The Night of the Comet (6 page)

The next week he plowed into the classroom, set his briefcase on his desk, and stepped forward. Twitching lightly in his clothes, he said he had some exciting news to tell us. He’d been talking to the other teachers about the comet, and during their last staff meeting, they agreed to a proposal he’d put forth:

Given that the appearance of Kohoutek was an astronomical event of historic proportions, and given that such an event presented unique educational opportunities for students, 1973 would be designated “The Year of the Comet” for the freshman class at Terrebonne High.

He wrote the phrase on the board, saying each word out loud as he did so, “The—Year—of—the—Comet.” Then he drew a big circle around it, just in case any of us missed the point.

Dusting off his hands, he explained how, per their agreement, all ninth grade teachers would include space-related themes in their lessons this semester. So our history teacher might discuss the cosmologies of different civilizations through time, our art teacher might have us draw posters of comets, and so on. Comets, comets everywhere.

“Sound fun?” he asked, and my classmates exchanged doubtful
looks. At the next desk over, Peter turned to me, lifted his hands, and wobbled his head, as if to say,
What’s with all the comet crap?

My father took the lead by tacking up a long chart of the solar system to the side wall of his classroom. He’d made the chart himself from sheets of freezer paper, with a drawing of the Sun at the front of the room and Pluto near the back. He said how we would use this chart to track Kohoutek’s approach over the upcoming months. Every Friday he would phone the Astronomy Department at LSU for the coordinates, and every Monday morning, a special comet person would be chosen to position the comet on the chart.

He held up a disk of cardboard, trimmed around the edges with pinking shears and wrapped with aluminum foil. “Here it is. The comet. Ouch. Hot,” he said, and snorted a laugh.

This might’ve been an awfully dumb activity for ninth graders, except that the first comet person he chose, whether by accident or design, was Gabriella.

“Comet person,” he said. “Arise! Take the comet.”

“Yes, sir.” Gabriella came to the front of the class and took the silver comet. She turned it over in her hands, looking at it.

“Distance,” he said, checking his notepad, “two point eight four four astronomical units.”

“Where’s that?”

“Here.” He pointed to an X penciled halfway between Mars and Jupiter. Tossing her hair over her shoulder, Gabriella bent in and stuck the comet on the chart. Then she stood back, sliding her heels together and cupping her hands below her waist. She had a marvelously upright bearing, as if she wasn’t afraid of standing in front of the class, as if she enjoyed it even. All the girls watched her with envy, and Mark Mingis, slumped in his desk, grinned approvingly.

“How does our current location correspond with the projected location?”

“Looks to be about the same.”

“Any estimates on the date of perihelion? Same? Different?”

“Um—the same?”

“Excellent. Thank you.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” she said, and gave a brisk kind of sailor salute before taking her seat. Good god, I thought. Had there ever been a girl as clever and adorable as Gabriella? And was everyone as in love with her as I was? How could they not have been? After Gabriella, everyone wanted to be the comet person.

Our other teachers gradually picked up on my father’s Year of the Comet idea, some more enthusiastically than the rest. In fine arts, we spent a couple of lessons making posters that went up in the hallways. “Comet Kohoutek, Superstar!” they said, and “Depictions of Comets Through History,” and “Interpretation of When the Comet Hits the Planet and Everything Is Destroyed, the Dinosaurs Return.” In math, we used algebra to try to calculate rate, time, and distance for the comet. And in English class, our teacher set aside a day for us to compose poems about the comet.

Miss Benoit was a nervous young black woman with large round glasses that made her look frightened and sad, like she was always on the verge of crying. She was a great lover of literature, as she often told us herself, and although her lessons were generally dull and confusing, from time to time she would read stories aloud to us in class with a hushed, dramatic voice that made even the most apathetic students lift their heads up from their desks. For her comet lesson, she showed us pictures of stars and planets, and then she pulled down the shades, put on a record of classical music, and told us to close our eyes and “write what you feel,” and “don’t worry about sense. Sense is for scientists.” We spent the better part of an hour working on our poems, and at the end she loved everybody’s. But she was especially taken by mine. She asked me to read it aloud for the class. I didn’t want to.

“Please?” she pouted. Miss Benoit had already singled me out as one of her favorites because she’d seen me checking out a stack of nonrequired reading in the library. “A like soul,” she called me. “A lover of literature. A son of Shakespeare.”

“June-yurrr!”
my classmates jeered when I came to the front of the room.

I lifted my arms from my sides and tugged my shirt from my chest. I could feel the sweat dampening my underarms. Miss Benoit stood to
one side with her hands pressed together in front of her, as if she were praying for me. My voice sounded shaky and weak to my ears; I didn’t dare look up for fear of exposing myself. “ ‘I Am the Comet,’ ” I began.

Miss Benoit made a small gasp when I finished reading, like someone had poked her in the side. “I cherish your poem,” she said. “I wonder who the Sun is? Oh, that lucky Sun!”

I didn’t say who the Sun was; I was careful not to even look in her direction. But I thought that it must’ve been obvious to anyone with eyes to see: there she was in the front row, blazing.

“I wonder who the Sun is?” Peter whispered as I returned to my seat. He slid his hands under his shirt and rubbed his chest obscenely. “Ooh, that lucky, lucky Sun!”

For Coach DuPleiss, who couldn’t see any link between comets and phys ed, my father volunteered to write the lessons himself. He planned a module called Space Age Fitness and made ditto copies of handouts on which students were to record their daily caloric intake and expenditure while practicing the same exercises the astronauts in
Skylab
did. He visited my P.E. class on the day we were to begin Space Age Fitness, and while my father spoke about the importance of fitness not only for astronauts but for teenagers as well, Coach DuPleiss, a short, tough man with hairy arms and a mustache, made faces behind his back.

