The Sand Hill Review http://www.sandhillreview.org 2004
Rita Kasperek
Cassiopeia
It was a fine night for stargazing. The
purple-black sky above
"I'm
scared," Beth whispered. She popped her gum.
"People experience this maybe once, twice, in lifetime,"
Lenny said. "Try to enjoy it."
"Leonard..."
Beth called him Leonard. Only his mother
called him Leonard. "Let’s go back and watch ‘Survivor’."
This was one
of the reasons he planned to break up with her. It was tempting, he thought, to
get it over with now, in neutral territory.
“Or eat. I
could eat a horse.”
"I'm
going to show you Cassiopeia." He
loved saying the name. It had a baroque
quality to it, like the Brandenburg Concertos.
Beth
insinuated her arm around his. She was a big-boned girl, pretty, with a
practical heart and a mediocre mind, a combination that alternately
disappointed Lenny and made him feel superior. He met her at a
She had
initiated the relationship by offering to cook dinner for him. He was a dreamy,
awkward sort of man, unused to attention from women. Tall and thin, he had a
hooked nose that threatened by its very gravity to tip him over like a bird-toy
that dips its beak into a water tumbler. He accepted her invitation, with few
reservations and, with even fewer qualms, allowed her to seduce him. He was
surprised at how tender they were together.
It was her
suggestion to spend a weekend, the anniversary of their first meeting, in
"It's
not like I'm asking you to marry me," Beth argued, laughing at him.
And so he
agreed.
On the first
day they drove through miles of alien-looking terrain with evil-sounding names
like "Devil's Cornfield" and "
"It's
like being on the moon," she said. "Only on the moon you don't get
sunburned," she added, dabbing lotion on his face in short, quick motions.
She hadn’t
wanted to venture out in the dark. So the first night she persuaded him to stay
in the motel and make love. On their last evening in
“Nobody else
is out here,” Beth complained. “What if something happens?”
“Nothing
will happen. No one is out here. Now, could you be quiet? I can’t focus.”
Lenny
switched on his penlight to read the star chart he had brought with him. Beth
clung to him so tightly that he could barely move.
"Leonard,
what's that?" She jerked his arm; he nearly dropped the chart, the
penlight, everything.
"What?"
"Over
there." She stabbed her finger at darkness. He pointed the penlight at the
spot, and located faint tracks in the sand.
"Looks
like a kangaroo rat," he said.
"There
are rats here? Ick!" She looked so girlish, it broke his
heart.
"Not
like city rats."
"Oh." She sounded let down.
"Come
here." He held out his star chart and switched his penlight on it. "Today is March 5," he said,
"so I'm going to adjust the chart to that date. Now, what time is it?" Beth gently turned his wrist so they could
read his watch. He loved her for doing things like that.
"Nine-thirty,"
they said together.
Beth
giggled. In the small circle of light her face looked soft and wise as a mother
cat's.
"Your
face is sunburned. You’ve got a Rudolph the Reindeer nose!"
He adjusted
the chart, irritated. "This gives
us an idea of how the stars are laid out tonight."
"Wouldn't
it be better," she said, scuffing at the sand with the toe of her shoe,
"to just look at them?"
He ignored her, busying himself with
the sky. He used to be able to identify constellations and planets and, for a
brief period, could reasonably discuss more obscure things like supernovae and
variables and binaries. Now, he could barely read a basic chart. He consulted
the stars again. The Big Dipper hovered slightly north and west of them. He could make out the Pleiades, a cluster of
light that twinkled off and on again like a distant motel sign. To the left of
that was Orion, unbelievably clear and bright, the three stars that formed the
belt glittering like a chain of lit firecrackers. From there he might be able
to detect—
"Jesus!"
he yelled.
Beth had crept behind him and trapped him in a
hug.
"Cut it
out."
She squeezed
him. "You're so serious," she
said, "you're cute."
He pointed
to the sky. "Look at the tip of the ladle on the Big Dipper and follow it
down." His finger traced the air for her benefit. "See that orangish
star there, kind of faint?"
She fiddled
with the zipper on her jacket.
"That's
the North Star," he explained.
"The Big Dipper and North Star are sort of your guideposts. You can
depend on seeing them in any sky, no matter what time of year. Once you find
them, you can find other things—"
"Like
Cassiopeia," Beth said.
"Exactly."
"What
does it mean, anyway? Cassiopeia."
"It's a
constellation," he said, eager to impress his knowledge upon her. "Actually, it was named after the wife
of a king."
"Yeah?"
Her voice took on a more interested tone. "Which king?"
"I
don't know," he admitted. “But she was the mother of Andromeda.”
"Oh."
She played with her jacket zipper some more. "I'm cold." She snuggled
against his shoulder. "Let's make
out," she whispered. Her breath tickled like a feather against his ear. He
could smell the Spearmint gum she always chewed. This stirred him more than he could say.
“Cut it
out.”
She
shivered. “There’s something out there.”
"Beth,
I want to show you something.”
“Waiting.
Watching. I can feel it.”
“Cassiopeia
looks like this." To demonstrate, he tucked the star chart under his
armpit and held the penlight between his teeth. He neglected to switch off the
penlight and its beam shot into Beth’s eye. He was, after all, an awkward man.
He held up his hands, forming a "V" with the tips of his thumbs and
extended his index fingers, pointing them down into an "M" shape.
