Seeing Stars
by Debi Carroll
Originally appeared in Crossed Genres, #23: Dreams and Nightmares (Sep 2010).
When you see stars, you know you’re in trouble.
It’s an early warning system — because you don’t feel any different, but suddenly all these bright points of light are floating around you, and you know your brain is suffocating. You know you have to breathe or die, because the danger’s inside your own head, now.
I’ve been seeing stars a lot these days.
The one standing in front of me now smiles, and both the white light leaking from the corners of his mouth and the malice in his eyes makes me edge back in my seat. I know he can’t speak, can’t touch me — the accident only damaged my visual cortex, not hearing or sensation — but it’s hard to remember when something primal in me reacts to that smile, triggering fight-or-flight adrenaline that has me ready to run.
See, my stars aren’t harmless points of light. They’re manifestations of my oracular talent, messengers that used to stay safely inside my dreams. Turns out, my subconscious fills in my new blind spot the same way it fills my sleeping brain.
“What do you want?” I demand.
He doesn’t answer, of course. He only smoothes down blue pajamas, tubes clicking where they spring from his right arm like translucent tendrils of coral. His clothes are neat but his hair is still wild, as unearthly platinum as all the stars. Still smiling, he rubs absently at a closed fist. I see the fine blue lacework of bruises across the back of both hands and in the crook of his left arm, and I have a sinking feeling I know who he’s supposed to be.
Then he opens his mouth wide, and instead of white light, out pours a flood of cockroaches, scuttling towards me in an impossible clicking wave. I lean back and turn my head, but of course he turns with me, and the roaches keep on coming, vanishing at an invisible line where I know my blind spot ends. I have the crawling feeling that they are still in the room, creeping under the grey carpeting that covers the floor.
“I get it,” I say. “You can go now.”
He closes his mouth, catching the last roach between his white teeth. It bursts open, splattering black fluid across his mouth. I flinch.
Then he’s gone, and I dig my heels into the carpet to stop my legs shaking.
The door clicks, and for a brief instant I expect a star to walk through, heralding another message of doom. But it’s Dr. Baker, my neurologist here at the Mellon Centre for Traumatic Brain Injury, who enters.
He’s grey enough to be my father, and even the hooked nose and ascetic features bear a certain resemblance. He bestows a professional smile on me, and takes a seat at the desk to flip through my file. “Good to see you, Luke. How’s the head? Any changes in the past two months?”
I brush my fingers across the base of my skull, reflexively. “Nothing significant.”
“And your hands?” He nods to them.
I look at the scars knotting across every joint on my fingers, and flex them, feeling stiffness as the skin tries to ripple around scar tissue. “The same.”
“Any recent sexual activity?”
I look up fast enough to see his mouth twist with the faintest sign of distaste, and my shoulders tighten. Baker reminds me of my father in more ways than one. “I don’t see why that’s relevant.”
“Everything is relevant with traumatic brain injury,” Baker says. “Often one of the effects of TBI is reduced libido.”
“You never asked before,” I say, aware that I sound fifteen again. My sexuality wouldn’t be on the charts at all, except for the immune deficiency issue–whether or not I was at risk for AIDS.
Baker raises his eyebrows. “Before, you were on so many different medications, and in so much pain, that it complicated the issue.”
He’s right, although I hate it. It’s hard to think about head-banging sex when your head’s been banged enough for a lifetime. “No,” I say. “No, I haven’t had sex since the accident.”
Baker makes a note, and I have the perverse urge to rip the clipboard out of his hands, just to see what he’s written. Patient is abstinent, sign of overcoming degenerate sexual tendencies? Unexpected side effect of TBI — correcting previous abnormalities? Prescribe heterosex? Just as long as they can prescribe something. I’m a triple threat to the medical establishment — brain-damaged, oracular, and gay. Three things they don’t fully understand and can’t explain — the damage I was given and the damage I was born with.
“What kind of hallucinations are you seeing in your scotoma?” Baker asks. I swallow anger, because this is back on plan. “Faces,” I say, and then describe gargoyle-like faces taken straight from Internet research. I’ve never told him about the stars.
Baker says it sounds like Charles Bonnet Syndrome. I pretend to be surprised. Baker asks me more questions about vertigo or dizziness, about driving — I take the metro these days — about medication — just ran out of my anti-inflammatory — about dreams — none; they’ve all crawled out the crack in my skull into my blind spot.
I keep that last part to myself.
We wrap it up and shake hands; he holds the door for me and we’re in the hallway before I hesitate, and give in.
“How’s Sam?”
“Sam?” Baker stiffens, surprised. “He’s fine. He’s doing well.”
