"NEXT STOP"
copyright 2006 by BARBARA JACKSHA

The Whirlpool Galaxy

A short story
by Janet Paszkowski

Out on the hotel balcony, it's dark and humid. Mandy is standing too close to me, breathing down my neck, asking too many questions. "What are you looking at? How long you staying out here? When you coming to bed?" She lives in a world where the sky is always just the sky—a dark empty sky. My world is defined by questions I can't answer . . . like whether or not life exists somewhere else in our solar system and when is the right time to ask for a divorce?

Even though I know Mandy is the kind of girl who asks too many questions because she doesn't give a damn about the answers, I peel my eye away from my telescope lens and answer every damn one of her questions—just like I always do and have been doing for a very long time, too long. "The Whirlpool Galaxy. Late. Later."

Mandy was supposed to be temporary, someone I met in a hotel Jacuzzi after my college sweetheart—fiancé—ran off with some biker guy she met at the DMV. Now here it is six years later, and Mandy and I are still together. "How the hell did this happen?"

"How the hell did what happen?" Mandy walks back inside the room before I can expand on what I had intended to be my preface to asking for a divorce.

I readjust my telescope and focus in tight on three young women with planetary breasts soaking under the stars in the hotel's outdoor whirlpool. I try to imagine what I would say if I wandered down to the dim courtyard and got into the whirling water with them; have you read any good books lately takes on a whole new meaning now that my reading material includes titles like The Child Custody Checklist for Men.

"Daddy, what are you looking at?" My son's small hand tugs the edge of my shirt—his toothless smile eagerly waiting my reply. I tilt the telescope back toward the sky. "The Whirlpool Galaxy," I answer knowing he will absorb what I say because he believes I am the King of the Universe.

"Can I see it, too?" he asks. His eyes hungry for my answers to all his questions—his life full of possibilities that I want to be a part of.

"Sure. But first let me show you how to find it without the telescope." I kneel beside him, the mysteries of a moonless sky and a black ocean roaring beneath us. "Find the Big Dipper."

"I see it, Daddy. Over there." He points directly at it.

"Now find the tip of the handle, and then look just below and to the right of it." I watch his clear dark eyes search the onyx sky.

"Do you see the dimmer star below the handle?"

"Yep."

"Do you see that blurry star beneath the dimmer one?"

"Uh huh."

"That's it—that's The Whirlpool Galaxy." My calloused hand—the hand of a roofer, not an astronomy major—rakes sand from his tight, pitch-black curls, and no matter how hard I try to find even the slightest trace of Mandy anywhere in his being, I can't. Except that I know without her, he wouldn't exist, and the blur in my life would be overwhelming. I lift him onto my bent knee, "Now let's see what it looks like with the telescope."

Looking at him, holding him in my arms as he peers into my telescope is like stepping back into my childhood and exploring The Heavens with my father—a man who died too soon giving his life to his country. I feel as if I don't have any life left within me to give to anyone.

Later, after my son and I had exhausted our search for alien spaceships, with only starlight to guide me, I quietly place him into a small cot, and then stand motionless in the middle of the room at the foot of a queen-sized bed. Mandy is lying on her side wearing only her red thong panties—her surgically constructed breasts defying gravity. Sleeping with her no longer boosts my ego; it weighs me down with guilt. And it appears as if sleeping with me is only something that interests her when she's bored and starts asking my opinion of cute names for baby girls. I try to slip unnoticed into bed beside her, but she's awake, facing me and still asking questions.

"Tomorrow's our last day here. Where do you want to go?" Her words weave through a long yawn as she rolls onto her back.

"Thirty-seven-million light years away," I answer.

She turns her back to me, draws her knees close to her body and tucks the blanket under her chin—just like my son did when I placed him on the cot with his Hey Diddle Diddle nursery rhyme quilt. "I thought we could take the Malibu Tour of Stars' Homes."

"I've always wanted to go where the stars live," I say, but Mandy is snoring and doesn't respond. I tiptoe back out on the balcony to study celestial bodies and clusters of bright young stars gathered in The Whirlpool Galaxy and beyond. Tomorrow I will tour the stars' homes, and the day after that I will climb another roof and search for the right time to spiral the three of us into another universe.