Lines on the Darkness

From the Introduction of Scott Russell Sanders' Paradise of Bombs:

The dance of nature has been on people's minds more than usual lately, with the ballyhooed return of Halley's Comet. Surely it is a greater marvel, I tell myself, for my heart to beat sixty times a minute than for a ball of ice to swing around the sun every seventy-six years. Still, whenever I look at the sky these nights, I find my skeptical heart kicking up into a faster pace. A few cold evenings ago, my wife, daughter, son, and I walked to the park near our home to look for Mr. Halley's wonder. The newspaper had announced that an astronomer would be there to help people find the comet, so a crowd had gathered. The four of us huddled together among strangers in the knifing cold darkness and searched the sky with binoculars. We had only the vaguest notion where to look. I calculated that my son and daughter, at eight and twelve years old, would have a chance of seeing the comet on its next visit, in 2062. I knew this would be my only season.

"Does anyone need help?" a voice called from the crowd.

The Sanders family gave a shout. Presently a man loomed out of the darkness, his face a disk of shadow under a parka hood, and he gave us directions for looking. His words drew imagined lines on the sky for us, beginning with Jupiter down near the western horizon, swinging up to the Great Square in Pegasus, back to the Y-shaped Water Jar in Aquarius, and so on star by star until our gaze reached a tiny blur of light. "That's Halley's Comet," said the astronomer, and he drifted away to help other searchers.

We took our turns at the binoculars, mother and daughter, father and son.

"That's the comet?" said my daughter when her turn came. '"That little smudge? That's all?"

"Where is it?" my son cried. "I can't see it. Everything's fuzzy."

I pointed, aimed the binoculars for him, but still he could not find the firefly in the glitter of stars. He was trembling. I squatted down and took his face in my hands to guide his looking and whispered directions in his ear.

"Do you see it now?" My breath cast a cloud about our heads.

"I don't know," he said, his voice raw with frustration, "I can't tell, it's all a jumble. There's too many lights. What if I miss it?"

I felt like weeping, there in the night among strangers, holding my son's face and murmuring in his ear, because I could not see through his eyes, he could not see through mine, and all I had to offer were a few words to draw lines on the darkness. Since it was all I knew how to do, I kept murmuring, stringing words into sentences, sentences into galaxies and constellations.

At length he murmured, "I think I see it. yes, there it is. I see what you're saying."

But whether he saw the comet, or only my words sketched over the darkness, I do not know.