Jenny's Eye

Jacob liked heights. The park served Jacob’s appetite for achieving those heights until he was seven years old and clambering on top of the monkey bars high above all the other kids running around on the ground. Jacob’s pride of life was climbing on everything. And he succeeded ninety five percent of the time.

Notice he was on top of the monkey bars, not swinging on them, so he was sort of bringing it on himself. Disaster in the making. He was on his hands and knees and wobbling from side to side trying to keep his balance, tongue sticking out in concentration and eyes pasted on the other side where his pal Joe rooted him on. His mother was not watching but stared into the her iPhone. It was Morris Stanson, an enormous four foot six eight-year-old, who managed to leap and jab Jacob in the ribs that he swung sideways with no hope of return. It wouldn’t have been a terrible fall, but it was, for this reason: Jacob’s shorts remained stranded on a knobbly screw as Jacob fumbled out of them and landed on his face among the public of children, who had stopped stock still and watched as the poor boy rose to his feet holding the shirt down taut and trying vainly to recapture the rest of his wardrobe. It wasn’t too warm of a day, but Jacob burned up and begged Joe to help a fellow out while the playmates began to topple over like dominoes in laughter.

Jacob’s mother eventually intervened, and since she’d been too involved in Candycrush, she assumed Jacob had thrown a wild card and decided to play the naked savage.

“You never take your clothes off in public, do you understand me?” she chastised him in the car as he wept.

“They fell off!” he wailed. “And everyone saw!”

“How on earth did they ‘fall off’?”

“Somebody pushed me!”

They drove home in silence the rest of the way home. They lived in a two storeyed house on the edge of town, far enough away from the glow of lights so the stars could be identified. Jacob’s father secretly believed his son about the playground incident, but measures had to be taken.

“You’re not playing there anymore from now on, okay?”

Jacob shrugged. He didn’t want to play there anymore.  

It was a similar emotional evening, five years later to the tee incidentally that Jacob found his fascination with the bigness of universe. He had climbed, as was his custom, on top of the roof and collapsed on his back so he could see the spread of things in a panorama. He thought to himself, “It doesn’t matter. Look how big it all is. None of them matter.” He had been inaugurated into junior high and the first day made him remember the playground, which to this day he hasn’t revisited.

He did like the stars. In their multitude, their varying timbres and tones and the span of existence between his eye and their burning orbs….it was amazing to him. He wanted to know more. Below him, below the roof that is, his mother and father were fighting about finances and had not paid him any attention for at least a week; and of course, school wasn’t any respite. He was the kid with the khakis. No one wants to be standing in line in khakis when Jim Slider’s got his slick little joggers on, adorned with Nike high tops at the bottoms.

“Nerd turd!” Jim delegated. “Your grandpa give you those pants for your birthday?” Although most insults humiliate for the very reason that they’re untrue, this insult happened to be accurate, and Jacob, instead of refuting, just went red and bowed his head a little deeper each day, a hunched automobile gurgling in gear two all the way from astronomy to gym class. Day by day.

Junior high is the age of the planetarium. Venus in its allure and Mars in its aggression begin to burst with their respective hues. Boys in headlocks by the locker rooms, fourteen year olds making out in the bathrooms. Insults thrown as projectiles, an alternative to the primordial spear meant to take down saber tooths. Jacob liked all the worst girls possible to his own demise, the kind of girls who scorned male advances because saying yes and submitting partial control to another party would be to dispose oneself as the center of the universe. To let go of the planets. These girls only said yes if they thought a resident of Mars could contribute some military renown to Venus, to make her burn even brighter. Jacob however found himself alone on Mercury in all its morbid metallic spin but this was not so bad when he decided the bigness of the universe could maybe beat out the badness of his junior high.

“Doesn’t matter,” he told himself. And he tried to mean it as the financial rage below him got stirred into something involving thrown dishes. Maybe it hadn’t been the money. Maybe it had just been the last straw, as they say.

