Frequencies

The artisan shopping center in the middle of downtown projected movies in its basement on Fridays and Saturdays, so I thought that might be a safe option. If we didn’t like each other, we would at least have shared a strange experience. When we got there, I expected paraplegic mannequins and forklifts, but it was all cleared out, done up, seats bolted to the floor. The screen though, looked old as the mall: moth-pocked and withered, as though this place had been lurking beneath shoppers’ feet for decades.

They played Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and I thought great, fascinating, but Alexis crossed her arms and grunted at every sexist instance. Afterward, we walked past the closed shops, all of them yawning and teethed by their telescoping grills.

“Was it the film itself that was sexist?” I tried to converse with her afterward. “Or was it the whole world?”

“Is,” she corrected. “The whole world is.”

We stepped outside and crossed the square, headed toward my car as if the date was already over. A sound crew busied itself on the far side, setting up a stage for a concert the following day: some amateur wannabe starlet singing auto-tuned pop. The lights blinked on and off, swirled in test-run bursts of pink and purple and red, spinning fragments of brightness that caught our eyes in patterns so rapid they seemed random. It was perfectly, beautifully surreal, and on the heels of the mall’s basement movie it seemed the precise recipe of oddness to spark a connection. But Alexis kept her arms crossed. She looked only at the brickwork in front of her feet: if anything, she sped up.

I took her to her mom’s house, where she was staying until she got settled. She sat for a second in my passenger seat and stared at the front porch.

“It’s weird being back,” she said.

I said, “I’ll bet,” because I didn’t know how she felt. When she didn’t get out, I offered, “It’s early. You want to drive around some?”

But she shook her head, almost like she’d forgotten she was in my car.

“I’ve got homework to do anyway,” I said. I put it in gear before she’d opened the door, and was idling at the stop sign at the end of her block when I saw it: a bright green stripe like a rip in the sky, just hovering, angled up and to the right. Not a comet, or a cloud, not some defect in my vision. I sat at the stop sign maybe fifty feet from her mom’s house and I laughed and I marveled and I blinked a thousand times. Still, I didn’t think about going back for her.

# # #

The last time there was something strange and phenomenological in the sky it had been a meteor shower, and everyone knew about it. The local news hyped it up, plugged the Lake Mary Observatory as the best place to watch it: the plateau was far enough away that the city’s lights didn’t mute the sky.

That was one of my favorite nights alive, the meteor shower. Cars were parked bumper-to-bumper among the telescopes — white, dome-topped tubes like scientific silos. We sat on our hoods, hundreds of blank strangers looking upward together, tailgating the collisions of the earth’s atmosphere and screeching debris. One bright bullet across the stars and then a lingering, rainbow-colored arc blistered the night before healing back to darkness. We cheered each time the sky lit up. In our hearts we were celebrating something that wasn’t for us, and we were made better by it.

No one else had come to the observatory for an undisturbed view of the green stripe. I climbed onto my hood and leaned against the glass. The stripe’s glow touched my face, like heat. We were alone together, me and this mysterious light, and we settled into some kind of mutual wonder, curious and awed by each other’s inexplicable presence. I was just getting used to being alone with it when a set of headlights crested the plateau behind me.

A minivan crunched slowly up the road. I couldn’t see anything but the dirt and grass caught in its headlights. It parked a few feet behind my bumper, and an entire family filed out without a word: mom, dad, daughter, and son. The father stood in the road and bent at the waist, touched his toes. When he stood, he called to me in a booming voice that raised the air temperature.

“You watching the thing?” he asked, flipping his baseball cap backward.

I pointed to the stripe. “You can see it?”

Nodding vigorously, he opened his trunk and lifted out a small telescope. “Help me set this up,” he said, but he set it up by himself, directly on my hood. His family closed in around us. As he focused in on the object in the sky, the dad explained to his kids why comets have tails, and he was pretty consistent with what I understood about comets, and the kids nodded and looked into the sky, seeming to understand from the lecture that this green stripe was not a comet. The mom hovered close in the scrubby brush at the shoulder, occasionally picking up chunks of limestone and dropping them back to the dust.

