THE KEPLER STORY by Lindsey Drager

This is a story that is easy to tell, but slightly harder to read.
It starts like this: A writer writes a book. As she’s writing, she thinks a lot about fathers, fathers you can’t live up to, fathers who have mothers with whom they struggle. Maybe this book, she thinks, will be the way she figures out who she is and what she wants and where she needs to go.
There is a reason she is interested in fathers, which is that her own is – to her mind – wonderful. She shares drafts of the manuscript with him as she’s writing the book. They laugh and he disagrees with the plot pivots and she changes them and he approves and though he would not admit that he cries at the requisite sad parts, he does and they agree they both love the book. It’s a really beautiful book. They agree on that. That part of this story isn’t really up for debate.
“It’s strange,” her father says. “Your books before this were so difficult, so hard to understand.”
“They were plotless and interested in language,” she tells him.
“They weren’t really telling a story. They were more like very long poems.”
Her father nods to her then and grabs her hand and pulls it to his chest and sort of messes up her hair. She says the requisite, “Dad!” but of course she doesn’t mean it. Of course she loves it, the way he treats her like she is still ten. She loves it because her life is lined with all kinds of complicated sorrow – sorrow that is not part of this story – and this gesture of his, it reminds her that once her life was a simpler life, a life that was smaller and safer and full of promise instead of full of a variety of different kinds of fear.
The next day she sends the manuscript to her editor at the small press that has published her last three books. And twenty minutes later her editor writes back.
“This is beautiful,” her editor writes, “but this book’s already been published.”
Her heart – it stalls. “What do you mean?”
“The concept. It’s already published, already in print. This manuscript you sent me – it’s already a book.”
Her manuscript is about Johannes Kepler and the strange moment in history when his mother was accused of being a witch. It is from the perspective of one of Kepler’s sons, Ludwig. The guts of the plot are about a short story Kepler wrote long before his mother was accused of witchcraft, a very short science fiction story that – years later – ended up being evidence in Kepler’s mother’s trial. Evidence because there were these aspects of the novel that suggested the protagonist was Kepler. The protagonist studies under Tycho Brahe, just like Kepler. The protagonist is an astronomer who determines the precise measurements required and atmospheric conditions it would take for a human to get to the moon, just as Kepler did. The protagonist has a mother who is a witch, and – apparently, according to those accusing her – so does Kepler.
The editor summarizes the book that is about to be published, the book that is not hers. It is essentially the same plot and the same uptake. There are even similar themes.
“Who wrote it?” the writer asks her editor as she is pouring herself a very large whisky and her editor responds with the name of a novelist she loves. It’s a novelist she deeply admires, a writer who – frankly – she’s not that surprised to hear has found this material interesting.
Fuck, she thinks and promptly gets a nosebleed.
That night, she emails the publishing house scheduled to publish the forthcoming Kepler book to request an advance copy. It’s not out yet, but will be in several months so she tells them she wants to review it and they send her a PDF.
The book is brilliant. It is a smart, witty, historically situated account of Kepler’s mother’s witch trial. It is also deeply relevant for our current moment, given that the circulation of gossip pamphlets that ultimately served as evidence for Kepler’s mother’s trial sort of elegantly echo the misinformation routinely circulated in our current iteration of gossip pamphlets, which is social media. So, fuck indeed.
It’s almost sort of better than her book because of the timely aspect.
Because it speaks to an Always-Fleeting Now. Which is – in large part – why a book gets published to begin with. It is superb, she thinks, a rare and stunning book. It is for the ages and she loves it and she downs the rest of her whisky.
Her deepest insecurity is – has always been – being derivative. This situation is the definition of that.
She is a writer of fiction. That is her job – to get people into trouble, then to get them out. But how – how does she get out of this problem in the Real World, the World of Tangible Conflicts with Concrete Ramifications?
There is a moment in her novel when Kepler is trying to discern what to do about the fact that all the evidence points toward the sun being the center of the solar system, but only a few people want to believe it. The math is sound, the logic is sound – everything points toward one conclusion, yet everyone else is finding a way to make their square theories fit into a round hole. Kepler is writing a letter about this to Galileo and he looks out his window and the moon is full and for a moment he is filled with awe because in the Western world, for some reason, humans are drawn to things that are round. He looks at the moon and he thinks about the beauty of a circle. Then he starts thinking about the orbits of the planets around the sun.
She calls her father to tell him the whole story – the story of the story – and receive the requisite Father Pep Talk.
“Screw everyone else, you’re brilliant!” he says. I’m paraphrasing.
He is not an artist at all, is really sort of to some extent the opposite of an artist. Which means he works in sports. This is why he is fantastic at Pep Talks. Also, he has this way of using various episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone to really elegantly, and in an understated yet also sincere way, say things about life. This situation reminds him of the episode “Six Characters in Search of an Exit” wherein all these strange characters – a ballerina, a mime, a military man, etc. – they are all in this kind of atemporal limbo-purgatory and they don’t know who they are and it turns out in the end that they are merely selfconscious but trapped and static dolls. They aren’t anything at all.
A reference to life struggles using plot summaries from episodes of The Twilight Zone would usually help her, but as she’s listening to her father say that this particular episode is an excellent example of how life governs through invisible structures, she realizes that the novel she finished before the Kepler novel – the one that was just published last year – it could easily be summarized as precisely and exactly the plot of that episode of The Twilight Zone.
Jesus Christ, she is so derivative she doesn’t even recognize it. She is taking stories and recycling them and she isn’t even aware. What is she? she thinks. Who is she? Why is she? She downs the rest of her whisky as her father goes on and on. Now the fear of not being anyone, of being no one at all surfaces in a very palpable way. She gets a nosebleed. She tells her father. He reminds her not to tilt back her head, just apply pressure and let the blood flow down. She tells him she loves him and that she has to go.
In her novel there is a scene wherein Kepler is starting to formulate a theory that all celestial objects actually have a soul, have some kind of central animation that drives them, including the earth. In the scene he is harvesting berries with his son, Ludwig. This is long before his wife becomes mentally ill and he’s accused of causing her illness because he is a “stargazer.” It’s just him and little Ludwig gathering berries and Kepler looking at a berry in his hand and believing that it is something the earth has created because the earth has depth and personality and spirit. And Kepler bends down and Ludwig sits on his knee and they eat a berry and Kepler tells his son that sometimes there is more to the story than what you can perceive. More to the story than what you can experience, since he – Kepler – knows about the stars but has never been there. There are some things that have to be perceived through a network of senses, not just the eyes. Then they each eat a berry and Kepler kisses his son on the forehead and then Ludwig hugs him – like a really long, intense hug that Ludwig will go on to remember for a very long time after his father dies at age 60 – and they situate themselves so that they are looking out over the hills and valleys of Graz together, with the taste of earth’s berries like a memory in their mouths.

