Bright Objects

DIVINATIONS

BARELY AN HOUR BEFORE MY first death on a warm night in January 1995—when I blacked out in a crumpled Toyota south of a town called Jericho—a bright object was sighted somewhere in the constellation of Virgo, the sign of the maiden, not far from a star named Porrima, after the Roman goddess of prophecy.

When I died for the second time, in August 1997, inside the floral bedroom of a country house as Chopin’s Nocturnes played, the same object, visible to the world for months by then—the talk of backyard barbecues and press junkets in both hemispheres—had reached its maximum apparent magnitude of minus three, the moment of its greatest brightness as viewed from Earth, before it began to retreat from our inner solar system and slowly disappear.

What happened in between is the story I will tell, a story that took place under the eye of a comet, the last great comet of that millennium: the Comet St. John.

When I close my eyes and peer as dreamers do into the mind’s darkness, I can still see it—a streak of light suspended in motion, brighter than Sirius, brighter even than Jupiter. It was forty-four light-seconds from our planet on the night of my second death, when I found myself being borne out of the house, the voices of paramedics in my ears like insects chirring, the blue-red headlights bruising the dark. It was the last thing I saw, there above the ghost gum trees before the van door shut and, with it, my brain: a torch-star with tails, white and blue-green; a winged creature in flight.

I wonder sometimes about the last time it was seen, appearing much the same to the eyes of the pharaohs and Assyrians as it had to mine—gorgeous and strange, a question. What other lives were altered by its course? What events understood only in the shadow of its passing?

It was not until the end that I saw St. John for what it was, a sign of destruction and strange rebirth, and then all that had occurred seemed obvious somehow; inevitable as the looping line of its course. But the truth it would reveal within my own small life was there from the start, when we were all blind, when the comet still hid in the dark skies above our heads—a nucleus of white fire, streaming its tails of dust and ion, and sodium-blue, those compounds we all came from.

DARK SKIES

1.

SOME MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT IT unhealthy for a new widow to begin work in a funeral home, especially the same one that just months before had sent off her husband in a premium rosewood casket. But Jericho was a small town, and I was suited to the business. I grew fond of the ritual chores, the somber quiet, the tight-lipped atmosphere of wood polish and plush carpet and heavy drapes. I enjoyed the feeling of marshaling the stricken troops to church, and the soothing sound of a casket closing. I knew the tone to take with the bereaved, knew how to slide around details as if by way of a network of delicate balustrades, to deflect death. But neither was I afraid of allowing the Reaper into the reception room as I served tea to those customers I liked best, who announced themselves with a look that was naked and steely at once, who wanted no part in a pantomime.

The work tired my body and stilled my brain, and offered at least some prospect of sleep at the end of the day. I often had the sense of moving through water, and imagined that if I could just accumulate enough days behind me as mindlessly as possible, I might at last look up to find I had gained distance from the horizon of all that had happened, and see the approach of some kind of shore.

I can still hear the voice of Clarence Bell, the director of Bell Funerals, bemoaning in his soft Midlands accent that another customer was late with their deposit, or intent on printing their own order of service booklets, or bringing their own roses. As soon as I appeared at reception in the mornings he would approach in his ambling wide-paced way, diminutive in his overlarge gray suit, and begin shaking his head a few steps from me, emitting little puffs of indignant disbelief as he spoke, half under his breath, as though obliged to relate a string of dirty jokes.

Clarence had a drawn, adenoidal look. His sharp dark eyes would dart around as if searching for escape, and sometimes if I spoke too suddenly, he would jump with the nervous quickness of a cornered marsupial. By the end of any service he always appeared deflated somehow, like he had puffed out too much air, at last resigned to facts which despite being routine appeared to wound him afresh each day.

I knew the morning debrief was over when Clarence drew out a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, lowered his face into it and, with an equine flurry, blew his nose. I had learned early on that my role in this exchange was as a passive witness, and that after nodding and sighing a few times myself in sympathy, I should prepare his coffee without rejoinder or delay, which he would receive in his office in grateful silence. From my station behind the tall mahogany reception desk, I would then commence my review of the day’s appointments, peering out every so often through the shop windows at the wide Victorian-era street just waking up, and measure my smile for the first customer, as Clarence had instructed: sincere yet restrained, with a touch of thoughtful gravity.

