Station-Keeping

This is how it begins: a mirror clicks into place. My face is pale in the bathroom’s halogen wash. There’s a screeching flame in my head. I see the flash of an eye. Reed is watching from over my shoulder. I’m caught with death in my hands. This is the weight I will always have to carry. ∘ A year later, I’m used to living in the aftermath. I’m waiting to reach escape velocity again, back in my childhood bedroom, now scoured clean of teenage nostalgia. A Tanglewood poster from the summer I had a fellowship is hidden in the corner of the closet with a dust-covered miniKORG, a skateboard, and every pulp sword and sorcery novel I read between the ages of 8 and 18. The walls are empty. My future is a blank. My parents and my therapist have told me any morning could be a fresh start, but I only get a quest worth leaving the house for in the August doldrums. It’s hot, the days are melting indistinguishably together, and I wake up sweating from a nightmare about being trussed up in a spider’s web. In the dream, I am stunned and unable to move. Someone is speaking to me. An affectless contralto has questions about my internal integrity. I can't reply, and the voice is eventually drowned out by arachnoid chittering. I come to when the jab of a stinger penetrates my wrappings. In real life, my stomach is cramping. The dream reminds me that I want to rewatch The Lord of the Rings. I think it would help to see someone else carry something heavy. The ring is small, but the evil in it becomes an unbearable burden. I get that. The last time I can remember watching The Fellowship, I was starting a marathon rewatch with Reed when I should have been packing. It was just before I left town. Before I came back. The memory is fuzzy, but I think I gave him custody of my film collection that night. It hadn’t amounted to much: every Lord of the Rings extended edition, all of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a handful of Criterion Collection classics. Not much, but mine, and I don’t really have enough to leave anything behind. I know the discs might be anywhere, after house moves and time and the death of the DVD, but it is good to have a quest. My ancient iPhone says it will only take an hour and fifty-three minutes on foot to reach Reed's house. I wait for the sun to start dropping, take a flashlight and a bottle of blue Gatorade, and head out. Siri tells me to turn left at the end of the driveway. ∘ When I ring the doorbell, Reed answers. Instead of saying anything, he pulls me into a hug. I don't fight it, but I’m atonic in his embrace. I think about how I must feel to him: hot and thin, my T-shirt sweat through. Otherwise, my mind is empty. A year ago, I'd also arrived unannounced, but Reed had just clapped me on the shoulder. He was distant and distracted, post-burnout from handing in his dissertation. It had been the middle of the afternoon and he showed me around the house his parents were paying for, wearing a dressing gown over a T-shirt and sweatpants. He spooned peanut butter directly from a jar into his mouth as we went from room to room. Now Reed is better dressed, partially grown into middle-class adulthood. His hair remains untamed; his linen shirt is creased. “Chris, what are you doing here?" he asks, releasing me. I struggle to string together an explanation, so he answers his own question. “We’re having a party," he says. "But stay. We can talk tomorrow? I'd love to talk. You know you can call me anytime, man." I don't have the words to refuse the invitation, and any emotions I should feel seeing Reed again are far away and petrified by the affectless contralto of my psychiatrist and the pills she prescribes me. I can’t bring myself to ask about the DVDs. Reed herds me inside and introduces me to his boyfriend Oli, who is a prim academic with copper hair trimmed into a conservative flop, wearing trousers cut from reenactment tweed. His irises are a flux of distinct pale blues. "Space boyfriends," I say when Oli tells me that he, like Reed, is an astrophysics post-doc. "Cute." They laugh at this. Reed kisses Oli's temple before disappearing into the kitchen and asks him to introduce me to everyone. It's just a handful of university friends and their partners drinking wine in Reed's living room. When Oli tells me their names, he describes their research. When he introduces me, he says I’m a musician. I haven’t told him that, but he knows anyway. After Oli steps out to help Reed, a young woman with a tattoo of a rat king crowding her forearm asks if I want a drink. "The boys are hiding them," she says. "But I can find you a beer. Or wine.” She raises her rosé. “I think someone brought mead.” Oli told me her name, but it has already fallen out of my head. Dawn? I only remember that her PhD was about the philosophy of plagues. She doesn’t have a partner with her. I turn down