NIGHT COMET MUSIC

By the time Simon arrived, the party was already in full swing. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to be here, having spent most of the last 24 hours at the observatory, but there wasn’t anywhere else for him to go. Sitting alone at home would only push him over the edge and tonight of all nights, he wanted to stay as far from any edge as he could get.

The moment the door opened, he was bombarded by the din of way too many people in way too small a place.

“…and you may ask yourself, how did I get here..?”

Somehow a red plastic cup materialized in his hand before he had even removed his jacket.

“Good evening,” said a man in a herringbone suit and mismatched ascot.

People waved.

Simon attempted to say good evening in return, but the strap from his shoulder bag had slipped over his mouth as he wrestled with his jacket, so it came out more like, “Hood weaving.”

“Have we met?” said the man. He took Simon’s cup so he could disentangle himself.

“Never seen you before in my life,” Simon took his cup and his shoulder bag and handed the complete stranger his jacket.

“Oh,” said the man, whose name was Tarik.

“Don’t feel bad,” said Simon, slinging his bag over one shoulder. “It’s been one of those days.”

Simon raised his cup over his head and as he maneuvered around bodies, making his way towards the barm which was an improvised space in a disused closet where a Ouija board had been set ontop of a chestof drawers. Bottles of various sizes and contents were haphazardly arranged, spelling out the words COMET NIGH.

“…And you leave on your own and you go home and you cry…”

Simon spotted Amelia across the room. She smiled at him. He smiled back. They made a silent agreement, negotiated with hand signals, to meet somewhere in the middle. But getting there was another matter.

Simon ran face first into a couple dancing a tango, even though the record player had been commandeered by one of the itinerant DJs who plague all parties everywhere, who had decided to play a selection of old records.

“The alleys, the comings, labyrinth, but what do I see there..?”

The crowd parted momentarily, presenting Amelia with a straight shot to Simon only to close in again, dropping her in the lap of her former roommate and an absolute bore.

“Amelia, darling!” squealed Hillary, hugging her.

“Hey there, Hillary.”

When Amelia first arrived in town to attend grad school, she answered an ad in the free weekly paper for a roommate and spent the next six months listening to Hillary talk about marriage and babies and the intricate, Machiavellian details of finding a suitable husband in these modern times, what with all the drugs, crime, loose women, gays, and pornography. Hillary was obsessed with the evils of porn. It was Hillary’s assertion that the Internet was invented by pornographers solely as a means of hooking men on a steady diet of cheap smut and this was why Hillary was in her late twenties and still single. Amelia thought it was because she was a bore, but what did she know?

“Amelia, this is Jorge,” Hillary said. She waved a well-manicured hand at the tall Brazilian gentleman in the three-piece suit standing next to her, looking suave and at ease, despite being the most overdressed man in the room.

Jorge smiled like a young Ricardo Montalban and said something in Portuguese that sounded florid and erotic but probably translated as, “How do you do. Thank you for having me to this typical American apartment.”

“Jorge is in shipping!” Hillary said behind her hand in a stage whisper to Amelia.

“That’s great!” Amelia said. “I’ll keep that in mind if I ever need to ship anything. The bar’s in the closet by the stuffed parrots.” Then she leaned in close to Jorge and whispered, “Nice to meet you. Run for your life.”

He nodded and smiled, uncomprehending.

Over at the stereo, someone wrestled control away form the DJ and put on something else.

Amelia turned to see where Simon had gotten to but he was no longer there, having box stepped around the tango-enraptured couple. It was a nimble shuffle whose execution surprised even himself. He turned around to find himself in the kitchen. He looked down at his cup, which was still empty.

“Glad you could make it.”

Simon looked up from his cup to find his thesis advisor, calm, cool, and bespectacled, sitting at a table by the open window, smoking a cigarette.

“…There’s a Starman waiting in the sky he’d like to come and meet us but he thinks he’d blow our minds…”

Jerry enjoyed playing the stereotype of the intellectual academic. He favored black-rimmed glasses, let his graying hair grow a bit shaggy, and even owned a blazer with suede elbow pads. He usually only wore this the first cool day of the fall semester, or to faculty meetings. Why he was wearing it tonight was anybody’s guess, though it was his party so Simon assumed that was his business.

