Read Online The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel by Andrew Sean Greer - Free Book Online

find that both chairs were empty at the post; Denise was walking back across the stone, and Eli had disappeared somewhere in the red-spotted darkness. Where was he? It panicked her. Then she saw him: He was approaching Manday’s wife, pointing to her golden combs. What was he doing over there? He squatted beside the woman’s chair and began to talk. She heard a boy shouting happily in English, but she ignored it. Later, she would recall that he had shouted “Catch! Catch!”
    Another call of “Time!” Kathy looked up and saw not a meteor, but the comet up there in Centaurus. She admired comets, creatures that didn’t race violently through the sky but quietly and coldly burned above without burning out, returning; they were things to count on. She looked down and saw Lydia lying on her lambskin. She thought of what her husband had said on the night she had met him. Comets, girls with long pale braids. Careless girls. Girls with heads full of thoughts, full of details from the tiring day. Girls walking slowly toward their vanities, undressing, blind to the thousands watching them from below. She felt they were in danger.
    At the time, she hardly noticed their positions: Denise walking back to her seat, stopping and pointing; Eli squatting near Manday’s wife; Kathy herself craning her neck to look at Lydia. A perfect triangle. It meant nothing; yet, looking back, this triangle on the sultan’s parapet would seem like such a crucial sign to miss. Such a clear image. That was when it happened.
    She would remember this moment all wrong. She would place Denise’s shout one second before the accident itself, nearly in time, and she would make it into a warning shout and not what it was: a call of annoyance, a shout that they were doing things wrong. In memory, she would wreathe the scene with worry. But there was no worry. There was no time for it. The baseball went flying from a boy’s freckled hand, through the dark meteor-spangled air toward the telescope—so low that Swift or Manday or even the sultan could have caught it if they had been looking—into the awkward palm of the grinning island boy. No one could have reacted yet—it was just a thrown ball—but someone watching might have noticed how wrong the next moment looked: the curled position of the boy’s arm, his jagged stance on the ladder, his other arm flying up to balance in the air. That was the moment to yell; not before, where she would place Denise’s warning shout. For some reason, though, she needed to remember it that way.
    Everyone turned at the boy’s cry, but it was just a fall from a short ladder. Eli would describe it later as a yelp, a crack of worry but not of terror, which somehow would seem wrong but true. The boy’s arm was tangled in the telescope, and he began to pull it with him. The only one who took action was Swift: He held the telescope upright so that the boy fell free of it. He fell, his arm unloosed, and this made his body turn so that he landed with his full weight against the wall of the overlook; and the wall, a bad repair from the war, crumbled beneath him. There was no cry this time. It was too quick to catch—the interval between the boy hitting the wall and his disappearance over the cliff.
    The first silence was of curiosity. Where had he gone? Surely… surely… and then the second silence came in a white burning flash. Kathy still craning her neck, Denise still pointing, Swift still holding the telescope from danger. This silence was the moment when their eyes revealed to their minds, like terrified messengers, what had to be true.
    The scene released its catch. Swift threw the telescope aside and leaned over the wrecked hole in the wall, shouting with the sultan, acting as if there were something they could do. Those already standing raced to the edge, followed close behind by those, like Eli, who had left their seats. Some did not run, but grabbed their children or wives and held them close. The baseball-playing