The dad looked through the telescope and we looked with our eyes until it was an unusually long time for no one to say anything, especially the kids. I thought about asking the dad what he knew about solar radiation. My best theory was that this was a mid-earth aurora, tropicalis maybe, which had managed to never appear until now. Only the color didn’t fit: so green it seemed chemical. The best I could speculate was that the light had been refracted through a gaseous body, or an ice cluster, or some celestial obstruction. When I got home later on, rather than doing my homework, I checked my guess: directly across the color spectrum from the stripe’s odd, neon green resided a pinkish orange. Magenta, basically. A color I had no trouble associating with a violent eruption of combusting gases on the surface of the sun.

I didn’t mention my theory to the family. Let it be a mystery to them. Let the kids think it might be aliens.

My shocks wheezed as the mom leaned against my fender. She wore an over-sized flannel and a bandanna over her hair. “Are you a student?” she asked, though I hadn’t said anything. “What do you study?” She had enormous hips, wrists constrained by the tapered ends of her sleeves.

“Earthquakes,” I said, still pondering nanometers and radiation. “The Anasazi. Modal logic.”

Her kids watched the father watch through the telescope. She extended her hand and told me her name was Brittany and I shook it and told her I had never known a Brittany older than sixteen. Our hands clasped but not shaking, I looked at her fully. I’d stopped thinking about the mystery overhead, and I’d begun wondering what the Brittany I’d known all those years ago looked like and was up to now. I looked at this bored mother beside me and understood that there were people who used to be in this woman’s life who were wandering the planet knowing only a sixteen-year-old version of her. It wasn’t a profound epiphany, but complete, like a small safe clicking open.

Brittany shivered next to me inside of her flannel. I offered her my sweatshirt. She declined, and her husband looked up from the telescope with a wild grin on his face.

“Brittany!” he said. “You next!”

She nodded, and the dad looked back into the eyepiece. The boy child whispered, “Can I look?” as though practicing the question, and the rest of us waited for him to actually ask it. Brittany’s teeth chattered and I put my arm around her shoulder and rubbed it up and down. She stopped shivering immediately. The little girl, several years older than the boy, maybe she was ten, wandered as if she wasn’t anywhere at all, scraping the gravel with her white shoes. Her socks had frills. Brittany cleared her throat and the kids silently initiated a game of tag. Within seconds they were in the darkness, only the girl’s white ankles still visible.

The dad lifted his head to turn his hat around the right way, with the bill in front, and walked back to his van with purpose. Brittany walked around my hood for her turn and I grabbed her elbow and pulled her toward me and dove into her fleshy face. She gasped, inhaling my tongue, and I flicked it against her teeth and then I flew from my hood to the dirt several feet away, a new soreness in my neck. She stood over me with a fist in the air. The father stormed up and said, “I saw everything.”

He grabbed the telescope and led Brittany to the middle of the road. Stabbing the small tripod in the dirt, he glared at me and came over and pulled me up from where I was sitting in the gravel and the stiff weeds. With a strong hand on the back of my sore neck he led me to the far side of the nearest telescope. I expected the kids to be hiding behind it, but they weren’t. No sign of the girl’s ghost feet.

“Are you some kind of idiot?” he asked. “Who are you?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know.”

“What more do you need?” he said, pointing to the stripe.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

His kids appeared beside us, panting.

“Okay,” the dad said. “Let’s go make it right.”

The children guarded me as I walked to Brittany’s side and apologized. She flexed her mouth, like testing her teeth’s memory. She nodded back into the eyepiece.

I said, “I’m Tony.”

The kids walked me back to the space between our cars. The girl dragged her feet in the gravel, tails of dust floating up behind her footprints.

“This is Kim and Freddie,” the dad said. The kids nodded.

“What do you know about solar flares?” I asked.

The kids shrugged one after the other and the dad said, “It’s too precise for that. The edges are too defined.”

I asked, “Why aren’t more people up here?”

The dad looked around. “Nobody knows.”

Brittany stood up slowly by pushing on her knees. Her cheeks trembled in the green glow, and by the time she was upright the green had faded and her skin reverted to the muted gray of moonlight. We all looked up, panicked, to find that the stripe was gone. Only a sky — still miraculous and inscrutable, but darkly aching where the stripe had been.

# # #

My professor asked me to stay after lecture “to discuss my options” regarding making up the assignment I’d opted to research cosmic phenomena and refractive properties of light rather than complete. She waited until my classmates had finished filing out, then asked me straight up: “How’d it go? Alexis said she had a really good time.”

