The Planetarium
Peter came home depressed. Olivia could tell because he'd had a drink before coming home, and because he'd also had a drink in the kitchen before he came upstairs. She could smell whiskey and rum; whiskey that they had in a kitchen cabinet and rum that they didn't. She hoped he'd left the car parked behind whatever bar it was. And that whatever bar it was wasn't too far away.
"They're dismantling the Carl Zeiss," he said as he fell into bed beside her. He said it with heavy finality, like it was something he'd known for a while but had not quite accepted. "If you want to go, we have to go soon."
"The what?" she asked, half-awake. She was tired. It was late – so late it was early - and did they know a Carl? She couldn't think of one.
"The projector," he said. He sighed. Drifts of alcohol across the pillow. She realized he was talking about the planetarium. Ah. Well, at least it meant he hadn't spent the entire night drinking: just the entire night, minus the run time of a planetarium show. "Tomorrow?" he said.
"Yeah," she said. "Okay." She would have said yeah, okay to anything. She was half-dreaming about being served pancakes by a bear in a bacon skirt, which Peter could probably tell. Maybe it'd make him wonder about the parts of her brain he couldn'tsee. Keep the spark alive, or whatever. "Sorry about Carl," she murmured, and he started snoring.
The Sunday was a beautiful Sunday, and they made a trip of it, even Astrid. Walter had a moment of grief over his breakfast plate when Peter told them why they were going.
"I have a great fondness for that projector," he said quietly, looking through his raisin toast while his forehead creased with worry. "Peter," he said, and Peter thought there might be a story forthcoming. But all Walter said was, "I think we may be out of apple butter."
The museum was crowded, but that was how Peter liked it. He could get lost.
The planetarium felt colder than usual, and he chalked that up to the bittersweetness of a last time. Soon there would be a smooth, high-tech rock in place of his bulky, barbell-shaped familiar. Still a Zeiss, but a new Zeiss. The Starmaster. A good name for exercise equipment, maybe, but not for a planetarium projector. It was too glamorous, too new. What was wrong with artifacts?
Since he'd come back to Boston - rather, since he'd decided to stay - Peter'd been feeling more and more like an artifact, himself. For whatever reason, his work with Olivia and Walter was exhausting. He no longer had the energy nor desire to broker dangerous deals in Farsi or gamble with dangerous sums of money in Boston back rooms. Somewhere along the way, it had become enough for him to sit in a chair and have his father feed him psychotropics, and now he took stability where he could find it.
Walter ended up sitting between Peter and Olivia in the hemispheric room, speculating every thirty seconds that the lights were starting to dim and that the show was about to start. Astrid took a seat near one of the aisles. She'd brought someone Peter recognized from the physics study lounge: a woman with fire-engine hair. They'd stuffed their jackets to capacity with smuggled boxes of candy and bottles of Diet Coke, and verboten Raisinets rattled around in their telltale box as it passed between them.
When the lights darkened and the Zeiss lit up, all its pinprick holes glowing, Olivia understood why Peter came. The ceiling disappeared, the walls might not have existed, and the narrator's voice bounced off the dome and filled the room, omnipresent. And as she stared up at the night sky she heard a whisper beside her, Walter's voice matching the narrator word for word.
After the show, Astrid and her accomplice pulled a vanishing act while Peter set an alarm on his cell phone and put it into Walter's pocket.
"When this alarm goes off, meet us by the Van de Graaff," Peter said. "If you need me, press 2 to call Olivia's phone."
"Yes, yes, enough," Walter said. "Go enjoy your date!"
"Walter..." Peter decided not to bother protesting. "Just don't set anything on fire."
"Certainly not on purpose," Walter said as he wandered off.
"You're just going to let him...go?" Olivia said once Walter was out of range. Peter watched his father disappear down a teeming hallway.
"He knows this place better than I do," Peter said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out something that looked like another cell phone. "Besides, he's microchipped. How far can he go?"
Three hours later, antennae extending, Peter led the way through a maze of exhibits to find Walter (finally) in the cafeteria. He was behind the pass-thru window, chatting up a white-hatted chef in a sea of polished aluminum.
"Oh, Peter," Walter said when he saw them, "Thank goodness you're here. Someone is trying desperately to get in touch with you." He pulled Peter's phone out of his pocket and handed it through the window. Alarm! was still flashing on the front panel. Peter shook his head.
"Ready to go, Walter?" he said.
And, no, Walter was not. He held up something that looked like a neon green hockey puck on a plate. "Flan and green jello sauce! My old favorite!" he announced. "Peter, you remember Geoffrey, don't you?"
The man in the toque reached under the counter and proffered a second plate: a pile of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, staged around an upright mountain of fries and barbecue sauce.
"Your dad told me you were here," he said, "so I whipped up the old 'Peter, Peter, Dino Eater' special."
