Urbain Le Verrier

What will it be like to orbit Neptune?

The winds are strong. We can’t get too close. Even if we could, the planet doesn’t have a solid surface. It’s hydrogen, helium, methane, eventually transitioning to ice. We’ll send a probe down to gather what we can. Like lowering a bucket into a well.

Mission Control knows this is a lonesome voyage. The crew they hired are not social animals. We stay in our rooms, we rest, we read, we wonder. I said hello to someone the other day and got startled by my own voice.

When I was 17, my mother died, and my father decided he would take us somewhere remote. He found an island in the Indian Ocean. Nothing for hundreds of kilometers. We spent a month there without any tether to real life. He said it was just us and the elements. We rarely spoke. I feel as though we never came back.

Neptune was predicted by a French astronomer named Urbain Le Verrier. He noticed a wobble in the orbit of Uranus, then deduced the planet’s existence from that wobble. Urbain Le Verrier, loosely translated, means the urban glassmaker. He found Neptune, they said, with the point of his pen.

I’m reading a book about the Soviet Union. That nation reminds me of the outer planets. Massive. Unknowable. The Soviets were angry with Gorbachev. He took the life they knew, their distinct existence, and dissolved it. Did life get better? Life got different. Life got blue. 

Words can’t describe how tranquil Neptune is. The stillness astounds us. Sometimes a moon drifts by. The Sun is a speck. I wonder why they sent us here. I wonder if they did it to be kind. I wonder if I am still in the Indian Ocean.

There is a small plant here that I try to keep alive. A thimble full of life, that’s all it is. Nobody observes it except me. Nobody observes me except it. The other day, though, a crewmate saw me crying. I didn’t realize I was crying. She asked if I cried when we were in Canada, and I said I honestly had no idea.

I feel some kinship with Urbain Le Verrier. Perhaps it’s being from Gatineau, being a trace amount French. Could I discover something with the point of my pen? Not in planetary science, that field’s too empirical, but in a more inchoate realm. 

There is an emotion that I can access that’s never been documented. Perhaps it’s not an emotion. A wavelength? The color of Neptune. Others would call it melancholic. It is built from diamonique language, it has no independent form.

I have difficulty squaring these facts — on the one hand, that I am words, no more, no less; on the other, that Neptune is gas and ice, beyond language. The point of my pen is scratching out letters one at a time. Letters become words, become my entire self. What have I discovered?