That summer, Bell Funerals had been asked to oversee the grandest service in the recent memory of our town, and we were all feeling the pressure. Joseph Evans, the fifty-five-year-old eldest son of a once-prominent pastoralist family, and a man of exacting tastes in matters of ceremony, wanted a stately farewell for his mother, a farewell worthy of the woman she had been. Patricia Evans—who had died suddenly after a battle with vascular dementia—was remembered locally as a no-nonsense, capable woman who, despite her affluence and acumen in business, had cared more for others than she had for herself. Widowed in her prime, she had run the ancestral farm and raised her sons alone, while supporting numerous charitable causes and becoming revered for the pumpkin scones she baked for the Country Women’s Association.

In the days between Patricia’s death and her funeral, Joseph often turned up unannounced, asking for Clarence at reception, with a notebook in hand. He was by turns meditative and tense, but always polite, with a patrician voice and a taste for twill trousers paired with Craftsman boots, as might be expected of a genteel stockman, albeit one with a ponytail.

Because the time we had to plan the event was in no way relative to its grandeur—which seemed set to rival the send-off of King George VI—it was surprising how often Joseph would lapse unprompted into ruminations about floral symbolism or the transmigration of souls, just at the point when he needed to finalize his choice of rose spray or casket. At times when he spoke, his palms would float upward, like a saint presiding over a scene in which Clarence and I were the fallen.

I had seen it before of course, and it was natural, this seizing of the dead one’s funeral—with all its potential intricacy and pomp, to plan and to stage—as a means of sublimating the freshness of grief. Dead bodies can only be held in cool storage for so long, and it’s terrible, really, how quickly a service must be held. For grief is a kind of rational madness, and new grief an alien planet, and it is not therapeutic for all in its exile to be faced with the finer decisions of commemorative slideshows and casket sateens. The funeral of Patricia Evans, it was clear, was not just a means of distraction for Joseph, but an event burdened with the significance of a final gesture, a monument to his love and grief.

On the January afternoon I’ll mark as the beginning—although as always there were other beginnings, casting their cells into this one and declaring themselves only later—Joseph arrived for his first appointment an hour early, with a furtive-looking young brunette in tow. He stood at reception in a white oxford shirt and chinos, with what appeared to be a shark’s tooth on a cord around his throat, wearing a look of patient expectation. When, at the sound of the bell, I emerged from the storeroom, he summoned a smile and with a rueful sigh glanced at my name tag.

Ah, hello, Sylvia, he said, his voice mellifluous and warm, as though I were an old friend. His large eyes were almost a true cornflower blue, more striking for the fact that his skin—owing to the shock of loss, I supposed—had acquired a grayish pallor. As his gaze ranged around the room and the noonday sun lit his silver-blond ponytail, I noticed that even in obvious grief, his face had a childlike openness, as though the wonders and torments of life were still striking him as new.

You’re a picture—like something out of a noir film, at this old desk, he said a little nostalgically, before introducing himself and noting that he’d spoken with Clarence on the phone.

Patricia had been dead for only forty-eight hours, but as Joseph began explaining when Clarence appeared, it was especially important to decide on musical arrangements. Due to his appreciation for Clarence’s professional input, Joseph had invited his friend Zara, a trained soprano, to trial some recessional songs during their meeting in his office, and had taken the liberty of arriving early, to ensure there was time enough afterward to discuss the flowers.

Even before Joseph’s interruption, the day had been destined for chaos. Clarence had already held three consults with newly bereaved families without a break, workmen were laying new carpet in the Serenity Chapel, and I had just returned, clammy and flushed, after finding myself in a broken-down hearse among the wheat fields out of town, with the new apprentice and a casketed corpse due for post-funeral delivery at the local crematorium. Having coordinated a solution that involved hitching a ride back to Bell’s with a truck driver and delivering the corpse in the company van without a moment to spare, I’d then had to soothe the nerves of Clarence’s daughter, Tania, our mortician. She was red-faced with agitation at a delayed order of cavity fluid, despite having spent the morning in the tranquility of a cool mortuary basement with no one alive to harass or detain her.

