Percival's Planet A Novel

Michael Byers is the author of the story collection The Coast of Good Intentions, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the acclaimed novel Long for This World, winner of the First Novel Award from Virginia Commonwealth University. Both were New York Times Notable Books. A former Stegner Fellow and Whiting Award winner, he teaches at the University of Michigan.

STELLAFANE
1990

The astronomer's wife is on her knees in the garden, facing away from him, stabbing at the soil with a silver trowel, her head covered with a big straw gardener's hat that is in fact a thrift- store sombrero whose dangly felt pompoms she long ago snipped off. During the winter when the garden is mostly dormant the mutilated sombrero lives on a hook in the laundry room, and it is one of the trusty signs of spring that Patsy has taken it down and pulled its little beaded cinch snug around her jaw and bulled her way out into the yard in just a track suit, despite Clyde's mild suggestions that it might be too early. Clyde is a sort of worrier, it must be said, but not so much that he is moved to go outside to help her. Besides, he gets cold easily now (he is eighty-four) and the cartilage in his knees is mostly gone, so that from time to time through the usual ache will come a spike of pain, always accompanied by the same musical, ivory klok of bone meeting bone. Instead he watches her from the kitchen table, where he is sitting with a glass of water and a small, colorful arrangement of pebbly pills, as bright as aquarium gravel, and with the afternoon's mail stacked in front of him. Their kitchen is dark, paneled in fake pine, and the appliances are the avocado green that was once stylish but which is now a source of cringing embarrassment to their daughter, Jean, who cannot help herself from picking at the Formica countertops when she comes to visit. "It's so dingy," she tells them, but Clyde can't see it. Well: doesn't care. He finds his kitchen fine as it is. From his seat he can see the garden and the neighbor's high paling fence threaded with the mean whips of bougainvillea and the giant primary-blue sky of March in New Mexico. And he can keep an eye on Patsy, in case she needs him.

He makes his way through the mail, pressing out the creases in the bills and paying them, one at a time, from the checkbook, keeping the balance in the register as he goes and setting the used envelopes aside to serve, later, once they have been scissored into squares, as scratch paper for telephone messages. (This also drives Jean around the bend, her father's habitual and unnecessary and, it seems, aggressive frugality. In private Clyde admits to himself that he takes some goading pleasure in what it produces in Jean, her dependable fury, her outraged sadness at her fading parents—well, it is what they have between them, it is better than nothing.)

The mail is bills and advertisements and nothing unusual; and then, like the prize in a box of Cracker Jack, at the bottom of the stack of mail he finds an invitation to speak at Stellafane, a society of amateur telescope makers, who convene an annual meeting in Vermont. He is still occasionally invited to things like this, but since most people suppose he is dead it does not happen as often as it used to. The invitation is for July.

He goes out into the garden, holding the letter, bright in the sun.

"Well," Patsy tells him, "that's very nice."

"I think I'm going to go."

"All right." She settles back on her haunches. "You ought to find somebody to travel with."

"You could come."

"Pfah. Not on your life. That crew." She means the enthusiasts and hobbyists who have made such a pet of her husband over the years. It is not jealousy but its opposite, the conviction they do not appreciate him sufficiently. Clyde likes this position, secretly shares it, and makes a feeble show of pretending otherwise. "What about Sarah?" she suggests.

"Well—if she'd want to."

"She might." She drives her trowel into the crunching soil. "Help me up," she says, and extends an arm. "We'll go call her."

Sarah is their granddaughter, their only grandchild. In 1990 she is twenty- two, having graduated the previous spring from Indiana University in Bloomington. She is still living in Bloomington, working in the IU botany lab studying grains and grasses. As it turns out she is pleased to travel with her grandfather, of whom she is simply and excellently fond. Besides seeming to like him for himself, she is of the opinion that having Clyde Tombaugh as her grandfather is a cool and incidentally useful thing. When she is out to impress a boy or make herself feel better about something, she has him to resort to, the story of Planet X. Clyde enjoys holding this position in Sarah's life, which feels like something resembling his due. His granddaughter doesn't know the whole story, of course, which is just as well. For certain reasons of his own, he has never told her the whole story.

For that matter he has never told Patsy the whole story either. Or anyone.

