“Like the money shot in a porno film,” she says.
He blushes. “I guess so.”
“Oh man! It barely fits!”
“Please, stop. Eclipses are wonderful.”
“Sorry.”
He google-viewed the area ahead of time and found a fire station along a county road eight miles east of St. Clair that had a paved open area on the off-road side. Saskia is back on her phone. “The media is calling this The Great American Eclipse.”
He makes an unhappy sound. “That’s the kind of appropriation I’m talking about.”
“We could sell hats. Make the Eclipse Great Again. It would be a MEGA-eclipse.”
A silence follows. References to Trump’s election still tend to kill conversation. Then he says, “I’m taking the long view. In a million years, the continents will barely have budged and life will have started diversifying again.”
“One generation passes away and another generation comes, but the earth abides forever.”
“Isn’t that George R. Stewart?”
“It might be, if he was one of the kings of Israel. It’s from Ecclesiastes.”
“Another thing I’ve never read.”
“You should. It’s Epictetus before Epictetus.”
“My next assignment.”
“You liked Epictetus.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t. I like assignments. Here we are.” He turns into the access area alongside the station and gets out to ask permission from the volunteer firefighters on duty. Climbs back in. “They say no problem, we should park in the gravel lot on the other side.”
They leave the windows wide open so the seats won’t melt, carry knapsacks with water and lunch toward the back of the concrete-block building. As they round the corner, three young people setting up a telescope come into view. Mark hesitates for a fraction of a second, then continues toward them. It turns out the two men were college roommates six years ago, while the woman is a girlfriend of one of them. They rendezvoused in Chicago last night and got up at five this morning to drive down. One roommate majored in economics, the other in communications. The woman is a photographer. The men do most of the talking, about their roomie days, their corporate jobs, their ideas, their ambitions, while Saskia teases out from the woman that an exhibit of her photography just opened at a prestigious gallery in New York City. “Wow,” she says, “what’s your name?” She googles it. The woman’s a young star.
The sky is mostly clear, but Mark must have mentioned the possibility of clouds, because one of the young men says, “I’ve heard the sky often clears right before an eclipse.”
“Why would it do that?” Mark asks.
“Something to do with the air cooling.”
“If anything, that would have the opposite effect.”
“That’s right,” the other young man chimes in, “cool air can’t hold as much moisture as warm air.”
“It’s not a question of holding moisture,” Mark says, “it has to do with the kinetic energy of the water molecules—”
Saskia wanders off before the two young men decide to beat Mark to death. The eclipse doesn’t begin for another twenty minutes, and then it takes ninety minutes to reach totality, so she’s got plenty of time. She walks to the edge of the paved area and continues across a grassy field until she comes to a line of trees. Turns to look back. She’s standing at the higher end of a long rise in the terrain, so she can see two or three miles westward. Bright green fields and darker woods, low hills. Ferociously hot haze. Hurry up, Moon, and show this fucking sun a thing or two.
Her eye lingers on Mark a hundred yards away, talking to the men. Yes, he’s twelve years older, and there’s still a part of her that’s slightly embarrassed by that. But it’s a free fucking country, right? It works well for her that they live 230 miles apart. They’ve been seeing each other every second weekend for about a year now, alternating between Ithaca and New York. He still works all the time, but let’s face it, she does, too. And Mette doesn’t seem to mind his occasional intrusions. Saskia was surprised at first, but probably shouldn’t have been. They invited Mette to come with them to see the eclipse, but she declined. “I’d just be in the way of the two lovebirds,” she hooted. That word is a source of never-failing mirth to her.
The glare out here is ridiculous. Saskia wanders back to hunker down in the narrow strip of shade at the bottom of the fire station’s rear wall. The young men announce that the eclipse has begun. The three young people are taking turns looking through the telescope and Mark is holding a rectangle of welder’s glass in front of his eyes. He gave Saskia a piece to call her own, so she leaves the shade to look up. Sure enough, in the ghostly pale image in the midnight window, there’s a neat round bite in the sun’s side. What perfect teeth the Moon has! Eat everything on your plate, little Moon!
She sits back in the shade and after a few minutes Mark joins her. “It’s good of you to come with me for this,” he says.
“Not at all. I’ve always wanted to see a solar eclipse.”
“Still, aren’t rehearsals starting tomorrow?”
“I’ll be there in time.” She’s flying back to New York City tonight. He’s taking a train to Syracuse. She takes hold of his hand. (She has always loved his hands.) “We’re coming up on our first-year anniversary.”
“Unless it’s our twenty-third,” he says.
“Hm. Let me think about that. I have to decide which is less depressing.”
He looks pained. “Why depressing?”
“I don’t mean that. I mean—” She has no idea what she means. After a moment she says, “It’s a strange path, is all. But it’s not like I value conventional paths.”
He waits for her to go on.