I was still catching my breath at reception when the stranger appeared.

The sun streamed through the window, heedless of my attempt to shield it with one hand as I sat slumped over the accounts. For a moment I closed my eyes, seeking refuge from somewhere deep in my brain, and instead finding the first diffuse throbs of a migraine. Down the hall in Clarence’s office, Zara had cycled through an eclectic selection already—Ave Maria, Somewhere over the Rainbow, You Belong to Me—and was just commencing Bocelli’s rousing aria Time to Say Goodbye. Her voice vibrated through the rooms like a pealing bell; I could feel it in my skull.

The stranger must have been standing there for some time before I opened my eyes, and saw him appraising me in a sharp way, as if I were a kind of equation. He looked a little like a rancher from some other place and time in his chambray shirt and old pointed boots. I apologized at once, straightening in my chair and gesturing behind me toward the source of the voice now nearing its crescendo.

I mustn’t have heard the door, I said, forcing my face into a deferential smile. How can I help?

His face was raised in a quizzical look now, the kind that precedes a question, and for an instant I felt his eyes register the scar below my right eye.

I was hoping for some information, was all he said, his accent American, his shoulders shrugging in a way that seemed nervous and involuntary. I was nodding now, and setting out pamphlets in a fan shape to face him: Saying Goodbye: Resources for the Grieving; A Life Remembered: Memorial Options; Bell Funerals: A Gentle Touch. I came out to stand by the side of the desk, unfolding the pamphlets and pointing at photos as I spoke.

We can assist with all stages of the service, from the planning to the day itself. We can accommodate all styles, small or large, religious or secular. Our aim is always for the day to unfold just as the family has envisioned.

Closer now, he peered in the direction my hands moved; here to a stock photo of sympathy lilies, there to a detail shot of the Serenity Chapel’s altar window, depicting the neutral vision of a tree with sprawling branches. From somewhere in the fibers of his shirt I could smell woodsmoke, tobacco, and something herbal. For an instant I felt light-headed, standing beside him as Zara sang her final soaring note, and I stopped speaking.

The moment seemed to stretch under the force of her voice, which held us within it, like airborne creatures waiting for release. At last there was silence. I took a breath and looked at the visitor, who was already looking at me. I supposed he was still reeling from the shock of new grief, which often ties the tongue and makes one slow.

I’m sorry you’ve found yourself here, I said, to ease him. We rarely have the pleasure of meeting people for happy reasons. Did you want to take a seat by the lounge, and look these over? Or, if you feel ready, I could take you through our selection of caskets and coffins.

At this he gave a noncommittal nod, not looking quite at me, and I wondered who it was he had lost. By this point, I’d usually been told. Perhaps some relative had forced him to come here too early, when naming the loved one in the grammar of the past tense was a new violence. I led him to the windowless display room behind reception, which itself had the aspect of a crypt or vault. I often ventured there between appointments for a few minutes of insulated silence in the glow of the downlights. It had beige walls and plush maroon carpet, a tone rather close to the color of dried blood.

I paused at the pedestal of false carnations, and tried to smile as I swept my hand behind me in a way I hoped was not too saleswoman-like. Stacked two by two in alcoves set into the walls were various vessels, stained or painted, accented with silver or gold, upholstered in different fabrics. The topmost caskets, at eye level, were the premium split-lid hardwoods. To show the comfort of their interiors, Clarence kept the head sections of their lids open. Each was lined with ruched velvet, satin, or crepe, and each had a pillow and matching throw draped over the lower lid, like a quilt just turned down for the night. When I walked down the aisle of the room, I would sometimes imagine I were aboard a train from another century, the alcoves like sleeper cabins with ornately carved bunk beds. Now and then I’d even feel a frisson of anticipation, as if I were settling into my snug quarters for a peaceful transcontinental journey.

I paused at the Polished Oak Classic, a popular midrange design with rounded corners and a navy velvet interior. Just point out any model you’d like to look at further, I offered, my voice seeming too loud in the silence.

The stranger peered with me into the vacant space, where a small white pillow lay.

