Is Astrology Real?

He loved a Capricorn woman best: the kind of woman who would organize him. He thought he could benefit from Capricorn’s earthy groundedness, her entrepreneurial drive, her dependability. Though actually the only Capricorn girlfriend he’d ever had had thrust her foot through a windowpane the first time he tried to leave her. Grounded she wasn’t, but he appreciated her force of character. He carried her to the emergency room to have glass shards pulled from her heel.

He was always making her angry. He’d say he would come over and then lose track of time. She’d text him: aren’t you coming? where are you? and by the time he finally arrived she’d be asleep with the door of her dorm room locked. “Where the hell were you?” she’d ask him on campus the next day, where he was buying her a conciliatory coffee, offering her a single Hershey’s kiss.

“Out walking,” he always said, and it was mostly true. Any night that began with a beer or two with the boys was certain to spiral, but even if he stayed out drinking until three in the morning he would find time to thrust his hands in his pockets and stroll. He meandered, alone, down alleyways, through city parks. He hopped barbed wire fences and crossed football fields. He looked up at the starless sky and imagined how wonderful the view might be if only he didn’t live in the city. He’d never lived anywhere but the city, but he imagined he’d be a perfect a country boy.

During the recession, after he’d graduated and landed a job waiting tables on 7th Street, he read the newspaper every morning. He liked President Obama. He liked that President Obama liked Bob Dylan. He felt certain he, too, was on the cusp of greatness. He would get a law degree, he thought. He would write a novel or a treatise or a book about the Constitution.

Ten years later the Capricorn woman emailed: are you all right? She attached a link to one of those websites that archives mugshots. A hollowed-out face glowered on the screen, hair and eyes dark like ink stains. Below, a list of charges: grand theft auto, mayhem, possession of methamphetamine.

He stood from his desk at the leasing office where he had worked ever since he dropped out of law school. Outside, he punched a trash dumpster until his knuckles bled.

It wasn’t him in the photo, though he could see the resemblance. Still, how could she believe he had stolen a car and gone joyriding? How could she imagine he’d ever gotten into meth?

Forget writing back to her, he stewed. Let her believe I’m a drug addict. Let her think I’ve gone to prison.

He was certain she had always considered him a loser, you see. Someone who could never get himself organized, fated to stay stuck forever in the city where they’d met.

But she didn’t think that. 

Back in college, before they broke up for the last time, they had walked to the edge of town, talking about everything. They debated which US state was the worst and decided it was Florida. They discussed the best and worst of Friedrich Nietzsche and began to call him Fred. They sat on a park bench with a plaque commemorating a soldier who had died in a car accident and wove dandelions through each other’s belt loops. As night came on, he looked up at the starless sky and said, “We’re so young.”

And she had laughed. “Maybe I am,” she said, for she was two years younger, “but you’re already twenty-two.”

 Now she thinks about that moment all the time. She thinks: He was right. She thinks: We were so young…

“What if this is it?” she’d asked the night he finally broke things off for good. “What if we’re soulmates?”

He’d had his backpack slung over one shoulder. In the lamplight his eyes and hair shined like ink stains. His stomach kept soaring and flipping, so dazzled he was by the prospect of such spectacular failure. “You have always found such ways to impress me,” he said. He shut the door and she cried for a week.

She lives in the country now, in a commuter town with her husband and young daughter. On clear nights the stars overhead trace out a dome; they make her think the whole earth is a snow globe on some old god’s desk. She shows her daughter the constellations and the planets: the Big Dipper, Mercury chasing Venus, every member of the zodiac. Falling stars are so common that they barely warrant notice. “There they go,” her daughter points, as another bright thing falls from the sky.