There is a thin line between obsession and deep critical investment in a single author’s oeuvre. Many people have exploited that for tenure. What she decides to do is this: read all of the author who wrote the other Kepler novel – read all of that author’s work closely, carefully, to see where it leads. And in the process, ignore the Kepler novel that she wrote.
It’s a waste of time in terms of her fiction-writing life – to abandon a book that’s done – but she needs to find a way around this problem, a way of discerning who she is and why. The Kepler book she wrote is a beautiful book, she thinks. Or rather, a beautiful manuscript. She figured some things out about herself while she was writing it and she elegantly – though in an oblique way – folded those revelations into the narrative. And Kepler himself, the man, to her mind, is a sort of crystallization of everything she truly cares about in this brief and fleeting life – the moon, snowflakes, the history of optics, and the way things that seem to be round are actually elliptical which has lots of metaphorical value in large ways and small.
So all of this: it’s a conundrum. It’s a whole web of agon. She doesn’t want to get rid of the book, but she can’t do anything with it. She can’t unwrite it, but she can’t put it out in the world. What she thinks she’s going to do is just read all the author’s work and allow the author – who to some extent did in fact craft this conflict, I mean not alone but there is some blame to lie there – she will allow the author, through her published work, to tell her what to do.
I’ve held off telling you the author. Did you notice? Her guilt and insecurity is a theme here you’re likely picking up on, and it was also a theme in the Kepler book. The son, Ludwig, is insecure about following in the steps of his father and she was folding in this whole other thread about doors and portals and the history of locksmithing and making these graceful and subtle relationships between locks that fail and insecurity.
There is an episode of The Twilight Zone in which things start relatively stable (that is sort of how all stories tend to begin) with these two families playing cards and then – agon! – there is a conflict and they have to flee the planet and they do so via a spaceship and in the last moment of the episode, as they are safely away and settling into their destination for a better world, the child asks his father where they are headed. It’s a planet much like ours, he says. I’m paraphrasing. And then he says the last line of the episode and that line is this: the name of the planet is Earth.
I want to be true to her. To tell you everything, because I have full access. I want to tell this story so that it is beautiful and haunting and ephemeral and says things in a really accessible, clear way but also a kind of elegantly coded way so that you get a chance to do some discovering. I want to tell the story so that it is about this network of breathtaking concepts: obsession and insecurity and doors and locks and space and science and stories. But this is fiction and fiction is supposed to be all about action and event.
The author is Rivka Galchen.

In her first published book, Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), Galchen makes her father a character. Or rather, she uses her real father’s name as a pseudonym for an imaginary character in her book. The novel is concerned with a man who believes his wife has been replaced with a doppelganger and the plot is driven by his quest to find the real wife.
In other words, the novel is about – on various levels – impersonation.

