Salt Flat Night

I turned twenty-eight on a Thursday and I drove out to the Great Basin salt flats that same day. I had booked a cabin near the observatory three weeks earlier, and I told myself the trip was about the dark sky. It was also about feeling something before thirty came and flattened me like the ground out there. I am single, never married, and my last real kiss was two years ago, so the bar was low.

The drive took five hours. My Corolla has a cracked dash and a radio that only picks up static past Fallon, so I sang to myself and ate gas station peanuts. By the time I turned onto the dirt road by the flat, the sun was going down and everything was white and pink and enormous.

The cabin was small, two bedrooms plus a bathroom, with a porch facing the flat. There was a truck parked outside that was not mine. An old Ford, paint peeling, a ladder rack on top.

I knocked, because what else do you do, and a man opened the door. Tall, dark hair going gray at the temples, maybe thirty-one, holding a bottle of wine by the neck.

"Oh," he said.

"Hi," I said. "I think I have the cabin tonight."

"Well," he said. "I think I do too."

We stood there a second. Then he laughed and stepped back and waved me in.

"I'm Milo," he said. "I paint signs for a living. I got here around four."

"Rochelle," I said.

"Nice to meet you." He held up the wine. "I brought this for myself, but it looks like we're sharing everything now."

He had his phone out and was scrolling through his confirmation email. I pulled up mine. Same cabin, same night, same key code. The booking system had double-sold it and nobody caught it.

"I'll call the coordinator," Milo said. "There's a number on the fridge."

He called. I unpacked a little while he argued politely with a woman named Bev. I heard him say "no, totally understand" four times and "it's late" twice. The observatory was doing a public star party until midnight and Bev had no other lodging within forty miles. There were two bedrooms, which was the one piece of luck.

"So," Milo said, hanging up. "We're stuck with each other. One night. Bev says she'll refund us both half, and she'll square the money with the office Monday, first thing. She was very sorry."

"That's fine," I said. "I'm easy."

"That's what she said too." He smiled. "Look, I came out here to look at stars and drink a little wine. I can do that with company. I'm not weird about it."

"Me neither," I said, which was about eighty percent true.

I had brought sandwich stuff and chips and a supermarket cupcake in a plastic box, because I always buy myself one. Milo had a cooler with more wine and some cheese that was sweating through its wrap.

We were arguing about whether the cheese was still good when someone knocked. Not a knock like mine, a knock like a drumroll.

Milo opened the door and there stood a third man, maybe twenty-nine, with a suitcase in one hand and a wooden rack of little jars in the other. He had a fair wristband on and his shirt had a logo, DESMOND'S SPICE ROAD, with a cartoon pepper wearing a hat.

"Okay, so," the man said. "Either this is the wrong cabin or Bev messed up again."

"You're kidding," Milo said.

"Desmond," he said, coming in and setting the rack on the counter like it was made of glass. "I sell spices at the fair. I had a stall there all week and my feet are killing me. Bev booked me here tonight. She said there was a mix-up, did she not mention I was the third one?"

"She did not," Milo said.

"Bev also owes me for a delivery. I promised to drop off this spice rack for her at the cabin, that's a separate thing, she's paying me fifteen bucks for it Monday, we settled it by text. So the rack stays here either way."

"That's fine," I said. "Fifteen bucks is fair for a rack like that."

"It's walnut," Desmond said, with pride. "I built it myself. The jars are extra."

So that was the situation. One cabin, three strangers, two bedrooms, and me realizing the odds of that. Three single people, and I'll admit my brain did the math, but I also figured nothing would come of it, because nothing ever does. I was wrong, but you'll see.

* * *

Dinner was leftovers Desmond brought from the fair in a paper bag. Indian food from a vendor two stalls down from his. Saag paneer in a foil tray, some kind of lamb curry, rice that had gone a little stiff, and a bucket of fried dough dusted in his own cinnamon sugar.

"This is fair food at its absolute lowest," Desmond said. "I apologize in advance."

"It's free food," Milo said. "It wins."

We ate off paper plates at a table built for two, so Desmond pulled over a plastic crate and we squeezed in. It was tense at first, the way it is with strangers, all weather talk. Milo told a story about painting a sign for a dentist that said SMILE in letters so big the dentist's wife hated it. Desmond told one about a customer who bought saffron and then came back an hour later to ask if saffron was the same as turmeric.

Then Desmond asked why I was out here alone and I said, "It's my birthday, actually. Twenty-eight."

Milo put down his fork. "Today?"

"Yeah. Today."

"You came to a salt flat alone on your birthday?"

"I came to look at stars on my birthday. The alone part was the booking."

Milo laughed, a real laugh, and went digging in his cooler. He came up with a cupcake, which confused him, because he had not packed a cupcake.

"Wait, this is yours," he said, handing it to me.

"It is," I said. "I buy myself one every year. Vanilla with the hard pink frosting."