The plate hovered in the air while Peter hesitated. There was something jarring in being remembered. It fought against the anonymity he'd constructed in the planetarium, escaping the notice of hundreds of people nightly.
"Guess you're a little too old for that, now," Geoffrey said.
"Peter? Not possible," Olivia said. She took the plate before it could start to descend, and promptly made a Stegosaurus disappear. She tossed Peter a backward glance. "Peter Peter Dino Eater?" she teased.
Geoffrey leaned back against a bare steel table in the universal language of 'story time'. "Eh, that poor kid," he said. "He was one little boy in the middle of all those girls!" He winked at Peter. "Bet you never saw odds like that again."
Peter managed a pained little smile. Olivia gave him a wide one in return that indicated explicitly that her interest was proportional to his uneasiness. Of course, he would expect nothing less from her.
"Look, I was ten years old at the time," he said, "so..."
"Olivia!" Walter said, delighted to take the wheel of the tour bus through Peter's past. "Would you believe that I taught overnight programs at this museum?" He gesticulated excitedly with a jiggling spoonful of gooey green something. "Hundreds of young scouts-"
"-girl scouts," Peter interjected.
"-descended upon this institution nightly like locusts in search of knowledge to devour!" He paused. "And snack foods. They were insatiable, despite their size."
"Walter ran this demo station," Peter said, "and one time he blew his eyebrows off mixing Potassium Chlorate and sugar. I guess news travels fast in Girl Scout circles because after that there was always a stampede to get to him."
"Apparently that demonstration was not on the approved list."
"It was very not on the approved list," Peter said.
"So...how did you get roped in with the Girl Scouts?" Olivia asked. This was like embarrassing childhood Christmas. She could barely tamp down her joy.
"I wasn't actually with the girls," Peter said. "I liked the museum, so Walter would bring me along. But these things were overnights, right, and I don't know how many sleepovers you went to as a kid, but those girls- it was like feeding Mogwai after midnight. There was no way I was rolling out a sleeping bag in that minefield."
"Once he figured out the security codes," Walter said, "he was impossible to find."
"I would have stuck around longer if Walter hadn't made me the missing link in eighteen static electricity demonstrations," Peter said. He looked to Olivia as if surely she must understand the pain of such a thing. "Between that and the ladies-only Lord of the Flies, you can imagine why I spent my nights in the planetarium. By myself."
"After the girls came through the cafeteria," Chef Geoff said, leaning back on a steel table in the universal language of storytelling, "Peter would come see me for-" He pointed to the plate that Olivia had almost wiped clean. "You know."
"And a game of chess," Peter said. He nudged Olivia. "You know he used to play in the parks for money. He's a shark."
At that, Geoffrey looked smug.
Peter felt wobbly inside.
Olivia held the last little Tyrannosaur up to his face.
"Saved you the best one," she said and Peter had no choice but to take it: a bright, breaded-and-fried reminder that his space in this universe was larger than just himself.
They met up with Astrid and Jane at the Van de Graaff an hour and a half late but the women didn't seem to mind. Having watched back-to-back IMAX films all day, they were wasted on sugar and caffeine, still popping Swedish Fish and Runts.
As they wandered out through the lobby, the Daedalus hanging overhead, Astrid said, "Walter, you still up for poker night?" and Peter's brain teetered a little bit on its axis. Walter kept right on strolling.
"Of course," he said. "I've even pressed my shirt." Jane the Redhead whispered something to Astrid, who checked her watch.
"We'll pick you up at seven," Astrid asked. "You can help us shop for snacks." Walter clapped lightly.
"At the Stop & Shop?" he asked.
"You know it," Jane said.
"Excellent. I very much enjoy their snack aisle," Walter said. "A cornucopia of transparent packaging."
Meanwhile Peter and Olivia were trading disbelief.
"Walter?" Peter said. "You gamble? For money?"
"Of course not," Walter said. "But I am an excellent dealer." He looked back at his son with a bright smile. "I wear a visor!" Peter tilted his head like a baffled dog.
"You should see him at pub trivia," Astrid said. "He cleans up."
"We have free beer at the Purple Shamrock 'til March," Jane chimed in.
"Besides, it's good for Walter to get out," Astrid said, patting Walter's shoulder. "Right?"
"Right!" Walter agreed, straightening up like a marcher in a parade.
Peter was dumbfounded. "Were you ever going to tell me about your secret life?" Walter either didn't hear or pretended not to. He'd sidled up to Olivia and had started in about pineapple upside-down cake.
"You busy kids miss a lot sitting on that couch," Astrid told Peter with a tiny smile. She walked off toward her car, pausing only to call back, "Don't let him have anything to drink before we pick him up."
Peter said, "What?" quietly into the air. She was too far away to hear, but Walter wasn't. "Wait, why?" Peter asked him, a little more insistent. Walter put on a shameful little face.
"Because then I tend to cheat."
