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The Toledo Institute of Astronomy was founded in 1837 as the Stickney Library of Almanacs (or al-manakhs) by Angelica Stickney, whose family’s fortune had been made in shipping, and whose lifelong passion was observing the night sky. She employed two full-time academics in her library. The more elderly of them, Dr. Claude Pooley, had been hired to study and catalog the information in Mrs. Stickney’s astonishing collection of almanacs, from a tablet of Sumerian origin depicting planetary movements to a document from the sixteenth century that was believed to have been penned by Francis Bacon. The other scientist in her employ, self-taught female prodigy Esther Birchard, was charged with studying stars and weather patterns in order to better inform the decisions made by the Stickney family’s transportation business, which operated largely on the Miami and Erie Canal and its Wabash extension. Birchard’s husband was an elevator man. He was a naturally suspicious person.
Pooley, the librarian, enlightened by the study of ancient texts and tables, became involved in light experiments postulating the chemical composition of the sun. He had such success with his observations that he began to publish his work and bring in other researchers to work with him. On the other side of this dual operation, Stickney Carriers laid unfortunate claim to the record for most vessels lost in the river to storms, mechanical failures, and crime. Esther Birchard, whose job it was to advise the captains of these boats, grew more and more reclusive, as her predictions increasingly failed. Year by year, she found herself relying less on her anemometer and more on fervent prayer to improve the fates of the company. Eventually, she lost her job. When pressed to account for this, Angelica Stickney calmly explained that Esther Birchard was a weather witch, and had accordingly been banished from the company. Her husband almost immediately fell down an elevator shaft and died, leaving behind a curt note to his children that his wife was not to blame. Esther Birchard was not seen or heard from again.
Angelica’s son Harold Stickney, a prescient man who anticipated both the decline of canals and the importance of the scientific work being done at the library, wisely sold off the family’s interest in the shipping industry and poured the family’s fortune into establishing a college of science in the swampy country north of the river. He dreamed of founding a mecca of learning and culture to rival the East Coast universities. They had a two-hundred-year jump on him, but no more zeal for learning and truth. His motto was Scientia vincere tenebras, or “Conquering the darkness through science,” and at this humble academic outpost on the Maumee River, Stickney and Poole planted a flag for reason. Deep in the woods, Esther Birchard whistled up a wind.
Almost two hundred years later, the Toledo Institute of Astronomy had fully emerged as the epicenter of knowledge and research that its founders had imagined. Its lecture halls and laboratories were well funded by interested corporations, its trust well endowed by generous individuals, its campus a glorious example of frontier classicism, and in 1992 its reach even extended into space, as the first Toledo Space Telescope had been launched into orbit via space shuttle. The city of Toledo was proud of its astronomers, proud of its status, standing shoulder to shoulder with Brussels or Shanghai or Sydney in the quest to unlock the secrets of the universe and plumb the depths of the history of stars.
* * *
George Dermont, third-year postdoctoral research fellow and favorite instructor of most female undergraduates at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, stopped in a stairwell of Stickney Center, looking for a vending machine that would take his dollar. George had a headache. A bad one. It felt as though the fibers of his brain were full of ice, and every thump of his heart was a hammer, shattering them over and over. It felt bad.
From the vending machine, he could get some headache pills. He could get some caffeine gels. At the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, the vending machines were stocked with sundries geared specifically to the young scientist. One could find lens cleaner, superglue, clamps, Altoids, and rubbing alcohol. One could certainly find migraine medication: vasoconstrictors, sumatriptan, even opium nasal spray. But George’s dollar was so wrinkled and old that it seemed he might try all the vending machines on campus and have no luck. The dollar kept coming back out.
George left the stairwell and turned down the corridor toward the lecture hall. He had five minutes to get to class and look over his notes from last semester, to try to remember what he was going to say to the new students. He pushed through the double doors and the class hushed their chatter. He pulled his notes out of his briefcase and pretended to look at them while he casually closed his eyes. It was the beginning of September. There was no need to panic.
He opened his eyes, turned his head to the left and right, and smiled down on the class. This is what they had come for. To learn the history of astronomy. And he would teach it to them, by the book this time: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, and the rest.