“Hiya Jerry, sorry I’m late.”

“Where have you been all night?”

“I was at the observatory going over the data.” This he pulled from his bag in one overstuffed folder, which he flopped onto the table in front of his professor. He slid into the chair opposite.

Jerry opened the folder and skimmed the top sheet, which was covered in data annotated with scrawling pencil figures and doodles. “I see the thesis is going well. You look like hell by the way.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Simon said. He saw a woman he vaguely knew walk past with a pitcher of margaritas, and tried to attract her attention via telepathy. “That’s what I wanted to uh talk to you about…”

The woman with the margaritas vanished into the crowd.

“Oh, that bad is it?” said Jerry. “Well, no one expected you to prove Panspermia in one go.”

“No, the thesis is just about done. Got the last bit of spectroscopic data on the comet last night, but the comet, see, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Ah, so. Success then. We have met little green men and it turns out we are they.”

“Well, maybe,” said Simon. “There’s some pretty solid evidence for amino acids in the comet ice, which if I’m right, could be pretty exciting. But that’s not the point. The point is this…” Simon shuffled through the folder until he found one particular sheet, which he handed to Carter. “The comet’s moved.”

“They tend to do that and at several thousand miles a second.”

“Yeah no, look. It’s changed its trajectory. Its orbit is closer to Earth than it was last week. A lot closer.”

Doctor Carter looked over the figures for a moment.

“Huh. That’s… interesting,” said Carter. “And you showed this to Doctor Ipsum, yes?” Carter handed the paper to the woman with suddenly sitting with them at the table.

Simon was almost certain she had just sat down the moment before, but this fact quickly slipped away, like it was hiding from him. She had been sitting there this whole time. (Unless she hadn’t. There wasn’t a chair there a minute ago and didn’t she walk through the door after him? Or was it before?) There was a third chair at the table and she was sitting in it. She had wide brown eyes and a thin purple scarf around her slender neck.

“Doctor… Ipsum?” Simon said the name as if testing its seaworthiness. It felt like it was full of holes but it floated just fine.

“It’s probably just a perturbation,” said Doctor Ipsum, barely glancing at the data. “Comets are odd little things. This one in particular has been wandering all over. Probably just got snagged by the moon’s gravity and kicked in a little closer to Earth. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“So… You’re Doctor Ipsum?” said Simon. He scratched his shaggy head and squinted. There were mental waves and her name bobbed up and down on them.

“Simon, are you alright?” asked Professor Carter. “You really have been overdoing it. Laura’s been… she’s, well she’s a specialist on…” Professor Carter looked at Doctor Ipsum, who raised a curious eyebrow back at him. He smiled sheepishly.

“You’ve been at the University just over a year now, and for some reason, I can’t remember your specialty. Forgive me. I’m embarrassed. And I was on your search committee!”

“That’s OK, Jerry,” she said. “It’s celestial mechanics. I studied at Oxford with Toynbee. You remember.”

(It struck Simon that this wasn’t a question, it was a command. This fact slipped away as well).

“Of course! And it’s only midterms. At this rate, I’ll be senile by Christmas,” Jerry raised his red cup to take a sip, remembered it was empty, and set it down again. A thought like a nervous squirrel half crossed his mind, saw something unthinkable, and darted back the way it came.

”Anyway,” he said to Simon. “Your stray comet theory is intriguing but I’m afraid it just doesn’t hold any water. Better stick to extraterrestrial life.”

“Yeah,” Simon said. “Guess you’re right.”

“Well, sorry to be such a downer,” said Laura Ipsum, Specialist in Celestial Mechanics. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I see someone I know. Be seeing you.”

Then she left. Or someone did. Simon and Jerry weren’t entirely certain about this. They both had the distinct impression that there had been someone there, but now there was just a lingering absence, like a hole in the world. (And why was there a third chair at the table?)

“So. Simon,” said Jerry. “Any plans for the weekend?”

“Hmm? Oh… uh. No,” said Simon. He spotted Amelia in the crowd again. She had been corned by that horrible bore from their organic chemistry class, Daryl. “No I don’t.”

“…Do you relaize we’re floating in Space..?”

