“Was she just tired or was she confused or was she—” Irene wanted to say drunk, but that was not something she would ever say out loud. Still, her mind would not comply: Was she blasted? Wasted? Hammered? Was she? Was she like, “Whee! Down we go!”

“Sweetie, we just don’t know. We don’t know. Listen, I need to speak to some people here that have just arrived. I will call you again later.”

Irene turned the phone off and put it down. There was a dense, strange feeling in her chest, like the residual joy at having successfully observed results in her experiments had collided with the grotesque horror of having her mother die of a broken neck, and a black hole had been created in the center of her chest, sucking in all her feelings and her will. She began to cry. She sat down in her chair and put her hands in her lap, coughing and sobbing.

Does death always make you feel sad? What do you do when someone dies? What if the person was a terrible and unsolvable lifelong problem for you? What if the person was your mother?

Irene cried and cried, in spite of herself. Her mother had been a bad mother, yet she was sad anyway. She couldn’t make the sadness stop, just because it was reasonable to feel relief. She tried to figure out what she would say to someone else in this situation. Maybe the years of awfulness dissolve, when a bad mother dies, so that all you really have to feel is sadness. Or maybe Irene would say to the person, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and that would be the end of it.

Exhausted from her tears, Irene finally looked up and saw her gleaming machine. She remembered the good thing that had happened to her, and what she must now do. Then she gathered her backpack and keys and went outside the lab and up the stairs. She did not fall. She did not die. She locked the door.

Outside, she saw it was midafternoon. The blue autumn sky seemed to hover just above the colorless buildings. The breeze felt cool but there was warmth radiating off the pavement all around. She felt sure it was a Monday. A rumbling of shouts came from the stadium, and she knew there was a sports practice going on there. A group of men shouting rhythmically as they ran forward, sideways, backward, or hunched in squats. Irene opened her phone and placed a call to the Toledo Institute of Astronomy. On the phone, her tone was full of spirit.

2

The Toledo Institute of Astronomy was founded in 1837 as the Stickney Library of Almanacs (or al-manakhs) by Angelica Stickney, whose family’s fortune had been made in shipping, and whose lifelong passion was observing the night sky. She employed two full-time academics in her library. The more elderly of them, Dr. Claude Pooley, had been hired to study and catalog the information in Mrs. Stickney’s astonishing collection of almanacs, from a tablet of Sumerian origin depicting planetary movements to a document from the sixteenth century that was believed to have been penned by Francis Bacon. The other scientist in her employ, self-taught female prodigy Esther Birchard, was charged with studying stars and weather patterns in order to better inform the decisions made by the Stickney family’s transportation business, which operated largely on the Miami and Erie Canal and its Wabash extension. Birchard’s husband was an elevator man. He was a naturally suspicious person.

Pooley, the librarian, enlightened by the study of ancient texts and tables, became involved in light experiments postulating the chemical composition of the sun. He had such success with his observations that he began to publish his work and bring in other researchers to work with him. On the other side of this dual operation, Stickney Carriers laid unfortunate claim to the record for most vessels lost in the river to storms, mechanical failures, and crime. Esther Birchard, whose job it was to advise the captains of these boats, grew more and more reclusive, as her predictions increasingly failed. Year by year, she found herself relying less on her anemometer and more on fervent prayer to improve the fates of the company. Eventually, she lost her job. When pressed to account for this, Angelica Stickney calmly explained that Esther Birchard was a weather witch, and had accordingly been banished from the company. Her husband almost immediately fell down an elevator shaft and died, leaving behind a curt note to his children that his wife was not to blame. Esther Birchard was not seen or heard from again.