At times he tried to show his students extra stuff about the universe and give them a peek at what the Toledo Institute of Astronomy really had to offer. Then they would squint, shuffle their feet, cock their heads to the side. As if that lecture was not something they wanted to hear. As if it would slide off their brains at an angle, leaving a scuff mark. He knew that if he went off book too much, it would get harder and harder to get back to the textbook’s comforting pages. He would end up standing in a corner, facing the wall, ranting and raving at nothing. George Dermont was the bright young star of the cosmology department, the “it boy” for concerns of the whole universe and beyond. But if he ever really told them what was in his mind? If he ever fully expressed the depth of his beliefs? Would they keep on smiling, winking, waving? Or would they say to him, “Now what the fuck is that all about?” and denounce him as a fraud?
George began his lecture, and the students learned. They nodded their heads. Twenty minutes in, George eyed a girl in the third row in a tank top and khaki shorts, looking like a young Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, minus the pistols and with double the braids. There was one ropey braid on each side of her head, each draping down to decorate one bulbous breast. George almost thought he had seen her before. There was something about the braids that looked familiar. The way her eyes met his. The way she held his gaze. And just like that, George found he had departed from his lecture script. He had limbered up. He had remembered exactly what he had to say, and from an introduction to the first six constellations, George took a sharp turn.
“Remember the Assyrians?” he said. “They were the ones that came down like a wolf on the fold. They had gods. So did the Babylonians. The Greeks also had gods: commonly seen wearing white and having really smooth brows. Romans had gods. Hell, yes, everyone had them.”
The students nodded and chuckled. They remembered. This was something in the history of astronomy that they could comprehend: humans having gods. “Nowadays we assume there are pretty much three gods. Ours and the ones in other people’s religions.”
George smiled through the pounding in his skull. Lara Croft the freshman was tickling the tops of her breasts with one braid. The other hand was resting on her laptop, but she wasn’t typing. George looked at her, but found himself unmoved. Years ago, he might have let a girl like this come chasing after him with her braids knocking into her tits, might have thrown her down on a cascade of throw pillows, might have thought, “We’re in Toledo; what could go wrong?”
“Three gods. The world population is pretty much agreed on this fact, with the exception of Hindus, who remain belligerently polytheistic and Buddhists, who don’t even really have gods.”
George waited. The students still watched him, waiting for him to get back to chapter 1, “The Ancients,” and the book. Lara Croft nodded too slowly, like she was saying yes to a different question. Then, strangely, she began to glow. Her face blurred for a moment as George’s head contracted into stabbing pain, and then it reformed with redder lips and darker eyes. George blinked and squinted. Her hair grew down until her braids were coiled around her feet, and her limbs stretched and curved into pinup proportions. Now George saw she was wearing not a tank top and shorts but a bustier and a type of undergarment that George had once referred to as “spanking panties.”
“No one worships, for example, Zeus anymore,” he went on bravely, closing his eyes against the sight of her. “Or Ra. So where did all those other gods go?”
One of the young men in the class raised his hand.
“Yes,” said George. “Your name?”
“It’s David,” said the boy. “What page are we on?”
“Where did they go?” George pressed on. “Are they sitting somewhere in a retirement home for aging deities? Sipping tea and asking for their sons, who they know are coming to visit them today? Asking every day until the nurses must dress someone up as a son and make the fake son visit all the rooms? And the gods don’t even notice the difference? Because they are in their dotage?”
The braided vixen before him was rising into the air now, shaking her head as if to say, no, no, no!
George got louder, “Does the fact that they did not survive mean that they were not real? Greta, do you think the gods were never real?”
“Well—” began a girl in the front row. She shook her head. Seemed about to say her name was not Greta.
“It’s too horrible to imagine.” He interrupted her. “Gods don’t die—they don’t just disappear. They can’t do that.”
Now the gorgeous, glowing creature in the air of the lecture hall was nodding, nodding, her sweet curves dancing a slow dance for him. This was the thing he could not tell anyone, in the lecture hall, in the office, in his weekly report to the chair of the department at their meeting in his office: “Hi, Dr. Sanji. My work on the latest astrometric project proceeds apace, and, oh, also I see gods floating around sometimes. I yield the floor to Dr. Jones.”
Religion is private. It’s a private matter between you and the dozen or so deities who visit you at the most inopportune moments.
