A man stands alone in the black night watching a passenger train speed past. Its yellow-lighted windows are splashed with colored hats and coats; flashes of silverware and glassware; with shoulders in black jackets and bright wool sweaters; with pointed and rounded and upturned noses. Three men in hats are drinking glasses of beer. The children dunk strips of buttered toast in cocoa. An old man snores like a happy pig, his mouth open, his giant milk-white teeth exposed. A young mother pulls a picture book out of her giant purse. Everybody on the train is warm with that consoling feeling of being on an adventure.
The man outside who sees the train knows none of the passengers personally, but they feel oddly familiar as each of their faces appears briefly before him in the dark; it is as if he does know them, the way a person can feel intimately connected to strangers in a crowd. Even though he stands apart, he recognizes he is of them, as thoughts are of words, as something is of nothing.
That he intuits this last sense at all is remarkably peculiar, because although the man outside in the dark, in the grass, cannot experience the train journey himself, it is his very act of witness that has rendered all of it—and all of them—not only material, in the first place, but beautiful, as well.
“This is brilliant work,” the international public radio correspondent emphasized for the benefit of his listeners. He sat with Dr. Flame and Dr. Flame in his studio; it was a warm summer afternoon. Outside the window, green palms splintered the clear blue sky. “For those of you just joining us, we’re talking about an astonishing paper and mathematical model created by the Drs. Flame, a couple of young physicists making big waves in the scientific community. Tell us, Dr. Flame and Dr. Flame—this paper presents mathematical proofs for a highly unusual idea about the nature of reality.”
Dr. Flame smiled at her husband. “But one you’ve kind of always sensed was true, no?”
“This is totally unprecedented,” the host said.
“Well. Fairly unprecedented.”
“Shoulders of giants,” the other Flame interjected, and put his hand on his beloved’s arm.
“What’s next for you two? You’re a young, seemingly normal couple.”
“We lead very ordinary lives.”
“And yet. I wonder if you don’t both feel a little bit like that man out there in the dark, set apart from everyone?”
“One of the keys to this model,” Dr. Flame said, as her husband took her hand, “is that every one of us feels that way.”
“Even the passengers on the train?”
“Someone on that train,” Dr. Flame said, taking over for his wife, “imagines there is someone out there in the night watching her rush past.”
“So what this model ultimately suggests,” the correspondent guided his listeners, “is that there’s some scientific ground for the old notion that the world is whatever we imagine it to be?”
The Drs. Flame laughed. If anything, they joked with each other on their way home, it was the other way around.
“There is some imaginative notion that there is scientific ground,” Dr. Flame tried out, and put his arm around his wife’s square shoulders, and steered with one hand. The light was changing all around them, the blue sky deepening to navy, the trills of mockingbirds slurring in the ficus trees. They had all the car windows down as they drove.
“I feel rich. Let’s go to that drive-thru up the coast for ice cream.”
“Shakes?”
“Malts.”
“Burgers?”
“Dogs.”
“French fries?”
“Definitely.”
THE NEXT MORNING on the university campus they met in the office of their chair, Dr. Regula, flanked behind her desk by the president of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the provost, and a man in circle-shaped glasses whom neither of the Flames recognized.
“It’s not that we think you’re pursuing something that isn’t worthwhile,” Dr. Regula told them. She did not look the Flames in the eye. “It’s that it isn’t science.”
The Flames knew she didn’t believe that. They pressed. What was unscientific about it? If it wasn’t science, what was it?
“It’s irresponsible,” the man in circle glasses interrupted. “And dangerous.”
“To whom?” Dr. Flame asked.
“You think it’s philosophy,” Dr. Flame suggested. “You think it’s religion.”
Dr. Regula looked down and folded her hands.
The provost cleared his throat. “I’ll escort you out.”
“We need to get our things.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
IN THEIR CAR, the Flames talked it over.
“If they don’t like The Witness and the Passenger Train,” Dr. Flame said, glancing at his wife as he drove, “they really won’t like the next one.”
“You think there’ll be trouble?”
“I certainly didn’t expect Circle Glasses this morning.”
“Maybe we should stay off the air this time.”
“The Drs. Flame, in hiding.”
