Short Story: “The Comet Watchers”

It was a season of unwanted miracles. The world was reeling and kindness seemed expensive. It was the year of the pandemic and the summer of George Floyd. The world lurched closer and closer to some unknown ultimate destination, and Comet NEOWISE appeared in Northern Hemisphere skies.

            A son and father living in those regions were living together a few years into the son’s adult life. The loved each other but now and then struggled to talk about things they had in common. The son was more religious and read more; the father exercised more and knew more about what may be called the “real world.” Both, however, liked science fiction; they had lately, stuck at home, begun watching Star Trek together; both loved the night sky, and both wanted to see the comet where it hung in the northwestern sky in the evening dim.

            Near their home was a fruit farm, with a store where the son had briefly worked upon finishing school, sorting crates of peaches and apples and showing people where to park on weekend afternoons. He had been let go before long but the family was still on good terms with the people at the farm and so they often found themselves going there still. The store was at the top of a large, steep hill with a commanding view of other hills to the east and to the north. Green and gold in the summer, gold and grey in the autumn, grey and white in the winter, white and green in the spring—such was the view in daylight. At night, they thought, it was likelier than not that much of the sea of stars could be seen.

            There were two ways to get to the farm store from their house, one much more straightforward than the other. The straightforward way involved driving down to the state highway, taking it up into the hills for a few minutes, then turning onto a smaller road that went up the steeper hill on which the farm stood. The less straightforward way involved taking several different back roads, one of them unpaved. In this way one could ape a direct back-roads route that had once been the obvious path to take; this route, regrettably, crossed a small bridge that had been out for about two and a half years. Even before the pandemic the towns in that region had not been made of money to spend on bridge repairs in outlying neighborhoods. Now, they had far bigger fish to fry, and likely would have them for quite some time. “I’m taking Route 2,” the father thus said when he and the son got into the car to go and see the comet. “Safer this time of night.”

            “Better lit,” the son agreed, although he was young and dramatic enough that oftentimes he preferred the romance and mystery of the less straightforward way. He expected that preference to be beaten out of him by life sooner or later, even though he had managed to escape being told sententiously that it would be. But for now…

            They set off into the night. The son had a marvelous app or program on his telephone in which one could see a clear map of the celestial sphere, one that, minute by minute, changed as the sky itself revolved or rotated around Polaris and Sigma Octantis high above the Earth. He had checked to see if this app accounted for the comet. It did not, but the website of a certain newspaper described where the comet was in the sky relative to the familiar northern summer constellations.

            “Shoot,” said the father. “Should’ve brought binoculars.”

            “It’ll be visible in the evening for four or five more days,” said the son. “Maybe we can come back in a few days and bring the binoculars with us then.”

            “Have you ever been up here at night before? Do you know how the view is?”

            The son shook his head. “I haven’t,” he said, “but I’m sure it’s fantastic.” This was a place that—during the day—had one of those old-fashioned coin-operated binocular viewfinders that one was liable to find on mountain overlooks and skyscraper observation decks. One could see dozens of miles to where higher hills and mountains receded into an ambiguous bluish horizon, marching steadfastly rank by rank northeastward. The son was confident that its late-evening sky would be remarkable.

 ❦

Twenty years before, when the son had been living alone with his mother in an old farmhouse (the father was, technically, a stepfather), he had gone through a childhood mania for outer space. At first it had been a purely factual and scientific craze, without the note of science fiction that had grown steadily louder in the polyphony of his interests afterwards. He had had a poster on his robin’s-egg-blue bedroom wall showing one of the famous pictures of Saturn from the Voyager flybys, gracing an expanse above a guinea pig cage. Once he had tried to make a mobile of the Solar System that had the planets to scale in both size and distance; it had been a spectacular failure, with Neptune in the bathroom, Pluto too small to keep safely in the back yard where stray cows might get at it, and the real scales still not replicated. He had known the names of all the northern constellations then, and had been able to make out most of them from the train tracks across the road.

            Then Tolkien and Doctor Who had happened, in that order and a few years apart. His future stepfather had been to credit for his introduction to both of them. This period had spanned the 2000s, a fecund and febrile period for the fandoms for both works. The son was banned from a Tolkien fan forum for lying about his age when he was eleven. Latterly he was given to discussing Doctor Who obstreperously on social media, such as it existed twelve or fifteen years before the pandemic—journals; fora. He became, in fact, a creature of books and media, interested in the fictional and the fantastical. Not unrelatedly, by this time he and his mother had moved to a region from which one could not easily see the nighttime sky.

