There was an old man and he had a glass eye
And he spent all day looking up at the sky
There was an old man and he had no eyes at all
And the world is surely getting smaller
(Irish, trad)
Sometimes it feels like trespass, when he looks at us. How else, when it is seldom us he sees? Not ever our fault, no one’s fault, of course not; even so it makes us feel as though we stand in other people’s proper place, in skins not rightly ours.
We want to apologise for not owning, not belonging to the names that he calls us. Sometimes we do. Sorry, Quin, it’s not Mickey, I don’t think I know Mickey. I’m Don, I work with Charles, remember?
Of course he doesn’t remember. Today he remembers Mickey, from ten or fifteen, twenty years ago. We correct him, every time; that’s policy, not to lie for his comfort or for ours. Hard on him, we can be hard on ourselves also. It makes no difference. What he sees is what is real, for him, for today, just now. Sometimes his reality leaks out a little, to infect us too.
You are what you wear; wear another man’s name for a while, and see where it gets you. Some place else: looking through a stranger’s eyes, not quite comfortable with your fingers or your friends, acquiring just a little distance.
Light-years are famously a measurement of distance. Sometimes there aren’t enough, and never can be.
The world is shrinking, people say that all the time. It’s still a shock to see it in real time, to watch someone’s sense of scale fall in on itself, on him. The universe is meant to be expanding in compensation, but not his.
Once he held all creation in a bead of glass, in his hand. Look, this little lens, this bubble: it’s nothing, it’s a marble, it’s a toy. We could play catch. Whoops! We could drop it, lose it in a gutter, crush it in a moment. But come close now, hold it to your eye, see what there is out there. You can see it all, or could if your eyes were better. That’s everything, everything there is, and you’re looking at it. The planets, the suns, the constellations, the galaxies, all the way to the furthest edge of time. Right now, this moment at this point in space, trapped in a tiny perfection. Hang on to that. No one else will ever see it quite the way you do tonight. Take another look tomorrow, in an hour, blink and look back now: it’s measurably different. You can’t step into the same river twice, and who would want to? You can never go home again, but this is your compensation. It’s a journey. Measure it in time or distance, it doesn’t matter, they’re the same thing in the end. We use light to measure them, either one: how far the light has come, how long it’s taken. And measurements are all we have, to know a thing is true. All things that are, are lights.
So high, so wide, so deep he was; so far he stretched. Not now. Now all his horizons are bounded by the borders of one room, and he has shrunk within it. How he lies, he can’t see out of the window; he says it hurts when we try to raise him up, to show him sky. I’m sure it does.
We did stick luminous stars across the ceiling while he slept one time, but I don’t believe he ever saw the joke. If he saw the stars, that would have been a bonus.
They say that light-years are a measurement of distance, not of time; I say it’s false economy to insist on a distinction. From me to you, how far is that? Three hours or three days, depending how we go, but it’s still a hundred miles since I saw you last. How long since you saw him? Time is distance, as near as we can figure it; vice versa, the sums still work as well.
The nearest star to ours, next sun over is Proxima Centauri, 4.3 light-years from where we stand. In other words, we look up at it today and what we see is a moment from four years ago, four years and a little more, an extra hundred days. How is that not a measurement of time? Four years ago, a hundred days meant a hundred days to party, to frivol away in search of the perfect hangover. These days we are more abstemious, we don’t have a day to spare.
But anything that can be measured can necessarily be contained, at least within the bounds of an equation. Sidereal time we count out by the grand sweep of stars across the sky; his time we could count out drip by slow drip of the fluids we pump into him, or by measuring what little good they do. Sometimes I like not to look at Proxima Centauri, or any star that I can name. I like to take my eyes off the numbers altogether and let the whole array, all the breadth and the reach of it tumble over me, tumble me over. I could drown in stars, if only I didn’t have to count them.
They say that he will lose his sight altogether, in the end; they say that he will lose his mind. Blind and mad, that’s the doctors’ diagnosis, and he’s halfway there already is what they’re saying now.
To us who have to live with him, it doesn’t seem like that. Rather that he’s being peeled, stripped back: think onions, think tree-rings, pearls, anything that accretes in layers. It’s a process of abrasion, necessarily of loss and we are the lost, he’s lost us. This is time travel in one direction only, in reverse, and he’s gone far enough now not to know us yet. He looks at us and sees old friends, old lovers emerging from the dust. Where and when he thinks he is, he can’t say and we can’t tell; only that it is not here, in his bed, his bedroom, our reluctant care. He’s a long way short of here, and receding all the time.
Those strange eyes of his must show him something, what time he has them open. What it is, I would not try to guess. He is a living lesson, or a dying one: that none of this is certain, that we can stand side by side and share not even the moment. How can I show you what I see when I can’t even describe it, only the negative, I don’t see what you see?
Before he did this to us—before he showed us how far away we were, we could be, he was getting—he took us up the hill with him, one more time the old invitation, Let me take you up the hill, show you the stars, you’ll like that.
More accurately, I suppose that we took him. Not how it used to be, but we were getting used to that inversion of dependency. Time was, he ran this filthy old estate and we packed in like puppies, spilling his papers onto the floor, filling the seats and the luggage-space and offering to ride on the roofrack, making more noise than the engine and to far less effect. And he ignored us magisterially while he manoeuvred us out of the dull sick glow of the city, and then there was no other traffic and nothing else that glowed beneath the fierce scatter of the sky, only his own headlamps, full beam all the way; and he would be talking, pointing, teaching while the engine thumped and strained against the weight of us, while we argued, elbowed, stretched and pointed and appealed. Always doing that, always appealing: he was our court, our arbitration, source and seer. He took us up the mountain and showed us all the kingdoms of the world, and all worlds else. Young as we were, greedy as we were, that seemed to be enough.
