Stars don't Twinkle

Stars don’t twinkle:
A genuine story

Silence. A silence I will never forget. It is an internal, unearthly silence. And at that moment it roared in my head like a barbaric monster, allowing me neither thought nor concentration. It filled everything, and for a moment I felt it is everything. That the world and its occupants are but a phantasm and that the silence is everything. It was thick; it had more substance than the wind, the dust or the ominous gray clouds that spread over the sky like a disease. More, even, than the quaint houses that nestled far below me, bathed in the last of the sun’s rays. The silence was around me. Stifling. Hot. I felt like I was suffocating under its weight. I wondered, Can one die of silence?
“Can one die of silence?” I repeated the question aloud, but spoke only to the wind and the dust and the rain clouds, filling the air with the characteristic smell of ozone. A single drop of water fell in the sand beside me. The wind became stronger as the rain became a solid sheet of water, as though the sky itself was weeping for the world. The rushing in my ears was different now, more substantial, less unearthly and I felt glad of it. The dark sky was charged with electricity, a thunderclap rang out. I wondered, Why am I here? And where is here? The rain drenched my body, but alleviated my soul. It was the smell. It smelt of cool afternoons in which the dust and dryness were washed away. But everything ends. Even life. Especially life.  I took one step and I was off the cliff face and falling, falling, falling. I closed my eyes and let the wind and rain wash over me, mingling with the feeling of liberty that made the pit of my stomach feel hollow. The swaying grass, previously far below me rushed upward with incredible speed. I could see the individual blades, all varying shades of greenish-brown. The rain had stopped, I noticed, dully.
I never struck the ground. At approximately one meter off the earth’s surface, I wondered, Why?
Why should I be susceptible to this death? It’s a free country. I can escape imminent death if I desire to do so. I put the world into that question. Why? The power of that one word suddenly struck me like a physical blow and I concentrated on it. I put my whole mind into it and wondered with my soul. There was no longer space in my subconscious to think about falling, and so I stopped. I hovered horizontally in mid-air, a meter off the ground. When, after a second I noticed this and looked down, some of my intense concentration leaving me, I fell heavily onto the sandy earth. I rolled over and stood up. My glasses were askew. I righted them and brushed off the dirt and dust and grains of would-be ideas (for these, I found, seemed to be everywhere these days) from my pressed trousers. I smiled suddenly. Once again, my thoughts had proved so very useful – saving me, cradling me, as I had known they would.
I couldn’t stay long. Although the small village I had spotted earlier seemed to beckon to me, looking so heart-rendingly alike to my hometown, I wrenched myself away from it. I started walking. I hated the action, but thought can only carry one so far without tiring and I didn’t rely on it to constantly carry me. And so I walked.
I am the Blurred Man. The silhouette with the suit and bowler hat and furled umbrella that the open-minded embrace and the narrow-minded fear. I have mastered the power of thought to such an extent that not only do I give it affection, but that it repays me with care and vigilance. You will have seen me. Not noticed me, perhaps, but doubtlessly seen me at some point or another. I have neither memories nor possessions and my thoughts and contemplations are my only company. But there is one thing I have learned in my travels: so-called stories are but a multiplicity of emotions, conversations and undertakings merged to create a usually entertaining readable or viewable piece of information which can be mentally stored or discarded, depending on the audience’s liking for it. However, real stories are not always easy to absorb or to understand. They may not be a string of events rather than a mess of ideas. These are stories, not undertakings. They do not have a beginning or an end. They are simply a chunk cut out of the universe as we don’t know it.

