The Indifference of Stars

The Indifference of Stars

by Eric M. Martin

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ISBN 978-1-300-12826-7

© Eric M. Martin 2012

epigraph

From clouds in the midst of trembling trees

Making a great gnashing, over the water wallows

Of a vacant sea declaiming with wide throat,

Over all these the mighty imagination triumphs

Like a trumpet and says, in this season of memory,

When the leaves fall like things mournful of the past…

- Wallace Stevens

So What

The Pacific splashed against the rocky coast of Big Sur, a deep turquoise punctuated by the white foam of waves. Standing inside her parents’ house several hundred feet above the shore, Hannah watched the sea through the windows, not hearing the sea sounds from so far away.

Such a slow machine of change, she thought. Such a gradual tearing down of the earth, it was like the slow life a tree, when the work was finished it would seem to have always been that way, like the trees now leaning into the wind, making a fence over the sea, appearing the browned teeth of the earth. Lonely watchmen chewing at the view from the last outpost of the world.

Hannah looked down from a floor-to-ceiling double-paned window in the second living room, the room that no one used. The house behind her was littered sparsely with furniture. Her parents had retreated years ago into the apartment of their master bedroom. There was a splash of furniture outside the door to their bedroom, as if the room had overflowed, like the sea, spitting back the carcasses of the dead.

Inside the bedroom there was almost no furniture. Two wooden chairs next to a wooden table at a window, looking to the north toward the forest. There was no bed, but a thin, densely padded mattress. They had been transformed by the locals into spiritualists. A process of change that Hannah watched in amazement as she grew up here, away from everything, taking her school lessons through the mail.

The second living room, where Hannah now turned from the window, held the old photos. Before moving to Big Sur when Hannah was twelve, the family had lived in San Diego, where Hannah’s father turned a real estate business into a fortune. They moved to the central coast with several million dollars after buying this huge house overlooking the ocean.

They had been typical upper-middle class people, breaking in to the upper class. Minds set on making more money, starting a family quickly so that retirement wouldn’t be put off, they were on a conventional course. Things didn’t change for them until they had lived in Big Sur for almost a year.

Money was coming in from San Diego, but less than they were used to. Now, there was just a percentage coming from the real estate firm, a small percentage; not quite enough to cover all the family’s expenses, especially since it was necessary to send out for almost everything they bought.

The bank account was shrinking. A more subtle change was occurring in Hannah’s parents though. They stopped getting dressed up in the morning. Her father experimented with a beard, grew it out, cut it off, then grew it out again and kept it, satisfied. The piano that Hannah used for her lessons was sold out of the house. Other expensive items were sold, and not all of them for sake of money. The television was sold to clean the house of distractions.

We can watch the ocean, Hannah’s mother said, with a voice that sounded new and distant to Hannah.

Yes. We have all we need right here, in these windows, her father agreed in a similar voice.

Hannah had watched them silently, wondering what it was that had turned these two in a new direction.

Early in the morning in their second autumn in Big Sur, Hannah and her father took a bike ride (they didn’t sell the bikes for a few years) and headed down the route 1.

On the way in and out of Big Sur there are pull-offs situated next to the road for visitors to stop in and take in the panorama of the ocean. A couple of them are equipped with magnifying viewfinders.

What are we supposed to see with these? her father asked, shaking the viewfinder.

The ocean? Hannah innocently surmised.

She was still a kid.

But, I don’t think we need any magnifying glasses to see something that completely fills the horizon, Ms Banana.

Oh. Maybe it’s to look at birds, she tried again.

Oh. You are a smart banana, Ms Banana. I think you might be right.

Why thank you sir, she joked.

They used to joke a lot, especially at times like these, out on a jaunt, just the two of them.

Hannah’s father pointed up the coast line, Can you see our house?

Where?

See where I’m pointing?

I don’t know. I don’t see it.

Well, here. Let’s try this thing, he said and dug a dime out of his pocket and put it into the viewfinder.

He swung the goggled machine to the direction of their house and shouted, I’ve got it.

Hannah was just a little too short to use the machine for anything but looking at the sky. When she stepped up to the viewfinder she had to angle it down to her face to look through it. Her father found a rock nearby and put stood it in front of the viewfinder.

