Chapter 5
THE STARS
Every morning from that point on we swam in the ocean. I wore my ragged flip-flops and swimsuit cover until I had crossed the rocky patch behind the lighthouse, and then I’d strip down to my swimsuit when I reached the narrow stretch of sand that passed for a beach.
Not too far away from Illumination Point was Mt. Desert Island, a patch of Maine that attracted tourists for much of the year. That area had beaches of both the sandy and rocky variety and allowed for satisfying hiking and exploration even when the weather didn’t allow swimming—as it now did.
Illumination Point was hidden away from that.
Lighthouses weren’t built according to beach quality, after all, but where the rocks off the shore endangered ships.
Still, there was a shallow patch just off the beach where the water was warm and the sand was soft and the waves rose and fell in a mellow tide.
I had found a collection of beach chairs and towels in the house’s garage, and when I planned to spend a lot of time outside, I spent a moment preparing a setup we could enjoy.
Days on the beach were fun, but the magic didn’t begin until nightfall. Some nights brought overcast skies, grim and filled with shadows. But some nights brought out the stars, and more than I had ever seen before.
Our location in comparative wilderness changed the way the night sky appeared.
Without the city lights and neighboring house lights polluting the sky, the stars picked up an awe-inspiring quality that only fascinated me more the more time passed.
I didn’t know what about them made me keep looking up.
The quantity, perhaps? There are always more stars out at night than anyone would assume.
I loved how much they twinkled, or the fact that, whenever I looked at them long enough, I could tell them apart by size and color instead of placement.
Or maybe my sense of awe stemmed from the thought of their size compared to mine, compared to my own sun’s—and the fact that some of what I had designated “stars” were nebulas or full galaxies with more worlds in them than I could fathom.
I had never paid much attention to astronomy before.
I always trained my eyes downward instead of up—down at my project, down at the path before my feet.
Aster, on the other hand, looked up just as readily and perhaps more so, as if he originated from the stars and could navigate his trails on the Earth by checking the map in the heavens above us.
How much had I missed in all of this? Already I felt embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know any constellations beyond the Big Dipper and Orion.
Whenever I looked at them now, I could easily see that there were more.
Many more. I could hardly watch them without imagining shapes, without knowing that this cluster on the north must have its own name and a story behind it, or those stars in the far east could have been Pleiades.
But I didn’t know, and I regretted that I’d never placed any observational weight on such a basic thing many people took for granted every night.
Aster took things further than pictures and appearances.
To him the stars were giants, living creatures that experienced a different sense of time and space than anyone on Earth.
They had journeys, goals, trysts in the night.
They were born and they died, and they lived full lives in between.
Sometimes they even forged friendships and alliances.
What surprised me was that Aster didn’t even need to say any of that out loud to me. I simply felt his thoughts pulsing through my head when I lay on the porch next to him in the evening and looked up.
Aster and I had been together several days by now.
We hadn’t written or attempted to write.
We hadn’t attempted creativity (at least, by my definition) beyond a few dishes in the kitchen and setups by the beach in the day.
Aster consistently preferred spontaneous acts of creative living rather than intermittent projects.
He didn’t want quotas or deadlines but instead a cycle that would never end.
Actually, I had never asked him much about his life since we first decided that questions were acceptable.
It was one thing to have permission to know everything about Aster, but a different matter entirely to ask and spoil the secrecy.
Interviewing Aster wasn’t the same as asking an ordinary person about his life.
Aster’s personal brand of honesty would mean that he would withhold nothing and lay everything out so flat that I could practically see right through him.
It would be like seeing a man’s veins and arteries laid out on a spread, eerie and overwhelming.
I was petrified at the thought and too unnerved to enjoy it.
So we learned about each other slowly by sharing our lives with each other.
One night I’d asked him to sing something to me, something original before I went up to bed.
The sound that came from his lips was too beautiful to be categorized as singing.
I recognized words, but I didn’t understand them.
Aster said that I wouldn’t be able to. Whenever he sung or wrote or worked, he did so in his native tongue, a language that sounded, as well as I could describe, like spoken music.
One night we lay side by side on the wooden deck behind the house, watching the stars in front of us. It was late. By the end of June, the sun doesn’t start setting until later at night, and I was already tired by this point.
I’d given in to the state of not caring much about preserving the very human secrecy between myself and Aster, and without thinking, I reached out and held his hand in my own. Its warmth surprised me.
“Aster?” I asked.
He grunted, not moving from his position but accepting my hand.
“Aster, what do you know about the stars?”
Now he shifted. He rolled onto his belly and propped his head up with his hands. His face bore the expression of a playful boy about to tell a scary story at a bonfire, and he wanted me to get the full effect.
I pulled myself up and sat cross-legged for the answer.
You ask about them like you’d ask about a community of people, and you’re right to do that. I know the stars well. Like I know you, I suppose.
“All of them, or just a few?” I didn’t know if I took his claim seriously, but it confused me as much as it fascinated me.
Many. It’s easy to know the stars, you see. They’re very old, and it’s always easy to see where they are. They don’t keep secrets or lurk in dark corners of haunted rooms.
I shifted closer to him. “Tell me about one of them,” I said.
He glanced up for a second and then looked back at me. Which one?
I lay back down and rolled onto my back.
Suddenly I felt overwhelmed. I could point my finger anywhere, and I still wouldn’t know the name of my chosen star.
I looked at the brightest stars, and then at the colorful one.
I felt annoyed that the media always portrayed stars as white.
That was a disservice. Even our own sun was yellow.
They weren’t diamonds against a black velvet sky—they were a full array of different sorts of jewels.