"Hold on." He went through the drawer by the sink and came back with a birthday candle, a little twisted blue one, still in its wrapper. "Who leaves a candle in a rental cabin drawer? Doesn't matter. Bev has a lighter by the stove, I saw it."

He stuck the candle in the frosting and lit it and they both sat there looking at me like I should do something.

"Are you going to sing?" I asked.

"No," Milo said.

"Absolutely not," Desmond said.

"Good. Singing would ruin it." I thought about the wish for a second. What I wanted was not a thing you could say out loud. I blew it out.

"Happy birthday, Rochelle," Desmond said. "Now let me do my part. I brought the tasting kit."

He got up and pulled four jars off his walnut rack and set them on the table with tiny plastic spoons, the sample spoons he used at the fair. Smoked paprika. A cinnamon that he claimed was true cinnamon, not the fake kind. A curry blend his grandmother's recipe, though he would not say whose grandmother. And a honey powder that sounded fake and was not.

"You taste them plain?" Milo asked.

"You taste them on the dough," Desmond said, and tore the fried dough into pieces. "We do it in order, mild to hot. That's the rules."

"That's a real rule?" I asked.

"I made it up just now but it's still a rule."

The paprika was smoky and a little sweet. The cinnamon was floral and strange and better than the stuff in my cupboard at home. The curry blend hit all at once and then kept going. By the honey powder we were all talking at once, and the tense part of dinner was gone, and Milo was refilling my plastic cup with his fancy wine as if it cost him nothing.

"So what do you do?" Desmond asked me, spooning more cinnamon sugar on a piece of dough.

"I paint," I said. "Watercolors mostly. I sell prints online and teach a class at the community center on Tuesdays."

"An artist," Milo said. "That tracks. You've got the look."

"What look?"

"The one where you stare at stuff too long."

"I do do that," I admitted.

Outside the window the sky had gone fully black and the flat reflected nothing. Desmond looked out and said, "God, look at that. You can see the Milky Way from the porch, probably."

"We'll check," Milo said. "After the honey powder. The honey powder is serious business."

* * *

We finished the honey powder and Milo said it was time to walk. The observatory was half a mile up a gravel path from the cabin, and the star party went until midnight, and it was barely ten.

"You'll want a jacket," Milo said. "The flat gets cold fast after dark."

I got my jacket. Desmond got his and also a bag of the fried dough, because apparently star parties required snacks. We went out onto the porch first, and he was right, the Milky Way was right there, a smear of white across the whole sky. I had read about skies like this. Reading about it is different.

"Okay," I said. "That's worth the five hour drive by itself."

"That's the warm up," Milo said. "Wait until there's glass involved."

The walk was quiet. Gravel crunching, three sets of footsteps. Desmond offered me dough twice and I took it twice. Milo walked with his hands in his pockets and pointed out a satellite going over, a steady little dot moving faster than anything real. Desmond said it was probably a plane. Milo said planes blink. They argued about it for a quarter mile and never settled it.

The observatory was a low white building with a dome, and there were maybe twenty people scattered around the parking area with telescopes on tripods. A woman in a reflector vest waved us over to a big scope on the pad and asked if we wanted a look. We did.

"Saturn," she said. "Straight up and to the left. Don't touch anything."

I bent to the eyepiece and there it was, this small perfect thing with rings, floating in black. It looked fake. It looked like a sticker somebody put up there.

"Oh my god," I said. "It's so small."

"That's the other thing people say," the woman said. "Everybody says small."

Milo looked a long time and said nothing at all, which told me something about him. Desmond looked and said, "Huh," like he was evaluating a spice. Then he looked again longer.

We drifted from scope to scope. A man had a double star split into blue and gold. Somebody else had a globular cluster, a ball of old light, two hundred thousand stars in a space smaller than the moon looks. I kept saying wow in different tones of voice and nobody made fun of me for it, which I appreciated.

It was Milo's scope we ended up at last. He'd driven out with his own telescope in his truck, a fat tube on a wooden mount, and he was set up off to the side of the crowd, away from the noise. He had it pointed at a galaxy, some fuzzy patch in Andromeda.

"That's two and a half million light years away," he said. "The light left before people existed. Before anything you'd call a person."

"That's not a comforting fact," I said.

"It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be true."

I was standing close to the eyepiece, bent over it, and somewhere in there a hand touched my back. Just lightly, between my shoulder blades, steadying, and a low voice I couldn't place said, "Okay?" close to my ear. "Okay," I whispered. The dark was total except for the red flashlights people used, and I couldn't see who it was, and the hand didn't stay. It was gone before I straightened up.

I didn't say anything else. I don't know which of them it was. I know my back thought about it for the next twenty minutes, which is a strange thing to admit, but there it is.

Desmond asked Milo about the mount and they got into wood and bearings and counterweights, and I looked at the galaxy again and let them talk. It was eleven thirty by the time the crowd thinned. The woman with the vest said the party