He readjusted the machine and said, See? Can you see it?

Yeah! It’s huge! It’s a giant’s house.

A giant house for a giant banana…

Dad, I’m not a giant.

They laughed.

She kept looking at the house and said, There’s a bird on our house, a humungous bird!

Oh no. Let me see, he said comically, moving to the machine.

A bird had landed on a tree branch about twenty feet from where Hannah and her father stood, right in the path of the view so that in the viewfinder it did look almost like it had landed on their house, an albatross of the ages, wings tucked in, watching the sea for small whales that it would eat for breakfast, ready to swoop down in its huge awkward grace and devour the world, one whale, one piece at a time.

We’d better go back and save Mom, he said.

Let’s go, she agreed, in the spirit of the joke.

The image of the bird perched atop their roof stuck with Hannah for some time and recurred to her mind as she grew up. She couldn’t tell what was in it, if she recalled the scene because she had been out having fun with her father or because the image was so uncanny, and kind of cheap, natural magic, or because it was symbolic for something about the family.

She remembered the bird flying away too as soon as she and her father mounted their bikes.

Goodbye, house-bird! she had said and waved and it soared out and out with hardly a movement of its wings, just gliding.

Before long, they were all used to life in Big Sur, with the ocean sky as entertainment, with incense, jazz cd’s and food being the only household purchases, with her parent’s gradual seclusion into one room of the house.

With the two of them living alone together in their bedroom, Hannah had possession of the whole house. When she was fifteen, she got a job at a local campground cleaning up the campsites and saved her money. The first thing she bought was a gallon of paint.

If the house was left to her, why not make it over as she wanted it to be? So the library off of the kitchen, on the ocean side of the house, went from being a light speckled grey to a deep blue bordering on indigo. The room, which now held only one chair, a padded chair that could have come from a hotel lobby, and a small, low wooden bookcase, was like a star observatory. At night, Hannah put classical music onto the stereo in the kitchen and turned it up so that she could here the music with the door to the library/observatory closed.

Hot tea, Mozart, and the stars. Hannah pulled the cushioned chair close to the window, which was also a floor to ceiling window. Almost all the windows on this side of the house were.

On moon-filled nights she watched the waves glow, bright white in contrast to the dark water further from shore. She watched them crashing hundreds of feet below to the sound of her own symphony. Other nights, she wouldn’t look down at all, but sit sipping her tea with head tilted back, leaning against the chair, the only light in the room coming from the stars whose luminescence found its way across the outer-world this room and into her eyes as well.

That was when Hannah discovered the joy of being alone. But, she wasn’t truly alone. Her parents were there. As a matter of fact, they were always there. The only trips they took out of the house were walks at dawn into the woods, meetings at a local woman’s house for a sort of spiritual book club, and an occasional car-ride to Carmel for some gourmet coffee beans, which they would never choose to give up, and which they made at home daily.

The smell of coffee was the essential smell of the house. Hannah, having met no resistance in painting one room, thought about painting another room, the nursery. Considering the coffee focus of the household, she went out and bought some rich brown paint, the closest she could find to the color of a roasted coffee bean.

All the preparations made – plastic tarp set across the floor, book shelves pulled away from the walls and onto the tarp, hair tied back – Hannah made a large vertical swipe with her roller brush on the wall.

The paint looked like shit on the wall. Feces, that is; as if an eight-foot-tall dog that had never been housebroken had broken into the house and wiped its dirty ass half-way up the wall.

She abandoned the project, temporarily. The mark on the wall remained for two years before she finally came up with a new idea. Hannah decided that the nursery was more like a library anyway. That was where all the family’s books and pictures were kept. There were really no books in the room that was referred to as the library, where she spent so much of her time moon-watching.

Using the internet and the liner notes from several cd’s, Hannah found the lyrics to five old songs and painted them onto the wall with a thin brush over a coat of very light brown paint. The dark brown streak showed through the lighter shade, but Hannah left it. History has its place. A record of mistakes.

The room was like a three-dimensional, aged parchment with lyrical stories from lives lived in other places, in times long gone. It had the familiar feeling of stories heard around a campfire, but which were