George grasped the podium with both hands and squinched his eyes very tight. Then he looked around again at the class. They were sitting up straight, their eyes lit up, on full alert. Something was happening—they had figured out. A real astronomer was now speaking to them, here at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, where they had come to be educated by real astronomers. They leaned forward, eager to hear what he would say next. George looked all around the room, everywhere else except her curves and colors. “If they fall into disrepair, do we have to retroactively call ourselves unbelievers? Are we stupid? Are we duped? If it happened to Ra, it could happen to anyone! Ra was an ass kicker. Ra was the sun god! How could this happen to Ra?”
No one raised a hand. The girl who looked like Lara Croft had now fully changed into the brilliant, irresistible form of a goddess with whom he was quite familiar. She had appeared to him before, but never at work. Now she climbed astride the long fluorescent light fixture near the ceiling, swinging from side to side, using her long braids like fishing lines to dangle in front of unsuspecting students. She laughed silently, but George could hear her, could remember her voice, telling him exactly what to do. The goddess of sex. American pantheon. Contemporary era. His head creaked in pain and he smelled cinnamon, like a very strong exotic tea.
“Maybe—” George paused. He began to move around on the stage, back and forth, trying not to gaze into the space above their heads. The god of sex swung her legs gleefully, biting her lower lip and waving at him. Hi, George, she seemed to be communicating. I’m up here.
“Maybe Ra was sucked into a wormhole,” George said. “Or maybe he just went back willingly into the wormhole from whence he originally came. Something has to happen at the other end of a wormhole, otherwise where the hell is your conservation of matter and energy? Nowhere, that’s where!”
Students were nodding. The girls were smiling. Someone’s book fell onto the floor and it wasn’t retrieved. A boy in the back row chewed a pencil between his teeth. “Could you believe that a wormhole might end in an ancient ziggurat?” George continued. “A cathedral in France? A human uterus? Maybe I’m asking for a looser interpretation of matter conservation than the one you’re willing to give.”
George was pacing faster now, and the sex goddess was swinging faster, his long limbs eating up the stage at the front of the hall, her body flowing over the light fixture and dripping onto the floor below. The students peered at him wide-eyed. Some of them had their mouths open. He would push the idea into the mouth, close the chin, stroke the throat. Even if the idea was blatant lunacy, they would try to swallow. He had that going for him: a certain charisma, a magnetic charm. But if he said, “Observe, above your heads: a modern deity. Observe.” Would they look up? Would they nod and smile, and write down points? He brushed his hair out of his face and turned a winning smile on them. He spread his hands out, long arms wide, a crisp white shirt illuminated in the stage lights over his khakis and loafers.
“George!” called the goddess from the ceiling. He ignored her. He tried to ignore the idea of her. “Tell them!”
“Maybe I’m asking you to believe in the conservation of gods and godliness. Is that too altogether impossible to believe?”
The class waited.
“Think about it. Nothing comes from nothing!” George implored.
The class tilted their heads to the right.
“There has to be a doorway from which they all crawled out, and then into which they all crawl back. There is a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, kids. What’s it doing over there, just killing time chewing up asteroids? It’s flaring. X-ray flashes: do you know what makes them? NASA doesn’t. I don’t.”
The rows of eyes were all locked on him, each little light devouring his words, none of them drooping down to look at laptops or checking out the other students in the next row. Was it his smile, his apple cheeks, the curve of dark hair on his noble brow? Was it the god above, directing the traffic between their ears? George was the tallest astronomer in Toledo. He was broad-boned and firm as a rock. He returned to the center of the stage. The words came out of his mouth without his intervention. He felt the odd but familiar sensation that he was talking for the goddess, that she was now putting words in his throat for sport, and then pulling them out on a string.
The door at the back of the lecture hall banged open and George could see, standing there, one of the older professors, his boss. Why was he here? To observe the class? To fire George? To find out if George was just a mouthpiece for a god?
“Who sang before the angels sang? In what shape did the stars align themselves, before they took the shape of Greek prophets, Roman warriors, and such? Where did the first flint-reaping knife drop from a weathered hand, so the hand could take a copper idol? Who built the temple of Eridu?”
What the hell is Eridu? thought George. He felt the panic coming on. He felt his brain was not his own. He would lose his job. He would lose his mind. This lecture had gone completely off the rails. The sexy goddess on the light fixture shrugged at him and made a kissy face. George took himself back behind the podium, put his fingertips together lightly and inclined his head, as if to say, Namaste. Good-bye. He gave a weak smile to the professor at the door. But the class breathed in, breathed out, waiting for him to finish. They wanted him to say one more thing. But what would it be? What could it be?