            He had begun to resent the lack of stars and constellations to be watched above his head almost right away after the move. It had been a move undertaken unhappily, for reasons to do with his education. For that reason he felt a certain degree of guilt about “doing this to himself,” and, for that matter, about everything else that he was doing with his life. Increasingly he was interested in girls, in several different ways, and he projected unhealthy fantasies and resentments into that area of his life, fantasies and resentments that had been developed elsewhere. Through some strange alchemy he found himself transmuting interests that he might share with others into excuses to isolate himself. He had certain illnesses too, and between one thing and another, he spent his mid-teens with few real friends.

            The father, previously a male friend of the family, became his stepfather at around this point. At first the son resented this too. His mother’s previous attempts to date had not gone well, and he was afraid that his closeness to this man would be wounded if this relationship went badly too. The situation also forced him to think of his biological father, a deadbeat junkie whom he had never met. It was not a pleasant road for him to go down, and new resentments did end up arising. It was at this time that son and father began to fear that they did not have as much to talk about as they had had in the past. It was a painful realization, and one that the son, at least, mourned intensely.

            Time passed. The son breasted the turbulent currents of religious and sexual identity, to and fro. After a few years of living with his parents in adulthood upon finishing with school, he began to despair of ever really finding again the easy commonalities that had existed in his childhood. When he had loved, back then, he had been able to merely love, without the outside questions of shared interest or presence of a shared goal that modify and limit the loves of adults. He had assumed that that ability to merely love was gone for him now, at least as far as his bond with his father came into it. He assumed this, and felt a mild despair, the kind of sickly-sweet feeling that decadent French poets of a hundred and twenty years before had managed to transmogrify into beauty. Then, shortly before his troubling twenty-seventh birthday, the pandemic hit, and for the first time in his adult life he and his parents had no way of leaving one another’s presence.

 ❦

The car bumped up the steep hill road to the farm store on the dark hilltop. The trees to either side stood grey and silver in the penumbrae of the headlights. The sky between the branches was darkening minute to minute, now the color of willowware, now the color of deep water.

            In somebody’s house to the left of the road a porch light abruptly burned out as they passed it and the shade of the evening shifted. Now suddenly near the zenith he could see what he thought might be Vega. At the hilltop the Great bear would surely be fully or almost fully visible. It was through the Bear’s paw that the comet was passing evening by evening. Now the only question was the cloud cover, light but striated, which would seem to be covering a good bit of the critical northwestern sky. The idea of not being able to see the comet because of light, passing cloud cover was an unpleasant one. One could even say that there was something morally outrageous about it, even if only mildly so. It would be like looking for a Van Gogh in a museum and finding it through the gift shop, or like looking for a livestreamed religious service and finding it with an unskippable ad. Or perhaps not quite as bad as those cases—clouds were not undesirable or inaesthetic themselves, merely objects of a lesser and less compelling order than celestial bodies.

            The son and the father came to the open country around the hilltop. At one point the road curved sharply to the left with very little warning. Going straight would have taken you right into a certain family’s front yard, possibly even into that family’s front kitchen.

            “I wonder if anybody’s ever missed this turn and driven into these people’s yard, or their driveway,” the father remarked. “I hope not. It’d be tough tot get out of that situation, you know?”

            “For the family whose house it is,” said the son, craning his neck at the house as it faded graciously into the gloaming behind then, “or for the driver who made the mistake? I think it’d be a tricky situation either way, but it’d be tricky in different ways. Depending on who in the situation you were.”

            The father laughed, a short, gentle chuckle. “I’m just imagining that I’m in that house sitting down for a late dinner and then suddenly, wham, you and I come barreling right along the road headed straight for the front door,” he said. “I can’t think it’s an easy house to live in, just in terms of keeping your peace of mind.”

            “I never asked,” said the son, who dimly knew some of the people who lived on the hill thanks to his season working at the farm store.

            “Looks like there’s plenty of other people here,” they both thought and one or the other of them said as they neared the hilltop. Spanning the summit and descending for a while along the road in both directions were maybe fifteen cars, along with tripods and collapsible chairs and other accoutrements of summer-evening stargazing.

            The two got out of their car. It was about a quarter past nine, nautical twilight in July in those latitudes, the time for sailors to take their readings with a clearly visible horizon and clearly visible stars. To the west, over a treeline that obscured the westernmost third or so of the hilltop, Arcturus and Spica shone, ochre and opal. One found those stars, or could find them, with the Great Bear’s tail—arc to Arcturus and speed on to Spica. The son had learned that on some website about six months before, when he had first downloaded that phone app and begun a serious scan of the high heavens. So now he doubled back from Spica to Arcturus, continued, and there was the Dipper, suspended in an almost primary-blue section of the sky. It was three or four handsbreadths above the northern end of the western treeline, so that the comet would be about halfway between it and the horizon. That spot was, horribile dictu, behind a band of cloud, but there was an insistent breeze and the clouds were drifting eastward.

