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

bathroom, ill, and fell, sighing, into a seat that was not his.
    Denise sat in the middle of the plane, sleeping at times, hopelessly awake at others. She lay under her blanket for a long time, eyes open and glistening. Then she pushed the blanket from her and noiselessly left her seat, padding down the aisle to the very last row, where Eli sat, leaning against a carpeted wall with his hands together in his lap. His glasses were off so that he could sleep, but he wasn’t sleeping; he was staring ahead. Kathy was far away. Denise moved into the seat next to him and pulled the blanket across them both. He looked over silently and touched her head.
    Manday pulled his shade against the golden bars and closed his eyes. Swift turned off his reading light. The underwater darkness was complete. People settled into their places with whispers and sighs, and even the stewardesses dozed off up front, near first class, sideways in a row with their white boots up on the seats. There was no one in the rear of the plane to hear the few quiet words floating in the last row. There was no one to see Denise talking in Eli’s ear as he sat staring ahead of him. Or when she touched his chin and turned his head toward her, when she kissed him with a hand spread out on his chest. If someone had seen the two friends, eyes closed, almost asleep in grief, kissing and holding each other in the last row, would they even have said a word? After all, for them, nothing on that flight, nothing from the moment of the accident until their arrival in California, was real.
    But three days earlier, on the first night of the storm, they all lay innocently under the stars. Kathy sat in her station, far from her husband, bored and confused by all these shouts of “Time!” sprouting in the air. Around her, young scientists were rising from their chairs, pointing, grinning excitedly and then they would yell “Time! Time!” And though Kathy knew it couldn’t be anything as literary or religious as she imagined, still she amused herself with the idea that she was caught in a starry revival tent. That these precocious introverts had seen some vision and were witnessing, shaking like Quakers in a meetinghouse. She knew it wasn’t true, but she also knew that eventually someone would explain it to her—these people were forever explaining—and she enjoyed her own version for a few minutes. Eli, Denise, the others, handling snakes. It made all their passion seem ridiculous.
    Suddenly, a little girl went running across the parapet. It was Lydia, Swift’s daughter, a five-year-old who had a kind of wild, baby animal look beneath her pigtails, running close to the wall. Kathy was surprised to feel her stomach clench, and she shouted. The girl stopped, and Kathy shouted again. She coaxed her away from the wall. Lydia was looking for a monkey that had long since been taken inside. The girl refused to believe it was gone. Kathy asked about the shouts of “Time!”
    “They’re seeing meteors" was how Lydia explained it, looking doubtful that this was a real question.
    “I don’t see them,” Kathy said, looking up. Nothing but that foreign spread of stars. “Are you sure?”
    “Well, you have to look very hard. My dad tries to show me, my sister can see them. You really have to keep looking in the same place and sort of make a wish for them.”
    “I thought it was the other way around.”
    This idea was too confusing for poor Lydia and she stood silently, letting her doll’s feet drag the stone. Her hand went to her mouth, and Kathy watched her slowly chewing something. Her nails? Nervous habits in such a young girl? Or had she found something to eat?
    “Did you see where Riki went?” Lydia asked again, hopefully. This was the monkey’s name.
    “I think he said something about baking a cake.”
    “Monkeys can’t bake cakes!” Lydia said, grinning, something in her eyes saying she believed quite the opposite.
    “Oh yes they can,” Kathy told her,