I gestured to the inner lid. Some family members decide to have an image printed or embroidered here, something of significance to their loved one, such as a photo, symbol, or insignia. In this design, there’s also a drawer for keepsakes.

I didn’t look at him, but felt his intent stare, and wondered whether, like me, he was imagining a figure nestled inside the casket, their head resting right there on the pillow. We have many models, as you can see, and also a range of vaults, urns, and memorial plaques, I continued, feeling suddenly like a parrot.

I turned to face the man, and gave a sigh I hoped sounded sympathetic. It might also be that you’re still in shock. This isn’t a decision you have to make straightaway, of course.

He nodded furtively, and as he peered around I saw him draw a great breath. They’re very ornate, he said at last.

I smiled. These topmost ones are, but we also have simpler models, traditional coffins which are very serviceable.

When I gestured to the lower displays, and asked whether anything caught his eye, I saw in his face a flash of amusement, which passed as quickly as it had appeared. Just as I felt irritation and curiosity rising in equal measure and considered posing the bald question of why exactly he was here, I heard Clarence calling, and invited the man to peruse the displays at his leisure while I stepped away.

Clarence sighed when he saw me in the hall, and reached out to grip an ornamental pillar. From behind us I could hear the sound of voices and clinking teacups.

They’re on a break, he said, his eyes darting upward as if some saint had blessed him. Look, I don’t think I’m going to make my appointment at the livery stables, Sylvia. You’ll need to go in my stead—the owner will be away from tomorrow so we need to see him today. It’s to inspect the horse-drawn hearse Joseph wants for the procession.

He handed me a business card, blew his nose, and stood peering at the floor between us, breathing as if winded. It seemed the carpet work was exacerbating his allergies.

I didn’t know you had an appointment this afternoon, Clarence, I said. You didn’t put it in the book. How will I get there? All the cars are tied up, and you know I walk to work.

At this he laughed bitterly, shaking his head. Well, of course! Honestly, Sylvia, can this day get any worse? He sighed. A taxi is out of the question, the fare to Allandale would be astronomical. Oh, please try to sort something out!

When I turned around, dreading the prospect of walking home through the heat to collect my own car, I was surprised to see the stranger standing there a few yards away with his hands in his pockets. I wanted to thank you for the info, he said, smiling frankly for a moment before glancing down at his boots.

I nodded, feeling faint, resting my eyes for a moment on a square of carpet and wondering whether the air inside was really as warm as it seemed. I saw the man’s feet shift.

I could give you a lift. If you like.

This struck me as an extraordinary proposition from a stranger who hadn’t yet even volunteered his name. But I was so tired suddenly. For a moment I tried to measure the man, testing his effect on my instincts. He looked guileless and almost shy now as I appraised him, standing there holding his keys and pretending to notice the decorative molding on the ceiling. I saw that his nose was a little sunburned, and his eyes when he looked back at me were on the green side of blue. Perhaps in my tiredness I stared at him for an instant too long, as by the time I smiled and thanked him, I’d inexplicably formed the image of his profile as belonging to a soldier on a Roman coin. As he held the door open and I walked into the bright day, I hardly cared, suddenly, whether he was really some gentleman killer with a preference for funeral attendants.

We rarely guess the significance of crucial moments in life while they are happening. For so much of the time we are steering blind. Retrospect reveals the most seemingly minor decisions to have been a crossroads, dividing one life from another. Strange, now, to think that the chaos of that day—Clarence’s peevishness and the heat, the lack of cars, the need to inspect a horse-drawn hearse for an overblown funeral—combined to make me reckless enough to ride several kilometers out of town with a stranger. Had I not, I feel sure I’d never have seen him again, and life—unless I’m entirely deceived about the nature of free will—would have followed a different course.

This really is too kind of you, I said when I was installed in the passenger seat of his green Holden.

He smiled as he turned the ignition key and reversed, his eyes on the rearview mirror.

Your boss sounded stressed. Besides, I’m off work today.

His voice hadn’t lost its grave, tentative quality, but he seemed a little easier suddenly. I’d wondered whether to ask if he wanted to discuss service options further—it seemed unprofessional not to at least conclude the consultation and it was a way to pass the time—but I felt he might withdraw again if I did.