I nodded. “She told me about Jamaica,” was all I could think to say. “She sounds like an amazing person.”

My professor wiped the whiteboard clean of the three words she’d written and circled repeatedly during her lecture. She said, “I like to think so. Thank you for taking her out. She’s had a hard time readjusting.” She evened out a stack of papers, other people’s assignments, against the table and cradled them in her forearm. She hesitated at the door and asked, “Do you think you’d like to take her out again?”

“She seems really nice,” I said.

“No pressure. I just thought you two would get along.” She smiled. She waited, smiling.

“I’ll call her,” I said. “Tell her I’ll call her.”

“That’s great, Anthony. I will.” She beamed. “You can turn in your paper to my office, please.”

I rode my bike home and finished last week’s assignment quickly and then the assignment for our next class and then I sat in the late afternoon sunshine on my porch while my roommates banged around inside and turned on their music so loudly, and then I showered and went to work, putting the pizzas together and sticking them in the oven, but mostly standing around thinking about frequencies and wavelengths and refraction, and about that deep, sudden blackness left over after the stripe disappeared. On a break I called Alexis and she answered.

“My mom told me you were going to call,” she said. I pictured her turning from her stomach to her back, wrapping the phone cord around her finger. An outdated image.

“Something happened to me after I dropped you off. There was a green stripe in the sky.”

“What kind of green?” she asked. There was a tone in her voice, something easy between us that hadn’t been there before. I wondered if her mom wasn’t lying: maybe Alexis had had a good time.

“Lime green. Not the color of limes, the color they call lime green.”

She said, “What are you doing on Friday?”

“Working.”

“What about after?”

I said, “Do you want to come to a bar with me after I get off tonight? There’s a thing to watch. Open mic. It’s good.”

“Open mics are never good.”

“This one is. People show up. The room is packed. The performers are terrified.”

“I’ll meet you at Alpine. That’s where you work?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll help you close and you can give me free beer. I like to sweep.”

“We don’t really sweep.”

“Then it’s a win-win.”

# # #

At the open mic, Alexis jumped up on the stage and gave the rock symbol and then jumped back off because while she was waiting for me to close the kitchen, I’d given her several beers called “Optimator” and she didn’t know that they were a special kind of beer. The emcee mocked her, rock fingers and raised eyebrows, a pretty good impression. The audience laughed and she did too.

“Who’s up next?” she asked me.

A redheaded barista stepped onto the stage with an acoustic guitar. I’d seen him before, at previous open mics and elsewhere. “This guy makes coffee at the place by the Laundromat,” I said.

“That place is so expensive,” Alexis said.

“The Laundromat or coffeeshop?” I knew she’d say “both,” and she did.

The guy sang through a crack in his teeth and played reggae. “He always plays this song,” I whispered to her.

“He’s good,” she said. She nodded her head with the music. She had been in Jamaica for the last year and a half, researching endangered corals. Her head-nod was a specifically tuned dance to the music. It made the music seem better than I thought it was. I looked back to the performer in awe.

I said to Alexis, “So there was this green stripe in the sky the other night. After we hung out. There was a family that came up to the observatory and watched it with me.”

She leaned in and, still dancing with her head, said, “You could be making them both up. The stripe and the family.”

“I’m bruised from where she punched me.” I showed Alexis the dark patch on my collarbone.

“You could have punched yourself. Who punched you?”

“I tried to kiss the mom, I think. I did, I think.”

The reggae guy finished his song and waved and stepped off the stage and the emcee made fun of Alexis again.

“Asshole,” she said. “I need another beer. Or water. I need water.”

“Your mom doesn’t know me as well as she thinks she does,” I told her.

Alexis stood up. “She begged me to do this. I like it. But she begged me.” She maneuvered between the shifting mass of bodies and came back handling two beers and two glasses of water. Her fingers were long and curved and gripped the glasses like tentacles. “My mom says you’re the smartest student she’s ever had,” Alexis said, watching the next performer tune. It was the emcee, playing in the final slot of the night. “I think I’ll boo him,” she said.

I told her, “I supported voting for the Green Party in my ‘Logical Reasoning’ paper.”

Alexis nodded. “That probably did go a long way.”

