"The October Stars"
by
Timothy Stilman
"I've got me a dream/ A beautiful dream/And that's what makes me a man"
Hal David
He loved the stars most of all.
He lay in a field of them this night, late, October 1, 2001. He was 13. He would be in space soon. He floated through it now. It was not his fault that an entire world and all the beings on it floated with him. He was singular. And believed there were great massive ancient beyond all counting civilizations up there--in unimaginable shapes and colors, made from materials that not the sharpest most dream laden eyes on Earth had ever or could ever dream so.
The world was end of summer. Summer over with as dust and pollen from butterfly wings gone caught in memory of someone else. Not him, for he did not like that season. But this one. Out lying on the top of a cold blue marble. Every part, inner and outer, of a cold blue marble was right side up, even if everyone else thought it was pointing toward the bottom always. Not this boy who was naked and whose body was a space ship primed in the primal darkness. The caves of sexuality in him like the caves of space all round him virgin to other's human eyes and hands and the touch of a heart beating somewhere.
But not here. Not for him. Only the heart up there, heard in the cold wind blowing. Felt in his hands at his scrotum as he lay in the fields beyond his house. The pulse of him beat there in him. As ancient as time before it existed as it was now. He was thin and short and long blond of hair. He was a mirror of whatever the stars wanted to do with him. And though he did not believe it, he was arrogant at times, this wistful boy, to think the stars waited for him. Up there on the silvery silk sky way that would take him to them.
Summer had died and Fall had been born and in the borning there were the leaves disengaged from the trees. The season of poetry had come again. Oh thank you. You've not forgotten me, the boy thought. Some leaves already were turning golden crisp brown here and now. He was on his back on the going brown grass. There was the susurration of dreams blowing around him and eddying on him. He was electric. A golden glow to light up the shiny bright beginning of the 21st century. A century that had the need of a boy like him. Smart and good in school. A track runner who excelled in that. Long, blowing body in the breezes as he ran with grace and self-containment round the circular cinder path that looped round the football field. And the arches of the boy. The light bulbs inside that said Christmas tree lights. The limber qualities of the boy and the ladders inside that he walked up boldly on October nights most especially and saw the heralding of all that was to be.
In the magical days. The grass tickled his back and his buttocks. His hands were round his pea small balls. His penis was three inches, hard. His eyes were blue as the sea. He was in love. He felt swoony and drifty. He felt as though he was already a Nomad in space. All the glass planets. All the planets that were filled with the mixtures of airless breath that only he could linger in and drink deeply with his lungs. They called him names in school. Girly boy. Limp wrist. Other things he did not like to remember. So he lay peaceful in the center of the clock of all creation this night. This night of the first breeze of Autumn. He lay there and he conjured. For he was brave enough to take on the blackness of space in order to get to the snow balls of stars and the colors and majesties of planets where there were solar winds and fire ball nights and molten mountains that turned into lava of larvae of electric discharges that crunched deeply into red as blood soil on which there were great black husks of for always lost history not of this Earth that he could bounce from, and go sailing to the iced hallucinogenic colored rings that ground round Saturn on which he would fearlessly skate. He just knew he would. And all of it, even the molten portions, made of winter and lingering to the coldness. Lingering to the frozen fingers of boys on milk ladles on farms everywhere of winter morning patinas.
He was brave enough to be sling shot out into space. Were the other kids? The bulkier ones? The more handsome ones? The football stars? Who needed this little sea of oxygen in which to stay alive. How weak their strength really was. But he was different. He had to, just had to be. And in the dark brine of air, with the moon full and Halloween at the end of the month with the breath all caught up and boxed in behind masks, and witches flying their broom sticks cross the yellow moon of midnight in the souls of children everywhere, souls that saw fear and countered it with nervous laughter, but he saw not the bones of the dead or the impossible to be so they probably were. He saw the bones of life incarnate shining blink bright in the sky. He saw what he was able to see of the immensity of it all. And there were no masks for him. For the stars whispered his name. Even in the day time, the stars kept watch over him. He felt linked to them as though he were a marionette on strings that they controlled.
Not to make him an automaton like most everyone around him seemed to be. But to make him aware of himself. To make him aware that soon he would start shooting something out of his penis other than little sighs. Soon his body would develop to more than it was now. Soon he would grow taller and the dignity would be left behind as though it were the first stage of the space craft that was him to disengage and to float in the black velvet to Earth orbit to be caught in it, and circle with it, until that once part of him disintegrated and fell and burned up and was never meant to be again. Not even the memory of it. He felt himself a Roman candle. He would not be able to stop the trajectory. And the candy stick of his that would grow. And the voice of his that would develop. He was on the verge now. Before the end of this year was up he would look at least a bit different than he did now. And by the end of school next year he might even not be recognizable to himself.