“Well?”
“You’re probably right.”
THEY FOUND THE handwritten letter in an ordinary business envelope in their mail that same evening. It was postmarked in Minnesota, and came from an old married couple who went by Blushwort.
“Clearly not their real name,” Dr. Flame said, reopening the letter on the kitchen counter.
“Clearly not.”
He looked up as if searching the spackled ceiling in the kitchen. “Blushwort,” he said. “Aeschynanthus.”
“Cultivated species. Showy flowers.”
“Red, orange, yellow.”
“Bird-pollinated.”
“Exactly.”
The letter indicated that if the Flames wanted at no cost but in fact with some considerable caretaking stipend the use of nine hundred wooded acres in a private, undisclosed location and the three-story, two-hundred-year-old adjacent farmhouse, barn, silo, stable, and various modern outbuildings, they were to contact the Blushworts at the PO Box provided.
It was an uncanny coincidence—the kind that tends to make one either suspicious or suddenly full of easy faith.
“It’s as if we dreamt it up ourselves,” Dr. Flame said, bringing the breakfast tray into their bedroom the next morning.
“Maybe we did.”
“Impossible to say.” Dr. Flame buttered a piece of toast and handed it to his wife. She refilled his hot coffee from a French press on the nightstand. The sun came in at silver angles through the white sheers and piano music spilled from triangular silver speakers mounted above them.
“No, tell me my love,” she pressed. “Did we invent the Blushworts?”
He took the coffee and leaned over to lightly bite her earlobe. “Did I invent you?”
“Certainly only you could have thought up such a remarkable creation as myself.”
“Nice of you to say so.”
“You have only yourself to thank.”
SO DID THE Flames go off the radar before the year was out, even as the next installment of their work was discussed on the nightly news, astonishing the astronomical community and anyone else who had ever looked up at the night sky.
In the second century, the news anchor explained, Ptolemy, the Greco-Roman astronomer, mathematician, geographer, and poet, identified a dim arrangement of stars situated between Centaurus and Scorpius and named it Nova Stella, Nova for short. It was a remarkable observation of both aesthetic and geometric sophistication, for the stars were situated such that the constellation itself appeared in the shape of a star: a shiny, metal-pointed celestial fixture that tilted up sideways with the moon and faded just before dawn. It was the kind of dazzling thing you might like to point out from a blanket in the grass on a fresh summer night—right after you finish a spread of cold chicken and June strawberries, and sharp cheddar and a buttery white wine, and the air around you smells lightly of blossoms and of the clean, freshly shampooed hair of the girl at your elbow. This is precisely when the constellation was most visible in the Northern Hemisphere.
But here was the modern-day breakthrough: the Drs. Flame found its perfect mirror opposite in what they subsequently named Nova X, just adjacent to Nova. As if the sky were a piece of dark paper a child had folded and traced.
The Flames had meant for the X to represent some kind of unknown, but the mystery was deeper than they imagined. Nova X, though many light-years farther away, was brighter and seemed, by their innovative computational reckoning, to be the original constellation. The real constellation. Nova Stella—Ptolemy’s Nova—the one that human beings had seen fixed in their peripheral vision for centuries—was merely its reflection.
“TO THINK ALL this time we were looking at the reflection of a thing, and were unable to see the thing itself.” From beside a telescope in his little glass office at the South Pole, the international star recorder turned to face the camera and shook his head in disbelief.
As there was no sheet of glass, or film of water, or any other smooth surface stretching through space by which such a picture-perfect specular reflection could be cast, the Flames’ discovery presented scientists with a new puzzle about the physical world: What exactly was reflecting what? And how? Especially baffling was the fact that ever since the Flames had seen and named Nova X, there it obviously was, right where it had presumably always been, printed in the black sky and clearly visible to the naked eye.
“Seeing it now is like suddenly realizing something you have—somehow—always known.”
“Known how? Intuition?” the news correspondent asked him. She wore a heavy parka with a fur-trimmed hood down around her shoulders, and in her gray-gloved hand held a thin silver microphone that she moved between herself and the star recorder.
“Sure,” he said. “If you like.”