Since she’s abandoned the Kepler novel – which haunts her at night, at 2 a.m. she wakes up worried about the book, not about the world without it (who needs another novel?) but her own identity adjacent to the book that is not a book because it doesn’t exist except to her – since she has abandoned that manuscript, she is now working on a story about a woman who is supposed to take over her father’s locksmithing business, but doesn’t because she is mad at her father for abandoning her through her parents’ divorce in her youth and so becomes a door installer instead. But then – agon! – everyone’s doors start failing and she can’t keep up with all the fixing she needs to do and everyone, including her, becomes unhinged. It is literal and figurative. But she’s caught up in the ending, where the father tells his daughter to take a look at her own door.
This is when she calls her own father for the requisite Father Plot Advice.
“Dad,” she says, “if you were a locksmith, what would you tell your daughter who didn’t take over the family business?”
“The same thing I told you when you didn’t take over the family business. It’s a stressful career, and I wouldn’t want to put that on you. But also, I’m glad your great-grandmother is dead.”
“But wouldn’t it be different if you were a locksmith? I mean, wouldn’t you say something about protecting yourself and striving for safety?”
“I’m sorry to say, but I just don’t think I would.”
Instantly she gets a nosebleed and tells him she needs to go.
There is an episode of The Twilight Zone in which a woman and her neighbor are suffering from an ecological disaster that manifests as a heatwave that threatens human life. It is purported that the earth is growing closer to the sun and the modern world can’t hold out. They are trying to cope with the political and social fallout of the heat – the fact that they have so little food, that the electricity no longer works, the radios are dead. They are trying to find a way to find meaning in a way of life that seems to them to be over, in a world that seems to them dead. They find just a bit of meaning in art, in a painting that renders a world that is cold. But then, the narrative turns inside out and it is revealed that everything we have seen is a fever dream the woman has imagined. For the real truth is revealed: Not that the sun is getting closer but it is going away. Everyone on earth is freezing. It is only in this parallel world that she can find some comfort. It is not in moderation – not in imagining the old world in which earth’s temperature was Goldilocks-perfect – but in her plight’s opposition, the very inverse of the condition under which she toiled.
She wants to make something beautiful and stunning and elastic, something timely and timeless and she believes it is possible to make this thing, this breathtaking meaning-filled thing for a solid twenty minutes and then she decides anything that strives to be universal is already failed and she pours herself a very large whisky.

There is this beautiful line in A.C. Hobb’s 1850 text The Contruction of Locks and Safes:


“Until the world becomes an honest world, or until the
honest people bear a larger ratio than at present to the
dishonest, the whole of our movables are, more or less,
at the mercy of our neighbours. Houses, rooms, vaults,
cellars, cabinets, cupboards, caskets, desks, chests, boxes,
caddies – all, with the contents of each, ring the changes
between meum and tuum pretty much according to the
security of the locks by which they are guarded.”

I should clarify what “meum and tuum” means, since I’m trying to be accessible. The answer is “mine and thine/theirs.” Essentially, Hobbs is saying that until there are less liars and thieves in the world, our valuables are only as safe as the locks we use to protect them.
She is on a run around the park in the small city where she lives. If the Kepler story wasn’t hers, because it was no one’s, or rather because the story only really belonged to Kepler, now long dead – if no one owns his story, then why did she feel so strongly that she stole it from this other wonderful writer? And what does it say that she feels like a plagiarist, even though she did not know Galchen’s book was a book as she was writing hers? What does it mean that she is a thief and she didn’t even know it? Can one be guilty of a crime they didn’t know they committed?
The answer to her question comes several hours later as she’s rereading Burton’s 1621 text The Anatomy of Melancholy. Of course, she thinks. You can be found guilty of a crime you didn’t know you had committed. You can be found guilty of a crime that isn’t actually a crime! Especially if you’re a woman. And that crime would be this: witchcraft.
Kepler’s story – the one he wrote in his youth – it was used against him and his mother because his fiction was read as fact. When the trial came around, the story hadn’t actually been published in any formal way. So after the witch trial – after his mother was freed from the prison – he published the book and annotated it, inserting these beautiful justifications for each fictional choice he made, spelling out why he’d made it and how it had nothing to do with recording reality, it was all an imagined fiction. Sure, he studied with Tycho Brahe. Sure, his mother was into the (arguably) occult things that the mother in the story was, too. But using someone’s fiction as evidence of anything other than the notion that someone has crafted a fiction feels really, really dangerous. And Kepler knew this. And she believes this, too. She could be wrong, she thinks. Actually, it’s likely. She’s extremely wrong most of the time. But it’s worth saying here that this is what she thinks. This is what she feels, she thinks, downing a very large whisky.
Rod Serling says in the intro to an episode of The Twilight Zone, “There is nothing in the dark that isn’t there when the lights are on.”