"That
looks like an upside-down W," said Beth, shielding her eyes from the
penlight.
"Well, itth a right-thide up M."
Beth
shrugged. "It could be an
upside-down W," she said. "Or
even a sideways E."
These kinds
of comments drove him crazy.
He took the
penlight out of his mouth and consulted the star chart again.
"You
know, I heard once that even if stars die, we can still see them. It takes so
long for the light to travel to get here, that it's still moving even after its
source is gone. It's
like...like..." He struggled for an explanation she would be able to
understand. "It's like something has happened, but time hasn't caught up
with itself."
"Do you
think there are animals out here?" Big animals, like wolves?" She
moved close, so close he felt her heat.
"Wolves
are extinct here," he told her.
"Maybe not.”
"Stars
can die pretty violently, you know."
"Maybe
there's one left."
"They explode as a supernova. In fact,
one exploded about fifteen years ago. It
was so bright that it was visible to the naked—"
"I
could get a rock—" She ducked to the ground, scrabbled about, and popped
up again, presumably with a rock of adequate size. She massaged it in her palm,
expertly gauging its weight.
"This'll do it. Now we're
okay. We're safe."
"—eye. Betelgeuse may already
have gone supernova, but we won't know for another—"
"Isn't
there a movie called Beetlejuice?"
Lenny
wondered how he would be able to get into the same bed that night with someone
so stupid.
She laughed
softly, as if she had read his mind. "You are so cute."
Clouds began
to drift from the edges of the sky. In a few minutes they would lose
everything. He searched, following the Big Dipper to the North Star and moving
left until he could make out the distinct lines of Cassiopeia. He gazed
lovingly at the crooked W (or M, he thought with annoyance).
"This
is really something, you know," he said. "You should really pay more
attention to this."
Beth tossed
her rock from one hand to another. "Something moved," she said, and
pelted her rock into the dark.
Orion's belt
dimmed under the gathering clouds. Maybe, he thought, he would break up with
her as soon as they got home.
"You know what the lady at the
front desk told me?" Beth scooped up another stone. "She told me a little European boy got
lost out here last summer. “
“My
father gave me a telescope. I was eight or nine. We used to look at the stars
from my backyard.”
“She said
the kid died of exposure.”
“It’s the
one thing we used to do together. I couldn’t play ball or fish or hunt. None of
the typical guy things. It’s the one thing we could do.”
“They found him with his tennis shoes melted
to the rocks."
“What? Who?”
“The little
boy! Melted to the rocks.”
"I hate
to say this," Lenny said, "but I think that lady was pulling your
leg."
Beth threw
her rock into a clump of mesquite. "It's no more outrageous than dead
stars. Or black holes. Collapsed stars that just suck everything into it? Give
me a break.”
She did this
sometimes. Just when he thought she never understood a thing he said, she threw
his words back at him and made them sound foolish and unimportant. As if she
and only she had a pulse on life.
“Astrophysicists have proven the existence of
black holes. Reverberation-mapping campaigns have revolutionized our
understanding—“
The wind
picked up. The sand made a shushing sound as it blew through the scrub. She turned to button his jacket. "It makes you wonder," she said,
adjusting the collar to fit snugly under his chin.
"What?"
"Why a
little boy was left to wander around this place by himself."
"That lady
was just pulling your leg," Lenny said. The touch of her fingers lingered
thrillingly at his throat. "They scare people so the rangers don't have to
go looking for some idiot who is dumb enough to get lost in the desert."
"He
must've been so frightened," she said, as if she hadn't heard him,
"and his parents were off fooling with a camcorder or something." She
fished on the ground for more rocks.
"That
reminds me—”
“Some people
shouldn’t be allowed to breed.”
He would
tell her now. Only…only…he had never
broken up with a girl before; what should he say?
“Reminds you
of what, Leonard?”
“We—we should go to Badwater
again tomorrow. Take some more photos. We can’t trust those tourists to have
gotten a good picture."
"Sometimes," Beth said,
"sometimes, you are so dense, I could kill you." Poised in the
moonlight, with those rocks in her hand, she looked fierce, dangerous.
"Cut it
out," he said helplessly.
She fired
off a rock the size of a peach stone.
“What I really need is a gun.”
Clouds
shifted and parted. Cassiopeia tightened into an N, widened back into an M and
then dissolved into a few broken lines.
“You missed
it.”
“I didn’t
miss anything,” she replied. She aimed carefully and leveled a bigger stone, almost
the size of a potato, at a threat only she could detect.
Lenny
thought about the stars that had died years and years ago while their light
survived, traveling toward him through space, outrunning a death that hadn't
found any of them yet.
"Someday I'm going to have a baby,"
Beth said.
Her voice
was decisive and came from a completely instinctual place, a place that Lenny
didn’t have but knew about and could only feel outside of, like a secret
clubhouse with an undisclosed password. He cried out, suddenly afraid in a
primal, ancient sort of way.
“You’re not
going to leave, are you?”
She merely
laughed.
Even now,
Lenny thought, the light he was watching could be dead. He searched the sky for doomed stars and dead
light, waiting for a past event to catch up to him, but the clouds closed upon
the sky like stage curtains. The moon would rise soon, behind those clouds,
beyond those stars. He watched and listened as Beth moved nearby, protecting
them both from all of the unseen predators.