“Dr. Flame and Dr. Flame declined an interview and have been oddly reclusive since leaving academia. Rumor has it they are privately funded for space exploration in the near future.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
The camera scanned the window and the frozen landscape below, the stars and overhanging icicles a jeweled ceiling above the planed and caped empire of snow. “Do you find the beauty of the South Pole comforting in what might otherwise be such a lonely place?”
The old man considered. “I find it terrifies me, this tremendous beauty. I find, sometimes, I would rather not see it at all.”
“Do you know what’s next for the Flames?”
He shrugged. “I cannot imagine.”
*
THOUSANDS OF MILES to the north, in the Blushworts’ undisclosed wooded location, the Flames were indeed preparing for a covert and unprecedented intergalactic expedition to Ardoris, a star in the constellation of Nova X that they’d named for themselves.
“It’s Latin,” Dr. Flame explained to the Blushworts. They were at the lunch table. It was always the biggest meal of the day, and all of their faces grew rosy as they ate.
“Latin for ardor,” her husband added.
“For intensity.”
“Brightness.”
“Color.”
“Fire.”
“Heat.”
“We like it,” Mr. Blushwort said, with his arm around the thick, aproned waist of the blue-haired Mrs. Blushwort. She lifted the basket of bread.
“Eat eat,” she said. “You need your strength. Butter?”
“Yes, please.”
“More gravy?”
“Absolutely.”
THE DRS. FLAME capped the Blushworts’ old silo with glass to study the night sky, and had an old airplane hangar retrofitted as a space in which to draft and assemble not only scientific equipment but also the vessel by which they would travel to Nova X: a slick little white-and-silver capsule they called the Inquiry.
As they worked, the Flames grew closer to the Blushworts. Mrs. Blushwort kept everybody well fed: pheasant stew, grilled cheese, blueberry pie, spinach omelets, and white wheels of farmers’ cheese she made and hung herself in the barn. Mr. Blushwort knew both where to find and how to fuse the rare metals the Inquiry required. He practiced precision in every mundane task and was fastidious with the Flames’ tools, equipment, and objectives. If the idea of visiting Ardoris had at first been his, or Mrs. Blushwort’s, they never afterward imposed with their own thoughts or ideas.
“We’re just here to support you,” Mr. Blushwort said by way of explanation one afternoon in the hangar.
“We think of ourselves as your godparents,” Mrs. Blushwort agreed. She set down a tray of black tea and fresh rolls on the workbench. “I made a rhubarb tart,” she added, turning from the workbench to the Flames. “For after dinner tonight.”
The Drs. Flame glanced at each other. “But that’s our favorite thing,” Dr. Flame said. “I mean, like our one absolutely favorite thing.”
“Well.” Mrs. Blushwort smiled, and lifted the glass dish. “How nice.”
“It isn’t nice,” Dr. Flame said later. They were in bed in the old farmhouse eating gigantic sandwiches and passing back and forth a tall green bottle of beer. “It’s creepy.”
“I know it.”
“All of this is beginning to feel very—unauthorized. Spooky.”
“Shh. Listen. An owl.”
“You see? That’s a portent of death, my love.”
“Be careful what you say. If we expect things to go badly, they will.”
“I guess what I’m wondering,” Dr. Flame said, “is what they’re getting out of this. I mean, I get it that they like us.”
“But.”
“Right.”
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, as if the Blushworts had overhead their entire conversation, Mr. Blushwort told a story.
Years ago, he and Mrs. Blushwort were cleaning the kitchen in the farmhouse. It hadn’t had a good scrubbing in years. Just when they thought the kitchen was as clean as they could get it, Mrs. Blushwort discovered that a piece of the countertop was actually on rusty old recessed wheels, and slid right out of place. Beneath it, old peeling linoleum was seeded with mouse droppings, rimed with rust-colored stains, and caked with a film of hair, lint, and pasty sludge almost an inch thick. So, they cleaned that too. Afterward Mr. Blushwort asked his wife, now, doesn’t that feel good, to know you’ve got everything cleaned, even the hidden places? And she answered: No. It makes me wonder what else we’re missing.
“Point is,” Mrs. Blushwort innocently explained, “you got to keep going.”
“Pushing the envelope,” Mr. Blushwort said.