Sarah arrives in Albuquerque in the middle of July. She resembles Clyde, in parts: she has his narrow shoulders, his blunt squarish head smoothly indented in places like a salt lick, his very white skin cool to the touch. All her own is the knowing stance, the tilt of the head down and to the side, and with this a habit of observing you through her hair with an air of tolerant skepticism. What in her mother is harried and punishing is in Sarah set back and noncommittal. But when she smoothes her hair from her forehead and puts it behind her sizable ears, you can be sure she is about to tell you something you don't necessarily want to hear. You can't fool Sarah.

On the flight to Boston, Clyde has the window seat and Sarah sits beside him. She has a new boyfriend, she informs him: Dave, a graduate student in the Indiana music conservatory. "Guess what instrument."

"Piano," Clyde says.

"No."

"I wanted to learn the piano once," he tells her.

"Guess again."

"Flute."

"No."

"Triangle," Clyde says.

"No." She bats him. "He's not gay."

"Well, I don't know. Guitar."

"Tuba!" She leans away from him, grimacing, horrified. "Can you believe that? What's wrong with him?"

"Somebody has to play it."

"Not necessarily. I went to a recital and he played a piece called something like Dance for Three Tubas. He couldn't find two other people in the world who played tuba, I guess, so he played the other two parts himself and taped them and then played the last part live on stage! By himself!"

"There must be other tuba players in the music school."

She hefts herself upright. "I don't know. He has to lug the thing around with him everywhere, in that giant case. It's like having the most enormous dog."

He is not very good at this, but sensing that Patsy would want to know he asks, "So, do you like him?"

"Oh, I love him." She grins. "He's ridiculous. He has a little tiny Honda Civic that he rides around in with his great big tuba. And," she finishes, "he's from Canada."

The talk he will give at Stellafane is the same one, really, that he has always given, amended marginally to account for differing audiences. The version he has written out for this trip is for the telescope makers, the tinkerers. They cannot really imagine what it was like to grind a nine-inch mirror themselves, in the middle of Kansas, in 1928, with the materials he had at hand. But he wants to give them a little bit of an idea. "Read my talk," he says to Sarah. He tugs the pages from his satchel and hands them across to her. It is handwritten in his tidy blue script, a few pages. She turns them over silently.

When she finishes she says, "I always forget how young you were."

"Twenty-two," he says. Then, realizing it: "As old as you are, in fact."

She hands him the papers. "I guess that makes me a dud."

"Well, that's—" He shakes his head. It is too wrong for words. "No."

"No, I'm sort of, you know—joking. Sort of! Maybe. I don't know. I'm just—" She reaches into her own satchel and tugs out a Walkman. She unwinds the cord from the earphones, inserts the jack into the tape player, and places the earphones over his ears. She presses play.

He hears tuba music, oomphing and bumbling, elephants in tutus. Her face is alive with embarrassed delight.

"Isn't that ridiculous," she says.

By the time they land in Boston his knees are so sore he asks Sarah to fetch a wheelchair. It is only slightly humiliating to be wheeled by his granddaughter through the terminal. This nice girl is mine, he wants to crow. He satisfies himself with the envying glances of other fogies in their chairs, pushed by indifferent airport workers in untucked blue shirts, name tags flapping. No one will spill him onto the concourse linoleum like a sack of potatoes.

They rent a car and head north, away from the rosy brick-and-glass towers of Boston, north through Massachusetts and into New Hampshire. Sarah drives while Clyde watches the countryside. He has never been to New Hampshire, and he is pleased to see that it looks more or less as he has imagined it. It is late afternoon, warm, verging on evening, and the orange summer light leans over fieldstone barns and farmhouses until these give way in turn to long stretches of silent dark forest. The road is narrow, the painted lines nearly worn away. A first star comes out: Deneb, bright point of the summer triangle. The sky is purple above the trees.

Stellafane is just over the Vermont border, a little encampment in the woods. A sign at the gate reads please only parking lights after dark. They creep up the dirt road, under the pine trees, then emerge onto an open hillside under the stars. Dozens, hundreds of people, it would seem: red- capped flashlights are bobbing everywhere. At the top of the hill stands a timbered house, pink in the glow of their parking lights. "That's where we're supposed to check in," he says.

"You sit," Sarah insists, and hops out and prances around the front fender and disappears inside. There is a flash of light, a glimpse of a desk, a bulletin board pinned with papers. A minute later she emerges with a bearded, wild-haired man, exactly the sort Patsy dislikes, in a dark T-shirt and pale shorts and tennis shoes and a beer gut. This man puts his hands on his thighs for support and peers into the car. "Mr. Tombaugh?" He extends a hand. "Mike Cornish."