The sky grew relentlessly dark as I continued my walking. I was glad of the silky yellow light when I came to a small town. Such was my relief for light other than the stars (for there was no moon that night) that I made a decision to pass through the town. It was cold outside and the dusty streets were deserted. I looked up at the sky, at the brilliant pinpricks of light so very far above me. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” I muttered absently.
  “Stars don’t twinkle,” said a voice, firmly, “Not really.” I turned on my heel to spy a small boy sitting on a doorstep on one of the small brick houses. He was looking up at me with an expression of such defiance that it made him seem to age several years. I inclined my head, gesturing for him to elaborate. “As the stars’ light travels towards Earth, it is bent by the atmosphere and the stars appear to twinkle,” the boy recited, as though he had swallowed a school textbook. He sighed. I wondered if he, at the back of his mind, desperately wished for the stars to twinkle. I asked, “Are you quite sure?”
He said, “Yes.” I smiled. I raised my right hand and closed my eyes. I could feel the boy’s skeptical gaze upon me. I knew what would happen and I trusted the events to take place as I planned. Thought would not let me down. I heard a whooshing sound and opened my eyes. A star had fallen into the palm of my hand, singeing my white glove. It nestled there now, beautiful and bizarre. But in my hand, it was not merely a ball of burning gas. It twinkled and sparkled, emanating a faint white glow. I blew on it to cool it down and handed it to the now wide-eyed young boy. He took it at once, cupping his hands around it and holding it close to his heart. I smiled serenely and walked away.
I do not spread cheer, for cheer is shallow and fleeting. I spread what so many human beings these days have forgotten – hope.

That night, I slept under a dense apple tree, a short distance from the village I had just visited. To my disappointment, it bore no fruit. Etched into the gnarled bark of the tree trunk were several names and initials. I traced them carefully with my finger, wondering about each person’s background. Wondering what they had been thinking about when they had carved their names into the trunk. The questions in my head were many, and it was hard to shut them out and make space for sleep. Resting my head on a particularly large protruding root, I slept.

The following morning, I was awoken by chaotic noise. I opened my eyes and frowned, wondering who or what could possibly be causing the commotion. As I sat up, a large red brick building came into sight. I smiled, suddenly. In the thick dark of the previous night, I had not been able to perceive the building, which I now recognized as a school. The noise, of course, had been the students, for what can be more impossible than a large number of youths keeping silent. Overcome with curiosity, I made my way up the paved pathway that wound through the school’s bedraggled garden. A large window at the side of the building caught my attention and I gave in to my temptation to look through it. It came as a surprise that there was only one pupil inside - a teenage girl staring decisively at her teacher. The teacher, unsurprisingly, was clothed in an insipid knee-length skirt and matching jacket. It was the pupil, however that attracted my attention. Blonde hair and blue eyes contributed to her vacant expression, but anyone who thought she herself was remotely vacant would be wholly mistaken. Her aura of thought was a deep, rich purple, a colour rarely had by young people and common amongst the learned – philosophers and so forth. It fluctuated and changed constantly around her, and although it was invisible to most humans, to me it resembled a majestic purple flame, in which the girl was already engulfed. What surprised me even more, however, was what I could assume from the words and phrases drifting through the glass of the closed window:

“Uncommonly bad work                   nobody                                    fail              
                    

                         term                 ghastly results
behind the rest

socks useless

      extra lessons given up hope


        

beyond help, perhaps ashamed

try harder”


I saw the girl’s lips move, but she must have spoken softly for I heard nothing. The next words, however, were her teacher’s and heard them all too clearly.
  “You will not get into university! You will not get a job, and you will be nothing, just as you are now!”

The sheer impact of the woman’s words made me wince. I watched her storm out of the classroom, leaving her pupil to sit down on a desk and grind her teeth, staring hard at the floor. I empathized. Sticking my hand down my coat pocket, I fished out a slip of paper and a pen and wrote:
You are something.
I put the note on my palm and blew it softly. Caught at once by the gentle wind, it soared around the building and out of sight. I watched. I waited. After a few moments, I spied my note flying underneath the classroom door and into the girl’s hand. She started. She stared around, and I ducked out of sight before she could see me, not wishing to reveal my identity to her.