Months pass and she continues chipping away at the locksmithing story. It is sort of, perhaps, becoming a novel. The night she realizes this she gets very, very nervous. What if there is someone out there – someone who is a bigger deal than her – right now, at this moment, working on a story about a locksmith who becomes a door installer and then becomes unhinged? She pours herself a whisky and picks up the phone to call her father. But she sees then that he’s already calling her on the other line.
What he says is this: he’s selling the business to A Corporation. I’m paraphrasing.
“The family business?” she says.
“Yes. That is, after all, the only company I own.”
“But Dad, you can’t. Can you? It’s the family business.”
“I am not trying to be disrespectful when I say this,” her father tells her, and he takes a deep breath which she hears through the phone. She imagines him then kind of whipping his bangs to one side and then looking up at the ceiling the way he always does before he delivers bad news. Then he speaks: “So, okay. Despite it being the family business, there is no more family left after me to take it over. Okay? And also, I’m not saying that is your fault. You are doing the thing that makes you happy to be a person. Which, it turns out, is writing novels. But I do have to bring this up – I mean, I need to remind you, gently – I need to bring this point up if you are going to give me what it feels like you are giving me, which is a hard time. I have to bring it up if you are doing what it feels like you are doing which is kind of guilt-tripping me about selling the family business.”
She thinks about this for a moment and then tells him that he’s right. It’s not the family business. It’s his.
She’s not sure that she means this, but it feels like it’s important for him to hear and thus for her to say.
Then he tells her that he loves her and to take care of herself and he’ll call her tomorrow and after he hangs up she cries so hard her nose bleeds.
Ludwig Kepler organized his father’s notes on the text of The Dream so that they were published together and after his father was dead, he published the whole thing – the text and the notes – altogether. This was primarily because his stepmother had so many children at home still and they needed money. Kepler was owed a great deal of money at the time of his death, but was never compensated. So Ludwig published The Dream for financial stability, not to exonerate Kepler and his story’s role in his mother’s trial. Kepler’s annotations on the story were almost three times as long as the text of the story itself. Which is to say, Kepler was afraid of being read wrong. The notes were supposed to make sure that no one would read his fiction as fact ever again, even to this very day.
Should she have taken over the family business? she thinks to herself that night. She does not appreciate the sport that her family has been involved with, other than it is connected to two concepts she is fascinated by: circles and risk. Perhaps in fact she is fascinated by these concepts because that is the world she was born into – one defined by the family business’s circles and risk. She doesn’t know how she would know if she is fascinated by those concepts because of the family business or because she is trying to avoid the family business and it keeps creeping – in elusive ways – into her life. She tells no one that her family is involved in this sport because she’s too embarrassed. She’s ashamed. The sport is bad for the environment and has a history of sexism and racism and has an origin story linked with crime.
But that night, as she’s reading The Anatomy of Melancholy, she thinks about all her memories of being on the grounds of the family business, all the labor she put in there vending beer and painting the ticket booth and cleaning the toilets and conducting the concession stand inventory. And she gets really, really homesick for that place,that space, which she has been so committed to cutting from her life. She doesn’t want anyone to know that this is the sport that put food on her table and a roof over her head, that this was the sport that her family is so enmeshed in that the concepts of circles and risk have been woven into the fabric of the person who she is. She is embarrassed and doesn’t want to face that reality, the reality of this sport being built into her even as no one knows this part of her life. Because she’s kept it hidden and locked up. She’s kept it private, behind closed doors.
She gets homesick then for the place her father is selling and she suddenly finds herself mourning for a life she never led. She mourns the life she would have had if she’d taken over the family business. Maybe it wouldn’t be sold now if she had. Maybe she herself would have had kids. What she knows for sure is this: if she’d taken over the family business, she wouldn’t have stolen the idea for a novel from another novelist.
She is a terrible person, she thinks. Taking something – a story – from someone else and trying to make it hers. Taking what’s been given to her – a family business – and choosing to give it back.
In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Burton writes: “And if so be that he cannot avoid it, as a nightingale dies for shame if another bird sing better, he languisheth and pineth away in the anguish of his spirit.”
In a letter dated November 6, 1629 written to his son-in-law Jakob Bartsche, Kepler writes, “When the storms are raging and the shipwreck of the state is frightening us, there is nothing nobler for us to be done than to let down the anchor of our peaceful studies into the ground of eternity.”
In the intro of the last episode of the first season of The Twilight Zone titled “A World of His Own,” which aired July 1, 1960, Serling says: “Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.”
In Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch (2021), Galchen writes, “I do so much wrong by doing pretty much nothing at all.”
Meanwhile, she doesn’t say anything.
Because, she thinks, she is a narrative failure.
But while she is sleeping, I plant into her head an image of her father handing her a copy of a key to the grounds of the family business and telling her to make sure she locks up when she is finished doing with it whatever it is that she needs to do. And in the morning, while she does not remember this dream, she feels a sense of recalibration that she can’t fully understand.
During the Thirty Years War, Johannes Kepler’s books were locked up and unavailable to him because he was accused of owning heretical texts. He would not gain access to them again. There is a scene in her novel where he is on horseback, travelling to get the wages he was promised years ago and would not get and as he is entering a village he grows homesick for the world inside those books. He realizes that somehow a different version of his life exists inside those books and while the memories of reading are lovely, it is his engagement with the texts themselves that he longs for, because each reading means he is a different person and each reading means a different text meets him there on the page, even as the text hasn’t changed at all. He is on horseback and at this point in his life he is struggling with abscesses and eczema all over his body, and he is in constant pain. His face hurts from the boils and sores that cover his skin as it is meeting the whipping wind.
From these travels, he will grow ill and die a week later, never getting the wages owed him for work performed twenty years ago.
But the reader doesn’t know that yet. At this point, the reader thinks he’ll get his money and his skin will heal and the story will end with him in his library, reading the books that make him the man that he is.