Instead, I asked about his accent. He said it was from Arizona. His family was from a farming town near the Grand Canyon. I pictured that red, yawning place, and asked how it was that he came to be here, in another farming town in a different hemisphere, and he said it was for work. He had a slow way of talking, seeming to measure his words so as not to waste them. For a moment we said nothing, but the silence wasn’t unpleasant. I watched him drive, one-handed and leaning back, without a spare movement.

Do you like your job? he asked suddenly as we were rounding the corner of the Rising Sun Hotel, a bluestone Victorian built during the gold rush.

I told him it occupied me, and that if I could be useful to devastated people, it was enough.

It seems ridiculous we haven’t exchanged names, I said at last, looking at him. I’m Sylvia, as you probably heard.

He told me his name was Theo, and I asked him what his work involved. He was a researcher, he said, at the observatory not far from town. I knew the place, a huddle of buildings and telescope domes on a mountain in the nearby national park, an area known for its volcanic rock formations and dark skies.

You’re an astronomer?

He gave a hesitant nod, as if astronomy were one remove from bootlegging or insider trading.

How fascinating, I replied. I suppose you know about the upcoming comet…?

For months now, and with increasing frequency, Comet St. John—ancient, rare, and huge—had been a presence in the local and international papers. Articles detailed its notable characteristics, its latest whereabouts as it journeyed toward us, how much time had passed since its previous visit, and what it was we could expect when it arrived, as if it were an international celebrity on tour. Editors made a sport of punning headlines—HOLY COMETS, HERE COMES ST. JOHN; CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE COMET KIND; ST. JOHN, PATRON SAINT OF THE SKIES.

Theo nodded, scratching his nose. We were out of town now, coasting through fields of dry grasses, passing the boulder-like shapes of sheep in the distance, old windmills barely moving, and the lone, stricken figures of gum trees reaching into the hot blue sky. My window was half-open to the rushing air, and sometimes the shriek of a crow or cockatoo would sear through the silence like a curse.

He glanced over, scanning my face. Yes, I know about it, he said with a sigh, looking back ahead. He might have been speaking of some notable local criminal, a near-mythical figure any thinking person in these parts was apprised of, a stealthy outlaw known to steal women and sheep and gold, who had never once been caught. I discovered it, he said abruptly. St. John is my last name. Theo St. John.

In the silence that followed, I heard the rush of air through my window. Then, as if of its own accord, my head began to nod, and I heard myself make an affirming noise, because I didn’t quite know what to think or say. While he drove on with his gaze ahead, seeming not to expect an answer, I felt the stirring of synapses in some region of my brain, the region still primed to look for meaning in happenstance, and, suddenly light-headed, closed my eyes.

Just that morning on my way to work, I had looked up at the signboard outside Our Lady of Perpetual Help on High Street, and noticed a new message below the one the young reverend, known for his efforts to attract new recruits with humor, had chosen for that week, which happened to be, LOOKING FOR A SIGN? HERE IT IS. Below this now in spidery capitals were the words, THE NAME OF THE STAR WAS BITTER—REV. 8:11, and finally, HEED ST. JOHN!

Perhaps because I had been vulnerable to certain kinds of fatalism that summer, I’d felt neither pity nor mirth upon reading those words, but rather a cold kind of recognition, which anticipated disaster as inevitable if not deserved—although on what scale, I couldn’t tell.

If news of the approaching comet had exposed these tendencies in me, I was not alone. Like the indicator dye used by doctors to reveal disturbances in the body, the comet seemed to be revealing us all to ourselves and to each other, in our various registers of fear, hope, and hubris, like clusters of divergent cells within the same host. And it was growing worse. Even in that moment, there in the car, I could sense it in myself, the dark dilation of fear, unfurling questions without answers, and the feeling of somehow being marked.

Because I wasn’t sure how much time had passed and I felt the need to break the silence, I glanced at Theo’s inscrutable face, and spoke. How amazing, to have discovered a comet. Its pending arrival has made quite a stir.

Without looking at me he nodded, and I saw the side of his mouth twitch in grim recognition. Yes. That can happen with comets.