“Do you know why we’re here?” It was Daryl speaking.

Amelia winced. She hated the sound of his voice. How high and nasally it was. The clashing synthpop blaring out of the speakers wasn’t helping any.

“I don’t think anyone knows that,” Amelia sipped her drink. “There are some who believe fate is preordained and it’s all like some sort of play where none of us has the script and we’re bumbling through it until we find a groove, or at least learn to improvise. That’s the ‘All Life’s a Stage’ theory. Personally, I think we have a bit of free will, but it’s superseded by genetic disposition and cultural boundaries, some of which are so subtle they’re practically infrared.”

“No, I mean, who’s the party for?” asked Daryl.

“Oh. No idea. I think someone’s leaving. Don’t know who though. Or where they’re going. Though maybe they’ve just arrived, in which case this is their ‘welcome here’ party? Hard to say these days.”

“You’re fun!” Daryl giggled.

“You’re not,” said Amelia, chugging the contents of her cup. “Oh look, my drink’s empty.”

On her way to the bar, she passed Simon and another grad student named Lupe, tangled in the embrace of a mutual drunk whose name escaped her at the moment. She offered a sympathetic smile, which Simon didn’t see.

“You two are the cutest couple.” Declared the drunk, whose name was Lonny, throwing an arm over both Simon and Lupe’s shoulders. He deftly balanced his plastic cup so as not to dump Bourbon and coke down Lupe’s sweater. “I mean it. I, I always looked at you guys as The Example, you know? The couple I want to be when I eventually meet that certain someone. You guys are cool, and I mean that. You guys managed to somehow stay hip, even with a kid and keep your unique style. You’re individuals. And you’re parents and that is awesome!”

Lupe and Simon exchanged awkward glances. This was not unusual. On the seventeen separate occasions where Simon and Lupe had been in the same place, they had exchanged only a series of awkward glances, side eyes, and crooked smiles. The truth was they did not even like each other. This is not to say they disliked one another either. They were neutral towards one another, a chemical incompatibility that manifested as cool mutual indifference.

“Well thanks, Lonny,” said Simon. “And I know one day you’ll find a Lupe of your own.”

“Or a Simon,” added Lupe.

“Or a Simon!” Lonny laughed.

“Well. We should be going,” Lupe said. “Promised the babysitter that we’d be home by eleven.” Lonny saw them to the door, hugged them both, and then wandered off to refill his cup.

Simon and Lupe exchanged another cool glance, then walked away from one another in opposite directions, Lupe to the porch, Simon towards the bar.

Which was when he saw the back of Amelia’s head.

He was sure of it. She was heading into the kitchen. Simon reached out, about to touch her shoulder when a wall shaped like a man stepped in front of him. Simon looked up about a thousand feet to see the not-so-grinning face of a large sumo wrestler standing before him. The man mountain looked down at his feet and saw Simon standing there.

“Oh, my apologies.” The sumo wrestler slid gracefully to one side and bowed his head. Simon patted his meaty shoulder and ran into the kitchen where he found a half dozen smartly dressed Cubans mixing drinks and overfilling the blender with ice, all the while yelling at the top of their lungs and laughing in Spanish, smoking cigarettes and singing old jazz standards. A Cuban Rat Pack impersonator’s club.

But no Amelia.

Simon held his empty cup out. A Cuban Dean Martin flashed a completely sozzled grin and upended a bottle of Bourbon but to no avail.

“Sorry Senòr. We appear to be empty.”

Just then, one of Simon’s classmates delivered a crate of alcohol. Everyone cheered. And made room for the man with the booze. This provided Amelia and Simon with the opportunity to meet in the middle of the room, at last. Only it wasn’t Amelia, but someone else.

“Glad you could make it,” said Laura Ipsum.

“What?” he yelled over the music.

“…You realize the sun doesn’t go down it’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round…”

Laura took him by the hand and led him back the way she had come, through a maze of pressed bodies, snippets of conversation, laughter, exclamations, bored looks, lingering gazes, libidinal swaying, and dirty jokes. Simon held his cup over his head and in a rare fit of dexterity, managed not to spill any of the contents on himself or someone else.

