brad petit

The Imminence of Mars

According to Maya the binoculars were trash. She’d said that right after Derek haggled them off a cab driver in Houston a number of Aprils ago, agreeing to pay five dollars. They were taking a cab in from the airport because somehow the Ubers were scarce at that time of night. “Is this not a major airport?” Derek had said. His airplane buzz, from the minibottles he’d smuggled onboard, had already given way to annoyance. The binoculars seemed to then cure that. They had the name of a major pharmaceutical company printed on their flimsy nylon carrying case, just a convention freebie that some doctor or drug rep must have left in the cab. Derek noticed this later and asked what on earth people are looking at in Houston. The Astrodome, Maya replied. The Eighth Wonder of the World. They were there for a wedding.

The binoculars passed their time in a closet until Derek had to clean it out, in a room they were about to redo. He took the binoculars outside the next day. He looked through them and spun the knob until his cypress trees flew into focus and back out. He tried stalking around his patio but the view was so disorienting he nearly fell into the fire pit. Later that night he scoured the piece of sky over his back yard, and it was starless, pure pitch black and hiding a blurry moon.

He went back inside, to the kitchen. Maya was drinking from a can of club soda and their favorite internet radio station played softly from the living room. Derek put the binoculars on the kitchen island next to a cutting board, which had little white bell pepper seeds sprinkled all around it.

“I have news,” he said.

Maya made a go-on face, mostly with her forehead.

“These are trash.”

Maya made another face.

“I can’t believe you’ve kept them for this long.”

“I paid five dollars for them.”

They watched TV while they ate but Derek regretted agreeing to the new subtitled show from Denmark that their friends were talking about. He kept missing dialogue when he looked down at his plate to scoop his food. He felt primal and slovenly, hunched over the coffee table. When he was done eating he leaned back on the couch and slid his hand underneath Maya so that she was sitting on it. The Danish show ended and they thought about watching a nature program but couldn’t settle on one.

<>

They took a walk the next day in the park by their house, one of the parks Derek used to visit as a boy. They’d walked there many times but had never before seen a live growing watermelon. It was the damnedest thing—growing underneath a tree on a slope, resting at the end of a vine that curled down the hillside like lazy hair. They had to stop and look at it for a while.

“Do you think we should eat it?” Derek finally said.

“It might be venomous.”

“You mean poisonous.”

“I meant venomous,” Maya said. “As a joke.”

Derek apologized with a pat on Maya’s leg. He started to pick up the watermelon by the vine but thought he felt the fibers straining so he stopped. It seemed to be making good progress, good and green.

“There was a time when I would have smashed this on sight,” he said. “I almost want to hide it.”

Maya was standing with her hands on her hips.

“Boys are so violent.”

For a split second, deep in his mind, Derek thought it would have been funny to cock his fist back and yell What did you say and then laugh. But they didn’t joke like that, nor did he. So he nodded and they watched two tennis players pass them farther down the slope, each carrying a large caddy of balls, already with bands on their wrists and foreheads. Their expressions were too humorless for the weather, too humorless for this park. Derek just motioned toward them as a sort of silent commentary. He did this as the tennis players walked away from them, hoping Maya was having the same thought.

<>

On their weekly video chat with Maya’s parents her mother mentioned birth charts again. It was a hobby of hers. She had been reviewing the chart of a famous politician, comparing it against his recent comments in the media and finding its predictions to be spot-on.

“If Mars is rising when you’re born,” Maya’s mother said, “that will make a person act blunt and brash. Ballsy, right? If you’ll pardon my French.”

Derek liked it when Maya’s mom got astrological. He found it interesting, or if nothing else amusing. Just the immense complexity of it, the certainty. There were quadrants and modes, aspects and conjunctions. Signs and sextiles. But Maya rarely engaged—she had probably heard enough of that stuff growing up.

Maya was starting to ask about a sibling but her mother continued talking, not yet hearing her due to the latency in the video-chat connection.

“But the interesting thing is that Mars is also in his twelfth house. See, that makes you appear open but you’re actually secretive by nature. You react emotionally. I mean, how perfect, right?”

“That’s good stuff,” Derek said.

Maya’s father reappeared in the frame with a drink in his hand.

“Still feeling okay these days, sweetie?” he said.

“No more nausea or anything,” Maya said. “But you should see these ankles.”

“They’re pretty large,” Derek said, nodding.

There was a noise from the kitchen. Derek alerted to it: the familiar sound of the dog going after leftovers. They’d quickly learned that the dog was long enough to get on his hind legs and lap at anything too close to the edge of the counter, but they still left food there too often. Derek excused himself from the couch and dealt with the situation. Of course there was still food in the dog’s bowl—Derek checked—and water too. The dog looked at him placidly and then bounced over to the kitchen door, putting his nose on the big glass pane and leaving a slimy mark. Derek said “I don’t think so, pal,” and pulled a beer out of the refrigerator on his way back to the living room.

<>

They were in bed; it was the afternoon. Maya was on top of Derek because of her belly. It was a strange new type of eroticism that he hadn’t gotten used to yet. The air conditioner outside their bedroom window cycled on loudly, pressurizing the ducts. They had kept the ceiling fan off because it made Maya cold, exposed like that.

The dog jumped onto the bed and Derek pushed him off with a foot, rougher than necessary. After, while Maya used the toilet, the dog came back and laid down across the lower part of the mattress. Derek scratched the dog’s head with his toes and had an involuntary thought about kicking it hard in the face. The dog looked back at him obliviously.

By evening Derek was feeling confident he understood the operating instructions that came with the telescope. He hadn’t known they were computerized now and could find objects by themselves. He had gotten a laser collimator to go with it, on the advice of reviewers. This would simplify and speed up alignment. This particular scope was in the Newtonian Reflector style with a five-inch aperture and a high theoretical magnification of over three hundred. People were posting photos of the rings of Saturn, crisp moon craters, even nebulae. Deep space objects in his own back yard for a few hundred dollars—what a bargain, Derek thought. Based on what he read, Mars would be in opposition and at peak magnitude by mid-October, its brightest point in a two-year cycle. Its polar ice caps, potentially, visible.

He sat on the floor of the living room with the manual and all the loose components spread out around him. The scope had come packed in a reassuring amount of foam. Maya walked into the room, carrying a book.

“Careful—don’t trip,” Derek said, gesturing at the tripod legs sitting on a pile of plastic near Maya’s feet.

“What will we be able to see, again?” she asked.

“Whatever you want.”

Derek picked up both of the eyepieces that had been included in the box. He had forgotten which did what.

“Pluto?”

“I don’t know about Pluto,” Derek said.

Maya said she’d have dinner ready in half an hour, if that was okay. Derek offered to help but was glad when Maya smiled down at him and said she had it under control. The flooring was solid and cool where Derek sat. When the builder was showing them the house, Derek had said something nasty about living on a slab, the lack of give to the floor. But that was then. He turned the instructions to the scope over in his hands. He felt an itch and scratched reflexively at something behind his ear, surprising himself with his own quickness, almost knocking the huge black body of the telescope with his knee in the process. His stomach sounded a low growl and he wondered what Maya had in mind for them to eat that night.