Now it was our turn, payback, one last brief trip before his bed could claim and keep him. We loaded him into Jed’s old Land Rover and squeezed ourselves into the back, unnecessarily many of us, as much like old times as we could make it. No room for the wheelchair that he was using already, that he would soon be too sick to use. Don’t worry, we said, we’ll get you there and back again, we’ll help. And so we did, of course, as much as we were able, not enough.
We drove the old road up to the observatory, and unpacked him at the door. University rules and ancient custom said that the keys were his, he was our St Peter; so we propped him up while his thin fingers scratched and fumbled, all grace long since departed.
In at last, we carried him up and around the gantry, and down into the well. It felt like a procession, as though we bore our saint in effigy. Hard to say we didn’t, looking back; even at the time there, it was quite hard not to be humming Bach as we went. Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht—oh, yes. We were not made to be quiet, but we were always almost prayerful that first minute, coming in under this great dome. With him in our arms—too light, too ungainly, too little of himself—we thought we ought to tiptoe, we were so overset by the silence, the gravitas, the weight of the space of it. If there had to be noise, creaks from the flooring and the shuffle of our feet, I would very much have liked a little Bach.
It’s the only appropriate music anyway, to watch stars by. We used to keep a stash of CDs up there, for party nights like this; we used to party often. Not these days. Too tired we say, when what we mean is tired of each other, unless it’s tired of ourselves. These days we do our shifts together and go home. Some of us come up to the observatory with our own sets of keys, a process I suppose from shift to shift. I always have something in my car, the St Matthew Passion or the Art of Fugue; if music is mathematics in the third dimension, then astronomy is the same thing in the fourth, and Bach is its prophet. If we had any ham we could have ham and eggs, if we had any eggs; if I’d been in my own car I might have played the Passion, if I’d thought to bring it in. Not regular party music, perhaps, or not ours, but this was not a regular party. They might have lived with it; they might have let me live.
None of us could let Quin live, but we could show him a good time, if a short one and out of his reach. We could sit him in his own old seat, where his narrow fleshless thighs didn’t fit the impression that he himself had made, so many years of sitting just exactly so; we could uncap the eyepiece for him, and help his awkward fingers with the focus; we could say, Look, see: here is everything that matters, everything that is. You showed us this, you taught us; we have not forgotten, we could show him that. We still get a kick out of this, we could say, popping the tops off bottles of Grolsch and clinking them together in salute, finding a carton of juice with a straw for him to suck, looking round to check that we’d all of us forgotten to bring any music, which we had. There were no CDs in the Landie, there being nothing to play them on. Still, we could have a good time regardless, let him see.
And let him look, let him feast his fading eyes. This was his last real chance; from now on it was photos from Hubble downloaded off the NASA site and an occasional television documentary trying to skip lightly where you had to sink or swim, in the deeper mathematics of dark matter. That would have enraged him once, except that he used never to watch television. Now he does by necessity, because we do, and it’s the rage he can’t manage. Unless he simply doesn’t see, or understand.
That night he was seeing well enough. He broke all his own rules for proper observation, he had us redirect the telescope a dozen times to find him favourite stars or clusters, little scatters of bright dust he could only find hereafter on the star-charts back at home. He had spent his life looking at those far few lights; spent it or wasted it, for precious small returns. He used to say that it was only ever the universe could give him any sense of perspective. That was a small return at the time, perhaps, but it was precious now. That was why we’d brought him here, one reason why: a last reminder, an inoculum against a looming loss. Still there, still bigger than it was last time you looked, how big is that? It’s all there is, and you are so so small a part of it, what can you possibly matter…?
Except to us, he mattered much to us. But we partied anyway, without the music; and when he was tired, when he fell asleep in his chair we partied a little longer, just to make the point that we could still do this, with or without him.
It was soon after that he started calling us by others’ names. He was going slower suddenly, or we were speeding up; either way, we were drifting out of phase. And he’s been falling further and further behind us ever since. I thought it was just a doppler shift, some kind of crucial red-eye; but it’s not only the speed now, it’s the distance, it’s the time. His gaze may move around the room; it isn’t us he follows. He’s seeing ghosts, like we do through the twelve-inch on the hill, the light of what’s long gone. Look into his eyes and there’s a glimmer there, but he doesn’t shine for us. That’s a light has taken twenty, thirty years to reach us, a spark struck ages since and deep, deep down.
Maybe that’s a spark was struck for you, how long ago you saw him, how far away it was? Maybe if I looked, I’d see your face rising in reflection.
Listen, I’m tired, and the words stop making sense. Or else it’s just a phaseshift, doppler, I’m starting to slow down. Whatever. I’m through with this.
As he is nearly, nearly through with us. Blind and mad, the doctors say; but actually that’s all right. I say it’s only distance. I can live with that.
And come the ending, and it will, he’ll be not blind and mad. Just nothing, a fire in a box and no one there to see it; and that’ll be all right too. You could say he burned out long ago, I wouldn’t blame you for it. Perhaps he did. There’s no universal clock, no absolute time to say what happened when. Near or far, you see things differently, and seeing’s all that counts. Being there is incidental. We’ve been close, we’ve had the last of the heat of him; he’s fading now. And heat is only light in close-up, quick-time shine. Come right down to it, everything is wavelength. You can measure that by time, you can measure it by distance, either way. All things that are, are lights.