Lux Et Veritas
IV.
Senior year, Viv read an article in a magazine. She was sprawled across Tran’s bed, otherwise known as her bed, and she was crying, and Tran could do nothing for her, not even when he undressed and spread as much of his skin across hers as possible.
This article was about light pollution, and about how nowhere in the world is the sky truly dark anymore, not even above the Grand Canyon. We’ve just been putting light and light and light out there and now we’ll never be able to really see the stars again.
“Fuck,” Viv was crying. She and Tran were coming to the end—it was inevitable, the hip joint cleaving—but they didn’t yet know.
Only the Eight could comfort her, only all eight gathered in the common room, perched on the arm of Beauty (still redolent of urine!) or sinking into Orange Couch, poked with memories. A new plan hatched. Just for one night. Just for even, say, half an hour. Half an hour was probably the most we could manage. But it was important. Another Idea, a bookend to the first. We would graduate in a month. We might deny it now—yes, we Deny it!—but we would spread and scatter. We thought there was something holding us, we thought we were braided together, eight strands in a cowboy’s trusty lasso. It wouldn’t seem terribly dramatic at first (one shouldn’t say, for instance, “When we meet again it shall be with wives and husbands and kids, middle-aged and bloodshot, decent lives, two attorneys, one doctor, one scientist, one architect, one teacher, one novelist, one mystery, dinner out at an Italian restaurant, a pleasant reunion, good laughs/great tenderness, a forgetting of certain things, calculus homework interrupted by a naked girl napping, a time when we were awake every day at three a.m.”), yet perhaps the gradual lessening of intimacy hurts worse than losing one another entirely for two decades. But whatever. All that was completely irrelevant. Viv had had her Idea, and so it became our Idea.
Les and Joey wore Ali’s pantyhose over their faces, which they didn’t mind at all. Viv and Tran (fighting, hissing at each other, swiftly breaking) were responsible for breaking onto the roof of the dorm. The locks had been upgraded over the years, no longer the easy task of freshman year, but Tran was clever and Viv was mean, that’s why we’d given them this job. Ali got absinthe from Jared/Justin/Jeremy/Jordan/Jason, who had connections, though she was pissed that Jared/Justin/Jeremy/Jordan/Jason wasn’t invited… she wore a hot little brown dress because she’d be seeing him later. Pat and Rob and Noah carried Beauty up the steep, impossible stairs. Then we brought up our three freestanding lamps, and our coffee table pockmarked with incense burns, and the stinky Oriental rug donated long ago by someone’s parents. Finally, we carried Orange Couch up to the roof. It was dangerous and thrilling, fossilized grapefruit skin and condom wrappers and weird crumbs raining down as we twisted around the orange velour mass and pushed hard. We hooked the lamps to stolen electricity; we awaited the moment, hopefully precisely eleven minutes from now, when the light of those lamps would be cut off, abandoning us to the darkness. It was a perfect surreal version of our common room, Beauty and Orange Couch spreading their arms wide just for us.
But, when the Gymnasium went dark, followed by the library, the dorms, the streetlamps, the traffic lights, the neighborhood of the Invisible Poor, followed by Les and Joey leaping up the stairs onto the roof (our three lamps now mercifully unlit, so we had to imagine them ripping Ali’s hot fragrant pantyhose off their faces, their hair all anarchy), we didn’t sit on Beauty or Orange Couch. Instead, we lay on the harsh tar of the roof, looking up at the blankness of the sky; yeah, it was practically starless.
Helen Phillips is the recipient of a 2009-2010 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, and the Meridian Editors’ Prize. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared in the Mississippi Review, PEN America, and Salt Hill, among others, and in the anthology American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers. Originally from Colorado, Helen lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Thompson. Her debut book And Yet They Were Happy is forthcoming from Leapfrog Press in May 2011.