“Thank you, Professor,” said the coach, winking and grinning. “I’m sure we can all appreciate that.” As soon as my father had gone, the
coach stuffed his handouts behind an equipment locker and made us run laps instead.

“You’re comets!” he shouted, snapping a towel at us. “Pick it up. Hey Junior, let’s go! Run!”

Nothing discouraged my father, though, not mocking coaches, or skeptical students, or a disinterested family. When it came to his comet, he was indefatigable.

Nights, he would take my telescope and head for the back door.

“I thought you said we weren’t going to see it for another couple months,” I said.

“I’m just checking. I’m just having a look, that’s all. Turn off the porch light, would you?”

From my bedroom window I watched him set up the scope in the backyard. His white shirt caught the light from the Moon so that, moving against the dark line of trees, he looked like a ghost bobbing around at the rear of our yard. He hunched down to the eyepiece and then stayed there a long time, his hands resting awkwardly on his knees. He seemed to sigh occasionally, his shoulders rising and falling with his breath.
I’m here
, he might’ve been whispering to the comet.
I’m ready. I’m waiting
.

When I went to bed he was still there in the yard with my telescope, still waiting with his head bowed beneath the stars. Drifting off to sleep, I imagined a spark from the comet floating down, down like a mote of stardust, to land inside my father, where, settling in his belly, it rekindled the long-forgotten dreams and ambitions of his youth. I saw his white shirt glowing yellow in the moonlight, flames shooting from his fingertips, like he was a man set on fire.

And who knew then how great the flames would grow, how bright they would shine? Or how completely they would consume him? We couldn’t have known, not then. Then, his comet was still little more than a joke to us all.

A Sunday morning a month into the start of the school year, my father trotted into the house in his pajamas and bedroom slippers carrying the newspaper. Megan, our mother, and I gathered at his elbows as he unfolded the paper on the table with a jerky excitement. On page three of the Fun section, just below my mother’s horoscope column, was a black-and-white photograph of him. His glasses looked larger than in real life, and he wore a stiff, crooked smile.

“ ‘Groovy Science’?” Megan said, frowning. “Whose idea was that?”

“The column was my idea. But the title, that’s the editor’s. They wanted to, you know, jazz it up a little.”

We knew he’d been working on something for the newspaper but didn’t know what, exactly. He told us he’d delivered this first piece just last week and everyone at the newspaper had liked it. “Careful you don’t get butter on it.”

I began to read the article aloud.

“Okay, okay, you don’t have to read the whole thing,” Megan said.

“It’s just something easy. Something for families and kids,” my father quickly explained. “I thought with the comet coming, this would be a good opportunity to raise awareness in the community about the importance of science in our everyday lives.” He had already mapped out a bunch of ideas for future columns: the history of astronomy, early views of the solar system, the laws of gravity, the origins of the universe, the nature of time … “You could go on and on.”

My mother looked at him with a peculiar expression of pride, envy, and disbelief. “And this is going to be in the newspaper every week?”

“Every week.”

“Great,” my sister said to me later. “Now everyone can know what a geek our dad is.”

But I was impressed, seeing my father’s name and picture in the
newspaper. That afternoon he brought home a whole stack of them. And that same night he got to work on his next column, “Why Can’t People Fly?” (
“Ever since Icarus strapped his waxy wings to his arms, men have stared at the birds in wordless wonder and envy, and thought
, Why can’t I?
Groovy science tells us that according to the laws of gravity …”
) When I went up to bed he was still working on it, sitting at the table, consulting his old college textbooks and making notes in the light from the overhead lamp as the house creaked around him.

At school, my father’s column was posted on the notice board in the entrance hallway with his name circled in red ink. Coach DuPleiss, seeing him out in the parking lot at recess checking the weather, couldn’t resist poking fun.

“See any comets yet, Professor?” DuPleiss shouted. Mark Mingis and a handful of other football players standing around the coach chuckled.

My father lowered his eyes from the clouds. “If you’re referring to Comet Kohoutek, not yet,” he answered. “He’s about halfway to Mars now. You’ll be able to see him next month with a good pair of binoculars. By December, of course, you won’t be able to miss him.”

“I’ll start digging my bomb shelter, Professor,” DuPleiss said.

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. The chances that Kohoutek will actually strike the Earth are negligible.”

“Negligible, you say?”

He could brush off the teasing easily enough, but the coach’s nickname for him stuck. Students began to call out to him on the playground and in the hallway, in a half-joking, half-admiring tone: “Hey, Professor! How’s it going, Professor?” Before long, other teachers picked up on it, too. “Any news on the comet, Professor?”

My father, far from shrinking from it, seemed to enjoy the attention. He answered all come-ons with a chirpy, self-conscious irony, as if to show that he was in on the joke. He’d pull his shoulders back and, smiling and twitching, say, “The Professor is feeling fine today, thank you,” or, flipping open his notepad, “Latest coordinates are RA eleven hours, eighteen minutes, and twenty seconds; declination minus six
degrees and six point two arc minutes. Distance two point two eight one astronomical units. Yep, Kohoutek’s right on track.”

Emboldened by the success of his newspaper column, he finally resolved to approach the school principal with a formal request for money to repair his department’s crumbling science labs. He wouldn’t be denied any longer, he told us at home over dinner. Didn’t he deserve as much support as a football coach? Wasn’t his work just as important? More, even?

He made a list of supplies and equipment, drew up a budget, and rehearsed his arguments with us at the table. It was, he said, “vitally important to engage students while the flame of their natural curiosity still burns.” My mother said that he should try to be more forceful and less flowery in his delivery; he shushed her and went on: “… the space race … the reputation of our school … the health of our community … the future of our nation …”