So he had to go to space. He had to go to the stars. He had to dwell among them. There where there was no brain fever. Where there was time enough. Where all the rituals of body and mind and society and tradition were off. No bets. New card games each moment and no one knew what was to happen next, least of all, he.
It was not sacrilegious to put the cathedral of boy in the cathedral of space, he believed. What grander gift could each of them give the other but themselves? He was a grain of sand. Come to the wrong planet from the leaves of outer space. He had been misnumbered, misnamed, misplaced. To his mother he was a burden. Now especially that his father had left. To his school and his church he was a joke. A cliche. An outcast. Stars, won't you hide me? To himself, he was immensely full of wander lust. He wanted to touch the candles up there in space. He wanted "to bite the stars." He wanted an end to illusory freedom. He wanted to be young forever. And he dreamed of his penis growing past its dimensions of now and the dimensions it would ever have, to be a huge stalactite bursting up from him. Pink and strong and marble veined with blue and impressive. He wanted to somehow move it from himself and climb up it to the planets and be away from this place for good and all.
He was still enough of a child to hide somewhere in his honeycomb brain, though he would be embarrassed to admit it to anyone, especially himself, the hope that when he touched down on Mars there just might be that giant bat rat spider monster like from the old science fiction movie. And there might be mental rivers of gold somewhere up there where thoughts were everything. Where he would gain the knowledge of all the gods and all the beings and all the universes there could ever have been. He would be so wise that he would answer every question precisely and he would be loved. Even he would be loved.
For in all his life, knowledge had been the only thing on this planet that he had loved that gave him return full measure. He was a boy weak of body and given to chest colds. He was quite sure he would receive a doozy of a chest cold from being out here unclothed in the chill night air. For he always did receive colds for this reason, among many others. But that was the price. It felt like, those sicknesses, winter burning bright inside him. Making him all jangly and on the edge of things. He liked to think some day soon he would use that jangly phone ringing feeling on the edge of the table, from the inside of him, to make that leap to the Andromeda galaxy. For that was where he would like to go first. He dearly loved the name Andromeda. Derived from a character in Greek mythology, Andromeda, who had married Perseus after he rescued her from a sea monster. This world, the boy knew, was his own sea monster. Rescue me! And I shall marry you. How strong and brave of sound it was. How much he would like to be that. To form a constellation and look at Earth down there far below, safe within the cupped hands of his keeping.
The boy was weak of eye. He wore thick lenses in his round glasses. He had chosen that style last year, much to his mother's distress because of their financial straits, but he had talked her into it, since he needed new ones. He chose those kind, because he had fallen in love with the Harry Potter books, and if truth were known, he had fallen in love with Harry Potter, who wore that style. We will greet the sun and fly on parabolas of space and tilt at time as Quixote tilted at windmills, thinking them dragons. But the time we tilt at, you and me, Harry, will not be windmills or illusions of dust in the red vapor trails of jets slashing across mid July skies in all that heat and bodily immobility. For the dragons we tilt at will tilt back at us and we and the dragons of space will be most real indeed.
He had discovered that he excelled, as he excelled at most everything, in the art of masturbation. He loved the long languorous feelings it gave him. Like there were winter stalks of wheat inside all of him growing and never topping off till he said yes. That were proud against the background of the gray skies and leafless shivery black skeleton trees of January. Not there for anything really utilitarian. Just reminders of yesterdays and the already foot prints of tomorrows. Tall and strong and young against the Earth flesh of limitless numbers of fields lined up together, handkerchiefs of farm land stretched out linked with each other, as if grounds of dominoes were holding hands. His penis wheat stalks against a horizon that cuts off sharp and clear and soon. He pushed his small penis to the sky. He whispered his incantations. He felt the all of him. The tightness of his stomach. His legs spread out. He raised his torso and he felt his buttocks free of the grass that was not tickling him now save in memory.
The boy moved and gyrated slowly and then fast. Gently. Then quickly. He felt he was glass. He touched one hand to his left nipple and his body cantilevered down to the ground again. He felt the canting inside himself. And he felt the canting of the night sky so close and so distant up ahead. He would ride the silver steed of dreams up there. Up to the mountains of forever. Up to the mountains where the air was thin and then non existent. But his lungs had breathed for a good long time. They would take the memory of oxygen with them. And they would breathe on the dream of air. Until he stepped off what he used to be, where he used to be, entirely, and learned how to exist in a new strange alien way. Such a good word "alien." Such a world filled with flower boxes of mysteries and enchantments and enticements.