He opened his mouth and out came, “What is history but a list of kings?” He decided that was the end of the lecture. It wasn’t safe to say any more. He gave a final emphatic nod.
Silence hung in the room. The students picked up their books and left, whispering to each other, glancing back at George in amazement. The History of Astronomy class at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy was required for all incoming students. He was its most popular teacher, and this fall was his sixth time teaching it. Usually on the first day, there were no gods in attendance. Usually he stayed in control of his language. And his head didn’t hurt as much.
“You’re wasting your talents there,” his mother had said. “Take a hundred dollars. Get a haircut.”
His mother didn’t like him spending his time teaching freshmen. She didn’t like his car. She didn’t like the girls he typically pursued. His mother actually wanted him to leave Toledo entirely.
“You’re not happy here, George, and you never have been.”
“But I will be,” he would say.
“But you aren’t,” she’d respond. “I just need to point that out.”
His mother was a lawyer. Pointing things out was her specialty. But George knew she was wrong. He would be happy.
The professor at the back of the room strode quickly up to the podium, as the students filed out.
“Dr. Bryant,” said George, by way of greeting. What more could he say?
Dr. Bryant had been much published, quoted, and admired. Dr. Bryant had never been asked to teach the undergraduate History of Astronomy class, or lecture from a textbook, or speak to freshmen. He never would have done it, either. But now the older astronomer was panting, sweating, and rushing down the aisle.
“George, she did it.” Dr. Bryant gasped.
“Really, well, here’s to another happy twenty-five years then, sir. That’s—”
“No, no, no,” he stammered on. “I’m talking about that strange young woman in Pittsburgh. Irene Sparks.”
“Oh, yes,” said George. “As I recall, she was determined there are black holes in tea.” George began to pack up his bag.
“That’s right. That’s her,” said Dr. Bryant. “Not tea, though. She was here for an interview, years ago. She had schematics for a microcollider.”
“Well? Has she collided something?”
“George, she has. She’s got—you know—what you might call black holes. In a collider she fabricated in Pittsburgh, can you imagine? The whole experiment is the size of a small truck! Hawking radiation, detectable with a human retina. Apparently … it actually glowed.”
“That’s not possible,” said George. He picked up his briefcase and made for the door, his office, his pain medication. But Dr. Bryant followed him.
“She’s got numbers. The radiation loss has been charted. And I’ve seen an image. With my own eyes.”
George frowned. He stopped short of the door. “So what does this mean for … downstairs?” He dropped his voice to a whisper and pointed toward the floor. Dr. Bryant came close.
“I think we’re going to be able to get her here, George. She could be the crown jewel of the whole project!”
“I see,” said George. “So, is she going to be teaching?”
“Who cares about that?” Dr. Bryant said. “Teaching? What does that even mean? We were the first call she made, George. That’s something, isn’t it?”
“Interesting,” said George.
“Oh, wait until you see it,” Dr. Bryant said. “I want to get her here before … Discover … Time … you know what a frenzy this will cause. When she talks to the media.”
George put his hand on Dr. Bryant’s shoulder. The old man seemed about to keel over.
“Are you alright?” he said. “You seem … crazy.”
“I’m going down to admin,” he said. “I’m going to put in a proposal right now, this minute. I’m going to have her here by the end of tomorrow,” said Dr. Bryant. “It’s imperative. How could we have been such fools to let her slip away?” He was looking at George as if he could hardly remember George’s name.
“OK, doc,” he called after him. “If you say so. Just don’t give her my office, alright?”
“Oh, George,” Dr. Bryant turned and called back. “I can’t believe I forgot—that’s what I really needed to see you about. We are giving her your lab. And you’ll need to be out of there by tomorrow. Thanks for understanding.”
As he watched Dr. Bryant bustle out into the hallway and away, the pain in his head almost forced George’s right eyelid to close, and George could suddenly think of nothing else but to get to his office, turn out the light, and die. But then he had a sudden thought. A different thought, and his hand shot out to push the door open so he could call down the hall.
“Dr. Bryant?” George bellowed. “What color hair does she have?”
“Hair?” said the older man. “Hair? It’s brown, I think. Brown hair. How can it possibly matter?”
And then he was gone, leaving George to wonder if it could.