Palladium

Some mornings, when my wife is still asleep at my side,and the darling quiet reminds me of my previous lives,

I twist off my wedding band, turn it until the pale lightcatches the PD950 etched into its inner luster, a reminder

of my preference for this lighter, less luxurious metal.I knew gold, even white, for a Muslim man was forbidden,

and had long sensed the dull weight of platinum wouldvex me whenever I sat down to type, or if one day

I decided to learn the ukulele or try my hand at sculpture.What won me over was palladium, was Pallas, was

the innocence of the boy I was. Fall term of my freshmanyear of college, the year the frosty Minnesota sky held

the bright thrill of Hale-Bopp, I remember visitingGoodsell Observatory nearly every night that freckled

astronomy major from Alaska was there, monitoringthe grand 1890 Brashear Refractor telescope as her

work-study. No girl's smile had ever been as generousand pure as hers; none had ever exhibited such joy

at my arrival, at my willingness to stay awhile. Later,instead of doing the convoluted challenge problems for

an introductory chemistry class, or reviewing for anotheressay exam in a literature seminar on the sublime,

I'd meander, giddy and entranced, to Sayles-Hill,find a spot by the yammering pinball machines, and sip

over-sweetened snack bar coffee while composingpoems about how beautiful she looked when talking

of comets, or about how she laughed so sweetly, soblushingly, the time I joked Hale-Bopp's tail lookedlike a wedding dress. Occasionally, while explainingcomet-related phenomena like comas and light pressure,

she'd veer off into tangents marked by inexplicableflashes of sorrow. I did my best to console her by simply

listening without interrupting, pretending to understand,like I did the time she narrated the sad life story of Pallas,

which she found way more intriguing than Hale-Bopp's.Pallas is the second largest asteroid in our galaxy,

after Ceres, she stated. I did my best to pretend I recognizedthe significance of this fact as I continued my study

of the speckled cosmos gracing her cheeks. Pallas, shewent on to say, was also the girl who the goddess Athena

adored dearly and deeply, but killed without meaning to…So much in our lives happens that way, doesn't it? she asked,

her lips trembling so much I wanted to kiss stillness backinto them, back into her whole being. It's like falling

in love, or having your heart broken, she said. I nodded,reverently, entranced by the way her voice echoed through

the domed chamber, the telescope towering over uslike a god, my spirit so charged by desire that I wondered

if my skin glowed beneath my sweater. Did we chooseto fall in love? Or are all scientific discoveries accidents

of chance, begging to be disproven? Her questions hauntedmy daydreams, pulled me deeper into the depths of possibility.

Then one snowy night, perhaps to prevent me from sayingany of the stupid things I'd been rehearsing for weeks,

she turned the talk for the first time to an ex-boyfriendwho'd graduated the year before and had called unexpectedly

last night from Ithaca or Athens or some other godforsakenuniversity town, to declare his love for her, promising

to make it all work, despite the distance, the lost time.The joy on her lovely face was so absolute that I felt like

the tiniest asteroid in any galaxy. Nothing more, really,than a nameless speck of dust floating through the great void,

my chest felt as knifed open as Pallas'. Afterwards, I wrotethe saddest poems and tore up every one. I wept over

how epic my foolishness had been since the beginning.I cursed every turtle in the universe, slept through every class

the next day, spent many evenings exiled in the lowestrung of Gould Library. Outside, high above the trees,

Hale-Bopp held its course, as did Pallas and every otherentity drifting along...