The Night of the Comet (4 page)

MY
father, the teacher.

Sometimes I got the feeling that he hated it. He never said so, but by the end of the week he’d come home from school looking tired and defeated, the dark crescents below his eyes visible even through the lenses of his glasses. He might’ve been a boxer stumbling out of the ring after losing another round to his students, those bored, gum-smacking teenagers who showed so little love for Earth and Space Science.

Looking up from marking tests at the dinner table on Sunday evening, his hair sticking out on one side of his head, he would say how he could’ve gone on to graduate school, how, if only he’d stuck with it, he might’ve had a career in research by now. He talked fondly of his college years at LSU in Baton Rouge: working all night in the Nicholson Hall lab to meet a deadline … swapping ideas with the older students at the coffee machine … the smell of acetone wafting in the corridors. How he had loved it, the pure, heady joy of intellectual pursuit. His old
astronomy professor, Dr. Brewer, always said he showed great promise, told him he had “the mind of a scientist,” an ability to get inside a problem and visualize a solution. Not everybody had that, Brewer said; it was the kind of talent they looked for in their graduate students.

“But instead …,” my father would say, gesturing wearily at the papers spread on the table, the red scrawl of his pen bleeding all over them.

He didn’t have to say it; the gesture said everything. It was shorthand for all the complaints we’d heard him muttering for years: He had sold himself short. He deserved better than this. If only he hadn’t gotten married so young, if only they hadn’t had two children and a house and a car that needed to be paid for, then he wouldn’t be sitting here at this table, correcting these papers for kids who didn’t give a damn, teaching at a poor public high school with a broken-down lab and an indifferent principal. Instead, he’d be working at NASA, or Raytheon, or the Palomar Observatory, where the real scientists went and where people cared about your work. Because he still had it, he said, that feeling for science. That wasn’t something that went away. It was like a fire that burned inside you, a passion to know more.

“Our mad scientist,” my mother would joke.

He wouldn’t laugh. He’d glare at her, as though the blame were all hers. Then he’d pick up his red pen and go back to correcting papers, his frustration settling like a black cloud around his shoulders. No one appreciated him, no one cared, no one knew the talent and ambition simmering inside him.
If only, if only, if only …

But still, every Monday morning, as dependable as the Sun, he’d be up and at it again—because, after all, this was his job, and we were his family, and someone had to feed us, didn’t they? He shaved, dressed, slicked his hair, and knotted his tie at the mirror above the sink, as carefully as if he were getting ready for church. He gathered his books and papers and repacked them into his worn leather briefcase. He lined up his pens in his breast pocket, three colors, red, blue, and black. He finished his coffee, handed off his cup to our mother, gave her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, and set off on his bicycle.

I’d watch him go, wobbling as he caught his balance on the driveway.
The morning would be bright, the air already warm; the yard, forever in need of mowing, and the weeds, sprouting along the drainage ditch out front, were spangled with dew. Turning down the street, he’d wave to me and Megan waiting at the corner for the bus.

“See you at school!” he’d call, and we’d both cringed a little at the sight of him:

My father, that stubborn, half-blind optimist, with his shirtsleeves flapping in the wind and his trousers rolled up above his ankles, pedaling away on the shaky hope that
this
week,
this
semester,
this
year might finally be better than the last.

“Comet Kohoutek.”

He wrote it on the board and had us repeat it out loud.

“Ko-hou-tek.”

“Ko-hou-tek.”

“Anybody ever heard of that? Yes? No? Maybe?”

The first day of class, my father stood at the front of the room gripping a stick of chalk and peering at us through his glasses. I sat as far back in the room as I could, hiding behind my curtain of bangs and praying he wouldn’t do anything too embarrassing. An oversized fan on a pole in the corner ruffled the papers of students sitting nearest the front of the class. On the walls were a chart of the periodic table, color posters of the planets, and a large picture of Albert Einstein making a funny face, with the caption “Science is fun!”

When no one answered him, he went on.

“Well then, you’re in for a real treat this year. Something really special. I think you’re really going to like this.”

He sniffed, pushed up his glasses, and launched into an elaborate explanation of the comet.

It came, he told us, from the great crystalline sphere that surrounded our solar system. We couldn’t see it—nobody ever had—but it was
there: out in the interstellar dark, out beyond the outer planets, was a vast, glittering cloud of stardust. This was the stuff left over from the birth of the solar system, trillions and trillions of pieces of icy rock and gas, some the size of pebbles, some the size of cities, all turning in slow, silent revolution around the Sun.

Waving his arms, he described how the comet must have looked then: a frozen, rocky mountain powdered with snow, twenty-five miles across, twenty-five miles deep, weighing more than a trillion tons—an iceberg floating in a black sea of space. It might have floated forever in its crystal cloud, except that a gravitational perturbation, a passing star perhaps, nudged it loose from its orbit and sent it tumbling toward the Sun. It fell slowly, so slowly you could hardly have called it falling; it fell for millions of years before it finally grazed past Pluto. It sailed through the orbits of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn. By then, warmed by the Sun, its ice had begun to melt; and as it turned end over end, its crater-pocked crust spewed geysers of gas, giving it a gauzy halo.

The comet was first spotted in March as it passed the planet Jupiter, by Dr. Luboš Kohoutek, a Czech astronomer working at the Hamburg Observatory who gave the comet its name. Next in its path was Mars, and then Earth. Kohoutek was due to reach perihelion, its position closest to the Sun, around Christmastime, when it would light up the sky over our town like a giant star, the brightest star we’d ever seen.

