The Stars

“Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say”.

He telegraphed a smirky little grin at me, and took a sip of his beer.

In my mind, I heard myself thinking Oh, for God’s sake, Rowan. If you want me to believe you, don’t talk in cliches.

I didn’t say that out loud. I don’t like the part of me that gets irritable and critical, and I didn’t want to say anything hurtful to Rowan. I watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall as he drank again, and noticed that his skin looked older than it had last summer, a little looser, a little thinner. I picked up a stick from the ground next to my feet, from among the scattering of dead eucalyptus leaves and the fine red dust, and used it to push a glowing chunk of wood back toward the middle of the campfire. I put a handful of twigs on top of the flames, too. The fire crackled, spat a few tiny sparks into the darkness, settled.

I looked back at Rowan. The firelight was gleaming on the lenses of his glasses, making it hard to see his eyes. His comment was the last of several, in the last few minutes, all deliberately obscure, but all hinting at some kind of alien encounter. I’d gathered that it was several years before he and I had met, when he was out here alone, under the stars. And I knew that referring to it, even in such a vague way, was making him nervous - which explained that cliched line, and the grin.

“Ok, enough with the mysteriousness. Did you actually see a UFO, or aliens, or something? Here? On the side of the road, in the middle of the Birdsville Track?”

“No … apart from the stars, I didn’t see anything.” His voice had become defensive.

“I did everything BUT see.” He took another mouthful of beer, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “But I don’t tell people about this shit, Tallie. I don’t tell anyone. I’m not sharing this with you if you’re gonna act like I’m some kind of nut job.” He tightened his jaw, and looked out across the plain, toward the West. The horizon now had only a small smear of fading, peach colored light along it.

He’s about to tell me something he’s never told anyone, ever, I thought, and I suddenly needed him to know that he could. I needed him to know that I would listen, and believe him.

“I’m sorry. I just … look, of course I don’t think you’re crazy, I think you’re one of the sanest people I know. Most of the time, anyway,” I smiled. “And if you say you experienced something, then I believe you experienced it.” I gestured toward him, helplessly, almost reaching for him.

“What it means, might perhaps be another issue.” I leaned into the word means. “But I don’t think you’re either a liar or an insane person. And I’m also very curious, to learn about something I’m ignorant of. I mean, I don’t know what’s possible and what isn’t. None of us do. Maybe there really are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in most people’s philosophies, right? Why not? Life is strange, that’s obvious. So, I apologize. And my mind is open. Seriously.”

Silence. I stared at his face and willed him to not shut down. “Please tell me what happened.”

Rowan rolled his head, wincing, and stretched his neck like someone who wished it would stop hurting. He coughed, and closed his eyes while the fire wafted smoke into his face for a few seconds. Then he considered me, studying my expression, his mouth tense. At last he sighed, and rapped his bony knuckles on the arm of his folding chair.

“Alright.”

Another pull on the beer bottle, longer this time. A readjustment of his position in the chair.

“It was just over five years ago. Late September, 2014. You know I used to come out here almost every year, originally with Joanne, and then a couple of times with Lauren?”

I nodded. His ex-wife. His last girlfriend. I knew.

“Well, that last year that I was here, it was just me. Lauren was in New Zealand, and it wasn’t feeling right between us any more. We broke up as soon as she got back. Anyway, so, I was out here alone, camping, getting some Rowan time. I camped right here, this very same patch of dirt. Used this same curved rock for the back of the fire pit. I had one of my award-winningly excellent Rowan-made chili con carne dinners” - that grin, again - “and a couple of beers. Only two.”

I didn’t argue. Rowan was never a big drinker, especially when alone. He carefully lowered his empty beer bottle to the uneven ground, reached into the cooler for another one, looked at mine, still half full, the amber glass glinting. I drank, reflexively.

“I watched the sunset. It was a crystal clear night, like tonight, and the colors were … beyond belief. Like Technicolor. You’re right, Tallie, it is the most incredible place, here, to watch a sunset. The sky is so huge, and the land so flat and empty, and the dry air makes everything look more intense. It’s like nowhere else I’ve ever seen, in Australia or anywhere else.”

He gently removed a small beetle from the knee of his jeans, set it down on the other side of a grass tussock, safely away from the fire.