Jacob proceeded to the big city on a college scholarship against expectations and ended up majoring in astronomy, getting to know stars and infinity by name and coming to terms with the atomic size of earth compared to the great suns of the galaxy. It was here where Jacob came across a discarded basketball in the alley between the dorm building and the gymnasium, found it to be pretty well aired, and bought everything proper for doing papier mache. He didn’t really know at first if he was making a point. A lot of people make globes. A lot of peers had them on top of their bookshelves, full of pins. And he’d always liked craft and arts, even if Dad wanted an athlete. But it was the feeling after he finished the globe and had that miniature earth in his hands that he had a hunger to make more. To make big things very small. To make a point. He could still bounce his little earth, hollow as it was, and he hoisted it on his back once like Atlas in a kind of mockery….this grain of sand isn’t so hard to bear!

He still wore khakis and a shirt with the moon on it, going to and fro through his cosmos without much interaction with the other planets...those little planets called people walking about in a whirl all around him. He made it a point not to really look at or like anybody so as to not relive the rejections of junior high; he didn’t want to hear the financial rage repeated in some other form when he did something wrong. Hunched up like a hermit who has philosophized meaning through the comfort of his papier mache globes. By virtue of comparison, our world matters not!

He made more of them, too. Made them all the time. He also made the mistake of leaving the door open one evening as he was plastering Venus together, attracting the attention of a fellow astronomy major as she softly padded down the hallway on her way to watch a sitcom.

“Jacob?” she guessed.

His eye darted and his mouth reeled. “Yes,” he affirmed. “I’m sorry… you are?”

“Jenny. Is that Venus you’re doing?” He reddened and investigated his work.

“Yes,” he repeated. “I...uh. You know. Do them for fun.”

“That’s really cool.”

“Thanks.” She proceeded to politely peer up at the ceiling as if something was interesting up there, trying to customize the awkward, and said, “Do you like astronomy?”

“I’m majoring in it.”

“That doesn’t mean you like it, haha.”

“Well. That’s true enough.” He looked up at her, bravely according to his own standards. “Do you like it?”

She patted her thighs in enthusiasm, leaning forward so Jacob automatically leaned back, and said, “I LOVE it. It’s so amazing to learn about the universe, just the beauty and the bigness of everything.”

“Why do you think that interests you?”

“God’s creation is so huge and mysterious.”

Jacob huffed at this and gave a downward expression of the lips suggesting he thought little of this comment but that he was nevertheless willing to hear it.

“Why that face? Why do you like it?”

“I like it because it reminds me how small we really are. That, you know, we don’t really matter at the end of the day.” he said, with perfect honesty.

She gave him, in return, an expression that suggested she had blundered into the wrong room, but she gave him some grace and said, “Ah, interesting.”

“Yeah.”

“Well.” She was by nature an imploring and open human being, but did not simply “accept” ideas, knowing that compliance to bad opinion is not compassion. “Do you not want us to matter?”

Jacob laughed shyly and shrugged, trying to mean it when he said, “If it doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t hurt.” Jenny knew compassion meant seeing through the surface, surfaces as brittle as papier mache trying to eclipse a shape so obvious as a basketball. It’s like wrapping up a bicycle for Christmas and genuinely believing your child won’t know what it is until opened. She perceived, as they say.

“I ask this question to a lot of people,” she said. Jacob said nothing, only waited.

“If you had the chance to hold the whole world in your hand, what would you do? Or would you?”

“Punt it out of the galaxy, put it out of its misery,” Jacob replied, readily.

Jenny perceived further that her new friend was a nihilist. “I don’t know if you would,” she said, smiling. “If you had the chance.”

“It is very hypothetical, yes.”

The conversation was too serious at that point to take seriously anymore, if that makes sense, so Jenny laughed, and started to back out of the room. “I guess we both should’ve been philosophers,” she said with a shrug. “Anyway, good luck on Venus.”

Jacob nodded, unable to articulate words, and slumped his shoulders in some dejection. She was a pretty girl, and had actually made him feel some happiness even though you couldn’t really tell it from looking.