I waited for more, but he only stared ahead. Through the passenger window now I could smell cow dung, hay, and dry earth. Looking out at the passing fields, I considered how, while much had been made of the town’s proximity to the observatory where an internationally significant comet had been found, precious little was known of the person who found it. As we lurched around a bend and I wondered whether the atmosphere between us had grown strange, I recalled references in the papers to the American researcher who had given the comet its name, but these references had always been vague. Some in town had formed the picture of a beleaguered recluse, shying away from the glare, and routinely declining to drop quotable sound bites to the reporters who approached him, a picture that I supposed might be true.

Now he was driving me to see an antique hearse. Despite my assumption that as a scientist he would have given no credence to the dark excitement and dread the comet was inspiring in some quarters, neither had he taken the opportunity to speak against it, to soothe nerves and undermine fearmongers with the tonic of calm, dispassionate scientific proofs. In fact, sitting there beside him, it occurred to me that nothing in his demeanor, when he spoke of the comet, disproved the notion that it really was a portent of doom. As I reminded myself, Theo was, of course, for reasons he hadn’t yet shared, living in grief, which as I well knew lent its shade to everything.

I looked at him and smiled.

Seeing me, he nodded rather stiffly. Almost there.

Perhaps, I thought, it was the intrusions on his privacy caused by the comet that he most resented. Perhaps he shared the ambivalence of some artists about the consequences of success—as soon as their creations gained any public appreciation, those creations ceased to really live for the artist, and instead became a threat to the inner work needed to unearth fresh material. Leaning back, I tried to imagine what it might feel like to search the skies each night for new life, and one day to find it, an object unknown to human records, reborn with your name. Such searching could, I supposed, lead one into a kind of madness—contemplating each day the infinity of space, from the confines of a human body on Earth. I had thought so even as a child, when I had watched the skies on camping trips with my father, sitting on the car roof beneath the Southern Cross with our star maps, taking turns to peer up through a portable telescope which, I now recalled with some regret, I had given a younger cousin years ago, less out of goodwill than because looking at it reminded me too much of those times.

I looked back at Theo to find him gazing gravely ahead at the wide dirt road unrolling before us, his back suddenly rigid, both hands now gripping the wheel. I wondered whether I had spoken out of turn or upset him somehow, and remembered how short-tempered the grieving can be, so I kept quiet, closing my eyes to the breeze on my face.

But then he began to speak, almost as if to himself, while staring out at the road. It hasn’t been here for four thousand two hundred and seven years. Its nucleus is eight times the size of Halley’s. It’s going to be—he said, pausing suddenly—very bright.

Before he could go on, I felt the car slowing and realized we had arrived. Beyond a line of willows and eucalypts I could see stables and sheds and a weatherboard house, and nearer to us, a pair of Clydesdale horses, white and brown, chewing hay and swishing their tails. A sign staked into the ground announced PRESTIGE LIVERY STABLES. I looked over at Theo and asked whether he wanted to come in, but he shook his head.

I can wait, he said, raising a folded copy of the Sydney Morning Herald like a flag.

The stable owner was a ruddy-faced man of about sixty in jeans and a polo shirt, who strode out of the office with half an apple in hand. When I explained I was visiting on behalf of Bell Funerals, he hurled the apple into the scrub behind us and in a deep smoker’s voice told me to follow him. The hearse was one of several other carriages in a large barn behind the house. In one swift movement he pulled away the drop cloth covering it and there it appeared, a magician’s trick, a funeral carriage from another century, all glass and black lacquer with brass lamps, like something out of a romance of knights and maidens.

It takes two of our drays, he was saying, four in pairs if preferred, and you can choose between white, black, or bay. We want them to match, of course. Some clients like a little regalia for the horses—an ostrich plume looks very noble.

As he spoke, detailing how the driver would hold the reins from the box seat, dressed in a black cape and top hat, I had to smile at the theater of it all.

Everything goes over very well, as a send-off gesture, he concluded. The guests enjoy it. Something to talk about afterward, over tea and all that.

Following him into the office to collect some pricing pamphlets, I wondered how many caskets the hearse had seen, how many dignified processions with no one left alive now to remember them.

I had only been twenty minutes, but the sun had lowered in the sky when I returned