She Didn't Have The Right Words

They were in his favorite restaurant, downtown, in Tribeca.

“Let’s do the eclipse”, he said.

He seemed very busy, so it came as a surprise to her.

“Are you sure?” she said, “it’s such a long trip, to Maine”.

“I can carve out time, but I might need to make a few phone calls on the road,” he said.

She didn’t mind. His work was important. She would find a place for them to stay.

“Are you staying at my apartment tonight?” he said to her, as he handed the waiter his credit card.  

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Couples, families, small groups traipsed from cars and pickups to the thawing sod field on the hill, where they clustered in islands defined by bags, blankets, chairs, and thickets of camera-tripods. In the distance, beyond the pitch and yaw of wintry Maine wilderness, beneath a brilliant blue sky, Mount Katahdin gleamed blue-platinum and ice-white, a giant origami construction.

The young couple from New York City occupied a second-floor bedroom in the small hotel that backed onto the hill-crest field. It was a cheap, bare-bones place, with neither spa nor gym, but it was only two nights, so they could tough it out. They might even checkout early, stay overnight in Boston and get a decent meal, or do the pit-stop marathon down the Interstate, full throttle in the BMW.

The man, thick black hair, good-looking, was hunched over a laptop. The woman, pretty and petite, stood at the window. Outside, a boy tossed a football, two girls hurried into a wood-thicket, a small white dog barked at a Black woman in a silver jacket. She wanted to be part of the restless crowd on the snow-flecked field.

“Perhaps we should go down now?” she said.

“I’m still on this damn conference call”, said the man, removing an earbud. He rolled his eyes, “the internet up here is so slow!”

The woman looked up at the blue dome of sky, and side-eyed the golden sun. Why was the moon not visible? Surely it was very close now. She put on her eclipse shades for the first time. The sun appeared as a small yellow dot against a black background.

“I cannot see the moon at all,” she said.

“This whole thing…”, he said, but he was interrupted by someone or something on the conference call. He put the earbud back in his ear.

Why could she not see the moon? Her left hand was the sun, her right hand, fisted, was the earth, between them hung an imaginary moon. She rotated her right hand, twisting it toward her chest. She felt very close to comprehension. She was surfing on this small orb.

He resurfaced from the conference call. “Why don’t you go on down? I will join you when this blasted call is over. It should end soon. It’s getting late in Singapore,” he said.

She left the room, went down through the deserted hotel, out the back door and joined the buzzing assembly of sky-watchers. Men fiddled with tripods, adjusted cameras, nudged lenses directly at the sun. The internet would be flooded with identical images of the eclipse.

A large truck roared up the hill, threading the narrow gap between vehicles parked on both sides of the country road. Perhaps its operator was the designated driver, tasked with an urgent delivery? Would he pull over soon, or just keep on going, cursing at three-minutes of gloom?

Perhaps there should be designated photographers, she wondered.

A cheer over to the left; a purple-haired woman was staring at the sun. “The moon has taken a nip at the bottom right corner. We’re missing a piece of the sun!” Laughter.

The young woman pressed the cardboard spectacles onto the bridge of her nose and confirmed the missing sliver. The sun, the orb, had a corner. More cheers, a group of college-age kids. She looked back at the second-floor window. How would he find her in the crowd?

“Exciting, isn’t it?” said an elderly woman with hair that was drawn back tightly into a braid. Her unprotected eyes were screwed up, her tan face was creased. Where had she come from?

“Yes, but I’m not sure why,” said the young woman, but the braid-haired woman turned in the other direction; she was talking to an elderly mustachioed man wearing a U.S. Navy Veteran’s cap. He was squinting at the sun, also without shades, also tan. The young woman wanted to ask them where they came from, whether they were Trump supporters.

The light was changing, warmth was draining away. She searched for words. Pallid? Leaching? Watery? She texted her partner. “Started. I am near woman in silver jacket”. The Black woman in the silver jacket who laughed away the dog incident.

She took photos of the wilderness, of the crowd, of Katahdin, with her iPhone. Flat, uninteresting, all-subject; nothing held the eye.

She donned the star-spangled eclipse shades. A total eclipse, an American eclipse, goddammit! Arizona, Illinois… Ohio? The moon, the sun, which? The fly-over states, moving at the speed of… she was lost. The speed of sound? The speed of light? A shadow going coast-to-coast, sea-to-shining sea at the speed of an American bullet.

Where was he? Not at the window? She pivoted to the south-west, then toward the paper shoulder of Katahdin. A narrowing strip of daylight spread around the horizon, a frame around the darkening dome, accentuating the overhead vastness. He, her boyfriend, he should be here. He would make sense of this, she thought, the fist, the rotating orb.