She is recalibrated by the dream I install in her mind. She is all energy and light and life and language. She is writing a story about insecurity.
“Dad,” she tells her father on the phone, “this might be the story that helps me figure out why I am such a failure. As a person. As a writer. As your child.”
“Hey, kid? So, it sounds like you’re being a bit hard on yourself. I mean, I don’t want to offend you,” her father says then, “but is this as existential as you’re making it out to be?”
“Dad!” she yells into the phone. “What the fuck!”
“Okay! Yes, it is. Wrong conclusion. You are right. Here is what I’d ask you to think about,” he says, then launches into a summary of The Twilight Zone episode entitled “Time Enough at Last.”
The episode goes like this: a man loves to read. He reads all the time, in the spare time he has, but his wife hates his reading and his boss hates his reading and they all think he’s dicking around and not doing the real work of the world which is facing a sort of pre-capitalist, patriarchal society in which he is a man so he must be cold and bold and obsessed with work. Indeed, he is employed at a bank. The irony is not lost on us. But then, on his lunch break, he goes into a vault to escape everyone and finish his novel and – agon! – a nuclear bomb goes off and when he emerges he sees that the whole world is flattened to a pulp. And he’s having a kind of panic attack as he’s looking around and realizing he’s alone and everything he’s known is dead, when he comes upon the ruins of the library. And then, epiphany: he could spend the rest of his life reading books. He could mine the empty grocery stores for food and just read all day long, every day, forever. And in his jubilation in the face of this epiphany, he trips on the steps of the library and falls and what happens is this: his glasses fall off of his face and are broken, so that the man can’t see.
As her father is reciting this, she realizes it’s a really good – a really savvy – way to handle the uncomfortable pivot he has accidentally taken in the requisite Father Pep Talk. It’s actually a brilliant way to address what she thinks is his slip-up and what he thinks is the truth. She tells him she’ll think about the episode. He says he loves her and she says she believes him and there is a silence and then she says she loves him, too, and they hang up for the night.

I don’t want to hurt her, but it’s impossible not to now. If you’re still with me, then you know: we’re in deep and we’re in deep together and this is where things take a grim turn.
The phone rings and it’s her father. She picks up. “It’s a good thing I sold the family business when I did!”
“Why’s that?” she asks.
“Because I’ve got some news. I just got back from my yearly checkup and it turns out, I’m a little bit ill.”
Her heart sinks as he tells her it is something that is going to mean a radical revision of his life. It could be Not Great or it could be Really Bad – that is the spectrum of the options for the outcome. They’ll know more after some tests. She is crying by the end of the call.
“Hey, kid? So here’s the thing,” and then he launches into a summary of an episode of The Twilight Zone.
The episode goes like this: It is the aftermath of World War III. There are two people walking the grounds, the ruins, but they are walking separately – perhaps from two opposite sides of the war. It is an episode with no speech, no language – there are just the ruins and the people walking aimlessly. The episode has no plot, except that at the end, the two people come together and – allegorically read – walk off screen in the end next to each other, presumably to forge a new path. It’s the lack of language, like a silent film, wherein the real beauty and solemnity of the episode lies. It seems to say that there is no speech after disaster. There is only a coming together of people who are otherwise navigating the ruins of this existence alone. The episode is titled “Two.”
Johannes Kepler wanted to believe the planet’s orbits were circular and not elliptical because it seemed silly to him that the planets would follow an orbit that was not mathematically perfect, the way a circle is. But he put his belief behind him and in front of his face he put the facts.
She feels a nosebleed coming on, but I stop it. Then she tells her father: “I’m coming home.”

She is a mobile being, which all humans are – all humans are automobiles compared to, say, plants – but she is particularly mobile because she doesn’t have to stay in her city for work. She can drive the four hours to his city and take care of him while earning her income online. It is the 21st century, after all, with all its perks and horrors in equal measure. She packs up her clothes and her toiletries and then she prints off the Kepler manuscript to read to him while he recovers because she already knows that he loves it – he helped her write it, after all – and she leaves the locksmith story on her computer at home. She also grabs The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Kepler says, “Despite all the hardships caused by my deviation from the opinion of the masses, I am encouraged by the thought that in the end the bright light of truth breaks through long lasting clouds of public prejudice; and always, when I fight on the side of truth victory is finally mine.”