“So anyway, I sat here, and I thought about how beautiful it all is - the bush, the desert, the sky, the animals, the sun, the moon, this planet spinning under our feet. I leaned back, put my head on the back of the chair, and stared at the sky for ages, as the little pinprick stars came out, slowly, one by one, and then lots of them all at once. Watching them, I felt so … known. And kind of … held, by them. They were shining like silver, and the sky was this inky, velvety black. I’d stopped blinking, like some people do when they watch strobe lights. I felt like I was starting to lose myself, starting to just become part of the stars, and the night. Like all of nature was connecting with me, and I was connecting with all of it. It was a wonderful feeling, really awesome - and I mean, literally, filled with awe. But also happiness, and peace, and,” he paused, “love. Love for the sky, the stars, this quiet place, nature. But more than that, too. It’s hard to describe.”

Rowan was not a man given to frequent and descriptive talk about his feelings, but I had seen him kind of like this before - just a few times. When we first fell in love, two years back, he spoke about his feelings for me with surprising openness and passion, letting himself be vulnerable. His way of loving me with his words felt so intimate, it was almost like being touched, caressed.

And then, the first time we had sex, when it wasn’t sex, it was making love. I don’t mean just some especially loving kind of sex. This was more than that. It was the sensation of actually creating love. Physically generating emotional, spiritual love between us. That night, his words to me were eloquent, revealing, and sensitive, as we lay on the tangled sheets, breathing deep, pressed together warmly and damply.

I saw him affected and emotional again, even more powerfully, last year when we spent two weeks over Christmas in the Victorian High Country. Some acacia leaves had brushed the edge of his shoulder, as he’d begun to wade into a deep pool at a bend in a creek, one afternoon. He’d stopped, as if it was a person who’d touched his bare skin, and grasped the leaves between his fingers. Holding them, he seemed struck by some strong reaction, as he took in the beauty of the water, the gray and black rocks, the tiny birds hopping around in the spiky shrubs. And then, inhaling deeply, he let go of the leaves, and raised both hands, palms up. It seemed to me almost as though he was using his hands to scoop up the summer air, vibrating and saturated as it was with the intrusive rasping of cicadas, and to offer that sound to the sky.

I can’t remember exactly what he said, after “My God, Tallie, can you feel this place?”, but it was a speech. An evocative speech, to all of nature that was gathered around us - the dragonflies, the thin white streaks of cloud in the deeply azure sky, the mud and pebbles underfoot, the yellow acacia blossoms, the water dragons disappearing with a sudden swirl from the creek’s edge. He spoke a little hymn, that day, joyful and worshipful, to the beauty of living nature. The sanctity of that hymn was not at all ruined by the one line I do clearly recall, which was “Absolutely fucking magnificent - and so strong - and so delicate - and so perfect.” I wished I’d been able to recall more of that speech, but the feeling of it wasn’t forgettable. Thinking of it now, watching Rowan across the fire, I understood that he was in love with nature, with the earth, with the night sky.

He pulled a thick section of branch from the wood pile beside his chair, balanced it strategically on some other branches in the fire, and continued his story. “As I was sitting here, staring up at the stars, mesmerized, something happened. All of sudden, I felt like I was falling up, into the sky. Like gravity wasn’t working, not for me anyway, and I was just zooming upward. I couldn’t feel the chair, or my body, any more, and that was... how do I say this... so freeing. It should have been scary and disorienting, but it wasn’t. It was lovely, natural, like diving down underwater, but with less conscious will. It was happening to me, rather than me choosing it, but I wanted it.”

Rowan looked at me. My eyes were wide, and I shook my head a little. “Wow. That sounds amazing. What did you think was happening? Or, I mean, why did you think this was happening?”

“I don’t know. Mostly I wasn’t thinking about that. I was so immersed in just experiencing it, which was overwhelming. I didn’t have any attention left for questioning it.”

We both sat for a few moments. I took a handful of cashews out of our food box for myself, and handed some to Rowan. He put them in his mouth, chewed. “After a while, I did think a little bit about what was going on. Some part of my mind asked ‘is this astral travel?’, but it wasn’t like it mattered, whether it was that, or whether it wasn’t. That didn’t seem important. I was in an altered state, I guess you’d say - a state where names and words weren’t that useful, concepts weren’t really getting handled verbally. I was just going with it, being pulled along, exploring the infinitely huge world of the stars.”

