From Jester To King XXV

They call them Stargazers. For each star corresponding to a person you pay a small fee to the Stargazer to look up at your own. I don’t know if they’ve identified them all, all I know is they claimed to have mine. So I went along. It was some sort of adjunct to a university building, a laboratory. There was no ceremony or signpost, no reception or waiting area and nothing marking out the building for the outside observer. The Stargazer was already in the room. He was a professor, male, in his 60’s, friendly, cheerful, very laid back. As I came in he was sitting at one of about 14 telescopes set at different positions around the room. All seemed to have been pre-configured as part of a wider research programme. He didn’t get up but just beckoned me over, at which point I realised that the star he was looking at was supposed to be mine. He had the manner of the typical boffin with complete mastery over his craft. I could see he was honing the set-up, making sure everything was right for my viewing. Then he just got up, smiled and left the room. He said: It’s all yours. He left me no other instructions.

So I went over to the chair in which he’d been sitting and noticed immediately that it was completely ill-suited. It was this deep leather contraption which you’d tend to fall right back into on contact, one of those chairs that made you feel like you were almost touching the ground when you sat in them, not only that, but it was also battered and old, the leather was wrinkled and the frame felt unsafe as if it was going to give way entirely as I lowered myself into it. I noticed that the telescope itself was positioned right up to the chair so that when you sat down you didn’t need to move it to start looking at your star. But the fact it was already in position was going to make it difficult to actually get into the chair. The telescope was mounted on something that looked similar to a microphone stand and this stand and the viewer were in the space you were going need for manoeuvring yourself into it. I had to come from the left side as I faced it because the other side was blocked off and it was going to be a tough ask to prevent myself from knocking the telescope’s viewer as I wriggled my way in and round and then down into a seating position. But I managed it without major calamity. I can’t be sure I didn’t graze the view-piece on my way in, all I know is I had no intention of going through the whole laborious process of getting back up out of the chair and calling the Stargazer to rectify, since a tiny shift in the apparatus wasn’t going to be critical. I wasn’t wrong about the chair; I felt almost incapacitated as soon as I got into it, luckily the viewer was still comfortably by my left eye and all I needed do was make the minutest of movements with my body to see what it was pointing at.

Initially the image was blurred and I couldn’t exactly make out what it was. Then I noticed that what I was looking at was actually a number of individual objects, perhaps about twelve of them rather than one sole self-standing star. These objects were roughly triangular, conjoined speckles of light drifting and oscillating, with coronas, and the coronas were pulsating, initially unstable and impinging on each other, but the longer I looked at the objects, the sharper they became, the more they seemed to settle down into their own separate space.

It struck me then and with enormous force that all of these twelve astral objects were my star. And there could be no doubt it was mine. I was in awe, I was dumbfounded, I was also transfixed. This was not a mental knowing but something more certain, something difficult to convey in words. And as I looked into the viewer, as I beheld the astral projection of me, I felt this enormous and powerful urge to cry, to heave from the deepest parts of my being. So strong was this grief, it was as if I’d forgotten what grief was like, it was if I’d never felt the feeling. It was the sudden remembrance of grief. It was the reconnection with it. It was the reconnection with my essence. And the longer I gazed, the more I wanted to cry, wondering at once whether it was appropriate to do so in this congenial atmosphere the Stargazer boffin had abandoned me to, and also whether there were really any tears beyond just the sadness.

And then I happened to stop looking at the star, perhaps it became too much, perhaps I was taking a breather and collecting myself. Something had caught my eye to my right hand-side down by the floor and bizarrely I saw that there was a gold-plated memorial plaque affixed to the floor there. The words on the plaque were prominent and in large text so you couldn’t miss them. They were to the memory of my youngest sister, not to her whole memory as thank god she isn’t dead, but to the memory of something she had done. And it memorialised the work she had done in this hostel for rough sleepers back in 2011. Every night she had cooked and cleaned, every day she had made beds, washed clothes, every day she had bought them basic items such as toothbrushes and razors. She had done this almost single-handedly and it was as if this memory had been elided from my mind, and on remembering it I remembered how good a person she really was, not that I’d necessarily doubted it in the first place, but the remembrance made it keener, it was sad that I had glossed over this commendable effort which reflected so well on her, but the scary thing was not really the memory itself but more when it happened, so long ago in December 2011, because I’d never have thought eight years had gone by since then, and I don’t know how it was this plaque was even in the room but it was as if both star and plaque were there to remind me of how quickly time goes by, rushes past you, it was as if my star was showing me that the last thing that truly meant anything was fully eight years ago, and I realise now that perhaps the me I was looking at in the first place was the me from eight years ago, since the light had taken eight years to reach me, and what was so sad was that this eight year period had set on such a beautiful creature whether myself or my sister, yet not much had been done, not much love had been given, not much self-love, not enough kindness, not enough care, care for others, perhaps that’s what the impulse to cry was about, but I didn’t cry and I wanted to and still want so desperately to cry, but now the impulse has gone.