"Yes. Hello."

"It's an honor, sir, to finally meet you."

They shake hands. He does like hearing this. "Thank you for the invitation."

"Well, it's about time we had you here, isn't it?"

Clyde answers, "I should say so."

Mike Cornish grins through his beard, showing a giant's gappy choppers. "You're in the founder's cabin. We'll bring you some breakfast tomorrow morning around ten o'clock. If there's anything you need, I'll be here for a little while and then I'll be over on the hill. But there'll be somebody at the desk all night."

"When do I speak?"

"After breakfast. Around eleven, all right?"

The cabin turns out to be a cedar A-frame, down another dirt road and under the pine trees again. Sarah hefts their bags from the car, arranges everything inside. There is one bedroom downstairs, another in a loft up a spiral staircase. "I'll arm-wrestle you for it," she tells him.

"No thank you." He sinks into the armchair. So much travel has unsettled his bones; he still feels the plane swaying beneath him, the thrumming of the tarry seams in the old highway. He is not surprised to note a hippyish air to the cabin: knotty pine walls and Navaho rugs—imitations, he sees at a glance. The fluorescent light from the entryway lays a cool green light over everything. He misses home, where he would now be napping in the corduroy armchair in front of the television. But he will not complain. He is a guest. He is being paid. It is work.

"I hope this is all right," he calls up to Sarah.

She pops her head over the railing. "It's so cool. I'm going to change and go out and look around. I saw people with their telescopes out. You want to come?"

"I'm going to rest," he says.

"But you're their hero," she smiles. A minute later she comes bumping down the stairs in a puffy blue parka and gray fingerless gloves. She has washed her face, and there is something clarified, uncomplicated, in her examination of him. She gestures: "So—I'll just be out there somewhere if you need me."

"Watch out for oddballs."

"Takes one to know one," she answers.

When she is gone he goes to the phone. He is surprised to find a dial tone. He calls Patsy. "You're alive," she remarks. "Are you bothering Sarah?"

"Not much, I guess," he says. "She told me about this new boyfriend."

"Dave? Dave's not new. Dave's been in the picture for—oh, at least a year, it must be."

"Well, I've never heard of him."

"You must have. He's the musician."

"The tuba player?"

"Well, that's him. I don't know, Clyde. You've heard of him before." There is something unmoored in her voice. Clyde misses her, worries over her. It is hard to be apart. "Is it cold there?" she asks.

"It's all right," he answers.

"It's nice here, but I didn't go out at all. I just lay around like I was no good. I just hate it when you go away." She sighs. "You know, I get all weedy."

When Sarah comes in a few hours later Clyde is in bed, not quite asleep. But for her sake he lies still while she washes and climbs the creaking spiral stairs to the loft. It rains that night, and a piney campground smell leaks around the aluminum window frame above Clyde's big iron bed. He wakes to the old sound of rain on the roof. He listens for a while, just enjoying the sound. A farmer's son, he never loses interest in such things. And it rains so rarely in Albuquerque. He buries himself deep beneath the knotted quilt with a sigh of sudden happiness. He misses Patsy, but it pleases him to have a bed of his own, a little camp bed under a slanted ceiling and the crinkling sound of the baseboard radiators expanding and contracting. It reminds him—oh, faintly—of his boyhood home. That vanished white room at the end of the hall—

About ten years ago Patsy got sick and went to the hospital and he was alone in their bed for weeks, which was entirely different. Silent, terrible nights, when they thought they were going to lose her.

He turns from this, listening to the rain again.

He sleeps long and late, and the next morning he eats the delivered breakfast: eggs, toast, coffee in a carafe, sausages, bacon, all things he really shouldn't be eating but which he does, greedily. Coffee is especially forbidden. As Sarah thumps down the stairs he stops himself like a dog caught with a roast. But she fl umps herself into a chair, not noticing, not knowing what the rules are. "I had a dream I was watching this parade," she tells him. "And there was this sort of tow truck, and it was pulling this big, uh, sort of a house, and the idea was you were supposed to see how people lived in the house, it was the parade of How to Live."

He will have just a little more coffee.

"I have the most obvious dreams," she says. "Like I'm in third grade. Oh, man, by the way, you should see some of these telescopes they have. Until it got cloudy it was amazing. I saw Saturn, I saw Jupiter and all the little moons. And also, by the way, everybody can't wait to hear you."

