Chapters (20)
“So you don’t think astronomy is dull, after all.”
“I think what I’m working on is beautiful. Entering the world of stars is like entering an infinitely vast garden. No two flowers are alike…. You have to think that’s a weird analogy, but it’s exactly how I feel.”
As she spoke, seemingly without realizing it, she gestured at the wall. A painting hung there, very abstract, just a thick line undulating from one end to the other. When she noticed what he was looking at, she took it down, then handed it to him. The thick, undulating line was a mosaic of colorful pebbles from the area.
“It’s lovely, but what does it represent? The local mountain range?”
“Our most recent measurements of the sun twinkling, it was so intense and we’d rarely ever seen it fluctuate like that this year. This is a picture of the curve of the energy radiated as it twinkled. Oh, when I hike, I like to collect pebbles, so …”
The scientist was only partially visible in the surrounding shadow. She looked like an elegant ink line a brilliant artist drew on a piece of fine, white calligraphy paper. The curve’s intelligence of spirit filled that perfect white paper immediately with vitality and intention…. In the city he lived in outside the mountains, at any given moment, more than a million young women, like a large group of particles in Brownian motion, chased the showy and vain, without even a moment of reflection. But who could imagine that on this mountain in the middle of nowhere, there was a gentle and quiet woman who stared for long stretches at the stars….
“You can reveal this kind of beauty from the universe. That’s truly rare and also very fortunate.” He realized he was staring and looked away. He returned the painting to her but, lightly, she pushed it back to him.
“Keep it as a souvenir, Doctor. Professor Wilson is my advisor. Thank you for saving his life.”
After ten minutes, the ambulance left under the moonlight. Slowly, he realized what he’d left on the mountain.
FIRST TIME
Once he married, he abandoned his effort to fight against time. One day, he moved his things out of his apartment to the one he now shared with his wife. Those things that two people shouldn’t share, he brought to his office at the hospital. As he riffled through them, he found a mosaic made of colorful pebbles. Seeing the multicolored curve, he suddenly realized that the trip to Mount Siyun was ten years ago.