            “It’s like Close Encounters,” the father said. “Remember that scene where they pass all the cars on the highway and they’re all lined up along the side of the road to see the UFO?”

            “Vaguely,” said the son. “The last time I saw that movie I was about thirteen years old, I think. I remember that scene, though. I’d be happy to watch it again with you some time.”

            “Have you seen it yet?” the father asked. “Is it on your app?”

The son shook his head. “I think the way this app works focuses on the models of the sky,” he said. “They just discovered the comet a few months ago so whatever model they’re using probably just doesn’t have it. If there was a supernova I don’t think it’d have the supernova either.”

            “There was a news website that had a picture of it in the sky,” the father said. “It should be there once that cloud passes.”

            And the cloud did pass, and there, dimly, was the comet. It was still faint in the uncompleted twilight, a faint, fuzzy patch of sky that one would have thought was a trick of the light were it not for the telltale tail. That tail, or tale, stretched even fainter a degree or a few up and to the right of the main spot of fuzziness, resolving undramatically into the deepening blue almost directly beneath steady-shining Dubhe. One wanted to stare steadfastly into that darkening northwestern sky in the hopes that that fuzziness would clear, in the hopes that something important would become manifest in a more manifest comet, something to be taught as a piece of knowledge to be guarded and cherished.  And so the son and the father held their gaze into that region of the sky, until after a few minutes, just past nine-thirty on that long Saturday evening, it was obvious to both of them that the comet was as clear as it was liable to get. Then the son took out his phone again, opened its camera, selected a night mode that took in all the light it could, and snapped a few pictures of where NEOWISE hung waveringly. They came out well, a couple of them anyway.

            “Can you still see it?” one of a pair of young women, a pair of sisters, or a couple, or friends, asked his father as he walked ahead of him back to the car.

            He turned. “Sort of,” his father was saying to the women. “You might have better luck another night.”

            “You can see it though,” the son said.

            The father nodded. “You can,” he agreed. “You just have to really look for it.”

 ❦

The drive back home was a little different from what they had expected going out. The father, for reasons of trust best known to himself but dearly appreciated by them both, allowed the son to direct him down the other side of the hill and then through the warren of back roads that circumvented the closed bridge and descended into their neighborhood from the north.

            The father was skeptical about this as a means of getting home and worried that the son, for some irresponsible twenty-seven-year-old reason, was directing him towards the closed bridge itself. Even so, he decided to trust where the son was directing him, and soon enough they were on the right back road after all, one that was gravelly and passed a maple syrup plantation and a small dairy farm. The drive home, which took about fifteen minutes, had for the father the great length common to people’s perceptions of unfamiliar roads. They pulled into their driveway at a few minutes past ten o’ clock and straightway went inside. The sky had turned the blue-black color, with a very faint and debatable greenish tinge, of certain fountain pen barrels. The clouds were a little paler and instead had shades of violet and silver. The Dipper had sunken slightly towards the black treeline and was difficult to make out in the glare of a streetlight that stood at the northwestern corner of their property.

            The mother was watching the news, which, as so often in those days, was largely about the pandemic with a few minutes given over to racial tensions and other enormities of the increasingly heavy-handed administration. She looked up as they came in; she was happy to see them, and, being used to having them in the house for the past few months, had indeed missed them while they were out. “How was it?” she asked. “Were you able to see it?”

            “We did but it was pretty faint,” said the father. “I think he got a couple nice pictures of it, though. That new phone of yours,” he said to the son, “takes really good pictures. I think it was worth the money.”

            “I certainly hope it was,” said the son “But yeah, one of these at least came out really well, maybe two or three. You can see the comet’s tail and everything. While we were walking back to the car I also got some good shots of Arcturus and Antares if you guys are interested.”

            “Antares,” said the father. “Don’t they go there at one point in Star Trek?”

            “I’m not sure,” said the son. “I haven’t seen enough of it yet to say. I do know that there’s a novel from the 1920s called A Voyage to Arcturus that I keep meaning to read. We also saw Vega tonight and that’s where the aliens in Contact were from.”

            “You think there actually are any aliens on Arcturus and Vega?” the father asked.

            “Who knows?” the mother said before the son could. “I hope so.” She turned to the son. “I’d love to see the pictures you took,” she said.

            “All right,” said the son. They turned off the news, and he sat down on the couch between his parents to show them his pictures of the sky.