Galaxies
I sit in half lotus in the bedroom practicing my sitar, the most painful of all the stringed instruments. I imagine that Sally and I aren’t divorced but are raising a couple of teenagers—kids we never had—here in our maintenance-deferred bungalow. We are happy and at peace. A string snaps.
Rummaging for a spare, I notice galaxies on the ceiling. A trick of the light. Except, getting closer, I see that the shapes are floating in three dimensions just below the ceiling. They are strands of iridescent cobweb colluding to appear like a collision of galaxies, each with the equivalent of spiral arms and a dense sprinkle of stars. It’s been ages since I last cleaned. I climb a chair. The cobwebs are almost too beautiful to destroy, but I pass my hand through them… and find that it’s morning, not evening, a Sunday but not the same Sunday. There’s not a galaxy in sight. My fingers seem to have lost not only their soreness, but their callouses as well. My beard is gone. As one does, I look up stroke symptoms on my phone.
When I arrive at work on Monday morning, I find projects I completed still unfinished and slightly altered in scope. It’s as though I’ve gone back in time a few months, but at a slant. It’s mind-melting at first, but quickly annoying—as is my slightly higher desk and slightly lower chair, and the way everyone at work pretends that this woman named Nell, whom I’ve never seen before, has worked here for years. I also have thinner hair, though no one seems to notice. A few days of this and I’m impatient for that Sunday to roll back around, the one where I originally spotted the galaxies. Will life return to normal? Were those galaxies real? Did they possess worlds I perhaps destroyed with a careless grope? These form the limits of my philosophizing; it’s one thing to have your life entangled with the inexplicable, but quite another to also need to keep putting in your forty hours.
I install a security camera in the bedroom and check the feed feverishly from work. When a galaxy’s spiral arm emerges from the wall, I realize I should have checked the room on the other side, the unused room where Sally passed away. Wait. That doesn’t feel right. I’m fairly certain Sally and I divorced and that she is still alive. But I can also remember her thin drawn face, the utter weakness of her hand in mine, both of us too drained for tears. Like I said—annoying.
I leave the newly emerged cluster of colliding galaxies alone. The mass rotates slowly until it seems more like two galaxies. A month passes and I’m left with one messy galaxy, supernovas popping off every couple of minutes in little blinks of light that make me wear a sleep mask. Then the galaxy begins to slowly vanish into the black hole at its center. This continues for weeks until there’s only a small mote of light remaining, and then no light at all. Good riddance. At work, Nell is fired for personal purchases on the allegedly stolen company credit card. And except for the desk and chair heights, and my hairline, life feels both familiar and unpredictable once more.
Summer descends like a hot iron, the mosquitoes parched. I’m hunting one that left a welt on my new bald spot, the beast bouncing along my bedroom ceiling. I get up on a chair, magazine in hand, ready to swat, but the mosquito alludes me. I return to my reading and immediately notice a trail of tiny perforations in the magazine, as though a burrowing insect went to town. I hold the magazine in the space the galaxy occupied and watch the issue disintegrate and vanish over the course of a minute. The corner of the bedroom begins to take on a dingy appearance, even with the bedroom lights blazing. Black hole.
Believe me, I understand I have a responsibility to prevent this potential world-ender from growing larger. But a black hole could be remarkably useful. I dolly in the concrete Greco-Roman column from the backyard and place my trash on top of the capital. Unlike municipal recycling, the black hole isn’t picky—and it’s free. It accepts offerings of junk mail, food scraps, and packaging, along with all the loose odds and ends from around the house that I haven’t thrown away: spent batteries, outdated electronics, paperwork older than seven years, and coffee cans filled with accumulated nails and screws. I feed it a broken length of sitar string and it gobbles it right up.