College passed by more quickly than anticipated for Jacob. He didn’t resort to going back home. He managed after graduate school to teach astronomy at a community college not so far from the one he’d been taught at, in the metropolis he’d learned to admit was home, which still brimmed with life as it always had. The universe kept spinning too, in ever more enraging forces; the same forces, so be it, but outrageous in their routine and order. The sun lifted itself too intelligently for Jacob, and he took a lot of pleasure in watching it rise from his balcony. An interrogated pleasure, but pleasure nonetheless. Life sometimes teemed too joyfully below him in the city, too ordered and flowing, and even some people seemed to live joyfully sometimes, counter to what the poverty pandering down on the sidewalks would have him believe.

“We’re all naked apes underneath the clothes,” he told his classes. “Let that change the way you treat your next intentional date at the wine bar. Date with a primate.” Students glanced at each other. Some professors really are masters of tickling the chin of self-consciousness.

But it wasn’t a secret that Jacob became lonely. He’d chosen the top floor of an apartment complex so nothing but a nest of eagles lived above him and a thousand people he didn’t know lived below. He never called home to the Midwest where he’d come from. He hadn’t seen his parents in five years. And he saw no one after walking home from campus. There’s a sort of isolation that can sift a person’s priorities and generate impetus to reconnect with the world, to acquiesce again to the demands of Being. Then there’s the kind Jacob had been harboring for decades, an isolation that secretly longed for a friend but was sensitive even to the briefest of eye contact. In classes he fared better. He was in control of the atmosphere. The city streets, though, employed their own priorities, and he was never one of them.

Fall came around, however, and Jacob visited a cafe on an impulse for coffee and saw someone he recognized at one of the counters by the window. The richness of coffee beans confronted him, a warm smell and hospitable. He liked the place. There weren’t many people sitting around, though the atmosphere was far from shabby and blinked with the tinker of glasses and small laughs. The woman, however, managed his attention.

She was pretty. Her dark hair fell to her shoulders, obscuring most of her face but not the rims of a pair of round glasses which eased to and fro as she travelled back and forth across the page of a book. The page, Jacob inclined himself to notice, had a picture of planet earth on it. He didn’t waltz up to her at the get go but did dare to inch himself two stools down from her at the counter holding his cup of joe. Snow began to tumble outside the window and a wind struck up the stillness, forcing people into their scarves. The woman failed to notice either him or the weather, so avid was her fascination with her page. And with the slight rotation of her face, Jacob said more to himself and out of shock than anything, “Jenny.” And up she looked. The paleness of the light must have defined the sleepless lines in his face, shown him to be a haggard version of the boy she’d met in college ten years before.

“Do I know you?”

Jacob snapped himself to his senses. “Oh, well, not exactly. I went to Eastern Tech. I’m the kid who made the globes in the dorm room.” Jenny studied him, a mature face, he thought, but not so giddy as it had once been. She didn’t shown any sign of recognition until she glanced back at her book and then it seemed to click.

“Ohhhh,” she said, with a smile. “You’re the kid who said the world didn’t matter because it was so small.”

Jacob laughed. “Yeah, that was me. It’s good to see you again.”

“Good to see you too. Jacob.”

“Yes.”

She sipped from her cup and held it close to her chest as if warming herself. She asked him the basics about his life, whether or not he’d gotten the upward mobility college was designed for, and he said yes, to a degree.

“You’re teaching what you love,” she approved. “That’s good. Do you tell your students about your Small Earth Theory?”

“Sometimes it comes out.”

“I thought about what you said quite a bit. Actually, still do. Recently, too.”

Jacob picked up, somehow, on a hidden note of angst in Jenny’s tone. A subtle wish to strike up their existential college selves.

“You have?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I guess I’m flattered.”

“I thought about it because, well….maybe it isn’t right to share, but I lost my job to someone below me and my husband left me all in the same six months. Left me for someone else. So I guess I started to relate to a little bit. Not wanting the world to matter.” Jacob hadn’t been in a position to empathize since his cousin had spilled his heart out about the betrayal of his soulmate to another eighth grader. It’d been a while.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Jenny shrugged. “I guess your were right, in a way. It’s practical. To not care.”

