Star Stuff

Where does the sky end? Is it just above the ground?Then are we always in the sky?

—Tisanes, Ana Hatherly

The night the moon disappeared, and the stars along with it, some of us were walking home. Some of us were waiting for the light to turn at the intersection, or were sitting outside on benches. Some of us were standing around the nighttime farmer’s market, the little tent lit by tiki torches. A couple of us were playing music on the street corner. Many of us were walking dogs. It was unseasonably warm for November, and the lights on our street were bright. The whole block smelled like Indian food. None of us talked to each other, though if you had asked, we would have said we relished being a community, even a community of strangers, all of us together under the same moon and all those stars.

Then the moon disappeared and took the stars, too. We thought it happened all at once, which of course meant it was probably happening by stages, and we just hadn’t taken the time to realize it. We had never before noticed the night sky. Some of us couldn’t even remember the last time we had bothered to look up at it. We never saw the stars in the city, even on a clear night, and we didn’t know the shapes of the constellations, spoons and lions or whatever, we didn’t know any of their names. We never bothered, when they were there.

But that night we noticed they were gone. The movie theatre lights suddenly shone too bright, the tiki torches in the tent became luminous, the way that a flashlight is invisible when the light is on, but commands the room in the dark. Without the moon, without the stars, everything else got brighter.

We converged on street corners, those who had been inside already were reappearing, noticing how the shadows in our homes had gotten stronger, our windows inexplicably darker. We met as neighbors for the first time in various states of undress; Kay was barefoot and Bruno wore a nightcap and pajama bottoms and nothing else; Lexa’s robe had come untied, Gary’s beard was only half-shaved, and Nell was naked beneath her red plaid coat. A number of us left behind our house keys.

Did you see that? we asked one another, when what we meant was: Did you unsee that? Because what we were trying to imply was that something had gone away, not come about.

We all craned back our necks so far they cramped and still we could not see what we had once always saw: Where was it?

Strangers joined our unkempt asphalt family—Sorry to bother you, but are you looking for the moon, too?—and we shrugged, baptized by streetlights.

Is it a lunar eclipse? one of us asked. We had only just met her that night: Stella.

Can’t be, said another, named Gill, we found out. A lunar eclipse wouldn’t totally erase the moon from the sky, he said. And it wouldn’t erase the stars. It emerged that he was a professor with silver hair and a cane, so we believed him.

Could they all—the moon, the stars, everything—be behind the trees? some of us asked.

Could they be behind the buildings?

Behind the clouds?

You would still be able to see the blots in the sky, where they were supposed to be, even though it was eclipsed, those of us who understood said to those of who didn’t. And if the moon was behind something, we would still be able to see its light. And anyway, what about the stars?

They’re all gone, we said, once we all got it. They’re just not there anymore.

We never thought to check with the rest of the world if they’d lost their moon and stars, too. All we knew was ours were gone, and that, to us, was the whole world. We took off for space, then, to try to find the moon and the stars...