The emcee began tentatively, quietly, but it wasn’t nerves: it was just how the music was. Fingerpicking and falsetto, a style like balancing an equation. Alexis and I tried our best to hate it, but the longer he played the more stunning the music was. Despite how impressed we were, the rest of the audience wasn’t in the mood to pay close attention and the room slowly emptied around us. When we eventually stood up to leave as well, the emcee just stopped, just caught the strings and put his guitar away like he’d been waiting for us the whole time.

Out front we stood among other strangers amassed there. I said, “I don’t think I’ll probably call you anymore.”

“Okay.” Alexis dropped her chin. “Take me home?”

“I rode my bike.”

She raised her hand to a bike-taxi and jumped in the rickshaw, smiling as she was pedaled toward my professor’s house. Alexis didn’t look back and I didn’t call her again. I rode home and immediately drove to Lake Mary. Again I was the only one there, this time with nothing spectacular to witness. I climbed onto my hood and leaned against the windshield and shivered against the snap of wind whipping up the back of my shirt. I endured it because the wind was what kept the clouds away. I stared at the visible sky but all I could see were stars. I couldn’t find that darkness anywhere.

# # #

On the weekend I decided to do my reading at the park. On the top of the hill is a different observatory, Lowell Observatory, a smaller complex than the one on Lake Mary. Lowell Observatory is famous because long ago astronomers discovered Pluto here. It made me sad, but at least those famous scientists were dead when subsequent generations nullified their work. I sat on a bench and said a quiet prayer for them: small and cold and too far away, Pluto is still a planet in my heart.

The afternoon was warm and the park fully populated: mothers watched their children on the swing sets, watched the children in the sandbox, watched the boys congregating behind the pillars of the jungle gym, giggling at any girls old enough to giggle at.

A group of girls too young for that screeched by, a stampede of high-pitched momentum. One of them stopped, a bundle wrapped in the stomach of her shirt.

“You’re the bad man,” she said to me. It was Brittany’s daughter. My cheeks went hot.

“You shouldn’t talk to me then,” I told her. I lifted my eyes to see if Brittany was somewhere, watching.

“My mom isn’t here,” she said. I’d forgotten the girl’s name. “My dad knows what it was.” Each of the girls had freckles and buckteeth and eyes creased by the incessant squinting of summertime. Brittany’s daughter said, “The green stripe. He knows what it was.”

“What was it?”

“I’m not telling. Why are you a bad man?”

“What’s in your shirt?” I asked. Whatever it was struggled, pulsed against the fabric. I could see the pink flash of her belly go taut as she tried to contain it.

“It’s a rabbit,” she said.

“You must be quick,” I said, “to catch a rabbit.”

She grinned. I sounded like a kung-fu guru. She said, “It’s missing a leg.”

“Mm-hmm,” I nodded. “Is it hurt, or just defective?”

“It’s not bloody, if that’s what you mean.” The girl looked around. Her friends tested the perimeter of the semicircle they’d formed. She said, “There’s something very wrong with you, is what my parents said.”

“You shouldn’t be talking to me,” I said again.

The girl’s friends loomed and listened in case they might be interrupting some legitimate reunion — a former piano teacher, an old camp counselor.

“Freddie,” one of them ventured. “Come on. I told my mom.”

Freddie. Freddie was her name. I jerked my head that she should leave.

She returned to her flock. As they were walking away, the girl who had spoken whispered, “Who is that?”

Freddie answered loudly enough for me to hear: “He’s my friend.”

“Freddie!” I called. The whole school of them stopped and turned. I stood up on the bench and asked, “Which leg is it?” I jammed my hand into the fabric of my shirt, mirroring the rabbit in hers.

Freddie answered, “Front right.”

I stood on my bench, watching them until they met their corresponding mothers. Brittany wasn’t among them. One of the moms peeked into Freddie’s shirt and then searched the park for an employee or police officer or, ideally, some animal control personnel. She looked right at me and past me, then back. Our eyes locked and we maintained eye contact long enough for the sounds and colors of the park to melt away. The motion of the swing sets and the rhythm of the children’s laughter merged into a singular note, a steady and pure wavelength that seared a fissure in the fabric of reality, and through that fissure life came pouring back. The park reverted to weather and physics and sound, everything normal again. It left no indication that anything had happened at all, except for the faintest aftertint — a faint echo of pinkish orange: basically, magenta.