The light was seeping away. Leeching? Leaching?

A third of the moon was gone, gobbled by a mythological dragon, or – more likely - a frog, or a squirrel. It had to be a small creature because the sun was so small, a yellow dot. How could they see it all happen, back in the day? Were they shocked? Did whole villages go blind? She removed the shades and squinted at the sun as if she were a primitive… tribal... a native… no, not a native... a woman? Always a woman, not once a warrior, or at least a man.

Two hawks flew up from the woodland, circled briefly against the now-indigo sky, then glided over the farmland to the North and out of sight. A cock crowed. There were dogs in the crowd, doing normal dog things.

Electronic buzz, where? A drone swept over the crowd. More buzzing. A second, a third drone. Red and green lights flashing. They hovered, fixed overhead, threatening to plummet, to cut and slice. Unwanted.

“It’s Mom. She’s texting. It’s finishing in Buffalo,” said someone.

The young woman stared in the direction of Katahdin, at the stretch of wilderness. Her mother was dead, died without seeing a total eclipse. Linda Bean too, the wealthiest woman in Maine, died last week; she missed the eclipse.

That word again: leached? Watery? Dilute? What exactly was happening to the light? The sun was on a dimmer-switch. Was this it, already? Her shadow sharpened against the panchromatic ground. The sun was a curved shard. Any moment now. He was going to miss it. Talking to Singapore. Singapore, in the middle of their night?

Oohs and Aahs, from the college students; a girl’s outstretched hand refracted light prismatically onto the side of a cooler.

The cock crowed again.

A dull shadow dropped on Katahdin and onto the wilderness, then raced towards them, up the hill.

And then it happened. The sun was eclipsed by the moon.

Stars! Stars in the dark dome, near and around a gold-fringed hockey puck. Cheers and catcalls. A spectral dawn hung around the rim of the world, beyond the umbral shadow. Two fists, an imaginary moon; things pivoting, circling, elliptical and… and… and… oh, the stars! The crowd hushed, the wind blew chill from the universe, from space. The stars! Icy peaks of Katahdin, glinting. Silhouettes of the awestruck in the golden ribbon of light between heaven and earth.

Alone, so alone. From nothing, to nothing, am nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

And then it was day again and the young woman, the throng, her people, woke from the dream. The crowd stirred, sunlight spilled around the side of the disk, Katahdin sparked, the stars faded.

Applause? They cheered at the celestial performance. Applause, but for whom? For the diminished sun or the fearless moon? Not for the earth, a mindful observer.

The young woman clapped at the moon, she clapped for the moon. She clapped for this unutterably strange interruption. She clapped at the moon’s audacity. She felt sorry for sun, revealed by its eclipse to be smaller and less.

It was still cold, and the light was thin, pallid, watery, leached? Spectral crabs played in the shadows on the ground. A new noise aggregated from the crowd; it was the sound of people concluding, packing, of the mundane. It was an ordinary day again.

“I’m sorry I took so long”, he said, ambling up to her with a grin on his face, “this is amazing!” He spread his hands out. Goofy jazz hands, out of character. He was performing, a distraction or an apology.

It was less amazing than it had been.

She agreed that it was amazing. He hugged her, pulled her into his chest, a long embrace, a memorialization. He whispered that she looked lovely but said nothing of the stars. She could smell nicotine on his jacket, and on his breath.

“How much did you miss?”, she said.

“I saw it from up in the room!”, he said, “it was eerie, right? Mind-blowing.”

He saw a dusk and a dawn.

People drifted toward the road. The Black woman in the silver jacket trod unsteadily across the clumpy pasture. She looked out of place in the field, eclipse-watching, in rural Maine; a thought that arrived unbidden, and the young woman wanted to apologize for it.

“I think we should leave, soon. Never mind the traffic”, she said.

The young man released her from his embrace.

“I felt like I was watching a Spielberg movie," he said, "What was it like for you?”

It was like nothing else for her. Katahdin was crumpled paper. The light was watery, leached? A squirrel ate the moon. She surfed an orb. A shadow crossed the land. Spectral crabs too. Never a warrior. A diamond in the corner. The sun was a cuckold. The moon was fearless. She was alone. The stars! He was a fool. The stars! She didn’t have the right words.

He filled the silence, “well, I hope you enjoyed it”, he said, generous, earnest, indulgent.

She felt like the small yellow sun, diminished to a dot. One hand, the sun, the other, fisted and rotating, the earth, and between, an imaginary moon. The eclipse was just a story to tell at a dinner party.

“I took some photos," she said.