Letting in the Light

Tulip Tree leaf photographed by Ray Zimmerman.

Smith was always the first to see returning comets. That was his reputation. He had even discovered and named a few. “How do you make a great discovery?” one of his students had asked, distracting befuddled classmates from a particularly technical lecture.

Smith went silent for a minute and mused upon the subject. How could he tell them? Set out to make a great discovery, and you will fail. Learn to love the process. Become a part of the quiet isolation of an observatory at night. Breathe under starlight until it is a part of you.

“Spend enough time observing, and you will see something,” he replied.

“So, it’s just a numbers game?”

“More or less,” Smith answered, unwilling to discuss the relationship between a scholar and the scholar’s investigations. Enough time behind the telescope, in the lab, or combing through archaic texts, and your mind guides you to the discovery.

That was a month ago.

“Tonight, I watch, and perhaps I will see something.”

No one answered in the isolated facility.

He recalled a conversation he had overheard in the University hallways. “That old man has spent so much time watching stars that if you cut him, he would bleed starlight.”

Perhaps so, he thought as he set the telescope to the coordinates where he expected activity and watched for a while.

The moon rose, just a sliver. “How convenient; too much moonlight obliterates the view of heavenly bodies.”

A coyote howled. Smith had seen coyotes trot along the perimeter fence and heard them howl in the distance, but this one seemed much closer. When the beast howled, the ancient star myths came to life.

The crescent moon had risen higher, and Smith saw Artemis driving her chariot across the sky as the great bear ascended in the north.

The isolated points of light in the constellation converged and became a living bear trudging across the vault of heaven. The bear became Callisto, the water nymph who gazed longingly at a distant river. She spoke to Boötes. “You are blessed, my son. Zeus is your father, but now we are both here in the sky, forever.”

“Serves her right for breaking her vows, the Tart,” Artemis said.

“But it was against her will,” said Smith.

Artemis paid no attention to him but slapped the reins against her steeds so that her silver chariot sped faster across the sky.

Callisto vanished, and the bear became the constellation again. A few of its stars became the Big Dipper, the picture within a picture, sometimes called an asterism. The two pointer stars became grizzly bears, and the other five became wolves watching the bears.

“Just the way I left them,” Coyote said.

“So now I am dreaming Native American star myths. By the way, how did you get in here? I must be hallucinating.”

“You are not. I am of the desert and move like sand. You can’t keep sand out.”

“But you are not real.”

“I am as real as the desert,” Coyote said. “You are such a dedicated skywatcher that starlight has gotten under your skin. I gave you a gift when I howled -- I let in more light.”

With that, Coyote turned and was gone. The night sky resumed its normal appearance, and Smith examined it with the telescope before checking the digital readout on his instruments.

There was the comet, exactly when and where he had expected it.

Smith recorded the time, date, and coordinates in his notebook. As he rose from his chair, he nicked his thumb on a rough surface on the edge of the desk. “Ouch! I have been meaning to fix that,” he uttered.

He reached for his handkerchief to staunch the wound, but only light poured forth. Red and green, it danced among the stars. He applied a band-aid, but the light leaked around the edges.

Smith sealed the wound with a second, larger band-aid. He felt a bit weak. “Even if you are only bleeding light, stopping the bleeding is a good idea.”

The observatory phone rang, and he jumped. “That phone never rings. Well, not often. Hello?”

“Smith. Did you see it?’ It was a colleague.

“Yes. The comet was precisely where I expected it.”

“No. I mean the Northern Lights. We don’t often see them here.”

“Yes. They appeared directly over the observatory exactly when I…never mind. I know precisely when they appeared. I was distracted, however. I didn’t get any measurements.”

“Smith! You are never distracted.”

“I was tending to a minor injury.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. It was just a little light bleeding. I will make a note of the occurrence now.”

As he wrote in his notebook, a coyote howled in the distance.