Jacob drank down a bit of coffee and drummed his fingers on the counter. After he said nothing, Jenny offered a chuckle and added, “Look at us! Having these deep talks all these years later.”

“Just where we left off,” Jacob said. “It’s a weird world.”

“It’s fun to look at photos of the world from space,” Jenny said. She picked up her book and handed it over to Jacob. “It makes you put things in perspective. Makes you realize how small it all it is compared to everything.”

Jacob flipped through some of the material and appreciated the Hubble telescope shots of some deep Nebula. So many colors.

“It certainly puts things in perspective,” he agreed, returning it to her. “The universe is a big place. Astronomers get it more than anybody else. We tend to enter the heavens and look down instead of the other way around.”

“I picked up the book just yesterday. Sort of rekindled my interests in it.” She went on to confess she hadn’t pursued much of an astronomy career after college. Marriage had taken her up, and she’d been content with the commitment to her husband. Jacob silently wondered why she’d gone to college if her prospects afterward demanded nothing more than high school, and she answered this question forthright. “I thought looking out into space was the best thing a person could do, especially with another person. It always caused me to treat the world with a little more love and care. Not less.”

“But these days.”

“These days I guess it’s weird to marvel at a cosmic design when your own marriage is chaos. It doesn’t seem to fit. Are you married?” Jacob shook his head, no.

“But you still probably know what I’m talking about.”

“I think I do.” His mind randomly referred to the playground where he’d lost his shorts. A playground so beautifully built up, and he’d been on top of it, making him a sort of god until his skinny thighs shown for the world to see. Mockery coming out through the portals of the caterpillar tube. Such a trivial memory at a glance, yet it still cut him to the quick; little girls laughing, wailing in hysteria, his mother blaming him for indecency. As if all of the kids weren’t indecent and horrible in some way or another.

Jenny checked her watch. “Come here often?” she asked.

“Never, actually. Usually go straight to the college and straight back. But I could maybe get used to a place like this.”

“Yeah. It’s nice. I usually come here in the mornings. Maybe we’ll bump into each other again. If the universe is so kind.” She smiled wryly, gathering her purse on a shoulder.

“I would like that.”

“Goodbye.”

Jacob got home to his apartment that evening, flicking on the light and looking at the glistening kitchen floor, scratching his neck and smelling the need to take out the trash. He fixed up some pasta and while it brewed in the microwave, stole off to his closet and experimented with its leftovers. What had he stuffed back in there and forgotten? His globes, it became clear. He found the earth he’d made out of the basketball back in college and brought it to the table next to his pasta, standing it on a bowl and recalling the process of making it.

“If you had a chance to hold the world in your hand, what would you do?” The question reappeared. He looked away from the globe to steal a bite, but when he looked back up he put a hand against his mouth to keep it all from spewing. The globe had lifted itself from the bowl and spun in an axial rotation, the papier mache giving way to living storms and waters and continents, one hemisphere bathed in sun and the other speckled with the lights of civilization. He stood up, peering at the icy north pole, and reached for a glass of whiskey to punch him into consciousness. His kitchen, meanwhile, darkened strangely and the stick on stars he’d plastered everywhere peeped out of hiding, refusing however to be anything but a backdrop to Jacob’s shining, spinning planet. There he was, physically standing where he’d wanted to stand all his life. In the heights, looking down and being confident in his theory, “Look at how small it all is. It doesn’t matter. None of them matter.”

He placed his palm beneath the planet, feeling the chill of Antarctica, and held it close to his eyes. He saw the playground down there somewhere. It was invisible, but it was somewhere down there. Then he saw Jenny’s divorce papers. Fluttering in the open window of a lonely apartment. His fighting parents and his solitary roof. All there. But it wasn’t repulsion which gripped him. The world looked back at him, like Jenny’s eye.