Angelica’s son Harold Stickney, a prescient man who anticipated both the decline of canals and the importance of the scientific work being done at the library, wisely sold off the family’s interest in the shipping industry and poured the family’s fortune into establishing a college of science in the swampy country north of the river. He dreamed of founding a mecca of learning and culture to rival the East Coast universities. They had a two-hundred-year jump on him, but no more zeal for learning and truth. His motto was Scientia vincere tenebras, or “Conquering the darkness through science,” and at this humble academic outpost on the Maumee River, Stickney and Poole planted a flag for reason. Deep in the woods, Esther Birchard whistled up a wind.

Almost two hundred years later, the Toledo Institute of Astronomy had fully emerged as the epicenter of knowledge and research that its founders had imagined. Its lecture halls and laboratories were well funded by interested corporations, its trust well endowed by generous individuals, its campus a glorious example of frontier classicism, and in 1992 its reach even extended into space, as the first Toledo Space Telescope had been launched into orbit via space shuttle. The city of Toledo was proud of its astronomers, proud of its status, standing shoulder to shoulder with Brussels or Shanghai or Sydney in the quest to unlock the secrets of the universe and plumb the depths of the history of stars.

* * *

George Dermont, third-year postdoctoral research fellow and favorite instructor of most female undergraduates at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, stopped in a stairwell of Stickney Center, looking for a vending machine that would take his dollar. George had a headache. A bad one. It felt as though the fibers of his brain were full of ice, and every thump of his heart was a hammer, shattering them over and over. It felt bad.

From the vending machine, he could get some headache pills. He could get some caffeine gels. At the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, the vending machines were stocked with sundries geared specifically to the young scientist. One could find lens cleaner, superglue, clamps, Altoids, and rubbing alcohol. One could certainly find migraine medication: vasoconstrictors, sumatriptan, even opium nasal spray. But George’s dollar was so wrinkled and old that it seemed he might try all the vending machines on campus and have no luck. The dollar kept coming back out.

George left the stairwell and turned down the corridor toward the lecture hall. He had five minutes to get to class and look over his notes from last semester, to try to remember what he was going to say to the new students. He pushed through the double doors and the class hushed their chatter. He pulled his notes out of his briefcase and pretended to look at them while he casually closed his eyes. It was the beginning of September. There was no need to panic.

He opened his eyes, turned his head to the left and right, and smiled down on the class. This is what they had come for. To learn the history of astronomy. And he would teach it to them, by the book this time: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, and the rest.

At times he tried to show his students extra stuff about the universe and give them a peek at what the Toledo Institute of Astronomy really had to offer. Then they would squint, shuffle their feet, cock their heads to the side. As if that lecture was not something they wanted to hear. As if it would slide off their brains at an angle, leaving a scuff mark. He knew that if he went off book too much, it would get harder and harder to get back to the textbook’s comforting pages. He would end up standing in a corner, facing the wall, ranting and raving at nothing. George Dermont was the bright young star of the cosmology department, the “it boy” for concerns of the whole universe and beyond. But if he ever really told them what was in his mind? If he ever fully expressed the depth of his beliefs? Would they keep on smiling, winking, waving? Or would they say to him, “Now what the fuck is that all about?” and denounce him as a fraud?

George began his lecture, and the students learned. They nodded their heads. Twenty minutes in, George eyed a girl in the third row in a tank top and khaki shorts, looking like a young Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, minus the pistols and with double the braids. There was one ropey braid on each side of her head, each draping down to decorate one bulbous breast. George almost thought he had seen her before. There was something about the braids that looked familiar. The way her eyes met his. The way she held his gaze. And just like that, George found he had departed from his lecture script. He had limbered up. He had remembered exactly what he had to say, and from an introduction to the first six constellations, George took a sharp turn.

“Remember the Assyrians?” he said. “They were the ones that came down like a wolf on the fold. They had gods. So did the Babylonians. The Greeks also had gods: commonly seen wearing white and having really smooth brows. Romans had gods. Hell, yes, everyone had them.”

The students nodded and chuckled. They remembered. This was something in the history of astronomy that they could comprehend: humans having gods. “Nowadays we assume there are pretty much three gods. Ours and the ones in other people’s religions.”