His slow, sad words stiffened the hairs up and down my body. My son had rediscovered Olbers’ paradox. Aly, who had been away for so long, leaned her mouth up to my other ear. He’s quite something. You know that, don’t you?
I laid it out for him, as clearly as I could. If the universe were steady and eternal, if it had been around forever, the light from countless suns in every direction would turn night as bright as day. But ours was a mere fourteen billion years old, and all the stars were rushing away from us at an increasing rate. This place was too young and was expanding too fast for stars to erase the night.
Lying so close, I felt his thoughts racing outward into the darkness. His eyes skipped around the sky from star to star. He was drawing pictures, making his own constellations. When he spoke, he sounded small but wise. You shouldn’t be sad. I mean, because of the telescope.
He spooked me. “Why not?”
Which do you think is bigger? Outer space . . . ? He touched his fingers to my skull. Or inner?
Words from Stapledon’s Star Maker, the bible of my youth, lit up in a backwater of my brain. I hadn’t thought about the book in decades. The whole cosmos was infinitely less than the whole of being . . . the whole infinity of being underlay every moment of the cosmos.
“Inner,” I said. “Definitely inner.”
Okay. So, maybe the millions of planets that never launch the telescope are just as lucky as the millions of planets that do.
“Maybe,” I said, and turned my head away from him.
That one, there. He pointed. What’s happening on that one?
I told him. “On that one, people can split in half and grow back as two separate people, with all their memories intact. But only once in life.”
His arm swung to the far side of the sky. And that one? How about over there?
“On that one, chromatophores all over a person’s skin always give away exactly what they’re feeling.”
Cool. I’d like to live there.
We flew around the universe for a long time. We traveled so far that the waxing moon, two days from full, rose over the mountains’ rim and blotted out the stars. He pointed to one of the last bright lights remaining. Jupiter.
On that one? All your memories never get weaker, and they never go away.
“Ouch. A broken bone? A fight you have with somebody?”
The way Mom’s skin smelled. Seeing that heron.
I looked where his finger pointed. The light was dimming in the full wash of the moon. “Do you want to go there?”
His shoulders lifted off his sleeping pad. I don’t know.
Something called in the woods. It wasn’t a bird and it wasn’t any mammal I’d ever heard. The cry pierced the dark and hung above the roar of the river. It might have been pain or joy, grief or celebration. Robbie jerked and grabbed my arm. He hushed me, although I made no sound. The shout came again, farther away. Another call provoked another response, overlapping in the wildest chords.
Then it stopped, and the night filled up with other music. Robin turned and grabbed me harder, his face lit by moonlight. Every creature alive would feel all things they were built to feel.
Listen to that, my son told me. And then the words that would never weaken and never go away: Can you believe where we are?
IN THE DARK OF OUR SNUG TENT, ten inches from my face, Alyssa whispered, Why does it matter so much?
We’d hiked for eight hours until my feet bled. We’d swum together in the wild cascades. My exhaustion was so complete that I had struggled to light the camping stove and cook our dinner. I can’t remember what we ate. I only remember how she asked for more.
I wanted to collapse facedown on my inflatable pillow and die for a week. She wanted to keep me up all night and talk philosophy. Does it make any difference at all if it happened anywhere else? It happened here. That’s everything, right?
I was brain-dead. I could barely get my subjects to agree with my verbs. “Once is an accident. Twice is inevitable.”
She pressed my chest and said, I like this marriage business. She sounded surprised, as if that discovery settled all matters.
“Find any trace of it anywhere, and we’ll know that the universe wants life.”
She laughed so hard. Oh, the universe wants life, mister. She rolled over on top of me, compact but planetary. And it wants it now.
For a minute, we were everything. Then we weren’t. I must have fallen asleep afterward, because I woke again to an otherworldly sound. In the dark, someone was singing. I thought at first it was her. Three fluid, looping notes: the briefest melody trying out endless new keys. I looked at Aly. Her eyes in the darkness were wide, as if the wistful, three-note tune were Beethoven. She grabbed my arm in mock-panic.