Galchen’s second book is a collection of short stories, American Innovations, which includes a number of tales that respond to and reimage canonical works. There’s a retelling of Gogol’s “The Nose.” And James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”
Her third book is a collection of essays about being a mother, titled Little Labors. It’s about children in literature and it is also a book about work – the work of being a parent. The work of reading a book.
So you can see: she is interested in replication and reproduction. Innovation. Making new. She is interested in complicating what we mean when we say something has an origin, is original. In her essay, “The Eighth Continent” from a 2019 issue of The New Yorker, Galchen explores the international space race to the moon. She explores Buzz Aldrin’s desire to be the first man on the moon and his resentment of Armstrong for filling that role instead. She argues this takes shape in the fact that while Armstrong took several photos of Aldrin, Aldrin took almost none of the first man who walked on the moon. She ends this anecdote as such: “We are petty and misbehave on Earth; we will be petty and misbehave in space.”
His illness is a really cruel illness, the kind that requires one to consume poison to try to kill it, never really knowing what the poison inside is killing that is healthy and good, and she cares for him night and day and she sleeps in her childhood room. The bed is so small her feet hang off the end and on the walls are posters of Virginia Woolf and Octavia Butler and Ursula LeGuin and Ayn Rand and she is flooded with memories of growing up with her father and flooded with memories of the family business, which he has sold and so she can’t legally enter the grounds for the purposes of Inaugurating Comforting Nostalgia During a Life Crisis. He is sick and she tends him – makes his meals and bathes him, takes him to his appointments and organizes his medication. There are months like this and it’s difficult on both of them but eventually it happens: it slowly becomes revealed that on the spectrum of news, his case is not Really Bad but merely Not Great. And he begins to get better.
She wants to believe it is her, her care and comfort, her being around to fold the blankets and soak the dishes and feel his forehead for fever at night, but she knows it has nothing to do with her. It is all – all of it is him.
So, very slowly he gets better. And better still. And every night she reads to him from her Kepler novel and he laughs and sighs and empathizes and grows frustrated, then angry, then full of a kind of muted sorrow for the son, Ludwig. It’s really Ludwig – the son – that makes the book so interesting. That it’s this sort of sideview of the life of Kepler’s mother which is a sideview of Johannes Kepler, but all from the vantage point of the son.
“It’s a really beautiful book,” he tells her.
She sighs loudly. She shakes her head. Then she dismisses his approval. And he tries to disagree right back. I’m paraphrasing.
She says he should read the Rivka Galchen novel, which has just earned starred reviews from Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly, and a beautiful write-up in The New York Times. “It’s brilliant,” she says. “It’s like a time capsule and also this lens through which we might re-see our current world.” He tells her he’ll read it one day, but the truth – and they both know it – is that he’s not much for reading, so they both know but do not say that the day he will read it will not be soon, might never come at all. Then they put in Season 10 of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.
In an interview about her process as a writer published on Columbia University’s website a few years ago, Rivka Galchen says that oftentimes writers of fiction think there needs to be a conflict that is about finances or illness, something to raise the stakes. But to her, the better way of thinking of such conflict is through the portal of the person’s worldview by making them really, intensely vulnerable through what she calls an “ego wound.”
One night after he’s been so well she is thinking about going back to her apartment in her city – one night he runs out of one of his prescriptions. It is raining out and dark. He curses himself for not planning ahead and says that he’s feeling good enough to get it himself. She says that is absurd, that she will do it for him. She calls in the refill and they tell her it will be ready in twenty minutes. He hesitates then and tells her he doesn’t want her driving in the dark, in the rain. “You are being ridiculous!” she says, and he says he’s just a bit concerned about the conditions. “Do you not think I am a good driver?” she asks him. He disagrees but the die has been cast. Emotions she has been carefully managing for months are starting to surface in chaotic ways. She’s experienced an ego wound. You knew this was coming. “So you don’t think I can drive. I’m sorry to hear that and I’m going now,” she says, pours herself a whisky and downs it.
On the screen before him is loading a new episode of The Twilight Zone and he presses pause.
Her father says, “Forget it, and forget me. I’m sorry! Come back. I’ll get the prescription in the morning. You are a wonderful driver. I can’t watch this while you are gone – you’ll miss it.”
She says, just before slamming the door shut, “I’ve seen them all before!”
When she is out the door he looks before him at Rod Serling, cigarette in hand, frozen on the frame.
She pays for the prescription and runs out the store to her car with her jacket pulled over her head to keep off the rain. She doesn’t want to get sick and then get him sick. He is so flawed! she thinks. But so is she. Being someone’s child, she thinks. Why the hell is it so hard?
In her mind she forgives him and she starts the car. The windshield wipers flip in rapid motion. He is doing so well, she thinks, and puts on her headlights and smiles. Then she puts the car in reverse and pulls out of her parking spot. Maybe the locksmith story shouldn’t be about a daughter resisting her father, she thinks, rounding the parking lot and meeting the street. Maybe it should be about a daughter sacrificing for him, but just a little while also staying true to herself. Maybe it should be about a daughter meeting her father halfway.
She signals then takes a left out of the drugstore parking lot, but she doesn’t see the car with no headlights coming at her and so the cars collide.
The world slows down then, time stalls a bit, and if you didn’t know there were human lives inside the metal shells of those vehicles, you would think what happened was beautiful because really, it is all about force and momentum morphing material like glass and metal into something soft and porous. The cars collide and in doing so connect and they are caught up in each other, their dualness making them a single entity that begins, then, to dance on the slick pavement. The cars are locked together, the structure making a “T” that is not unlike the middle section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse which makes the book an “H” and is called “Time Passes.” But that is not what she happens to be thinking in that moment – instead she’s thinking of the first time she read Woolf’s play-poem The Waves and how she kept having to put the book down and look up at the clouds because how could it be? How could a story do this? How could language on the page incite in her a whole new way of being even as she is lying here on the same old grass, navigating the same old human ground? A book is a door toward an elsewhere, she thought then, and then she thought: I want to try that. This is what she’s thinking and the yoked cars slide off the street together and into a ditch and there is a screeching of tires from other cars and in the end four other vehicles pull over and the drivers of those vehicles work collaboratively to try to open the doors of the two vehicles that have melted themselves into one conglomerate of metal and plastic and human and heat. And ultimately the report is this: the car without headlights – a teen who just got her license last week, who had never driven alone in the rain at dusk – the teen has a head injury and what is likely a broken arm. The teen is okay. And the other driver – a youngish woman wearing a solar system shirt – she doesn’t seem to be breathing. She isn’t breathing. She has stopped breathing. She is gone.
It’s almost – it isn’t, of course, but it’s almost as if the father knows, because at that precise moment, in his living room on the other side of town, something tells him to un-pause this particular episode of The Twilight Zone. And Rod Serling says, “One time in a million, a coin will land on its edge, but all it takes to knock it over is a vagrant breeze, a vibration, or a slight blow,” and as soon as this line is delivered, the father’s phone rings.
Despite abandoning his wife and children to spend a year in the village where his mother lived trying to get her out of jail, Johannes Kepler did not convince the court that his mother was not a witch. In the end, they tortured her in an effort to force a confession. But she refused to confess. She would rather die, she said, than confess to being something she knew she was not. She was then acquitted and released, but died of a broken spirit just a year later.
In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton writes: “We abhor death, pain, and grief, all, and yet we will do nothing of that which should vindicate us, but rather voluntarily thrust ourselves upon it.”