This was truly a remarkable discovery, my father said. Historic, even. Comet Kohoutek might very well be the biggest comet ever witnessed by mankind, bigger even than Halley’s. Scientists were already calling it the comet of the century.

He stopped and blinked. His shoulders twitched, like a small electric current had shot through his body.

“The comet of the century,” he repeated. “Wow! Just think about that for a minute, everyone. Wow.”

My classmates, silent, seemed unimpressed. Some listlessly took notes—
“the comet of the century.”
Some stared blankly at him. Others ignored him completely and turned their gazes to the open windows, where outside, water sprinklers tossed rainbows across the new grass on the football field.

My father, undeterred, turned back to the board and drew a sketch of the comet, a circle with three horizontal lines extending from it. He added labels to show the nucleus, coma, and tail. He told us how as the comet came closer, its nucleus would grow hotter, its coma would swell, and its tail would flare out until it was millions of miles long, streaming behind it like an immense, glittering trail of stardust.…

And still, girls checked their fingernails, boys shifted in their seats and scribbled in their notebooks. Mark Mingis, a big, athletic fellow, closed his eyes and jigged his leg up and down in the aisle, like a sleeping dog dreaming of running. At the next desk over, my friend Peter Coot looked at me and rolled his eyes up into his head like he was dying.

I slumped lower into my seat, wishing myself into invisibility. It was true, dear god, it was true. Not even fifteen minutes into the first lesson, and already I could see that what my sister had warned me about our father was true: he really was a terrible teacher. Nobody listened to him, nobody cared what he had to say. The problem wasn’t his lack of knowledge; he was smart enough, certainly. It wasn’t his lack of enthusiasm, either; anybody could see how much he loved science. The problem, so I dimly understood, was that he had no idea how to communicate all his love and knowledge to other people.

He wanted to, I know. He tried so hard, my father—and if dedication and hard work were any guarantees of success, then my father would’ve been the best teacher in the world. I’d seen him rehearsing this very lesson the night before, pacing and gesturing in the backyard as though he were lecturing the stars. But in the classroom, in his eagerness to share with us everything he knew, he seemed to have forgotten that we, his students, were there. It was as though a thick glass wall stood between him and the class. We could see him on the other side of it, waving his arms and moving his mouth. He obviously had something important he wanted to tell us, but what this was, and why it was so important, we didn’t know. We could barely even hear him, and he seemed not to be able to quite see us. And so my classmates, bored and baffled, sighed and closed their eyes. They rubbed their faces and watched the clock, praying for the hour to end so that they could go
outside and join their friends and laugh and talk like normal people did.

At the board, he was busy drawing a diagram of the solar system now—“Not to scale,” he informed us—with concentric circles showing the orbits of the planets around the Sun. Talking all the while, he traced the path the comet would take as it passed through the solar system, looped around the Sun, and journeyed back to outer space and its home in the crystal cloud.…

On and on he went, and soon I, too, felt myself sinking under the spell of his dullness. I couldn’t help it: he was so damn boring. My eyelids became heavy, gravity tugged my head down to my desk. The fan hummed in the corner, swallowing his words, until his voice became a sleepy, distant drone:
Oort cloud, highly eccentric elliptical orbit, perihelion, aphelion …

There was a knock on the door, jarring everyone awake. My father stopped short and stared at it. The door creaked open.

“Mr. Broussard?” said Gabriella, peeking in.

I sat up. She introduced herself and apologized for coming late, saying something about going to the wrong classroom. My father sniffed and welcomed her in. “Fine, fine,” he said, and put his nose in the roster to check off her name.

Having only ever seen her at a distance, I’d never been fully convinced that she was real. But here she was walking into our classroom, the living, breathing proof of her existence. She wore a sleeveless white blouse that set off her tanned arms and shoulders, and her dark, extravagant hair hung loose down her back. She carried a brown leather purse and an armful of books. She gave a quick smile to the nearest students as she slid into an empty desk at the front of the room. She took a fresh notebook, opened it, and removed a pen from her purse. Then she sat up straight, looped her hair behind her left ear, and put her pen at the ready.

I looked around to see if my classmates were as startled as I was by her arrival. A girl at the rear of the room leaned forward, tapped her friend on the shoulder, and whispered something in her ear. At his desk in the middle of the room, Mark Mingis had his eyes wide open now. His right leg began to bounce more vigorously in the aisle.

At the board, my father had resumed his lecture. Gabriella watched him for a minute, frowning slightly. Then she went to work copying the words and diagrams from the board into her notebook. I was impressed by her diligence. When she filled a page, she turned to a fresh one and continued writing. Her fingernails, I saw, were painted the same tantalizing shade of pink they’d been when I spotted her with my telescope. Around her left wrist she wore a gold watch, and around her neck—I could just make it out through the drape of her hair—a thin gold necklace. When she moved her head, looking up at the board and then down at her notebook, her hair seemed to ripple with life. She was so pretty, so elegant, it made me lonely just to look at her.

My father came back to the center of the floor. Wrapping up his lecture, he explained how in addition to our regular lessons, we’d be paying special attention to our cosmic visitor from outer space. Together with NASA and scientists all over the world, we would track him, we would study him. We would learn all we could about Kohoutek.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event,” he said. “Something you’ll remember for the rest of your lives. Something you can tell your grandchildren about. You were right there, you can say, in Mr. Broussard’s ninth grade Earth and Space Science class when Comet Kohoutek came. Wow. How cool is that?”

Abruptly, my father struck a dramatic pose. He hunched forward and raised his hands in front of him, as if he were getting ready to catch a basketball. Standing crouched like this, his dark hair and tie sprinkled with chalk dust, his glasses reflecting the light, he looked like a weird, giant alien insect.