Chapter Three
On the SETI website there's an entire page dedicated to information about Project Whitenoise and CowBelle's research. It links to a bunch of videos that she'd uploaded, many online interviews an long nights doing video updates of what was happening with the project. Among them is one that she filmed of the Transit of Venus in June of last year. And it is the Transit of Venus video that is my absolute favorite...
I made the decision the December before, at the tail end of 2011, but I wanted something special to commemorate the night with, and that's why I waited for six and a half months.
We had set up an air mattress, a telescope, sleeping bags, and a cooler with snacks and drinks on the roof of the observatory where CowBelle could film the passage of the second planet for the site. She was ecstatic, like a little kid at Christmas time watching the skies with an energy that easily excited anyone around her.
She had the camera filming, though looking back I don't think she realized it was going already. "This is going to be amazing," she was gushing. In the United States, the Transit was to be visible at sunset. We were planning to spend the rest of the night star gazing. "You realize the last time this happened was literally centuries ago? And that the next time isn't until 2136?"
"That's crazy," I replied, my voice disembodied from somewhere off camera.
"The Transit of Venus means that Venus's orbit passes directly between us and the sun.
The camera moved into the sky, focusing on the sunlight, blinding white filled the screen until Belle had slid a lens cap over and the exposure backed down and soon we could see the black dot that was Venus in the center of the sun, the video catching all of our laughter and banter along the way.
"It's smaller than I expected," I said at one point, "Venus is."
"Not that small."
"Smaller than the moon."
"It only looks like that because the moon is so much farther away than Venus is," she said. "In reality, Venus is like three times bigger than the moon."
When the Transit was nearly over, CowBelle's voice broke a mostly silent video. "The Mayans called Venus Noh Ek," she said suddenly. "They thought it was a star."
"Do you believe in the Mayan Calendar thing?" I asked her, still off camera. "Like that the world's gonna end and all that?"
The black dot was nearly completely across the horizon. "Nawh," Belle replied to my question. "It's impossible. If the world was gonna end on the day the Mayans predicted we'd be at the end already. They didn't account for leap year, so it really would've happened last month if they were right."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. It won't end. I promise."
"Good. I didn't really want it to end now that I've found you," I said.
CowBelle laughed, "You're full of crap."
"No I'm not. I'm being honest," I laughed.
"Well, the Mayans were wrong at any rate. We'll all be here still on December 22nd the same as we will be on the 21st. Mark my words," she said. We were both quiet for a spell. Then, as Venus was slipping away from the edge of the sun, Belle said quietly, "It's beautiful... isn't it?"
"Yes," my voice came without hesitation. Off screen, I'd been looking at her, not the sun. The last dying rays of light had reached across the sky and landed softly against her face and blonde hair, glinting off her glasses, and making her freckles nearly blend into the softly tanned skin of her face.
She'd looked over then, caught me staring at her, and laughed. "I love you, Nick."
It was always there that I stopped the playback of the video from continuing, clicked back a few frames, hit play again. I love you, Nick. I love you, Nick. I love you, Nick.
The night of the Transit of Venus, after the I love you, Nick... After the sun sank below the horizon and the Transit, for us, was complete, and the film was transferred from the camera to the computer and we were in our sleeping bags on the air mattress, looking up at the sky... After we were laying in the dark, staring up and listening to the hum of the satellite sending out CowBelle's signal...
I pulled her close to me in the dark and breathed her in. "You smell so pretty," I commented.
She laughed, "It's a new shampoo," she said. "Roses and tea leaves."
"I meant the you-smell, your skin or whatever. That smell that's yours. The one shampoo doesn't change."
"My body odor?"
"Yeah, sure."
Belle laughed. "You're so messed up," she said.
I kissed her head. "That's why you love me."
"Yeah I guess so," she replied, but I could hear the smile in her voice that said yes.
"You should marry me," I whispered.
"What?" she asked. CowBelle tilted her head back to look up at me, and I pulled away just enough to look into her eyes and pull the ring that I'd been hiding out of my pocket and hand it to her. "Oh my God," she whispered.
I'd had it specially made: a blue diamond, cut into a star shape, set beside a couple other clear and canary diamonds that gave it the effect of being a shooting star, set into platinum - a metal only found in space.
"You're the brightest star in my sky, Bellatrix," I whispered, "You put the Sun and Sirius and every other star in the sky to shame."
Tears filled her eyes as she slipped the ring onto her finger and stared at it. She sniffled and stared and then looked up at me after a long pause, "Oh Jesus Nick, you must've practiced that line in the mirror for ages," she choked.
I laughed, "I've been thinking it up since January."
"It was just so damn perfect," she whispered.
I laughed, "Was it?"
"Absolutely," she said. She turned her head and stared at the ring again. After a moment, she turned back to me again. "And yes, by the way."
If only going back in time were as easily as remembering something, if only conjuring thoughts of a person or a place could bring them back. If only I could climb through the TV screen and sink back into before.
See, in all the time that I knew CowBelle, she was always, always right. She knew everything. And even times when we fought and I argued like there was no tomorrow, I still knew deep down that I was fighting a losing battle because she'd eventually come up with proof that she was right and I was wrong. Unfortunately the one thing she was wrong about was the Mayan Calendar. Because my world did in fact end on December 21, 2012.
It ended with a single phone call.
It wasn't a particularly cold December for Tennessee or anything, in fact it'd been seventy degrees the day before, but on the evening of December 21st, 2012, there'd been a little bit of rain that had frozen on the roadway. At least that's what I'm told. I hadn't gone to the observatory that night, I was at home watching TV specials about the Mayans and drinking a beer, a carton of Chinese food on the coffee table in front of me. But CowBelle had gone to the observatory to make some tweaks to the signal's course.
I was still watching the History channel special, eating my pork fried rice and drinking my beer when the phone rang. I thought it was going to be her apologizing for being so late and explaining some really cool thing she'd gotten sucked into watching on the telescope. Instead, it was her father, who had received a phone call from the doctor at Vanderbilt requiring that he get down to the hospital immediately.
"You should probably come, too," he said. I could hear his car engine starting in the background of the call. I even could hear the wiper blades squeegeeing the windshield. "It sounds like it might be serious."
The Dyer Observatory is located on one of the highest points in the area surrounding Nashville. It sits on top of a tall hill with a narrow road that wraps around it like a corkscrew, jutting up from the land below it sharply. There only protection along the side of the road are tiny yellow reflector lights and the promise that you can drive on the wrong side of the road on the way down since residences don't go as high up the mountain as the Dyer does.
Nobody really knows what happened. Nobody was there except Fabritz, and he was driving ahead of her on the way down. He said he suddenly saw her headlights shift and he looked in his rearview mirror in time to see her car disappear over the ledge.
Whitenoise by Pengi
