Pale Fragments

the stars

At the age of eleven, Anders will break through the dead winter trees and feel the weightless magnitude of the night sky on his forehead as he waits for the Robot to meet with him.

There is no moon on this night in Kenai, Alaska. It will be, is, and has always been a small fishing town bordering other small fishing towns on a southern peninsula, all three hours from the biggest city in the whole state.

In that clearing, Anders is standing on a tower at the top of the world, which seems a raindrop below him as he feels flung up into the maelstrom of color shooting back into and at him. 

(The stars, the stars! They are endlessly considerable. Each time I look up, I feel there is more to be discovered, and that urgency is motivated with a deepening understanding of the futility of finding any meaningful discovery whatsoever. This may partly be due to my not being an educated astronomer, but I suspect they continuously feel the same.)

Anders feels dizzy in his meditation (which is unsought; Anders, at this point in time, has not yet become overwhelmed by an exponentially expanding barrage of constant thoughts.) The dizziness is gentle and warm. He lets himself be pulled backwards flat to the ground, and he feels as though he were a face of moss attached to an ancient tree trunk with roots of hair spread across and deep within the Earth. He breathes the grass and its soil, and he imagines he is in the midst of photosynthesis, sucking in a vacuum of the Milky Way's light.

(As I said and we will soon see, though these childhood years were the best of Anders' life, these nights spent watching the stars and speaking with the Robot were the direct cause of all the pain he would feel as an adult.)

He waits, breathing deeply and slowly as he does, watching the sky, trying to see dimension in it, willing the ends of the godly arrows piercing towards his eyes to move so as to be caught, and he waits, then feels a warmth blooming with a white light behind him which fades as if a mist blown away by the wind, and then the Robot is there lying beside him.

(The way she, the Goddess, spoke to me about Anders was...well, it was with an air of worship. This surprised me at first. She didn't speak of him in a washing-of-feet kind of way, not with a condescending recognition from prophet to disciple; she spoke of him sometimes with self-conscious brevity and a guilty frustration as a result of continual confusion, but most often with mystified awe. She didn't always speak to him like this when she knew him, and she didn't ever expect to.)

Neither speak, yet. They lay entranced as if in the beginning parts of waking wherein one must gather wisdom from dreams as into a single garbage bag the gardener stuffs a diminishing sea of leaves that fly away on wind at the end of autumn. Then Anders blinks hard and fast, inhaling deep and slow as his eyes widen. He sighs as if releasing the winds upon the straggling leaf-impressions, trusting that they'll visit again someday.

"Stars are out tonight," he says importantly.

"Are they?" says the Robot with sincere irony.

"I'm trying to learn how to start conversations."

"You're doing a great job."

"Thank you."

"Who told you that?"

"You did..?"

"What? No. Who told you that you had to work on your conversational skills?"

"Oh. My Bishop told me."

"Didn't he also tell you not to see me?"

"No..."

"I saw the whole conversation! You can't hide from me. I am actually worse than Santa, though he was nothing like what people imagine him to be. You know this magical holiday-superhero Santa isn't real, right? Sorry to spoil it for you if not, but it's time you learned."