After passing through more rooms than Simon thought it decent for such a small apartment to have, they found a semi-quiet nook beside a potted palm tree. The only light in the room, which was no larger than a closet, came from a string of blue Christmas lights that wrapped the palm tree, dangling off of its leaves.

“Look, Dr. Ipsum, I want to apologize for earlier. It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s just that I–”

“Oh, I was lying to you back there in the kitchen.”

“You were what now?”

“I’m not a professor. There is no word for what I am in your language. My function lies somewhere between a nanny and a shepherd.”

“I don’t understand.” Simon looked at his empty cup. There was no explanation to be found there for his lack of understanding.

“Search your memories. You will find that you have none of me, aside from our conversation in the kitchen and even those will be indistinct, like they are trying to run away from you. But that is alright, because you won’t remember this conversation either.”

“I won’t?”

“No. You’ll have a vague and uneasy recollection that you know something. Something impossible but true. A terrible truth that only you know. And I apologize for that. You weren’t ever supposed to know any of this but you — your species — you are all just so curious.”

“What’s happening? Am I going insane? I’m going insane, aren’t I? I always thought there’d be more shouting and possibly a talking animal telling me unreasonable things…”

“Well I am not an animal and what I have to tell you is quite reasonable. Also, you are not mentally ill.”

“That’s a relief! About the not crazy part, I mean. The rest still has me kind of nervous.”

“Again, I apologize. I just wanted to let you know that I am sorry your species is about to become extinct.”

“It is?” Simon raised his empty cup to his mouth. He was so perturbed he pretended to sip anyway, just to have something else to do. “Huh.”

Doctor Ipsum, or whatever she was, made a face, somewhere between exasperation and curiosity. “You don’t seem particularly fad by the news of your impending demise?”

“Oh, it’s a shame, sure. If I were sober, maybe I’d be upset. But I grew up thinking we’d have nuked ourselves with atomic bombs by now, so every day I wake up is just another day maneuvering through that unfulfilled expectation.”

“That’s unusual,” said the entity named Ipsum. “I’d say almost wise, even.”

“How exactly?” asked Simon.

“How what?”

“How are we going to… go?” Simon asked.

“The comet you have been studying is about to change course one last time, which will bring it on a direct impact trajectory with Earth. A region you call Siberia.”

“Siberia? Why is it always Siberia? Is there some sort of comet magnet there or something…” Simon smiled. She did not. “You aren’t joking, are you?”

Her expression said she was not joking. Even on the square.

“The impact will bring about the near total collapse of your biome. Not all at once, of course. The initial explosion will be devastating of course but it will take several months to fully wipe out most of the life on your planet. The small animals and microbes that do survive will flourish in time, if that’s any reassurance.”

“No. Not really.”

“I wish I could convey to you what the future holds. This world will one day be home to a flourishing species, one that will spread throughout the universe and live for eons. It just won’t be your species. Sorry.”

“Yeah thanks… wait. How do you know what will happen in the future?”

“I am the nanny-shepherd of this once and future species. I think your term for what I am is an artificial intelligence, though this is not quite right either.”

“So you’re from… up there?” Simon stared up at the Christmas lights and the ceiling as if looking beyond them, through them to the sky and the stars above. “But why us? Why not Mars or one of Saturn’s moons? Europa is nice this time of year. Titan could do with a smack.”

“Only your planet possesses the right geomagnetic properties to support our type of life. We really are not that different from you. Or were. Our home world was undergoing a global ecological catastrophe that threatened the longevity of our species. We had rudimentary space flight capabilities but this was not enough to colonize another planet. Then one of our scientists hit on the idea to seed comets with our genetic material and guidance systems that could steer the comets towards suitable planets. It would take thousands of years for them to reach their destinations, and millions more for evolution to take its course but guided by… chaperones, maybe?” she tried the word on for size but didn’t like how it fit either. “Whatever we are, it is the only chance for our species to one day reemerge.”

“At the expense of ours, though!”

“I would say that I am sorry but that would be disingenuous.”

“You know ‘disingenuous’ but not what to call yourself?” said Simon.

“Names are slippery things.”