“That one,” I said at last, pointing. “The bluish one. Twinkling right up there. Can you see the one I mean?”
Aster rolled onto his back and scooted beside me, shifting until he could see from under my hand. Yes, I see what you’re pointing to. That’s a youth.
“A youth?”
Old by your standards, but very young by the standards of the universe. It’s very small, see? And it’s traveled a long way. It knows how to move. It’s gentle. Elegant. You could call it a dancer.
I couldn’t see any sign of movement in the star, and all of the stars looked gentle. I looked at it flickering and figured that it must be impossibly far away. “It looks lonely.”
Aster drew a breath. It’s not lonely. Though I suppose most of its companions are too small and far away for you to notice.
It’s busy. But you are right that it doesn’t have much of an emotional life.
Most life in the universe doesn’t. But that’s where humans stand out.
You don’t merely experience emotions—you build an identity.
You don’t fear, but develop anxiety. You don’t want, but develop greed and covetousness.
You don’t love… you pull yourself into something much stronger, much more powerful and more deeply connected with your being.
I blinked. I pulled my focus away from that one star to the entire sky around it, suddenly feeling like the only world I knew really was just a tiny speck on the edge of a massive universe. “That’s beautiful,” I said. “Should I run inside and grab a notebook?”
And spoil the fun? You should have thought to bring one with you when we first came out here.
“Oh.” I sat and straightened my hair down my neck. The light from the kitchen near the glass back door of the house was pulling my attention away from the more subtle light from the sky.
Stella, come here. Aster was sitting now, even though I hadn’t seen him move from his position on the ground. Let me hold you. Just for a moment. I want to wrap my arms around you.
Again my eyes flickered to the glass door. “You know what?” I asked. “I want to write this down. This moment. I think we can use it. Could I grab some paper from the house?”
Are you sure I’ll still be here when you get back?
“Where would you go?”
He crooked his fingers to call me closer.
I crawled to Aster on my knees and prepared to hear something profound or elegant.
I still shivered every time I remembered his telling me I was beautiful.
Since then, he hadn’t said anything amounting to a compliment.
At least, not a compliment of me. He would observe me frequently—he would list my priorities, point out what I was focused on, name the attitudes with which I lived my life.
But he said nothing in a kind or endearing way.
The fact that I knew he could made me wonder more with every passing day, every passing hour, if now was the time and if he would soon break his silence on the matter of what he thought of me.
Aster lowered me to a sitting position on the smooth wood of the patio and then wrapped his arms around me in a gentle hug.
“What is it?” I asked.
This.
I twisted in confusion. I couldn’t make sense of his words when I couldn’t see his face. “This? Holding me?”
Holding you.
I relaxed. Aster’s hold surprised me with its firmness.
He had the hold of a guardian, both protective and confident.
A hero’s hold. For a second, I enjoyed it, but my curiosity for more—for confirmation of more—outweighed my desire for the moment to last. “It’s not that it isn’t nice, but I don’t understand,” I commented. “Why are you holding me?”
He said something that I couldn’t rightly understand, either “I want to” or “I want you,” and my heart raced in my chest.
I shifted and turned around. “What was that? I couldn’t hear you.”
I said nothing.
“Sure you did. Say it again. Say it!”
Stella, you shouldn’t press me.
“I just want to know what you said.” I pulled his arms from me and turned around more fully to face him.
Aster’s countenance was pale, marble in the moonlight. His eyes looked larger and more expressive than they did during the day, wide with desire and thirst. I’m a terrible muse, he said.
“No you’re not. I’ve had a really good time. And I do think my writing will be better because of everything we’ve done.”
That’s just it. It’s not your writing I care about.
He glanced over the sea, where a reflection of the overhead moon rippled across the water.
“Then what...?”
He looked at me again, and despite the dark of the night I could still see the blue in his irises clearly. I want you, Stella. I wanted you from the moment you first called me into being. From the moment I first saw you. Your desires, your life, your energy and sad frustration.
My breath stilled in my chest.
Aster continued. This is exactly why I’m not supposed to talk to you about this kind of matter.
It’s not right for us, for either of us, and it’s not fair to you.
We’re supposed to work together for a single summer, and then I will fade away as soon as you leave to go back to your home in the Green Bay.
But I never want to be away from you. I want to be with you always.
My throat stiffened, and I felt a lump forming. “How much do you want me?”
His lips didn’t move. Expressing my desire would only downplay its significance.
I could hardly believe what happened next. I moved forward. It was like being sucked into him. Like he pulled me into him with a gravitational field that I could not fight. Next his arms were around me again, but this was not the sweet embrace from moments before.
His eyes sought out mine. They sparkled with smaller gray stars of their own. His chin lowered.
I closed my eyes and leaned forward, waiting, even if I didn’t know for what. Then an electric buzz filled me as his lips touched mine. At first they were so soft I didn’t know if he was kissing me, or if I only imagined it.
I parted my lips just slightly, wondering if he would move forward. I opened my eyes and saw him still looking at me, still swallowing me with his omnipotent gaze.
Aster’s hold on me tightened. His kiss grew firmer, tighter. It locked the breath in my chest. If this went any further, I might have needed to leave my body for a moment to process it. It was too much. To beautiful. After a while—seconds or minutes, I couldn’t tell—I realized I had become dizzy.
Aster let go. He glanced upward, either ashamed or afraid.
Meanwhile I looked straight forward at his face, his mouth, in a numb shock.
Aster slowly lowered his gaze to me. I suppose that inspires you?
I had forgotten the entirety of my need to write.