Despite the homophobia, Baker’s a good doctor, but only a doctor would call Sam’s condition fine — the nurses keep him in a permanent sedative sleep. But Baker won’t violate patient confidentiality for me; I was only Sam’s roommate for a few weeks. And I can’t say that a star that looks like him has been belching roaches in my blind spot.
“Well, good,” I say inanely, and watch Baker walk away down the hall. The elevator’s right behind me; it would be easy just to turn and leave.
But maybe it was the mention of sex, but now I’m remembering the first time I saw Sam, emerging finally from the white noise of pain to find myself in a strange room with a comatose roommate. I must have stared for ten minutes at his profile in the neighboring bed, watching the line of his jaw, the jut of his cheekbones. A frisson of awareness snaked its way in through the pain, even then.
It’s foolish to think of that now, but I start down toward my old room — fourth floor, west wing, a route that’s perfectly familiar. The hallway is eerily quiet; it’s a blizzard outside and icy roads mean that only the core staff of the Centre has come in to work today.
I’m halfway there when the air changes, the smell of hospital lotion and soap slashed to ribbons by the smell of ice and snow. Another few yards and the sounds reach my ears — hurried voices, something beeping, and a low hum that vibrates through the floor and walls. That hum can’t be human, shouldn’t be human, but it is — Sam.
He’s awake.
I sprint the last few yards. It’s like walking into a ringing bell; Sam’s hum throbs through my bones, makes my joints ache. As I reach the doorframe of the room — our room — it swells to full song, still wordless.
He’s crouched on the sill of the open window, inches away from a four-story drop, singing into the face of the blizzard. Snow and wind rush past him into the room and tear at the bed sheets and dividing curtain, layering everything with fast-melting snowflakes. The IV monitor by the bed beeps wildly. Two nurses are collapsed on the floor, staring at Sam with dazed eyes; one more curls almost at his feet, her hand outstretched toward his ankle — desperate, but also afraid, to touch him.
I know how they feel; my own knees wobble with the power behind Sam’s song. I’ve only heard him mumble in his sleep, but even then I could hear the traces of siren heritage — the deep, beautiful compulsion to believe, and obey, anything he said. It hadn’t taken long for me to realize why they kept him in a drug-induced coma.
Anyone with our sort of talent learns early to keep it tightly under control, but brain injury throws all bets out the window. If Sam had taken any damage that would erode that control — delusions, depression, mood swings — he’d be a hazard to anyone around him. Even the nurses and doctors, even if they didn’t understand why they felt compelled to listen to him, would understand that. So they kept him asleep.
But eventually, all sleepers wake.
I realize that I’ve taken several steps into the room, and quickly retreat, only to bump into Dr. Baker as he comes through the doorway.
“What is going on?”
Sam’s song cuts off.
The nurses blink free of the compulsion, and climb hurriedly to their feet. One turns off the IV monitor, and another starts to babble about incorrect dosage, but I can’t tear my eyes away from Sam. He turns slowly from the window, gaze fixed on Baker. His eyes, incredibly blue under snow-caked lashes, are those of a predator stalking its small, stupid prey.
“Doctor Baker.” My bones vibrate under his voice, a rumble of granite and basalt, of tectonic shifts.
“Sam, you need to go back to sleep.” Baker enunciates as if talking to a child.
I glance warily from one to the other, and pause on the star leaning against the bed table.
The star holds a cage with a canary inside. As I watch, its beak opens the size of its entire body, and it rips off the cage door and zooms straight at me, until the darkness of its open throat consumes my blind spot.
I duck fast around Baker and out the door, putting the wall between us and stuffing my fingers in my ears. I expect some blast of sound, but instead I hear a low murmur. I can’t make out any words, but it oozes so sweet and so nauseous that I crush my ears against my skull hard enough to bruise, desperate to drown it out.
The murmur swells to a crest, and then drops, fading to silence. For a long, viscous moment I wait, and when nothing but silence comes I peer around the door. Baker and the nurses are crumpled on the floor in little fetal balls. Sam leans against the windowsill, breathing in gasps. I ease my fingers from my ears.
The motion catches Sam’s attention, and he narrows his eyes at me.
I throw up my hands. “Wait! I’m not a doctor. Just another patient.”
His face morphs into a frown as he studies me. “I recognize you.” Only the vestiges of power vibrate in his voice.
I gape at him. “How? You were always asleep.”
“I recognize your voice,” he says, and I feel heat flood my face. It’s true that I talked to him sometimes, lonely in the middle of the night. I never thought he could hear me.
