Read The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel for Free Online Page B

unshowered and feeling crazy, unable to resolve his data into the answer that he knew was true. It was not even important; it was not even the purpose of his research, and yet it had to fit for him to move on. Eli stood up and walked down the polished halls, listening to his steps, peering into all the darkened offices until he came again to his own with its one fly-specked light. He was alone. What had happened to those years of surefooted reason? When he could bend gravities with a mechanical pencil? Now, when the other BADgrads slept, he scrabbled at the simplest set of data and could not get a hold. And it wasn’t even that he didn’t understand. No, he knew exactly where his paper should go. It simply would not go there. Standing outside his office, listening to the buzz of the hall’s fluorescent lights, Eli imagined the rows of scientists, coughing impatiently as he described his inability to bring this simple research to conclusion. “Thank you,” they would each say, “but not entirely persuasive.” Those would be the exact words.
    So he trimmed. That was the expression they used back then, the scientists who spoke of such things; he sat back at his desk with a clean sheet of paper and trimmed the data of its upsetting spurs. He left a roughness to the shape, but now the numbers fell more or less as he predicted. He sped through his conclusion and moved on. The presentation came and went with no surprise, the scientists applauded him, and Swift, impressed, had offered Eli part of his grant to come here to this island. No, he would never tell anyone. This was how you overcame your flaws, he believed; with tricks like this one, which he wanted to teach Denise, about letting yourself forget.
    The bats were back again, catching insects drawn in by their feeble lights. He looked to Denise for her answer. Just then, that small piece of skin broke off in a gust of wind, and he watched it fall slowly through the air and into the darkness of the jungle.
    “All right,” Denise said finally, facing away with a smile. “Hello there, Jorgeson.” The deal was struck.
    The blond Swede stood above them, chattering in his antisocial charmless way, and Eli began to lead the conversation toward Carlos. He kept glancing to Denise, seeing the vague smile on her face as she listened. Eli could see only her pale, thankless profile now as she waited for some morsel of information to pounce on. As he pulled her Carlos from the weeds of this conversation, he noticed how his words made her face shift—and not just in expectation of her lover’s name, but at what Eli himself said. She was coaxing him on with small gestures: her eyes, a smile, a stiffening of her features. She was leading him. All this time, Eli had thought he’d tricked her into doing what he wanted her to do, leading the life he planned for her, but that wasn’t what had happened at all. He was doing what she wanted—the very sentence falling from his mouth came only as she’d planned it. There was no one like this woman, no one.
    Eli said loudly, “So, Lars, tell me about your friend Carlos….”
    Three days later, nothing but the accident would matter.
    You could have walked down the aisle of their plane, headed through the dawn toward Hawaii, toward California, and seen the difference in their faces. Every window shade but one was pulled down to create an artificial darkness in the uncrowded cabin, glowing in places because light came in through the crevices nonetheless, jungle vines breaking into the room. The one open shade belonged to Dr. Hayam Manday, who sat with his chin on his hand, watching the dawn without his glasses, alone. The rest of them—the students, wives, professors, children—were hours into a fitful sleep: faces crumpled against pillows and bulkheads, bodies spread uncomfortably across a row, hands grasping at thin blankets to cover a shoulder. Many, though, like Manday, were awake; they sat wide-eyed in the darkness, their wives or