and dark right now. The hair rises on the back of his neck. He looks it up on his phone and is surprised to realize it is close to apogee now. Is this coincidence? That he should think about this now. That he should look this up now. A checkpoint half way between these poles of his life?
The comet is as far away as it will ever get. Turning its head to sip one small breath from the distant edge of the solar system. What stars can it see from there? Apogee is a peak and also a turning point. For an instant it will be still like the swans-down feather that neither way inclines. No choices to make. And then it will change direction and it will come back. But the journey is long and the thing is dim and he won’t see it for some long time. He will be an old man. He wonders again, for the second time in his life, if he will live to see it. And if he does, will it remember that faraway breath? Will it tell him the taste of it?
It will make him cry, he is certain. As certain as you can be about an old man. And what will that man be crying about, really? Lost childhood? The wonder of the cosmos? The inexorability of slow unfolding change? The never ending turning of the wheel? Yes. And no. He will cry for the only thing that haunts men of a certain age: the passage of time. Every moment a collapsing of possibility now. A negation. A crossing off. When did addition change to subtraction? When did he slide so nonchalantly to the other side of the ledger? And is this sadness it is bringing to him pre-ordained, a spring set in the clockwork of the universe by an eleven year old boy, 75 years in the turning? He can feel the tug of that sadness already, distant and still. Gravity has no limit. Apogee.
But there are closer moons to mourn and closer still to behold. Or to hold. A great many before the comet returns, each beautiful, each pulling more or less. He feels them pull. It is love bright and glorious. Let the wheel turn, let the clockwork work its wonder. He feels his weight in the chair. It is the weight of the Earth itself.
Head still down somewhat he turns his eyes again to the woman. She is not so much more than eleven herself. Not really, in the scheme of things. Her hair, her nails, her small feet and childlike hands all speak of innocence and possibility. Her beauty is an attribute, not a reduction, right? Her hands. Her jacket. These are attributes of she, but what is the she? He will never know. But it doesn’t matter. He has constructed a she from what he sees, and built within it a story to hold these things. This could be his daughter in not so many years. A bright spot in the firmament. He’s looking at her face again. Striking. She looks down and smiles before he can look away. A bold warm welcoming smile. A smile without shame.
Her teeth are a mess. Meth. Gapped and brown and brittle and broken. Is she still beautiful? Her smile is kind. Her teeth are cruel. Her hair flashes. Her face is soft. She rocks on her tiny feet. He looks away. He stands and leaves. He will think of her from time to time for the rest of his life.
Apogee.
Footnotes
- Arrokoth Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Roman Tkachenko, 2019.
- Comet Image credit: Geoff Coffey 2023.