“This sounds so fantastic, so extraordinary.”

“It was, and it gets more so. I’m aware this all sounds like a magic mushroom trip. Or a psychosis. But it wasn’t. I was as sane and as sober as I am right now. No drugs, no crazy time. Just like now.”

I nodded. “Okay. So what happened next?”

Rowan took another long pause, hesitant. A breeze came up. The leaves on the tree beside our truck whispered, moved.

“Then, well, I got a bit of a shock. I’d swirled around for a while, among the stars, and finally got so close to one of the stars that it’s light, which was brighter than you could ever imagine, was taking up my entire field of vision... and then … it spoke to me”.

I waited a beat or two. He didn’t say any more. “The light spoke?”

“No, the star spoke, through the light. The light got so bright and all-consuming, that I couldn’t see anything other than this total lightness, a kind of endless golden-white, and then I lost my awareness of it, to a degree. I think my eyes sort of switched off, or maybe the bit of my brain that deals with vision switched off. I felt the light, not just the warmth of it, but the light itself, all the way through my brain and my body. It was a presence, buzzing and energizing, very real. It had a scent to it, too, that I can’t describe at all, like an exotic spice you’ve never encountered before, but much more complex… But, yeah, I stopped really seeing that light. All I could do was feel it, and smell it, and hear. I was hearing the star. It was communicating with me.”

“Holy shit, Rowan. A star communicated with you?”

Rowan pursed his lips, raised his eyebrows, nodded, looking as though he wasn’t sure he should be admitting this out loud. I could see why he might feel that way. The smoke of the fire drifted between us, making my eyes sting.

“What did it sound like? What did it say?”

“It was ….. like music, and song, but where the notes mean things, and the song isn’t made up of words. And the notes have layers, and nuances, like shapes, that musical notes don’t usually have, in our world. The music was a language, and it could express anything, any thought. It was very, very weird to find that somehow I could understand this language, but I could.”

I was also feeling a little weird, at this point. Rowan’s words were painting the reality of all this for me so well, so effectively, that I could nearly feel the light, and nearly hear that musical language. I felt as though I knew what that would be like - and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, just to imagine it. I was now completely taken up by his story. I had no more doubts. I knew that I was not listening to a man who was making anything up. His descriptions were so obviously coming directly from the memory of something which had affected him a great deal. But beyond that, he was managing to come within a hair’s breadth of making me experience the things that he had experienced. Disbelief was no longer an option.

“What did it say to me? Um, it said a lot,” he smiled. “I don’t think I can remember all of it. But the parts I do remember, I’d like to tell you about. Is that alright?”

“Of course.” I wondered why he’d felt the need to ask me that.

“The star said that they - hang on, I better explain first - the stars... it’s not just this one star. It seems they all communicate with each other, all the time, in a similar way to how this one was communicating with me. And they work like a very close community, who agree on everything. They have no arguments or disagreements, any more than bees in a colony would. Like a hive mind, or something? But highly intelligent, so, not like bees in that way. Lots of thinking going on, up there. And they are, well, I guess you’d call them aliens. An alien life form, they would be classified as … with stars for bodies. Anyway, the star told me that they all saw Earth as a very precious place. There aren’t that many planets with organic life on them. There’s stars, they’re one type of life, non-organic; and then there’s organic life - us, animals, plants, birds, microbes and stuff - and that second kind of life, our kind, is really rare in the universe. We aren’t the only planet with life on it, not by a long shot, but there’s only a very small number of them, compared to how many stars there are. And they, the stars, they value every single living thing, as though it’s their own child.”

I interrupted. This was moving too quickly for me “Wait, back up. The stars are … aliens?”

“Yes. They’re alive, even though they obviously don’t have organic bodies like we do. They have consciousness, thoughts, feelings, communication. And even though their lives are massively long, they are born, they grow, they change, they love, they hurt, they feel delight, they die. When I got that, it seemed to me that we have more in common with them, than we have differences. Even though the differences are really big. And that’s how they feel too. They feel like we’re their little kids, or baby cousins, or something. But they don’t just feel like that about us humans. They feel it about every kind of organic life.”