“Even when you think you’ve already found everything.”
“I guess that’s something like what has us worried about you,” Dr. Flame said, and she checked Dr. Flame’s gaze to make sure she was speaking correctly for them both.
Mr. Blushwort laughed. “Trust,” he said. “A scientist’s least appreciated but most important tool.”
THAT EVENING, THE Flames circled the expansive property to gulp the oxygen and observe life on earth in all of its glory—for the launch would be soon, and there was, of course, a good chance they wouldn’t make it back. The crickets clicked and creaked around their ankles. On the horizon, the hemlocks and balsam trees were a soft feathery black. Bats circled above them and the night birds whirred up in the dense canopies of leaves.
“The world at night,” Dr. Flame said, and put her hand on Dr. Flame’s upper arm and whispered, her face pointed toward the opening in the trees. There was a coyote, standing just beyond a rectangle of light cast by their science library window. Its eyes full of green fire, its gold and brown fur matted and filthy. They often saw the coyotes—on blue sheets of snow in the night, or, as now, in summer, on the move under an egg-shaped moon. But it had never seemed to the Drs. Flame that the phenomena of the world—visible or invisible—were facts or physical forms to be taken for granted and studied, so much as they were questions posed. If their lives and all the inventory of the world in which their lives took place were equations or could theoretically be represented and modeled by equations, then this wild and beautiful creature surprising them in the circle of blue grass struck each of them as a new, heretofore unaddressed problem.
“Perhaps we’ve chosen the wrong destination,” Dr. Flame said.
“Perhaps we’re being a bit too one-to-one in our thinking.”
“Looking for symbols.”
“Correlations.”
“Messages from beyond.”
“Thinking figuratively.”
“Metaphorically.”
“Anagogically.”
“Looking for answers.”
“God forbid.”
“Mm.” Dr. Flame nodded and coiled a dark curl around her long white finger. From out of the dark, the deep and hollow ringing call of a loon on the lake in the woods. “We might end up creating whatever it is we think we’re discovering.”
“That’s not science.”
“No,” Dr. Flame agreed. “I don’t know what that is.”
QUIETLY THE FOLLOWING week, just before dawn and without any fanfare, the Drs. Flame stepped into their silver suits, head to toe wearing blankets that snapped at the neck like pajamas, as if they were tucking for a long nap.
Ardoris was a distance of approximately ten light-years from home, so they expected some considerable length of travel time, but somewhere around two light-years out, the hum of the Inquiry ceased, and they felt themselves begin to accelerate in a direction they would have called downward if—without gravity to propel them—this had been at all possible.
“It feels like falling!” Dr. Flame shouted across the craft, buckling himself into his white co-captain’s chair. And his breath caught in his throat. In her own chair, Dr. Flame was perfectly still and—it struck her husband all at once—hauntingly human. As if this were not her true form, as if he had known her as something else, and would know her again in yet some other shape. The line of her jaw, the whiteness of her cheek—ghostlike in how they brought to bear some other thing that was—how could it be so?—more vivid than his beautiful wife.
“My love,” he said. She heard him, but did not respond. It was as if she were on the edge of sleep and instead of being jolted awake by this sensation of falling, she was turning right for it, pitching into it.
Later, he would say he had felt it too, but had been so fearful he’d allowed his anxiety to eclipse it. “It’s just so hard,” he said, “not to jump to Newtonian conclusions.”
“We’re so accustomed to them,” she agreed. “I could feel an impact coming right here,” she said, and tapped the center of her chest.
But there was no impact. The Inquiry began to rattle and shriek. Everything outside the viewfinder window went dark. The instrumentation indicating direction blinked in and out of operation and suddenly, everything was quiet, and still. The Inquiry slowed and was hovering in the midst of nothing, nowhere.
Exhausted, unable to resist, they fell asleep, whereupon they both dreamt the same dream. They would share it with each other years later, when Dr. Flame was dying, and his wife sat upright beside his hospital bed, holding his hand, her once brown hair woven back in a coarse silver braid.
“I dreamt we weren’t ourselves.”
“So did I.”
“What did you dream we were?”
He paused as if something pained him, and looked up at his old friend. “I couldn’t say.”
