The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (37 page)

Josh was pulled out of memory by a noise. A sound in the doorway, possibly one of the other tenants, someone opening a mailbox, but then there it was: a key grinding in the lock. And there: the elongated profile of Henry’s face against the curtain. Josh stood up from his rocking chair and it banged against the wall. The door opened with the shout of his name. His mother knew, somehow— but how?—that nothing was too wonderful to be true.

Eli walked away from them. The old professor’s ashes were floating everywhere now, and Eli brushed them from his sleeves, his hair, as he gently clucked to the parrot, which sat silent in its cage. It chewed a dull green feather and watched warily as he passed. He could hear the parasol clattering around where he had dropped it, and he imagined it caught by the wind, rolling around and around, a bamboo compass. The parrot made a sound and Eli looked back, but it just stared at him again with that feather in its beak, the snow of ashes falling faintly around it. He turned and entered the golden dome of the stairs.

It was too much. The day was accumulating in his head in small details—the comet, the ants, the photographs, the bird-of-paradise on the path below—and he wanted to clear them away and start again. The darkness of the stairway did him good; the sound of the others abated here, and just his steps rang out against the walls. Windows appeared at every landing, giving a blazing view of the tea plantations and the spit, and then he was into the darkness again and the damp, clean odor of the stone.

Now he was out into the humid shadow of the jungle. The path lay there before him, nothing more than dry gold grass flattened by passing feet, shining where it left the trees and went into the sunlight, but it crunched satisfyingly under his shoes. A few yards away stood that same grove of sealing-wax palms he’d seen before, bending in the breeze, flashing their gaudy stems among the leaves. He stood and rested. The grass smelled dry and good against the muggy scent of the jungle. For one last time, he let himself pretend things had gone differently. That quantum physics was correct, and all the ways that life can go—it goes there. Not time as a woman, picking up our choices one by one, but as the wind, which touches everything at once. A pact, a sandal stepping from the shade, now.

He heard a rustle in the leaves before him. Two birds flew out of the shadows and landed on a vine, trying to find footing before they looped again into the sky. He watched them as they crossed one particular point of blue. Where the comet lay. It couldn’t be seen in daylight, but he of course knew where it would be: just there, beside that cloud. Not far off, but invisible, and moving away. He knew the fate that nobody on the overlook would speak of; he had noted the late arrival, done the calculations, and seen the obvious. It would not return. It was headed on a parabola out of this system forever. The last of Comet Swift-Manday, and of his own, Lanham-Spivak, which he knew now was lost as well.

The shooting stars, though, would return. Every year, on this day, as always, Earth would continue to turn through that trail of dust, and so the meteors would continue as well. But not forever. With no comet to replenish it, the meteor shower would begin to fade. Gradually, there would be fewer falling stars each year, until the day arrived when they were all in their graves—Manday, Eli, Lydia, all of them—and some boy might look up on this night, from this overlook, and notice nothing but the bright, still stars.
The sky,
Eli thought as he watched the hidden comet,
even that forgets.

A breeze cooled his face and he looked down, staring at the bower of the palms. A few dead flowers had broken loose from a vine and fallen into the wind, sailing a little ways down the path before settling into the weeds where dragonflies rushed and halted in the sun. The jungle was still now; just an orchid smell, and the scent of mud and rotting. He waited, watching the blue trembling shade before him. Parrots jabbered in the trees. It would be now.