After the father buries his daughter, after he reels from his grief to the point that he loses his sense of self and has to go to the hospital not for his physical symptoms but for his emotional health, after six months go by and he is still a shell of the person he was despite – ironically – being now firmly free from his illness – after all of that, on the anniversary of the day he sold the business, handed the key to The Corporation and walked away with his check – on that night the father calls the corporation to whom he sold his family business. He is wondering if he could possibly please just walk the grounds tonight. He doesn’t want to be there when others are there, he doesn’t want to face anyone or speak to them, he doesn’t want to be there in the daytime. He’s not interested in touching anything or causing havoc. He just wants to walk the grounds. Could they let him do this? Tonight? Have an intern turn on the lights and allow him to walk the grounds?
The secretary gets the CEO on the phone who says he doesn’t have a key and he doesn’t know when the groundsfolk will be back on the premises. Could he call back tomorrow? Could they arrange for something next week?
“It has to be tonight,” the father says.
“I’m sorry,” the CEO tells him.
Johannes Kepler had to use the calculations of his mentor Tycho Brahe to do his work to prove the orbits of planets were elliptical, not circles, which contributed to supporting Copernicus’s theory that the sun is stable – not the earth – and everything revolves around it. But Brahe didn’t believe in heliocentrism. He believed with every bit of his being that the earth was at the center of the universe. On his deathbed, he forbade Kepler from using his calculations to support any conclusion other than that. And what did Kepler do? He completely fucking ignored him.
The father hops the fence and breaks into the secret door that runs underground, the door that jams a particular way and so you have to kind of wiggle the handle while simultaneously pulling to the left at the same time that you insert the key in the lock which, it turns out, they have not changed. He isn’t a locksmith, but he knows how to break into the buildings he once owned. He knows the way through his own doors. These are, after all, the buildings that he has spent his life going through, and his mother before him and her mother before her. He knows the grounds of this space like he knows no other part of himself. It is a part of himself, these grounds. This sport, which his daughter always told him was sexist and racist and bad for the en-vironment. He knows all of this, and he knows she was ashamed but he also knows that she loved this place, too. Being the parent of another person is a paradox, he thinks then, and he climbs to the top of the grandstands and looks out over the field.
He remembers all the crashes, all the cars colliding and blowing up and hitting the walls and smearing the paint of the sponsors on the backstretch, remembers the years of watching his daughter repaint those walls each week so that by Saturday the sponsors’ logos were bright and clean and visible again. Remembers her in the restrooms on the weekends cleaning and making sure no one graffitied the doors, reading Virginia Woolf. Remembers her taking inventory, counting all the stock of tires and then counting again, counting a third time if the numbers were off. Her, vending beer in the grandstands, the rolled-up sleeves of her white T-shirt, the dirty knees of her jeans from kneeling down to make sure people could see over her while she served them, the sweat making her glasses slide down her face and watch her push them up with her wrist while she counted change back to her customers. Her, as a child, when she was go-for, running the points sheets and entry forms from the pits to the press box. Her, as a baby, the first time he brought her to the track, wrapped in a blanket on an autumn afternoon, showing her the oval and whispering into the crown of her skull, tender and covered in delicate fur, that this was her home, just like it was her father’s and his mother’s before him and her mother before her. He whispered to her that this oval was the place where she belonged.
He thinks then of all the young men who died on this track, in their cars. That the nature of this sport is life and death, risk linked with desire, that the nature of this sport is all and only danger. And how she never understood it, but found a way to respect what she didn’t understand. And how he didn’t really understand it either, but it was part of his blood, of his lineage – and he never questioned that the way she had.
It is cool at the top of the grandstands, and he pulls his coat around himself tighter. If he had not taken over the family business, what would he have done? He has never wondered this and he does now, from the top of the grandstands, looking out and over the winner’s circle in the center of the field. The night is crisp and cool and he would not tell you that the tears on his face are from sorrow. What he would tell you is those tears are from the wind.
He goes home and pulls out the Kepler novel that she wrote. Should he make a copy before he does what he’s going to do?
No, he thinks, putting the copy of the novel into an envelope and sealing it shut. No, he thinks because though he is a philistine, though he has no capacity to understand art – is at heart a man of sport, the kind that kills you, that breaks you from the inside out, the kind that is all about insecure men trying to prove something to their fathers, the kind that is all about how far you go even as you go in a tiny circle that is only a mile or so long – even though he doesn’t get fine art, he does get the human spirit. He believes in what is right and what is good. He doesn’t make a copy and the next day he takes the envelope to the post office and puts the envelope in the mail.
There is an episode of The Twlight Zone called “The Eye of the Beholder” where a woman is having facial reconstruction surgery and her face is wrapped and everyone is really nervous about what the results will be like. But also, the viewer begins to realize, no one else’s face is visible. There are all these sorts of ways in which shadows and veils and facades are happening, even as you are getting a straighton view of the woman whose face is wrapped in gauze. And the plot relies on the reveal of her face in the end – which, it turns out, is stunningly beautiful. But only by the standards of a human being watching The Twilight Zone – because the faces of everyone in her world are then revealed to be these pig-like amorphous masks. And everyone is devastated that her surgery failed so completely and she has to live out her life with this mortifyingly dreadful face while from our couches and living rooms – from our plane of existence – it is clear where the real beauty lies.

