The Stone Loves the World

subjects. He thought, in fact, that brown dwarfs were sufficiently unsexy, but he was wrong. He turned instead to astrometry, than which nothing could be unsexier. From there, it was natural to branch out into theories of galaxy formation, which depend on reams of accurate measurements of stellar mass and motion. The latter subject might, at rare intervals, generate a small public fuss, but except in cases where he has a responsibility to aid the professional prospects of a graduate student—ape behavior, but they are his trustful little chimps—he shares his data and his ideas freely. It may not have helped his professional standing, but it has certainly left more time for teaching.

Saskia sleeps on. It bothers him that he is attracted to small women. It’s probably a control thing. Not that he could control her. In fact, what he seems to miss most about the brief time they were together is the way she ran circles around him. A scientist needs his paradigms jostled. Of course she’s right that he likes to be an observer, to feel removed from the fray. When he played with his model train neighborhoods as a kid, gazing through the windows of a house, imagining the inhabitants washing dishes or reading in a chair, he found it gratifying that they were merely living their lives, while he was forming hypotheses about their lives. But the fact that smokers like cigarettes doesn’t mean it’s good for them.

He realized some time ago that he may be kind and patient with people, but that’s pretty much all he is. He realized that the reason he tends to give people what they want is not because he’s generous, but because he likes predictability. If you offer people what they want, they’re likely to take it. It’s a way of getting them out of your hair, so you can go back to eating at home alone and playing the piano for nobody. He and Saskia were trading favorite quotes a few minutes ago, and he would never admit it to her, but there’s a quote that for years has occasionally come “unbidden” (as they say) to his mind, and every time it does so he’s overcome with the feeling that it’s the most important advice anyone has ever offered about human relations. The reasons he wouldn’t admit it to her are, first, that it seems so sentimental, and second, that it’s so comically, or maybe sadly, at odds with the way he’s lived his life, or anyway with the outward appearance of the way he’s lived his life. He doesn’t know the origin of the quote, and of course he could google it, but he doesn’t want to know, because it’s probably from a Coke commercial, or some Disney cartoon song sung by simpering forest animals. The quote is, “Shower the people you love with love.”

Saskia sleeps on.

He wonders if he’s ever made it clear to Mette how much she means to him. He wonders if Saskia had any idea how upset he was when she left him. (Is “left” the right word? It was so brief.) On the other hand, who would want a person to stay with them solely because the person knew they would be miserable otherwise? That’s manipulation. Saskia said her father was manipulative. In the past couple of hours Mark has been feeling more and more anxious. It’s partly the flight, but also, suddenly, he’s afraid for Mette. It’s maddening that he has no way to assess the validity of his fear, since he knows nothing. He wonders if it’s his own fault that he knows nothing.

He breathes deeply for several minutes, then takes refuge in the book again. Dawn comes early, but no one raises the shades on their windows because many passengers are still sleeping. He returns to the galley to ask about another cup of coffee and is assured it’s no trouble by the same woman as before, who he could swear is on the verge of giving him her telephone number. Returns to his seat, reads. The book makes him think of Saskia’s claim, or charge, that he and Mette are alike. He wonders whether Mette, like himself, might benefit from someone attempting to coax her out of a predilection for solitude that serves her well in some ways but badly in others. He wonders whether, during all these years in which he has been pleasing himself in his email exchanges with her, he has been failing her.

Daylight glows around the shades, which remain lowered, while Saskia and most of the other passengers sleep on. Some dozen young people watch their first movie of the day. Eventually stewards and stewardesses begin to move along the aisles, then one of them gets on the PA system and announces the imminence of breakfast. A few shades are raised, which brightens the cabin, which wakes more people who raise their shades, and suddenly it’s a bright new day, in fact dazzling, thanks to the wondrously reliable 4.6-billion-year-old G-type main-sequence star rising in the southeast of the nitrogen-blue sky and the brilliant carpet of greenhouse-worsening but—on the plus side—albedo-enhancing white clouds below. Mark’s wristwatch says 4:00 a.m. Local time is nine. They will land in two hours, or crash in approximately one hundred minutes. (Most airplane accidents occur on approach.)

Saskia wakes and stretches.

“Did you sleep well?” he asks.

“Mm,” she murmurs drowsily. Another thing he remembers about her—her difficulty waking. On each of the five mornings she woke in his house he brought her coffee in bed, then worked downstairs for an hour before she appeared. She apologizes for making him get up, goes to the lavatory. When she returns to her seat she still seems stunned.

“They’ve just started serving breakfast,” he says.

“Mm.” She yawns. Then she says, “Thomas had a nervous breakdown. When I was four. Tried to kill himself. Part of me thinks I should be compassionate, but another part thinks the whole thing was a performance. He’s one of these charismatic types