“Ok. Wow. Um, I’m still a little stuck on ‘the stars are aliens’. The differences are big, you said. Hell yes.” I breathed for a moment, thinking.

“Do you remember once we watched a few episodes of Star Trek Next Generation, and I said how it was a bit feeble that all the aliens in that show were basically just humans with funny heads?”

“Haha, yes. I remember that!”

“I always thought, why would aliens look anything at all like us? Why would they have two arms, or two legs, or heads, or torsos, or mouths? It’s equally likely they’d resemble a fluorescent twenty-legged lobster with titanium feathers. Or a mountain-sized, soft, oozing jellyfish. I even thought they could be like a tree, and never move. But I never thought they could be a star. That’s … mind-blowing.”

“I know, right? Believe me, my mind was blown too. It’s just that I’ve had five years to get used to the idea.”

I drank the rest of my beer, in a series of gulps. “Alright, so. This star, these stars, which are aliens, alive and thinking and feeling, and who have a kind of hive mind, told you they see life on earth as precious and special, like their own children?”

“Yes. Ever see a meme on Facebook saying something life ‘We are all stardust’? Well, we are. The stuff they’re made of, is the same stuff that we, and every other kind of life on earth, is made of. And the stars, they feel this. It’s not an abstract idea to them. They love us, like offspring.”

“That is so cool.” I struggled to find words. “I mean, it’s way more than cool. It’s … fucking beautiful.”

He laughed, relief in his voice. “Now, you’re getting it. Yes, it is beautiful.”

I smiled back at him. I was slightly dizzy. This stuff felt so real, and so right, even while my head was spinning with the newness and strangeness of it.

“What else did it say?”

“The star, or the stars, I was never sure which, told me this stuff, and then … hugged me. Or, enfolded me. I felt it. They wrapped me in what felt like huge arms, almost. It was like being cuddled,” I heard a tinge of embarrassment, “stark naked but completely safe, by someone you utterly trust. Someone who will never, ever hurt you." His voice was not quite steady. "It was the best thing I’ve ever felt.”

The fire had died down a lot. In it’s dim glow, his skin had a dull orangey-redness, but he raised his face, now, away from fire and earth, and looked up into the sky. At the stars. Their cool, faint, radiance touched his face, and showed me that his eyes were brimming, behind his glasses. I fancied, for a heartbeat, that the starlight was putting it’s fingertips onto his skin, onto those tears, to soothe him.

“Rowan …,” I started, but I didn’t know how to end that sentence. I felt envious. I wanted to feel what he had felt. I wanted to have what he'd had. But I was so glad he’d had it, that my heart swelled with gratitude on his behalf, gratitude for the gift he’d been given. I couldn’t put words to all that, in that moment.

I followed his line of sight and looked up at the stars with him. Visually, they stood out against the dark vastness of the sky, like sparkling diamonds in a deep cave, caught in the beam of a torch. But now, the stars weren’t just a thing to look at, and find pretty. They were alive. I imagined I could feel them looking at me, and I almost wanted to hide. But then I remembered the love Rowan had described. It is said that if you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back, into you, I thought. I gazed at the stars, and they gazed back. For a long time, Rowan and I stared up. The Milky Way spread across the sky above us, and it felt sacred and timeless, like an ancient temple.

Rowan eventually took a deep inhalation, and sat back up, rubbing the back of his neck. The night was cooling down. I returned my eyes to the fire, which looked very small now, and added some more sticks. Rowan put three more pieces of wood on it, and stayed leaning forward, warming his hands.

“Then,” he said evenly, “there was the bit that made me want to scream into the vacuum of space. I would have, too, if I’d had time. That agony...”

My heart jolted, and my throat felt dry. I hadn’t expected this. “What? What happened?”

“They told me,” he said, “that they love us all so much, that they can’t bear to watch us humans massacre all the other species - by the way we live, by not caring, by being in plague proportions. They weren’t mad at us, but they know that we never value the life of the millions of other species on this planet, as much as human lives; and we often don’t value them at all.” His voice had an edge, now. “They know that everything we do is about us, and every other life form comes a distant second, in our plans and our priorities, in what we allow, in what we consider and don’t consider.”

