Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

Then she fastens her chopsticks to the table and begins to talk about a memory of her and her mother climbing a mountain in Shikoku. She gestures the immensity of the mountain with her arms, and then the napkin she still clutches becomes a waving flag. She says how her mother arrived at the top ahead of her, in the wind’s full fury, and raised her arms in excitement and called Chie-chan! Chie-chan! I’m here, I’m up here! And that is the happiest memory she has of her mother as an adult, when her mother was strong and full of joy. It was the safest and most loved I had ever felt by her, Chie says. When she called out Chie-chan! I’m up here! I can’t stop thinking of that now, she says.

Pietro stares for a while at the painting, and a while longer, then says, It’s the dog. Pardon? To answer your wife’s question, the subject of the painting is the dog.

He looks then – when Pietro hands back the postcard, reaches across to squeeze the bony dome of Shaun’s shoulder before diving away – at the dog in the foreground. He’d never given it a second glance, but now he can’t look at anything else. It has its eyes closed. In a painting that’s all about looking and seeing, it’s the only living thing in the scene that isn’t looking anywhere, at anyone or anything. He sees now how large and handsome it is, and how prominent – and though it’s dozing there’s nothing slumped or dumb in that doze.

paws are outstretched, its head erect and proud. This can’t be coincidental, he thinks, in so orchestrated and symbolic a scene, and it suddenly seems that Pietro is right, that he’s understood the painting, or that his comment has made Shaun see a different painting altogether to the one he’d seen before. Now he doesn’t see a painter or princess or dwarf or monarch, he sees a portrait of a dog. An animal surrounded by the strangeness of humans, all their odd cuffs and ruffles and silks and posturing, the mirrors and angles and viewpoints; all the ways they’ve tried not to be animals and how comical this is, when he looks at it now. And how the dog ...

The dart of a jay between the trees in his backyard. The dash of a spider into cover. The shadow of a pike beneath the water. A shrew carrying her young in her mouth. A hare leaping higher than

seems warranted. A scarab beetle navigating by the stars. Pick a single creature on this earth and its story will be the earth’s story, he suddenly thinks. It can tell you everything, that one creature. The whole history of the world, the whole likely future of the world.

They were weightless not through lack of gravity – there’s plenty of gravity here, so close to earth – but because they were in a constant state of free fall. They were not flying, but falling. Falling at over seventeen thousand miles an hour. Never crashing of course; they could see what had only been theoretical before, that the earth was curving away from the hurtling free-falling craft at the exact rate the craft was travelling, so that the two could never collide. A game of cat and mouse. They inside, weightless in the sense that you’re weightless for a moment on a plunging roller coaster. Working, running, sleeping, eating in a constant state of plummet.

We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast.

I decided to be an astronaut when I was in the womb, Roman’s saying to a roomful of people. Before I was born, when I was taking in oxygen through an umbilical cord, when I was swimming weightless, when I knew infinity because I’d recently come from it, that’s when I decided to become an astronaut. And the people in the room start laughing and clapping as if he’s told a joke, when in fact he’s told the plainest truth he knows. All the same, he feels exceptionally happy. His mother and father are in the room, clapping along, and behind them Anton. Chie, half awake and

Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.

Up now and diagonally across China’s great mountains, the faint smudge of rust that is the extraordinary autumn bloom of the Jiuzhaigou Valley and then the Gobi Desert in seeming plainness, except in looking closer there are the fearless brushstrokes of a painter who sees in sand the movement of water and sees in brown bolts of duck-egg mauve lemon and crimson, and casts the arid in shades of oil spill, and makes of canyons nacreous shells. And on it presses, the northward orbit, into the afternoon of North Korea and up above Hokkaido. Japan is a wisp trailing into a vanishing point. It was eleven orbits and sixteen hours ago that they passed it going down, and this time they skim it going up, across the arm of Russian islands that sweep along the Pacific ridge, over

the Bering Sea. Now the land falls away like a silken slip.

There is the feeling of climbing over the continents, climbing up and over the crest of the earth. Up and over the north Pacific in a wide clean arc. Though their orbit proceeds in a straight line around the planet, the planet’s turn makes the orbital path appear to loop up and down, north and south in deep undulations, from the rim of the Arctic Circle to the southern seas. And now, at its northernmost point, it dips again. Far off to the left is the smooth, crisp bonbon of ice that marks Alaska. A cloud-free confection of crackable white. When the cloud accrues further south, the whole of the view is a liquid swirl of ice floe and cloud. The long tail of the Alaska Peninsula. A glimpse ...