George looked down at his pale, weak, pained body. Sixty percent of it was indistinguishable from the little drips of water that clung to the sides of the empty canteen. Mostly, he was just a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen. Eighteen percent carbon. Three percent nitrogen. Some calcium and potassium and other salts. All down the line, these were the same elements that he measured every day in the stars of the Ring Nebulae, the same as in the sun, as in all the stars in the universe. On an atomic level, he was constructed from fused leftovers, expelled into the void when these stars inevitably collapsed. In a way it comforted him that he was elementally connected to everyone and everything — even if, as he lay in the dirt, he felt sure there was also something to him beyond atoms. He’d seen something leave Irene, in those final seconds, and it wasn’t energy or matter.
Back in high school physics he’d learned the cycle of decay and renewal over the course of millennia, and what a small footnote mankind was, when you looked at the entirety. But what he hadn’t learned until much later was that for millennia, these stars, perceived by the naked eye, were thought to be, well, what they appeared to be: lonely, single points of light, isolated by billions of miles. But with better telescopes, astronomers in the seventeenth century had first noticed that some of these single dots were really two stars orbiting each other, or some common point, but in any case swirling close together. And now scientists had discovered that the vast majority, over 80 percent, of stars in the universe were these binary systems. Some were even multiple systems, three or more stars bound up in the same complex gravity.
He could hear Sara breathing beside him, and he reached over to take her hand. It was surprisingly warm. But he knew he shouldn’t be so surprised. She — this woman he loved — was a great inferno of carbon and nitrogen and water, orbiting his own glowing, celestial body as it, in turn, circled hers.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many stars,” she said, as awed as he was by the wide, bright swath of the Milky Way, stretching above them from one end of the valley to the other. Silently they stood up and, eyes fixed on the heavens, lofted Irene’s urn from the damp earth. He held the base while Sara unscrewed the lid. Together they tipped it into the soft wind that remained of the earlier storm. In the dark they could barely see each other or the ashes as they swirled away, but they felt the urn getting lighter as they emptied it. George believed that on some microscopic level the last elemental traces of Irene would change this spot and, even if imperceptibly, affect all that would someday grow from it, just as surely as she had forever changed his life and all their lives.
Sara closed her eyes and wished Jacob and William were there with them. She began, silently, ordering all the events of the day into a story that she and George would soon tell many times. She opened her eyes and looked at her husband. He was looking up at the dippers and the North Star. He was staring into the dark place where, though the light hadn’t yet reached them, 237 Lyrae V had long ago collapsed and formed a new bright white star. And George, just like the explorers of centuries past, felt the warming chill of knowing just how large it all really was and exactly where he was inside it.
“Let’s go,” he whispered to Sara, taking her hand. “I can find our way back from here.”
THE CITY THAT IS
See gray threads of streets, dotted with the green of trees off the lanes. See glass rising, indistinguishable from sky. See aluminum herds coming down the West Side Highway and gulls circling the Battery. The ferry is just easing in. See the firecracker glow of M&M’s advertisements on Broadway, where the Levi’s are ten stories high. See the pine tar on the telephone poles and the chalk-dusty cobblestones. See where the careful grid begins to go off in angles, because part of this city is from before it was even a city. See, everywhere, there are children here. Everything is two or three times bigger in their eyes. See a takeout bag gusting up into a traffic light. There may be snow there, below, crusted to the curb. Or weeds driving up between the acts, to live an inch, or two, before the parade of dogs and passing feet. We are almost always about to touch. To be hit by bicycle messengers or buses. See how soon we get lost. See soot on silver, Post No Bills, snaking subway cars. Tunnels below tunnels below tunnels. See the copper skeleton city inside of it, all pipes and wires. We have this much in common. These belong to us all, like the blankets of green forests that hold pearl lakes inside and the rivers that cradle us and all that sprawls beyond them. See? It is a different city than the one we knew. It changed while we weren’t looking, and while we were. We will never really understand how it changed because of us. Our words and motions moved its air and entered its vines. Still, my city is not your city, and neither of ours is the same as the city that belongs to the rest of them. To all the people elsewhere, remembering, or expecting it. There is a city that none of us knows at all. Why there is a dinosaur on the side of that building. Where all the yoga pants come from. What happened on that street corner fifty years before we were born. How that empty sports bar down the block stays in business. If anyone anywhere owns that bike that’s been locked to the speed limit sign for the past nine months. There is the city where we are falling in love, and the city where we have lost all hope, and the city that never lets us down. There is the city that comes at us from all sides and knocks us down into puddles of something (we’d rather not know what). There is the city beneath the paint that coats this city. There is the city we step out into on warm days with no place in particular we have to be. Had you forgotten? There are cities where we are still young and cities where we have become very old. There are cities with just me, and cities with only you. There are cities that have vanished completely. There are cities we speak of very highly. There is a city we can never go back to, and a city we have never left and a city that was never built, and even one city that we all, each of us, believe in, that never fully leaves us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks are owed to the dozens of supporters, believers, and friends who have helped me to write this book: Chelsea Lindman and everyone at Sanford Greenburger; my editors at Viking, Chris Russell, Beena Kamlani, and, formerly, Maggie Riggs; and my publicist, Angie Messina.
Thank you to Leah, Joshua, my parents Dennis and Deborah, Oma, Jonathan, Dennis and Susan, Hanna, Chris, Theodore and all the rest of my family.
I owe a great debt to the kind eyes and hearts of Elizabeth Perrella, Andrew Carter Dodds, Neil Bardhan, Jerry Wu, Jill Rafson, Robin Ganek, Rachel Panny, Emily Ethridge, John Proctor, Jordan Dollak, Michael Levy, Andrew Bodenrader, Dongwon Song, Yaron Kaver, Dr. Aaron Prosnitz, Dr. Joel Green of the University of Texas at Austin and the Space Telescope Science Institute, Katie Peyton, and to Tom Mansell and Lenn Thompson of the New York Cork Report. Additional thanks to the good people at Bien Cuit bakery for many vital refills.
I am indebted as well to the support and generosity of Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence University, the New York Public Library, my tremendous colleagues at SUNY New Paltz College, the PEN/New England Organization, The UCross Foundation, and the Sherwood Anderson Foundation.
This book was written in loving memory of my sister, Jennifer, who pushed me first.