the drink, making eye contact with her tattoo. "Are you sure?" She lets a black-nailed hand glance my arm. “A Coke? Water?” "I'm okay. Really." "Alright.” She takes a swallow from her own glass. "Oli said you're a musician, right? What do you play?" "Oh, uh," I hesitate and look up. Dr Maybe-Dawn is really looking at me, face open and interested. I feel taken off guard by her kindness. I don’t remember people being like this when I used to go to parties. "Keyboard instruments? Piano and synths. That kind of thing." "A pianist! I can just about get through chopsticks." She pauses to laugh, and I laugh, too. "What's your specialty? Classical? Or synths—I guess not. Electronic? Is that what you say?” “I studied classical performance. But it’s up in the air now. At the moment.” I once hoped the conservatory would shape me into someone else. That practicing hard enough and long enough would erase the half of me that liked glitchy dance-pop and watching anime and scrolling through strangers’ LiveJournals until 2 am. My useless, soft parts would, I thought, be strangled, killed off by the good soil of discipline and expectation. I would become someone who sparkled at a cocktail party, owned a tailcoat. This has not been the case. My failure fills an awkward silence. I say, “I'm just going to find the bathroom.” Dawn gives me directions I don't listen to. I know where I'm going. I’ve been there before. ∘ The bathroom is the same as I remember. I close the door behind me. I lock it. This time I lock it. Without thinking, I open the medicine cabinet. It’s empty now, except for toothpaste and a disappointment of floss. If Reed takes any pills, he keeps them somewhere else now. I press the door closed and the mirror clicks into place. There's no eye over my shoulder. No screeching pain. No one watching. Downstairs, I know, the party is full of nice people. People who aren’t thinking about me at all. Still, everything about me feels wrong: my loose T-shirt and Arizona iced tea windbreaker, my insomniac sunkeness, my black metal hair. My nothing to say. I spend as long as I can in the bathroom, until I start feeling self-conscious. I flush the toilet I haven’t used in case anyone is outside and splash cool water over my face before I go back out. My legs ache from the long walk. The idea of speaking to a stranger or looking, even, at Reed, takes on a physical weight. The thought of actually returning to the party after the pleasure of the bathroom’s quiet is too much. I sit at the top of the stairs, propped against the wall. I tell myself I am listening. I am waiting. I close my eyes. ∘ Reed wakes me with a touch on the shoulder. I'm still on the stairs, but it's late and the house is quiet. I can hear Oli loading the dishwasher in the kitchen, the clang of plates. "Hey," Reed says. "You okay?" My mouth is dry and rank with metallic tang. I nod up to him. My muscles seize then relax. “I thought you left,” he says. “I couldn’t see your car." I cover my face with my hands and turn the movement into a stretch. There are holes in the past months that turned out to be seizures, brought on by prescription drugs I had to take in front of a nurse. An eye always watching me. Pills in my hands. I don’t know what happens in the gaps, but I can remember the compliance theatre, opening my mouth and closing my eyes. I can remember surrendering my license after I woke up confused, laid across the chairs in my psychiatrist’s waiting room. I want to tell Reed that this has happened to me. That there are pills for me every day. Pills and new blanks. I know if I say this, it will sound like an accusation. And I know Reed didn't do anything wrong. My therapist narrates this to me calmly, regularly. It is something, she says, that should not be forgotten. He did his best. I am responsible for this. "Walked here," I rasp, then work my throat to release my voice. "Sorry." "You walked?" Reed asks. He knows where I live. 5 miles, maybe, in a straight line; who knows the distance over suburban terrain. Oli comes up behind Reed and touches him on the elbow, aborting Reed’s surprise, his raised voice. "I was on a quest," I say. I feel tired enough to go back to sleep. "Do you want to stay here tonight?" Oli asks. Reed looks at him, alarmed. He sways. Oli puts a hand around his waist. Reed’s drunk, I realise. I nod and close my eyes. ∘ Oli wakes me up again after he's pulled out pillows and blankets for me. Reed has gone. "When I said sleep here, I didn't mean actually here on the floor." Oli is sober and smiling. He offers a hand to get me to my feet, but I don't notice until I'm halfway standing. I apologise and sit on the sofa he’s assigned to me. When Oli’s gone, I check and find The Fellowship of the Ring in the cabinet under the TV. A DVD player is still hooked up, too, so I put it on. It helps to see someone decide to move forward to a