“Not because you don’t know.”
“Right.”
“Rather because—”
He put his finger to her lips to shush her.
Her eyes were full of tears as she put her lips to his old furry ear. “I am going to miss you so much.”
WHEN THEY AWOKE on the Inquiry, a younger pair of dark-haired explorers, they rubbed their eyes and crossed the room to check on the status of the instruments. Everything seemed intact. Checking the function on their scope in the giant viewfinder, Dr. Flame was looking at Planet Earth when suddenly—it was gone. The whole earth. “Oh! Darling!” She waved her hand to beckon Dr. Flame and he came over and stood behind her, then bent in and took a look.
“What did you do?” he said, straightening.
“Nothing! I don’t know.” She bent and looked again. “I was afraid it might not be out there. And then—it wasn’t.”
He took another turn at the scope and looked into the dark. His panic began to mount when suddenly he felt a little heat in the back of his head and the earth reappeared. “There,” he said. “It’s right there.”
“Oh. Oh I must have had the setting off.”
“I didn’t touch the setting.”
“Well what did you do?”
“What did you do?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“My God.” He took his wife by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Do you understand what’s happening?”
“No.”
He zoomed in on their own faraway launchpad in the woods; she watched. The rivers were a tangle of silver string; there on the sparkling, board-hard snow was a pack of wolves, the whites of their throats visible in the night as they all had their heads thrown back, their eyes shut, their mouths narrowed and pointed like hollow weapons at the sky; and there was the little town outside of where the Flames had lived with the Blushworts, where they purchased their groceries. It was the middle of the night. Sparse, modest rooftops among the trees. No one was up and no one was out. Dr. Flame pointed his gaze at the cold bare branches of a burr oak, and the sky behind it filled with starlight, and its branches lined themselves with soft white winter birds that tipped their heads and blinked their small shining black eyes in the soft light.
“Ohhhh.” She thought she understood. “Did you put those birds there?”
“What, those birds?” he asked. “I didn’t make those birds.”
In the next moment, the Flames saw the Blushworts far below, outside their cottage on the snow, simultaneously turning the beautiful white ovals of their faces up from the trees and the birds toward the sky, straight toward the Inquiry, straight at the Flames.
“Oh,” Dr. Flame said hoarsely, and her knees went soft. Dr. Flame held her up.
“I think they are making us,” he whispered.
The young doctors were silent a moment, but all at once, and simultaneously looking at each other with wide eyes, they remembered they’d launched in summer, but were looking down on a winter’s night.
“Light-years,” Dr. Flame recalled. “Time travel.”
“We’re looking into the past.”
“Exactly so.”
So they adjusted the settings on the viewfinder, entered the coordinates they wished to see, and there it was: the two slightly younger Flames in their science library two years past, peering through the telescope at that smear of sidereal light where they’d discover Ptolemy’s error.
“Ah ha,” Dr. Flame said, and he moved the viewfinder to Nova until, to his satisfaction, Nova X appeared beside it.
“Nicely done.” She moved to kiss him, and he extended his cheek.
“But.” Dr. Flame stepped back from the viewfinder and looked at her gravely.
“Down on earth we should thereby—right now—conceive of our idea to travel to Ardoris.”
She thought back. Yes, that was how it’d gone. They’d found the constellation, and decided it merited a visit. “We’d come out here,” she said. “Where presumably, our future selves would create Nova X. Which we just did.”
Dr. Flame thought. “Say that again.”
“And on that trip, at Ardoris, we’ll invent Nova X.” She nodded and smiled broadly. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
“But my darling.” He pointed to the digital map that indicated they’d fallen short by several light-years and were in a strange pocket of dark, unmarked, directionless space. “Ardoris is not where we are. In fact, we don’t know where we are. We got stopped here by mistake.”
“By accident.”
“So it seems.”
Inside their silver suits, the hair went up on the backs of their necks, along their forearms.
“So then, who—” He frowned. “Where,” he said, and stopped. “What are we?” They stretched out their silver-gloved hands before them, turned them over in space, looked each other up and down.
“Oh my God,” Dr. Flame said, seeing a crush of light outside the window screen. “My love,” he said. “Look at the stars.”