Like all boys, he believed that he had been meant for somewhere else. He believed that the life he lived, not the life he wanted to live at all, was not a burden shared by another human being in the world. They were of a piece, to his eyes, with the world in which they shored up and worked with and developed and gave time and sagacity to. They had in short "learned how to do it." He had not and never would. He was studious and he was an excellent track runner. And he had some friends. But mostly, and even in all the things in which he excelled, he felt too--different. In science class, they were all the time looking through microscopes. At cells of peaches. At dust and motes and insects and slides of slices of frogs and tadpoles and salamanders. He hated doing this. For the world was already too small. The atoms were needed of course, though he knew splitting them had caused holy hell all over the world and was bound to cause more holy hell sooner or later (by then he hoped to be zipping about the ancient dead alive stars). But he didn't want to see small things made even smaller. Components of things small already he did not want to look at with one eye closed and the other eye going down further and further the tunnels of life until death stepped out to meet him.
He wanted to look through a telescope. He wanted to be expanded like a huge flower dropped upward into that massive Lilly pond where the laws of Earth science didn't apply. Where the box of crayons known as reality and immutable logic and all the names of Latin priceless heritage of old thought and "proven" conjecture, all the words of Galileo and Newton and Einstein and physics, were turned over, and the crayons all spilled out and made marks as they fell, hysterically, on the walls of space--marks that were the true graffiti of how it all really was, thou learned men and science and thou foolish men of religious bunkum, to thus align science and fairy tale religion together and show the fallacies of both. The little minds of little men and women who thought they knew so very much but who knew literally nothing at all.
All of this was to him supremely sexual. The moon frosted his body. His hands pulled at his penis. It felt warm and it was so hard and he loved the way it moved in his hands without his having to move it himself. He loved the way his balls would tighten up so to his body, almost going back in the cavity from which they had descended. One testicle, the left one, had only descended last year--finally. His mother had been frantic about what she called "his deformity," and had weepily blamed herself as she blamed herself for everything. Making it clear that she blamed her son really for everything.
She had taken him to the doctor's over and again, to remedy this terrible tragedy. The doctor had tried to assure her it was normal, that the testicle would descend soon. And then sometime or other--you would think this would have been made aware to the boy at the exact moment it happened--a convocation of bells and drums--the testicle had come out of hiding and suddenly, one night, the boy taking down his pajama bottoms in his safely locked little bedroom, had been rubbing away, and as usual felt his right ball, his single lonely right ball, and then, his hand encountering something new--out of place, disjointed, an addition there, fabric of boy all of a happy change (for he had been worried too) with this little left nut finally there, against it's fellow and he felt as complete as he would ever feel as a boy. When he told his mother, vaguely, just enough, so she would quit worrying and taking him to the doctor which was so highly embarrassing, he gave relief to her and himself. This was one less thing she could blame on him.
And the stars seemed even closer for some reason, with the ball's descent. The balance finally his. He, on this night of October 1, played his body like a musical instrument. All of him was of a piece. All of him was a magical stitch of the same gifted garment. And his magician's wand, of course, was his penis. He loved the sound of the word "penis." It was almost as good as the word "Andromeda." "Penis" though, was a private somewhat secret word. It had the thread of boy hood throughout it. It was his own. It could perform these tricks with his hands assisting or not. He was a boy magician of masturbation. The silvery arcs in him he felt at these times were of the same dream material the ships of other beings used to sail through in their own wanderlust in the star fields in which he was supine no longer. But sitting up and looking down at his smooth crotch and legs and chest.
He worked himself. It was a bridge, his penis. It was a bridge that was so caught in him, that was of him, that would be more than him sooner, and was more than himself now. The life of it. The sperm it would ignite, please, please hurry, would be filled to the brim with life. He dwelled in imagining that first eruption, and how he longed for it to happen, and was always disappointed when it didn't, for it classified him still as a little boy--AND HE WAS NOT!, but when it happened, he wanted the stars to shoot from it. He wanted a new sky and a new heaven that was not laced with do's and don't's and threats of cosmic Armageddon. But something that would explode from him to the vast up there that would be filled with wonder and with joy and with love like he had never experienced here on Earth. Thinking everyone else had experienced it but he. Though of course as with many things, he was quite wrong about that. If only he knew.
