The Waning
First it was the meteors. Once in a lifetime, people were saying. Colleagues. Students. Clear skies all week. Stay up late. Getting out of the city is best. The city obscures and dulls everything about the experience. Get out of the city and watch the sky lit up like nothing you’ve ever seen. Stars falling like running water.
But Spenser kept forgetting. Falling asleep on the couch and then lumbering to bed in the early morning hours, only to wake up and curse himself for not making it outside. Once in a lifetime. Think about that. A genuine celestial event witnessed by a small sliver of humanity, a broken brotherhood of flint-knapping savages, pistol and rapiermen, drone operators with blistered eyeballs, reeling sparks from the forge of the gods right above your head, and you’re dozing off watching east coast baseball highlights.
He did remember on the last night of the shower and found himself in the middle of his quiet street, neck craned skyward. A thin scattering of stars that he tries to sketch into constellations, but he can’t make the mental map, doesn’t know the shapes, and even if he did he can’t recall the names. So much he doesn’t know. Twice he thinks he sees something streak across the edge of his vision, but he can’t be sure. Maybe just an illusion of eyeblink or protein clusters casting shadows in the vitreous.
Weeks later, it was the moon. Walking home late from the grocery store and stopping at the same spot in the middle of his quiet street. Chiseled in the black and hanging there, smiling at him, sirenbright. The brilliance of it surprised him and he still felt guilty about the meteors, so he went in, put the groceries away, and dug out the rickety, child-size telescope from his front closet, purchased years ago for $6 at a garage sale. He had bought it but never used it, bought it out of some strange, unspeakable devotion to his younger self, like a promise he wanted to make to the boy he had been, you can still explore the stars it’s never too late. Now is the moment. He lugs it down to street level, hoping it can pierce the gloamy pollution of the lampposts.
He feels slightly ridiculous bending over the tiny device, but what he sees is truly marvellous. The bright edge. Craters everywhere, older than history. These have names too. The size of the thing. Without the telescope the scale of it cannot be understood. Wonder, he thinks. This is a wonder to see.
On a whim, he decides to look through the telescope with his other eye. But in making the switch he hits his eye socket against the eyepiece, like he can’t measure the distance from face to viewfinder properly. Then he has trouble with the angle of his head – it feels so strange to tilt his head in this direction. Little tremors move along the muscles of his neck as he tries to steady himself. It all seems unnatural now. Forced. He can’t even seem to get the squint right. Everything seems slightly fuzzier when he squints with his right eye and looks with his left.
He interprets this as a sign of burgeoning frailty. A sobering realization that the way of the world can be encapsulated in a single word: Senescent. So much he doesn’t know, but that word he knows.
And now he knows this: all bodies tend toward asymmetry.
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