Rivka Galchen is just returning to her office at NYU. She shares this office with another notable writer, since office space is limited in the English department. She also teaches at Columbia, but today is her day here and as she climbs the stairs to her office after class, she decides she is exhausted. She is in charge of making dinner tonight, and needs to get home soon. But there is a package in front of her door. She doesn’t recall agreeing to blurb a book that is coming in the mail and so thinks it may be a book for her to review or perhaps an advanced copy of a new novel from a former student. She sits down at her desk – covered with the books and coffee mugs and notes and ephemera of the other writer with whom she shares the office, a writer whose work she doesn’t love but who gets more commercial attention than her – and she opens the package before her. It is a manuscript. There is a cover letter, handwritten. She reads the first line: “This is a story that is easy to tell, but slightly harder to read.”

Johannes Kepler is eighteen years old. He is thinking of writing a book, a book of fiction about a boy who goes to the moon. He is looking at the moon – earth’s only natural satellite – and wondering about what can be seen from that vantage point. What orbits what from up there? What is at the center – the sun or the earth?
He is not one for fiction, but he believes in the synthesis of art and science, math and imagination. And isn’t that all a good fiction is? A synthesis of logic and inevitability, of truth and something a bit sweeter, something that pierces the heart. He would never tell you, but he has a soft spot for stories that end with a twist, even as he is himself a man of fact.
So what he decides is this: he will tell the fiction of the boy on the moon, but he will add a frame. He will add a frame that this is all a dream. This way, the fiction is held tightly in a realm that is both fictional and not, the realm of the slumbering mind.
Johannes Kepler’s mother is not yet on trial for witchcraft. His son, Ludwig, is not yet born. He is not married and has no obligations – he is merely a student trying to figure out how and why the world works.
I am tired, he thinks, and there is much to do tomorrow. His candle is nearly out and he looks out the window at the moon, then the stars. He can see all of the Milky Way up there, a billion worlds yet to be found. There is much to do tomorrow, he thinks. He doesn’t know yet that the planets orbit the sun, that those orbits are not round but elliptical. All he knows is that he loves the sky. And for his fictional story, he’ll add a real frame.
The earth is wide and round and true, he thinks. He shakes his head in astonishment at the majesty of our earth.
And then, I form a tiny gust of wind through a crack in his window.
And his candle flickers out.

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Lindsey Drager is the author of the novels The Sorrow Proper (2015), The Lost Daughter Collective (2017), The Archive of Alternate Endings (2019), and The Avian Hourglass (2024), all from Dzanc Books. Her stories have appeared in Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, and Threepenny Review.