Most momentously, Rudy introduced Mark to science fiction. It might seem strange that, after Lost in Space, he hadn’t found sci-fi on his own, but he had always read what his mother gave him. From now on, Mark read whatever Rudy recommended—Asimov’s Foundation series, Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Herbert’s Dune, Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar.
Mark returned to the same music camp every summer for the next five years. It constituted the happiest part of his life. He paid for the second month in the last three of those years from money he’d earned on a paper route years ago and had never spent. He quit the trumpet, took up bassoon, continued with piano. He sang at meals and in the chorus. He became infatuated with a series of girls—Mendelssohn Violin Concerto; Poulenc Flute Sonata; Brahms E-minor Cello Sonata—but never told them (could they hear his applause?). After concerts, before curfew, he sometimes lay out in the big field, looking for shooting stars, imagining heartfelt conversations. Rudy recommended Niven’s Ringworld, Clarke’s Childhood’s End. Mark performed the Beethoven Opus 10 number 3. Most days he could hold the tetherball court against all comers, and he thought of Susan, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, who could hold a pool table all night at the various bars she hung out in, getting free drinks. Mark got nothing, but who cared, he liked it, the rhythm, the mesmerizing orbit of the ball. At the ends of the summers, in the camp yearbook, Sharps and Flats, girls wrote that he was sweet and funny and should never change. One girl he had a suffocating crush on (Mozart Bassoon Concerto) wrote, “It’s been really great playing next to someone who wasn’t boring.” Actual love notes he had to write himself, and did so, in the margins of his own yearbook, thinking he was being lighthearted: “I’ll miss you so, dearest Mark, please come back, I cannot live without you. Rachel.” (Rachel had been the Poulenc.)
In other seasons he lay on his bed on the weekends and read about time travel, galactic empires, teleportation, aliens benign and malign. He visited Rudy in the Bronx and half-conquered his fear of the subway. Whenever he smelled fresh-cut grass on a hot day the unbidden mental image was so strong it was almost like teleportation, back to the big field in Maine between the dining hall and the concert hall. On many nights when the moon was down, he lay out in the side yard and stargazed. (When he came out early, the twilit sky was the deep melting blue of his Matchbox Iso Grifo.) Boston’s light pollution was worse than Maine’s, but it was on these suburban nights that he learned how to recognize the constellations as they appeared in the sky, rather than on a chart. Of all of them, Cygnus aroused most powerfully the emotion he now thought of, complete with quotation marks, as “the nameless feeling” or, when he was in the mood to wryly self-dramatize, “wordless longing.” Of course he was aware that he had thus named the nameless feeling and found words for the wordless longing. Susan called this “effing the ineffable.”
Why Cygnus? Mark pondered this, lying out in the yard in the aluminum lounge chair with the hollow rubber straps that thunked like bullfrogs when you plucked them. Cygnus was the Swan, but it was also called the Northern Cross, and maybe he liked the balance, or maybe the rivalry, with the Aussies’ Southern Cross. (Theirs was flashier, but ours was more beautiful.) He liked the fact that the Northern Cross was almost but not quite regular: a form flexed as though by motion. Motion implied migration, and many species of Cygnus migrated. Unlike most constellations, Cygnus actually looked like what it was supposed to represent, a long-necked bird with a bright tail, its two wings curving slightly backward. There was something poignant about that long neck, Mark couldn’t put his finger on it, but you could see how it was stretched forward, reaching toward its destination, maybe with “wordless longing,” which reminded him of that other migration he still dreamed of, namely his own to a lunar colony, or to a domed city on Mars. Or one that science fiction novels had taught him to yearn for: when a good boy’s lonely contemplation of the night sky was rewarded with one of the stars brightening, lowering, proving to be an alien spaceship, landing, opening, welcoming.
• • •
Thinking of the magic of randomness—how amazing it was that as soon as you got twenty-three people together in a room, the probability that two of them shared a birthday was over 50 percent. But maybe the really interesting question was, why did the 50.73 percent probability, which was provable, strike everyone, including Mark, as counterintuitive? Why would our intuition, evolved over millions of years, be wrong about the incidence of coincidences?
• • •
Susan was living with friends but occasionally came by to see him, mainly to slaughter him at pool down in the basement. He understood