Though this morning, I’m having second thoughts. It’s nibbling at the corner of the bed, this quivering nothingness with an insatiable appetite. The pull is inescapable; into the maw I go… and find myself looking out the bedroom window, the ash tree in full leaf. I hear a whine, clap my hands, and wipe the stricken smear of a mosquito from my palm. I look up at the ceiling and see my three tiny colliding galaxies. I’m not going through this again, at least not alone. I call up my ex, Sally (not dead!), who is apparently living with someone named Terrance (boyfriend? new husband?). I remember our divorce being based on irreconcilable differences—and her dislike of the sitar.
Sally arrives, skeptical of my story of cosmic apparitions. “You first,” she says, pointing a handgun at me I didn’t know she owned.
Me, calmly, from inside the bedroom. “Look for yourself, in the corner.”
She, entering warily. “Yeah, so?”
“Look up.”
I hope Sally will have an explanation I haven’t considered. Instead, she shoots the thing. Twice… and then it’s Sunday again. And here we are, Sally and I, waking up in bed together, not yet divorced—so there’s all of that to still go through.
Not fun times.
Now, many months later, I steer the moment back to Sally coming over to have a look at the newly appeared galaxies. No handgun, I insist. She claims not to own one. She takes a different tack this time, babbling on about how famous we are going to be. She’s going to sell the selfie she’s recording of herself and the galaxies to the news, she says. Charge admission.
Given Sally’s wildly different reaction to the galaxies, I’m momentarily heartened by this rough proof of free will’s existence, but I remind her that I bought her out and that this is my house now. I’m not turning it into a circus. Then she pulls out that handgun. I’m not having any of it. I climb up on a chair and pass my hand through the billions of stars… and look out the window at the old ash tree. But the tree is different. It’s only a sapling. I let go of the curtain, which is also different. Embroidered. And though the rooms have the same dimensions as my house, the furniture is unfamiliar, as is the woman dressed like a 1950s housewife, reading a book in the living room. She lowers a cocktail shaker from her lips. “Fix you a drink?”
And then I realize who she must be. “You’re Ginger Something. The original owner. Your husband didn’t like your idea of adding a pass-through to the kitchen, so you took a sledgehammer to the wall when he was at work.” It’s one of the stories Sally and I were told when we bought the house from one of Ginger’s sons. I turn to the pass-through. It’s not there.
“I’ve heard about mind readers,” she says. “Keep going.”
“You hid cash around the house.”
“Show me.”
I pull a wad of tens from the hollow behind the loose trim of a kitchen cabinet and hand it over. Sally and I stumbled on these hiding spots when we moved in—what I took for a good omen at the time.
“Impressive. Do it again.”
I find the loose panel in the pantry and remove another wad.
“I haven’t told a soul about my getaway money,” she says. She gives me the once over, then hands me the cocktail shaker and the cash. “What am I thinking now?”
She bares her shoulders, then her dress falls free. I spill her drink on the new, unmarred oak floor. Her husband pulls into the driveway just then, his car engine grumbling. Ginger pulls her dress back up. She takes the cocktail shaker and the cash from me and shoves them into a kitchen cabinet.
“I suggest going out the back,” she says, dropping a dishrag on the spilled drink and moving the rag about with her foot. “But I’m free tomorrow after nine. Or did you already know that?”
I take her advice—out the back door as her husband comes in the front, the situation like some country song two-step.
Outside, everything is new. My street is paved with unbroken concrete not yet covered in asphalt. The sidewalks are straight and untroubled by tree roots. Everything is white and pale yellow and desolately fresh.
I sleep in the park. At nine a.m., I’m knocking loudly at Ginger’s door, trying to be heard over the ruckus behind it. She finally answers, sweat on her upper lip, her hair in a kerchief. Louie Prima sings “Just a Gigolo” on the radio.
“Finish what you started,” she says, thrusting a sledgehammer into my hands. She roots through a pack of cigarettes on the mantlepiece and walks from the room.
Her efforts have broken through the wall’s lath and plaster and scalloped the studs. I can see Ginger through the opening, fixing a drink in the kitchen, ice cubes crackling. She watches me coolly as I take my frustration out on the wall, widening the opening to what will be there, roughly, when Sally and I buy the house many decades later—though I suppose that future is now annulled. Destruction is cathartic, but only if you don’t stop. I do, out of breath after a dozen swings.