"Too bad for them."

"You are totally a myth and a legend to them and you know it. Seriously, it was like being a princess in disguise."

"The Princess of Pluto."

She grins, points a strip of bacon at him. She is too pleased, she can hardly bear it; she flushes into her plate.

As for Clyde, he urinates six times in half an hour, and then his face goes a little numb and his hands start shaking, so much that he draws blood shaving under his big flat chin. When they go out a little while later to walk up the road to the main camp there is still a scraped irritation. And his knees are pretty bad this morning, after all that sitting yesterday, so it is a slow trip, a quarter mile; but he wants to walk it. It is more dignified. When they reach the top of the hill, they observe that the timbered main house is in fact pink, as it had appeared last night. And beyond it he sees now what was hidden in darkness: a long green slope hemmed at the bottom and at either side with great trees; and on the hillside an array of tents, and at the very bottom of the hill a small wooden stage and a lectern. And hundreds of people, stirring around their tents.

"Your people," Sarah whispers.

He has to pee again in the pink house, the offices of Stellafane; he shakes a few shy hands on his way in and out, and then he spends twenty minutes or so making his way down the hillside through the mob of campers. He shakes more hands. He signs things: old photographs of himself that he exclaims at; what appear to be photocopied announcements of the discovery of Planet X from the Harvard College Observatory; photographs of Lowell Observatory—and also maps of Vermont, and dollar bills, and chewing gum wrappers, he goes from one to the next, his signature always perfectly legible because it is never otherwise. Sarah walks with him, taking his elbow over the humpiest parts of the grass, hovering nearby when he is thronged. He is cold, he notices absently, but he is too busy to really pay attention; he has his windbreaker on, and his khaki pants, and his comfortable brown shoes, and people are making a fuss over him. Well, he likes it.

At the bottom of the hill Mike Cornish greets him. "You sit here," he orders, and Clyde sinks into a folding chair on the grass beside the little stage. He plunges his hands into the linty pockets of his windbreaker and shivers once. His granddaughter is sitting on the grass a ways up the hill; she sends him a sporty little wave. The four legs of Clyde's folding chair do not all meet the grass at once, so he finds himself rocking slowly from one triplet of legs to another as Mike Cornish begins the introduction, the story as it is known, in outline: the years in Kansas as a boy, making his own telescopes. The surprise summons to Lowell Observatory, as a young man with only a high school degree. There, the endless starfields to be compared. And at last the discovery.

Clyde listens with pleasure; but something odd is beginning to happen to him, possibly having to do with the coffee. There is a feeling of peculiar displacement, of being relocated somehow—that he is being gently separated from his own body. Possibly he is having a heart attack. He finds, in the afterglow of all the attention, and after that excellent, illegal breakfast, that he doesn't really mind. It is as good a place to die as any. Patsy will make it all right without him. He has left the checkbook balanced, anyway. Then Cornish finishes, and Clyde is still alive, but still in his strangeness, and he hoists himself out of the chair and climbs to the stage, which has a nice smell of new plywood and gives a little under his small weight. He has the indistinct sense of people shifting on the hillside, and then he gathers everyone is rising to their feet to applaud him. It takes eight steps to arrive at the lectern, when he turns and faces the crowd. He has been applauded before. He is used to it. No, he is not dying. Not yet.

So what is it, now, that is producing this rich sensation in his throat, not of sentiment but of something entirely else? He draws his speech from the inner pocket of his windbreaker and, unfolding the pages, presses out the crease against the edge of the lectern. The Vermont sky is gray. The air is weirdly clammy. The trees hang motionless. People are sitting down again. He looks up at them. He adjusts the microphone.

Then he sees. It is the tents. That's what it is. The tents on the hillside, all massed together like that. Suddenly the ache in his knees is gone. Those tents on the desert, in Flagstaff—and then he sees it all again. In an instant, he sees everyone. Alan Barber and his beautiful girl charging desperately up the hill around the fossil pits, around the white tents standing on the hillside. And all that blood. And the rich man, and the fighter, and the painter, and the dinosaurs, and the mad Empress Constance, and the planet that wasn't there—

It is so much. The huge, secret story that no one knows. In all its many parts, too much to tell.

His granddaughter watching.

He opens his mouth to speak, and the story comes back.

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