Inside that trailer, once my eyes adjusted, there were no chemicals at all. There was a telescope, a beautiful one, mounted on a heavy tripod, and around it, shelves of astronomy books and hand-drawn star charts, and a reclining chair positioned under a section of roof that, I realized, slid open to the sky.
I stood in that hot doorway and felt my whole idea of my uncle turn over.
The old man everyone pitied, alone in the desert with his radio and his ashtray, had built himself an observatory. Out there, an hour from pavement, with no lights for a hundred miles, he had one of the darkest, clearest skies in America, and he had spent his nights not lonely at all, but voyaging through the stars.
The painted-over windows were not to hide chemicals, they were to keep out every last scrap of stray daylight so his eyes could adjust to the dark, and the locked door was not to keep me from danger but to protect the delicate instrument that was the great love of his secret life.
His journals, dozens of them, were not assay records. They were observation logs. Decades of them. Comets he had tracked. Meteor showers he had counted. Planets and nebulae and galaxies, all recorded in his careful hand, along with his thoughts, night after night, alone under the stars.
And they were not lonely thoughts. They were full of wonder. The old man we all felt sorry for had been happier out there under that sky than most people are their whole lives.
There was a letter to me, tucked in the newest journal. He wrote: You never laughed at me for looking up. When you were a boy you asked me about the stars and you actually listened. So the telescope is yours, and the sky with it. Come out here on a dark night and look up, and you will understand why I was never really alone out here. I had the whole universe for company. Love, your uncle.
That night, I stayed. I opened the roof, the way he built it to open, and I looked through his telescope at a sky I had never truly seen, thick with stars, the Milky Way spilled across it like sugar.
I understood him completely then. He had not been a lonely old man in a trailer. He had been an explorer, and the desert was his ship.
I kept the claim, and the observatory. I go out there on dark nights and I look up, exactly as he asked. I even started an astronomy club that brings kids out to that dark sky to see the stars for the first time. My uncle would have loved that.
Some inheritance, the family laughed. They had no idea. He left me the whole universe. I have never felt richer, or less alone, than I do under my uncles sky.