The wind blew cold and the moon made him coated silver sugar, like Tony the Tiger's frosted flake. It made him elf and sprite and faun and imp and happiness and giggling and rubbing his dick hard with his left hand, for he was left handed, which was the first difference he noticed about himself. All the school desks were made with right handers in mind. A teacher tried to make him right handed. He tried his best but could not. He remembered how the other children laughed at him. And now children said he was too pretty to be a boy. That he looked more like a girl. He wanted to scream at them, do you know what that makes a boy feel like?, do you know how much that hurts?, you can't possibly. But he didn't. For he was polite and tried to stay neutral about everything. Except in his bedroom, or when he escaped his house and ran here to lie in October countries. Where he explored himself and put his hands to his hard on, yes, his hard on, no one might believe it, but he was as sex crazy as the next boy, damn them for their little faith in him, and their tiny almost non existent imaginations that could only see football days for sexual prowess. Good boys even have sex drives. Especially good boys.
For young astronauts dream of sex and want everything about it just like everybody else. And now he rubbed himself and his penis arched and it trembled. His balls felt so tight like they would almost burst. His penis tickled like crazy. It itched at the head like the nose cone of a rocket ship powered by a Roman candle about to thrust its trajectory into deep space, then the candle itself falling by the way side and drifting, gone, (that would be the hardest thing to accept, he believed, and hoped he would not have to, in all the transformations he was to undergo on his journeys) as the ship proper drifted alone in space and on this ship was this boy and he was naked to the entities of everything.
His candle of penis ready to pop. His naked vulnerability out there already floating in the field of stars. Come to be something and someone. Come to be better than anyone had ever been before. He heard the horse hooves clattering on the opposite side of the glass of space. He heard the horse hooves clattering inside his glass body. He felt the motors of his penis and scrotum and his crotch and abdomen begin to burn, begin to turn over. The clicks and the unlocking of the lock. The tumblers falling into place. Making him a spectral boy. A boy who was sex. A boy who was all hard on. And then he rubbed that last time. And he felt his body giving up itself. Giving up, in pleasure and permission and home up at the top of the world and then gestation from the top of that world to the top of creation and then perhaps, oh yes, perhaps, even further still.
He let the waves of space flow through him as he eased back, and lay down again to his temporary cold brown grass home. He felt that intense wicked glowing fulfillment in him. And he was so grateful to be a boy. So grateful to be young. And not to think of tomorrow the way it is thought of on this planet. Tomorrow for him, as the doors in his body throbbed, and blew open and closed again, and his penis squirmed still with glee, was up there, where tomorrows are measured differently. And he lay, perspiring a bit in the cold, feeling his chest start to seize with sickness, but he was prepared for it, as always, the payment for this singular time of his. He put his hand on his bony stair step ribbed chest that was breathing hard. He closed his eyes, and felt the rapture of earth life ending and star shine life beginning. He felt distant. Floating. He would look upward soon in a minute or two and find himself sailing on his new voyage that put that of Columbus and even Neil Armstrong's first step for mankind on the Moon, in shadow forever. He held to his penis and he felt deliciously like a berry on a summer tree about to be picked in an autumn land.
And he lay there, body thrust outward, for a few minutes more, before he grudgingly put his clothes back on and headed home that was not home, where he would lie in bed and look up at the stars. No matter there was the ceiling and roof between him and them. He saw them anyway, clear as a bell. He thought yet again of the title of a science fiction novel he had recently read at the school library--"The Lights in the Sky Are Stars." He loved that title as he loved the book. It was about a man who ached with all that was in him to go to the stars, but who was, for all his trying so desperately hard, for all his vastness of mind and spirit, allowed only to be broken by tragedy.
Only and always the imagination and rhymes of thought to go into space, but not to be there actually. The writers, the dreamers. The boy knew it would be far different for him. When bad things encompassed the boy during the day, and he was sadly happy for what he was, and what he would be, he would hide in quotations he loved from his favorite books. But mostly now he hid in that particular title. It said everything. It said what it was all about. What was up there. What was inside him. It gave him comfort. I'll make it for you, he told the man in the book. I'll make it for you and you will come with me. I will not forget you. You will join Harry and me on our grand cosmic tour. Oh, the sights we'll see. That will make everything that has come before worthwhile. All the obstacles. All the cinder paths run and the hurdles jumped over. All the falls we've taken. The skinned burned knees and the whole of it.
And the title of the book was balm to the wounds. And it gave him courage. To always remember, the simplicity, the beauty, the eloquence of the words and all the wonder and magic in them--"The Lights in the Sky Are Stars."
(in memory of Fredric Brown)
end