Starlight

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

Just as Peter was about to drift off, the hiss of the machines in his walls started their nightly concert of industrial cacophony. It always started the same. An invisible worm would burrow its way into his ear and start buzzing around in his brain. He would toss and turn to shake it loose, and, after it was dislodged, it would scurry into the walls to conduct the nightly concerts. All hope of sleeping was lost.

He was desperate for sleep. The isolation of working remotely was tearing at his seams of sanity and he had been unable to sleep for the last few days. He said to no one, “I am going to sleep tonight, I am going to sleep tonight, I am going to sleep tonight…” even though there were no dreams to come. He lay awake, starting at the popcorn ceiling he told himself he would scrape off five years ago. His clock was staring at him from the dresser, he could feel it. It put out a menacing red glow that filled the room. It was in league with the hissing and groaning machines in his wall.

Thirteen little blocks and a colon made up the time—2:37. They glared at him, daring him to keep trying to sleep. He rolled over and fought against the damp sheets that clung to his body. He was strangled by them and knew that they were going to swallow him into some nightmare and feed him to the worms that hid away in his walls. Frightened, he stared at the glow casting distorted shadows across the ceiling. He looked again at the clock and it was 3:21.

“Fuck…alright you win” he sighed.

He got out of bed and pulled on the same pair of shorts he had been wearing for the past five days and put on a stained undershirt that was balled up in the corner.  He stumbled down the hallway, tripping on shoes he would not bother to put on.

Peter opened his front door to wander into the warm night. There is a thick stillness to the night air, and the world feels different in the absence of motion. He relishes the feeling of hard blades of grass pressing between the gaps in his toes. He meanders around his front yard, looking for sleep out in the yellow blanket of streetlamps and sentinel trees waving in a slight breeze. He looks into the grey skies for stars but cannot find any. There are only a few clouds gliding by, but the noise from the city covers up everything else.

He is frustrated and thinks that if he gets just a little farther away and to a high place he might see something, just one star. He wanders along the streets, lurching through front yards to a nearby hill in an unlit field. As he trudges along his thoughts go back to his childhood.

When he was a young boy, maybe 8 or 9, he begged his mom for a star chart he saw advertised in a nature magazine.

“Please Mom, please? I bet Neil Armstrong had a star chart when he was little.”

“So, my little astronaut wants to learn the stars, huh?” she said and ruffled his hair.

“I promise I’ll be extra good and do all of my chores forever if I can get it!”

She took the magazine from him and saw it wasn’t very much—$4.95 plus shipping and handling. “Forever?”

“Yes yes yes, forever and ever, cross my hear.”

She wrote the check and three weeks later a dutiful young Peter got his star chart in the mail.

His mom let him stay up late two nights a week against her husband’s protests to go onto the back porch and look at the stars. She sat out there with him helping him figure out how to position the chart and relate it to the night sky. Pretty soon he could rattle off all the major constellations.

“There’s Aquarius, that one is Gemini, that one is Orion, and that’s Caseyopia!” he said as his finger darted back and forth across the sky.

“Wow, you’ve learned so much Petey. What’s that one over there?” she asked him as she pointed off above their house.

“Mom, that’s Leo, you know that one! Oh, oh, when we getta dog I’m gonna name him Leo the Lion.”

She knew that his dad would never let them get a dog even though she pined for one too, “What a great name, but remember it’s if we get a dog.”

After a while of gazing at the sky, Peter asked, “Mom, why can’t I see all the stars on my star chart?”

She clicked her tongue and said, “Well, honey, the lights are too bright, and those stars aren’t bright enough to be seen.”

“Like a flashlight in the daytime?”

“Yeah, just like that.”

He looked at the blank spots in the sky and sighed, “Oh.”

“But you know what Petey, if we drive out into the country, I’ll bet you can see every one of those stars on that little chart of yours.”

Peter smiled and nuzzled against his mom, “Wow, that would be great.”

The next week his mom loaded some juice and sandwiches into a cooler and bundled up some blankets which she put in the trunk of her station wagon. She yelled across the house, “You ready for our trip Peter?”  Peter squealed and zoomed through the house in pure glee. His dad shifted a little in his chair and grumbled something to himself

They drove out to the country for what seemed like forever to Peter and ate their snack when they got there. His mom laid down some blankets on the hood of the car and told Peter, “Okay, we can lie down on the car but be really careful and don’t tell Dad.”

Peter rummaged around his seat and told his mom, “Oh no! I forgot my star chart at home…”

“That’s okay we can make up our own constellations.”

“You can do that?”

“Of course you can, who’s stopping us?”

Peter and his mom stared into the endless sea of stars and made up dozens of their own stories and names for all their new constellations. Peter fell asleep in his mom’s arms as she was whispering a story about a brave warrior. He was light enough that she could lift him and put him on the backseat without waking him.

Now, Peter laid on the dry ground of a hill and stared at the void, starless sky. He always dreamed of being an astronaut. Every night he would fall straight asleep, eager for the dreams of radioing to Houston about mission statuses and stepping foot onto the Moon. His dreams were full of cosmic explorations and endless worlds.

He thought that his problem wasn’t that he couldn’t sleep, but that he didn’t have dreams to sleep for anymore. It isn’t sleep that brings dreams, but the dreams that bring sleep. Science had never gotten it right. Instead, all he had were the buzzing worms burrowing into his head and the machines hissing through the night.

He never liked his dad and his dad never seemed to care much for him either. Once, when Peter was zooming around the house in a cardboard rocket his dad reprimanded him.

“You think you’re gonna be a god damn spaceman. You’ll never be one, never. You think Neil Armstrong had problems with adding and subtracting? No. He wasn’t an idiot like you. So, quit running around like a retard and go to your room, be quiet, and study so you aren’t a moron for the rest of your life.”

His mom was quick to say, “Dave, don’t talk to your son that way.”

Still, Peter’s lip furled, and tears began rolling down his cheeks.

“It’s okay, honey.”

“Oh, quit coddling him Sharon, it’s about time he grows up.”

Peter said, “You’re right, Dad, I won’t never be an astronaut.”

He marched to his room and tore up his star chart and threw it in the trash. He tore down his NASA posters and ripped the glow in the dark stars off the wall. Leaving little patches of dry wall behind where the paint pulled off. At last, he took his framed poster of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins posing in their space suits in front of the moon and hurled it to the ground. He smashed it over and over until his fists were bleeding while his parents kept shouting. He laid down in his bed and stared at the popcorn ceiling and cried.

No sleep came to him that night.

Peter was now crying on top of the hill. “Fuck you.” He said to the sky and his dad. He closed his eyes and remembered the start chart and superimposed it onto the night sky. He could see where everything should be, where it used to be when the world wasn’t filled with so much noise. He could smell his mom’s faint perfume and wished that she were still around. That night on the car hood he named a constellation after his mom. He looked up at it and saw it crying for him, wishing he were better. He drifted back home with his childhood stars guiding him, and he slept in the backyard under the warm sky.

 

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