“And they’re beyond heartbroken. They understand and accept the necessity of death, of course, in a natural way, but they say we’ve gone way past that. We’ve taken control of the planet, and we’re treating everything else that lives here, as though it doesn’t matter at all. And that indifference, that completely selfish, thoughtless destruction, on such a scale, is an unspeakable obscenity to them. They’re devastated. No, devastated doesn’t even begin to cover it. They’re racked with horror, and with uncomprehending grief, that we would be like this. They can’t grasp it. It damages them, in the center of their being, just knowing that we’re like this.”

I’d stopped breathing, absorbing his words.

“And then, they let me feel it. They let me feel, what they feel, about this.”

A thick span of four seconds, in which everything inside of me halted.

“It was the worst thing I’ve ever felt.”

“Jesus, Rowan,” I murmured. It was my eyes that were wet, now. I understood what he had said. My body felt it. My spirit felt it. I wanted to sob. “Bloody hell. Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m alright. The shock of it was appalling, but they only let me feel it for a split second, and then it stopped. I don’t feel it any more. I only remember the feeling, weakly, at a distance. That’s a mercy. I know they didn’t want to hurt me. They brought me back to that hug, that embrace, and held me there for a long time, saying nothing... except one thing. They said, ‘We wanted one of you to understand why it’s going to happen’, and I immediately knew they what they meant. Something was going to happen to us humans. Is going to. Something is going to happen, to make us less able to destroy all the other beings. Something to stop us ravaging the entire planet into a wasteland. Something not at all fun.”

Off in the dark desert somewhere, a small creature made an alarmed, high sound. It might have been a mammal, or a bird, or an insect. It was hard to tell.

“And then it was over. I woke up, or whatever, in my camping chair. Obviously, I was extremely spun out, asking myself if it was an hallucination. But I knew it had been real, and I didn’t feel crazy. I felt tired, happy, sad, confused, alive, peaceful - everything - but pretty much sane. Eventually, I just went to bed. What else is there to do, at a time like that?” He ran his fingers through his hair. “As I was falling asleep, I felt them again. They touched me, with the love, with the light. I smelled that faint, spicy scent. Heard the music. They were there. And they’ve been coming back ever since, briefly connecting - once a week, or once a month, I’ll be falling asleep, or taking a break at work, or driving, and I’ll feel them. I’ll hear the music-language.”

“Can you still understand it?”

“Yes, but not as clearly. It’s more vague, more impressions of ideas and feelings. I know they’re trying to comfort me. And they’re telling me it’s coming soon.”

“What’s coming?”

“A bad disease, an illness. A, what do you call it? A pandemic, affecting the whole world. I’m thinking a virus. Not bad enough to kill us all off, but enough to reduce our numbers. And then other stuff, too. I’m not sure what the rest of it is, yet. Not one big apocalypse. Just a rolling series of things, a gradual culling, a way to put restrictions on us. They don’t want to. They hate doing it. But it’s like, if you had one kid who could be so sweet, but who also kept being cruel and brutal to all your other kids … at some stage, you’d stop trying to make him see that it was wrong, because it’s too late for that. You’d turn your attention to protecting the others. Even if it meant depriving him of some of his freedom, or some of his rights, or some of his energy. Even if it hurt you terribly to do it, because you still loved that kid.”

Rowan and I ended up sleeping outside, that night. We set up the camping mattress and the pillows and the sleeping bags on the ground, near the remains of the fire, and lay flat on our backs, side by side. Our fingers entwined, as our eyes roved across the universe, trying to feel it and hear it. The hollowed-out logs of the fire fell into each other, and the breeze rose again. After a long time, Rowan’s breathing slowed, and his eyes shut. The alien sounds of the star’s language must have filtered into his dreams, because soon, in his sleep, he smiled.

I lay awake, all that I had learned and felt rolling across my awareness, like thunderclouds across a grassland. I knew the stars were right. I was scared, because I didn’t want to live through what they’d predicted, and I didn’t want to die from it either, but I couldn’t protest about any of it.

At last, as my mind grew sleepy and quiet, I felt it - an embrace, of raw, pure compassion, coming from above. I sensed a subtle aroma that was utterly foreign to me, and all the pain went out of my heart. My mind was flooded with light so immense, so brilliant, that I couldn’t even see it any more.

And I was held, and held, and held, in a place that felt like home.