place they don’t want to go. Forward without hope for themselves. ∘ I stand up startled when I hear Oli coming downstairs at three in the morning. I catch myself in the hallway mirror. My eyes look hollowed out; flyaways of pale hair form a flickering halo lit up by the screen strobe of lightning. There’s the tinny screech of Nazgûl. Oli turns on the lights and the screen cuts away to a panoramic of the New Zealand countryside. I drop back onto the couch and point the remote, push the volume down to nothing. “Did I wake you?” I whisper. “No, no,” Oli promises. “I just couldn’t sleep. Reed is snoring like you wouldn’t believe.” Oli goes to the kitchen and pours us each a glass of water. The light spills into the living room, and I sit on the sofa with my knees up to my chin. I say I'm sorry when I take the water from Oli instead of thanking him. The spare pillows and blankets he left me to make the couch more comfortable are still neatly stacked and folded. “You can’t sleep either?” Oli asks. I shake my head. "Shouldn't have had that nap. But you don't have to stay up with me." "I know," Oli says. "Am I bothering you?" I'm surprised by the idea. It hasn't occurred to me that Oli is in the room where I should be sleeping; that Oli has come downstairs and turned on the lights in the middle of the night. “No,” I say. “Not at all.” There's a relief in being visited so late, anyway. At home, I'm largely ignored. There'd be a fuss, though, if I was found awake much past midnight: What are you doing? Why aren't you sleeping? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? “Do you want to come outside with me?” Oli asks, standing up. “Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I like to look at the stars. It’s a good night for it, too. Clear as it gets.” I follow Oli through the backyard to a haphazard-looking shed and wait while he fiddles with a combination lock. Even in the dead of night, it’s tropically warm. After hours in the air conditioning, there’s a physical relief to the heat. My muscles unclench. I can see the stars without any help. Oli still hauls out a complicated telescope with a motorised stand and a huge glass eye of a lens. I hear Oli lock the reflector on his scope. The mirror clicks into place. Then there’s a whirr as the computer that guides the bulk of lens and aluminium directs its gaze towards Saturn. Oli closes one blue eye and bends to the viewfinder. “There she is,” Oli says, straightening again. He gestures for me to take his place. When I look through the telescope, I gasp. I can see the bands stretched across the planet, the gaps in its rings. “You can see so much.” There is more wonder in my voice than I can feel. My body knows before my mind. It’s good to see something out in the darkness. I think about space as the nothing between things. I remember the Elvish word for star is elen. Oli inputs something else into the guidance system and looks himself. “Perfect timing,” he says, and ushers me back. Through the scope—which is moving a little on its own, making adjustments according to the mysterious instructions of the computer—I can see a man-made object flanked by shimmering solar panel wings. “Is that a satellite?” I ask, squinting against the eyepiece. “It’s the space station,” Oli says. “I didn’t think it would move so fast.” The telescope tracks the ISS hurtling through its orbit until it disappears beyond the line of roofs that obstructs my view of the horizon. Oli nods. “It goes around the earth fifteen times a day. Every hour and a half.” I'm not sure why, but I’d assumed the station completed its orbit just once a day, specially tethered to the Earth. I’d imagined a rocket going straight up in the air and sticking like it was captured in jelly, hovering always over the place it had launched from. In orbit, to my mind, was some fixed place, a destination. “That’s a geostationary orbit,” Oli explains. “Some satellites are like that. I had a roommate that specialised in orbital station-keeping. It’s a whole thing to keep satellites at the right speed, the right height.” I don't entirely follow what Oli is talking about: thruster burns, directional manoeuvres. I stop him when he starts talking about premature re-entry. “You mean they can fall out of the sky?” Oli nods, only frowning at the layman’s hyperbole. “Especially when something’s in a low orbit, there’s a lot of force. It’s still getting pulled back towards the earth." Oli keeps talking about satellites and non-Keplerian forces, his reassuring explanatory patter accompanied by the electric whirr of the telescope as he directs it towards something new. I lay down in the grass to listen and try to feel the force of gravity pulling me down. I imagine the earth’s dense core dragging me through the dirt until I reach the super-heated centre. A fire capable of destroying all the evil I am carrying. A white