She could see the star man’s outline against the night sky. He was hunched over the telescope in such a way that she could not tell where the man ended and the instrument began. What marvel was he pointing to up there in the sky? The black velvet sky alive with diamonds. Diamonds that were the light from whole systems of worlds millions of miles away, racing through the black emptiness of space for unimaginable years to come to her very own eyes this late-summer night.
Did the stars know about her? Or was she truly nothing—not even a speck of dust—to whatever or whoever was there in those blazing, whirling worlds? I’m here! she called out silently. It’s me, Angel Morgan.
At first, he seemed not to know she was there. She didn’t dare speak out. He was still too close to a man from a dream, despite his very real trailer. You didn’t interrupt people in dreams; you waited to see what they had to say. Without taking his eye from the eyepiece, he spoke at last. “Did you know that always somewhere out there, there is a new wonder to be seen?”
“No.”
He stood up. He had a lit cigarette in his right hand, which he put in his mouth. “There was a time,” he said after taking a deep drag and slowly blowing out the smoke, “there was a time I wanted to be the first person in the world to discover something in the sky. People do that, you know. People not so different from me. Just a few years back a man in Essex Junction discovered a nova. He looked for fourteen years. Every clear night for fourteen years.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth to cough, a rusty-sounding cough. She wanted to tell him not to smoke, that it wasn’t good for him, but she didn’t quite dare.
“How old are you, Angel?”
“I’ll be twelve next April.”
“So fourteen years must seem a long time to you.”
I guess.
“It takes the light from Andromeda two million years to get to earth.”
“You told me,” she said.
“So that doesn’t make fourteen years seem so long, does it?”
“No.”
He took another long drag. “1 stopped looking after only eight years. Do you know why?”
“No,” she said again.
“Because one night I realized I was looking and looking and forgetting to see.” He propped his cigarette on the little stand between the telescope legs and put his eye on the eyepiece again. “I guess that sounds crazy to you.”
“No.” In her daytime world it might sound crazy, but not in this enchanted nighttime universe.
“Here,” he said, drawing her to the telescope. “Right here, meet Albireo; that’s the beak of the swan. They couldn’t see it in the old days, but it’s really two stars.”
The twin stars blinked gold and blue like jewels in a heavenly crown. She wanted to ask him about the swan, since she didn’t see anything like a swan in the sky—just jewels. She didn’t have to ask, as it turned out.
“Long ago,” he began, “people just like you and me looked up at the sky and they began to tell each other stories about what they saw. The stories helped them map the sky.” He put one hand upon her shoulder and laid the other lightly against her ear, pointing her gaze away from the eyepiece to the sky itself. “They called that group of six stars Cygnus, which means ‘the swan.’”
She nodded, though the cross in the sky above her looked nothing like a bird.
“Albireo is the beak. Deneb, that bright star up there, is the tail. The three stars almost in a line making the breast and wings of the swan are Sadr, Gienah, and Azelfafage.”
She giggled, then quickly covered her mouth. She didn’t want him to think she was laughing at him.
He went on seriously. “Sadr means ‘the breast.’ It’s the one in the middle. Gienah and Azelfafage mark th
e wings. And no, I am not sneezing. I’m speaking Arabic. Didn’t expect an old broken-down Vermont country boy to speak Arabic, did you?” She knew then that he was smiling, though it was too dark to see his face clearly.
“I was wondering something,” she said. His joking had made her bold enough to ask.
“Yeah?”
“Do you think that sometimes they told stories about the stars so they wouldn’t be scared? I mean, the universe is so huge, and you look up at the sky and feel so like, well, so like nothing?”
He picked up his cigarette and took another puff. “Could be,” he said, and began to cough again.
“Maybe it’s not my business.” Angel couldn’t help herself; she had to say it. “But it’s not good for you to smoke. It really isn’t.”