“You know we won’t go without a fight, right? If there’s one thing humans are good at, it’s blowing things up. I could tell someone,” Simon looked around. The corner of the apartment they were in was mostly empty except for one drunk couple in the corner who were more intent on making out than anything else going on around them.

“Seems you are good at other things as well,” said Laura, leaning over to study the vigorous lip-smacking and fondling happening in the corner.

“Still. I could call someone,” said Simon. “The President, or… someone.”

“This isn’t an invasion, Simon. We are not your enemy and there is nothing for you to fight against but your own indolence and ennui.”

“And a comet. A great big ball of rock and ice.”

“That if you shoot with anything in your arsenal will just spread the impact over a wider area and kill your species that much faster.”

Laura could see the desperation and confusion on Simon’s face.

“You misunderstand me,” she said in a reassuring tone. “There’s nothing I could do even if I wanted to. The course was set a hundred thousand years ago, on a planet that is now dead and gone. There is no one to call, no button to push or last minute countdown that can be snipped like a wire. This is going to happen, whether you or I want it to or not. All you can do is decide how you will spend the last few hours of your life. And soon, because I must go now and you will forget that I was even here.”

Their conversation folded in on itself, collapsed like a black hole under the weight of Simon’s futility to make even one rational statement. Every second was extended out towards infinity. In this singularity of confusion and miscommunication, there was no sense to be had. Simon stopped even trying and instead fantasized about a way to swim backward through time to the event horizon, cancel her words before they happened, and walk away blissfully unaware of this terrible alternate future. But there was no alternate future. This was his real present. And it was almost over.

Simon wandered back to the party. He looked at his empty cup and headed for the bar. Stopped. Looked around the room until he saw her. Amelia was over by the fish tank laughing with a mutual friend. He didn’t know why exactly but decided right then that nothing else mattered but that he talk to her. Tell her something, anything at all.

Their mutual friend smiled and waved as Simon approached the fish tank. She made her excuses to leave Amelia and Simon alone and left.

“Hi,” said Amelia.

“Hi,” Simon replied. They smiled at one another in the light of the fish tank, until they both felt like teenagers.

“How’s your comet?” Amelia asked.

Simon shrugged. “Headed on a collision course with a patch of Siberian tundra where it will kill us all.”

“So the usual then.”

Simon shrugged. “Apparently the Milky Way is chock full of giant icebergs.”

“And we’re living on the titanic,” said Amelia.

A moment of near silence again. Someone had gotten bored with French electro-pop and had replaced the CD with some mid-nineties Trip Hop. Scratchy jazz riffs and mellow bass lines reverberated in the living room. Here though, beside the palm tree, in their little nook, it was just quiet enough. Amelia looked up at Simon with one eyebrow raised.

“You want to go up to the roof and do anything but stay here?”

“Absolutely.”

They headed back through the living room, past Terik and Daryl, chattering away about nothing in particular. Jorge had wandered off to discuss something in jovial Spanish with the Cuban rat pack, while Hillary sat in a corner and cried. Lupe stood alone and drank from a plastic cup. Jerry had emerged from the kitchen and was dancing with a young grad student half his age who Simon had never met before.

At some point through the swell of swaying bodies, Simon and Amelia had found each other’s hand. They held on to one another until they climbed through the bedroom window onto the balcony, and then never let go as they climbed the rusty metal stairs to the roof.

Despite the new Moon, the night sky was aglow. The comet was a long slow strobe of glittering light across the night sky. Inside, they could her the dull thump of music.

“It’s so bright,” said Amelia. “It looks like it really is going to fall out of the sky and land on our heads.”

“Yeah it does,” said Simon.

Another long pause as they looked at each other, searching one another’s faces for a sign. Pondering dimensions, and doing a lot of mental arithmetic. Not that it mattered. The numbers always add up the same, no matter how you divide them. They were both right and they both knew it but knowing doesn’t always feel the same as doing. From below, the recorded voice of a plaintively pining woman reaching out in the dark found them.

“…Wandering stars, for whom it is reserved the blackness of darkness forever…”

Simon and Amelia kissed. And looked up at the stars. They would stay there until the end.

+

Text and images Copyright © Keith Edward Kisser 2023
All song lyrics © their respective owners
No algorithmically generated text was used in this work.