Ginger’s forearm comes through the opening, a finger pressed against my chest, hard. “Spill the beans,” she says. “How did you know I wanted to open this wall? How did you know about the cash? You some kind of mentalist?”
“I’m from the future. Or something like it.” I put down the sledgehammer. I need to find larger targets than a wall. I need galaxies—something to get me out of here. “Do you mind if I inspect the bedroom?”
“Is that what they call it in the future?” She holds her cigarette in the same hand that she carries her drink, a risky thing if you don’t have a lot of practice.
I grab a kitchen chair and carry it toward the bedroom, pausing at a tidy, paint-fresh nursery room. I sense a miscarriage—though this wasn’t part of the grab bag of anecdotes Sally and I were told when we bought the house.
“Keep walking,” Ginger says.
“Some unsolicited advice. Cut back on the drinking and smoking.”
“Abandon my companions?”
“You’re going to raise three kids in this house.”
She laughs huskily, like Kathleen Turner, who isn’t even born yet.
I set the chair in a corner of the bedroom and search the ceiling. I’ll take a single star, interstellar gases, a lonely comet. Anything. All I see is the hideous wallpaper that I softened with noxious chemicals and scraped off, decades later.
Ginger puts a hand on my leg and squints up at me. “You some kind of city inspector?”
“You ever notice a black hole here?” I say. “Or galaxies? Small ones?”
She turns her head and looks out the window. I hear the engine. “Someone’s in for a surprise,” she says.
“Back door?”
“I should think so.”
I’m several houses down the street when I hear her husband yelling in a register of incredulity that can’t seem to drop below a falsetto. I hear it one block over. I hear it from the park.
The next morning, Ginger answers the door in a robe. The hole in the wall is a wide grin braced with studs.
“I’ve never seen him so riled up,” she says, chaining a fresh cigarette. “He even took the sledgehammer with him to work. Isn’t that a hoot?”
I look at the gash from the kitchen side. “He’ll come around. You eventually fill the opening with a stained glass motif of…”
“Grapevines. Hell, you really are a mind-reader. And you said three boys, right?”
“Maybe it was four.”
“In this house?” She places a hand on her stomach, then reaches out and grips my arm, tightly. “Tell the truth now. You escaped from the home on Green Street. You’re a savant or something, right?”
“Sure.”
Her expression changes. She cinches her robe tightly. “To think I was going to let you make love to me.”
“Do you mind if I continue to look for my galaxies?”
She waves me off. I set about scouring every inch of the house. I’m searching the closet in the nursery when her husband comes home on his lunch break. They start up in the bedroom next door. “Lovemaking,” as she put it. I guess he’s still riled up. And then I see a hazy something in the air, cloudy, a galaxy still putting its act together. I climb into the crib to get closer to the ceiling. Maybe I can whisk myself a few years earlier. I’ll buy land and get rich. Invent disco, the Rubik’s cube, Tetris, the Internet. Opportunities abound.
The crib creaks beneath my feet.
“It’s nothing,” I hear Ginger say. “Come back to bed.”
But her husband storms into the nursery, a sweaty gleam of a man stopped cold by the sight of me in the crib, grasping at the space above me.
“I’m your wife’s guardian angel,” I find myself saying. “Let her have the goddamn pass-through.”
And I leap up toward the faint galaxy… and the tree, this tree, is an oak, not an ash. That I know. A scrub jay glides off a thick branch. California towhees interrogate the leaf litter. Not a city in sight. No sabertooths or dire wolves either, thank god. The air is ripe with the comforting, dusty scent of sage. The day passes and grows cool, and though I know how to start a fire, I lack the skill to pull it off. Instead, I look at a million other fires—the stars at night, the comfort of familiar constellations.
I wake the next day from someone kicking the underside of my shoes. It’s Ginger. She’s older. Middle-aged, like me. Her hair is caught in an unflattering perm.
