The Silk Road by Kathryn Davis

Author:Kathryn Davis [Davis, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-878-5
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2018-03-24T04:00:00+00:00

It was New Year’s Eve. Lots of people had already set up blankets on the lawn surrounding the Vocational School. They came, as they did every year, to see the fireworks. For a while the Cook had been enrolled in the school and when he was, we got the best seats, on a flat section of roof near the exhaust fan. Our father used to be the one to bring us, for as much as our mother claimed to adore beautiful, transitory things, she also hated noise and crowds.

The yellow acacia petals on the mahogany tabletop, she loved them.

Her children—until we got big, that is.

The Astronomer was on his bicycle. He’d ridden a great distance to get away from everything and yet here he was, back at the Vocational School; his knees were stiff and his back ached. Since the last time he’d been here he’d devoted himself to studying the spherical vastness of the Boötes Void, a part of outer space into which particles entered and, millions of years later, out of which they exited, looking exactly the same. As he explained, there hadn’t been enough time since the universe began for the void to empty itself the way it seemed to have done.

Sometimes the Astronomer wandered on foot, sometimes he went via bus or train. He never owned a car and he almost never flew, aside from that one time landing at the cove in the floatplane. He was especially partial to his bicycle and he rode it everywhere.

Everywhere, that’s a big place. The Geographer made a shape with her hands.

Or you could say that’s all there is, said the Topologist.

The sky had only just gotten dark enough for the fireworks to start. The sky was dark but the darkness still had a sheet of light inside, the way a philosophic tenet is backed by intuition. The Astronomer wheeled his bike between the blankets, scanning faces—of course no one looked familiar after all that time.

He had decided to try his luck getting into the school building and climbing to the roof when a woman wearing a fur cloak and sitting on a plaid blanket called out to him as he wheeled past.

“Hello there, handsome,” she said. At first he thought she was alone, until he noticed the bearded man stretched out beside her on the blanket, his eyes wide open, looking at the sky.

The cloak was made of squirrel fur and it was hooded; all the Astronomer could see of the woman was the disk of her face and one hand, ungloved, lifting a flute of champagne to her mouth. “Sit,” she said, patting the blanket.

There was enough room for him if he sat very close to her; otherwise he would have ended up sitting on some part of the bearded man, who was steadying the champagne bottle between his feet.

“Your poor mother would be so proud of you if only she could see you now,” the woman said. She tipped back her head to take a swallow and the hood slid onto her shoulders, giving him a better look.

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