I walked the dusty lane alone until midday, when, at a crossroads, I met a fellow traveler. He was a middle-aged man, with disheveled clothes and graying hair, which was partially covered by the soft trilby hat he wore. On his back he carried a bulging backpack, which seemingly weighed him down, for he stooped slightly as he walked. Upon meeting me, however, he met my eyes and smiled. We shook hands and thereafter agreed to travel together. We said little for a long stretch of road, walking in cordial silence. The man suddenly looked at me and asked, “Where you off to, then?”
  “Me? I really haven’t any idea,” I lied, not wanting to explain my destination. “What about you?”
  “Blimy. I keep forgettin’. Y’see, I b’n travelin’ for such a long time now, I forgets where it is I’m travelin’ to. I wonder if it worth all this bloomin’ effort.”
   “A week from now, you won’t remember this moment,” I said.
  “Yeah. Scary how the past don’t matter. I wonder sometimes, why do we bother with the present if it’s just gonna become the past, what don’t matter?”
  “Because,” I said, “if we don’t bother with the present, there will be no future for us.”
The man rubbed a hand over his eyes. He said, “I won’t never understand time.”  
   “You don’t have to understand time,” I said, “you just have to learn to use it to your advantage.”
The look he gave me then was full of comprehension and I was glad to have found someone with whom to share my cogitation.
We parted at another crossroads a little further on – he walked east, while my destination lay to the north. We shook hands again and as we were about to go our separate ways, the man called out to me, “Oi! You never told me your name!”
I was silent for a moment and then, “Amicus,” I lied, “My name is Amicus.” He gave me another one of his smiles – one which seemed to be directed more inwardly than outwardly – and tipped his hat. I wondered if he had recognized the Latin word.
  “Name’s Philip,” he said. “It’s b’n a pleasure having your company, Amicus.” The words were formally spoken and sounded odd when shrouded in Philip’s cockney accent. “The pleasure is all mine,” I replied, smiling. And then we parted.

I could feel the power and heat long before I reached the place. I knew what I would find, but even so, it knocked my breath away. For two hours, I had climbing been a mountain, but nothing could ever have prepared me for the view that now lay stretched before me. Looking down the mountainside, I saw a sweeping pasture, but instead of swaying grass, the pasture was filled with what could easily have been mistaken for snow, save for the fact that it emanated heat. I knew what it was, however. These were discarded memories. Everything everyone has ever forgotten lay below me. The memories resembled snowflakes, but they were as dry as bone. They were so clear and powerful and filled with energy that they emanated heat some even glowed softly. The wind whisked them upwards towards me and I felt one brush my cheek. As it did so, I suddenly saw staccato images, heard indistinguishable sounds and smelt something like burnt toffee. I smiled. I closed my eyes and lost myself in whirlwind of memories now swirling up from the pasture, warming me, welcoming me, fluttering around me like birds. To the casual observer, they may have seemed haphazard and chaotic, for not many now that memories, once released from a person’s mind, will always arrange themselves neatly in chronological order. I lifted my arms as I felt them all, from the most recently forgotten to the secrets of the ancients – everything went backwards as the memories seemed to rewind:

Someone ignited birthday candles by inhaling.
Water spurted out of a drain and a bath was filled with it.
A concert – Cher was singing Walking in Memphis: “Seohs edeus eulb ym on tup…”
A man put hair on his face with a razor.
Another, younger man in an old fashioned tweed jacket took a step backwards and kneeled and said, “Em yrram uoy lliw?”
Children walked backwards into a school and took ink off the paper with their fountain pens.
Smoke disappeared into a chimney.
The Wolf spat out Little Red Riding Hood.
The industrial revolution – parts of the machines smashed by Luddites were magically brought together again.
Mozart played the piano, backwards.
King Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette’s heads were both seamlessly attached to the owners’ necks.
Moses walked backwards through the parted red sea, brought down his staff and watched as the water splashed down.
The wheel was un-invented.
Eve put the fruit back on the tree, as the serpent slithered away, backwards.
God said, “Thgil eb ereht tel!” and there was darkness.
Then it was the beginning.


The End