“Five!” she says, kicking me again. “Five boys!”
“Motherhood that bad?” I get another kick.
She sighs. “I could only take it in pieces. Lots of redos. The jump before this one had me breastfeeding the twins again. Hell, no. Had to crawl the whole goddamn attic searching for the stars. Babies were crying downstairs. Husband was calling the sanatorium on me. Again. Disaster.”
She looks around. There’s an adobe far in the distance. Cows. Same view as yesterday.
“What year is it?” she says. “I need a cigarette.”
We leave the oak tree’s canopy. Cows glance in our direction. A man on a horse emerges out from under the shade of an oak between us and the adobe.
“When was the martini invented?” Ginger asks, then goes down at the crack of a rifle shot.
I don’t bother to run.
The big old ash tree tells me it’s spring. My sitar rests in the bedroom’s corner, strings unbroken. In the kitchen, the stained glass in the pass-through isn’t a motif of grapevines, as it used to be, but stylized olives and martini glasses. I hear the floorboards creak. Sally walks into the kitchen all dressed up.
“You haven’t showered?” she says. “Get going. Gina’s bringing this Terrance guy. Says he’s the bee’s knees.”
That’s the one. The man who ends our marriage, with Sally’s help.
As I shower, I vow to give my marriage my all this time to see if I was the one to blame for its collapse. I’ll shed my laziness and my inattentiveness. I’ll tackle more of the chores. Give up the sitar.
I dress quickly to the sound of impatient car honks. I go out and climb into the passenger seat. In the back sit two teenagers on their phones. They look a little like me, a little like Sally.
“What’s made you Mr. Cheerful?” Sally says, backing the car down the driveway.
“Everything.”
Terrance, it turns out, is a nice guy. Sally finds him stuffy.
In the privacy of our hosts’ bathroom, I look up stroke symptoms again, but my symptoms—marriage, fatherhood—raise no red flags. I wonder how to give this new arrangement a lifetime of longevity.
I spot the mess in our hosts’ kitchen and make myself useful. I load and start their dishwasher, then wash the rest of the dishes and glasses by hand to show my appreciation. It’s a peculiar, forgotten emotion.
“There he is,” says the host. “Always cleaning up after others. Leave it. Leave it!” She laughs.
Is this the life of my best intentions, realized? I dry my hands and return to the party. My wife is telling a story about Ginger, about the hole she made in the wall with a sledgehammer, and how, after we bought the house, we found a hidden panel holding ten grand in cash in an envelope. “Finders’ keepers,” my wife says.
“What’d you spend it on?” someone asks.
She mimics a shot in the ass. “In vitro.”
She looks out the open patio door at our two teens bouncing on the large trampoline. I realize I don’t yet know their names. I want to return to our home, search for old photos, maybe discover a journal and thank this past version of myself for the work he put in to get me here.
Terrance is outside, too, so maybe Sally’s gaze isn’t on our kids.
Terrance rests his beer on a flagstone and climbs onto the trampoline, joining my kids. A small dog tears around underneath and barks as Terrance and these kids of mine go up and down, laughing. Is this when my marriage first begins to fall apart, with Sally taking in a jubilant view of what a married life can be? I place a possessive hand on my wife’s shoulder, but she coughs and excuses herself to get a drink to clear her throat. Is this how an illness first comes to light, lung cancer’s first manifestation?
I don’t know. I can only be thankful for the present moment. Because on this particular Sunday I’m not alone in my bedroom torturing myself on the sitar; not sucked into a black hole; not divorced with a pistol-happy ex; not pummeled again and again in a nursery room, nose broken, jaw dislocated, two ribs cracked—“Jesus, Leo, you’ll kill him! He’s only a savant! A stupid savant!”; not gunned down in the 1800s watching an incarnation of Ginger die in the dust beside me.
I am here, watching the dog lick the mouth of Terrance’s beer bottle. Terrance comes off the trampoline, incandescent. He takes a refreshing swig. What can my being here mean other than that I have been given, at least for today, the unearned gift of grace?