flash of light after all the darkness. I think, maybe, I can feel it. Barely. It’s strange that a force that could rip the space station out of the sky is exerted on me all the time with no ill effects, no pain or heaviness. Even I am able to live under certain patterns of stress. Perhaps, though, that’s why it’s so hard to change in the first place. There’s a kind of emotional velocity required, more arcane than Oli’s chemical thrusters. How much power did it take to fix the station in its orbit? How much to place a star in the sky? “Are you okay?” Oli asks, after a while. I open my eyes and see Oli has come to sit next to me. “I was listening,” I promise. “I was thinking about gravity.” “Literal or metaphorical?” I laugh shortly at the question, seen through. “Metaphorical. I’m sorry to disappoint you, Dr Stars.” Oli rolls his eyes. “I have gravity of my own. I talk about space all day. So I talk about space all night, too.” “There are worse patterns.” I turn my head to look through the grass at Oli, and feel the cold slick of dirt against my cheek. “I was thinking about being crushed by the dense core of the earth.” Oli frowns at this. “Sounds pretty literal.” I feel instantly bad for making Oli unhappy. I hadn’t meant to sound sincere. “I didn’t mean it like that. Sorry. Some things—the stars, a planet—it all feels too big for me to even think about. None of it is real.” The things I can actually think about are small. I remember when I was only six years old, telling myself to remember my first piano recital. There’s not much I can pull up besides the laminated wood flooring of a stage and the feeling of being too small for the piano stool. Mostly, I remember the remembering, already tied up with forgetting. I try not to think about the gaps. The fragments I have from my past are shattered details: construction-paper hearts hung up in my second-grade classroom; the metallic scattering of the Walkman I dropped running for the bus; learning tengwar in my bedroom; a hurricane downpour through the window of my deserted high school; driving to the shore and listening to the radio. I remember, last year, sitting on Reed’s sofa and flipping through a coffee table book full of full-colour photos of nebulae. “What are you researching?” I’d asked him, running my fingers over the glossy explosions, the cradles of stars. “Entropy,” Reed said. “Heat death of the universe, baby.” He pointed his fingers at me like a gun and fired. I remember a mirror clicking into place. I could see myself. I hadn’t locked the door. Reed was behind me. An all-seeing eye. His Xanax prescription emptied into my palm. I don’t think about what came after. Instead, I reach out and touch Oli’s hand. Oli doesn’t pull away. He threads his fingers through mine. "Reed thinks that everything will always drift further and further from everything else. That everything gets cold," I say. "Is that true?" "Maybe," Oli says. "Some people believe that. But it might be that the universe has a cycle. It expands, we know that, but maybe it can contract, too.” “That’s a nice thought.” In The Lord of the Rings, the stars are the only things that aren’t corrupted by evil. They are pure points of light, burning suns untouched by the things that happen here on Earth. I can believe in goodness if I think about it like that. I can hope for the stars to come closer. “We just don’t know. When you look through a telescope, you’re actually looking at the past. It takes so long for the light to reach us. You can see a nebula from six hundred years ago, or a star just as it was a million years before that. We can only predict what’s happening now. All we know for sure is what has already happened.” This makes sense to me, that even the present is a mystery. Possibility spins out around us, even as the same old forces pull us back down. The moment has its own gravity. I can feel my chest working, a little shaky on the inhales. Even though Oli keeps a gentle pressure on my knuckles, I tug my hand away. “Sorry,” I tell him, bringing my hand up over my eyes. I’m not sure what I’m apologising for: reaching out or pulling away. “You don’t have to apologise,” Oli tells me. “Has Reed told you? About me?” I pull in a deep breath, like I can’t get enough air. There is a weight. I feel it around my neck. The memory of an eye. Oli reaches for my hand, but I cannot take it. “Yes,” he says. “He has.” I nod. The stars spin overhead. “Do you want to go back inside?” Oli asks me eventually. I realise I’m shredding the lawn, pulling up blades of grass one at a time. There’s dirt scattered across my acid-wash jeans, grass stains along the seams. “Yeah,” I say. “Probably should.” Oli stands first and pulls me up. I look through the telescope’s viewfinder one last time while he packs away the electronics. Without the guidance system, I can only see the dark blank of space. ∘ ∘ ∘