“Oh,” I say, but his attention has already skipped to the huddled forms on the floor.
“Beginning to the end,” he says. “It’s all been done before. There is nothing new under the sun.”
I wince as the rising power in his voice turns me into a tuning fork, vibrating to his note. On the floor, the others breathe in short, panting breaths. For the first time, I realize that my own talent may provide a buffer for Sam’s voice — I’m still standing, after all.
“There was no beginning that is now within recall,” Sam gasps, and I realize that he’s veering delusional. A fine sheen of sweat is glistening across his arms and forehead, matting his wild blond hair, despite the fact that the window is still open and snow devils swirl around the room.
I frown. “Sam, are you hot?”
He blinks at me. “No. Yes. I — I feel sick.” He backs up into the foot of the bed and slides down to the floor, one arm curling protectively around his stomach. “I might puke.”
The tubes sprouting from the crook of his right arm click against each other as he moves, and I recognize the PICC line — a long-term version of an IV, a tube that goes up a major vein in his arm to his chest. “Withdrawal,” I realize. “Sam, we’ve got to get you to a hospital. A real hospital, not a specialist center.”
“No!” It’s the sharp crack of something breaking, and I can almost feel ragged glass against my skin. He lunges to his feet, swaying. “I go back to a hospital, and they put me back to sleep. Years I’ve been asleep.”
“That’s the point,” I say. “You’ve been drugged for years. And now, cut off so fast? It’s going to be bad.”
“Better than going back on the drugs at the hospital.”
“They don’t need to know the full story,” I plead.
He gives me a look thick with scorn. “To treat me they do. There’s no way to hide it.”
Baker moans, and we both jerk to look at him, then at each other.
“Let’s get out of here,” I say. “We can argue about the hospital later.”
Sam doesn’t question the we part. He only kicks Baker onto his side, fishes something from his pocket, and tosses it at me. I see metal flash in the winter light, and then I’m holding a set of car keys.
Old fear curdles in my belly.
#
I’m fine pulling out of the parking lot, tires grinding against snow. I’m fine with the wheel under my fingers, although the scars ache in the cold. But as I take the right turn out of the lot, a tire gets stuck and for a moment there’s just the spin of rubber against snow. I bear down on the gas, the vehicle jumps free with a little kick, and that little kick is enough to make me not fine at all, because I remember:
The spin of the wheels against snow, road a perfect blank.
The air, a translucent white, fast going opaque beyond the reach of my headlights.
Frost, glittering across my windshield like many tiny stars.
I bear down on the gas, impatient: faster.
It’s all there, untouched by trauma — a perfect imprint that rises to the surface now in exquisite detail. I have to remind myself that I can see the road here, that visibility is always the biggest problem, and the smile that finds my face is macabre.
“Hurry,” Sam says from the back seat, and when I glance — fast, jerky — over my shoulder I find he’s clutching the back of the passenger seat tight enough that his fingers almost vanish to the knuckle. Bruise blue stands out vividly on the backs of his hands — the marks of blood draws three times a day. “The world’s spinning.”
“Is it the withdrawal or the injury?” I ask. I have no idea what kind of damage his brain took in the accident that made him this.
“I don’t know,” he mutters. “But we’re not going to the hospital.”
“They’ll help you there.” I squint at the signs by the side of the road around my blind spot. I don’t know if I remember the way to the hospital, any more. I only remember:
Glass, shattering around the tree that has grown through the windshield, a glittering spray of glass and ice coming through my fingers like light.
Sideways up and backwards down. Vertigo.
Something against the base of my skull.
“Nothing helps,” he snarls. “Nothing to help, nothing to betray, nothing to ruin, nothing to save–” A tide of power rises in his voice, and then he punches it up: “Nothing under the sun—”
“Sam!” I shout, terror cutting through the sense of unbearable loss that bubbles up from my gut. “Don’t do that when I’m driving!”
“The hospital won’t help,” Sam says, carefully. Without the siren song, he sounds shaky. “They’ll just make me go back to sleep.”
“You’re about to go through violent drug withdrawal,” I argue. “You’re going to go even more insane without help.”
“No.”
“I’m open to suggestions,” I snap. “What’s your great idea?”
“I want to go free,” he whispers.
“You can’t go free, Sam.” Fear makes my words cruel; memory is so thick I can taste blood. “You’re damaged. Damaged people have to be locked up.”
“You’re damaged, too.”
“And the only reason I’m not locked up is that I’ve learned to pretend I’m whole.” I shake my head. “Granted, I’m pretty good at it. But the only hole I have is right in front of my face, and you wouldn’t like what comes out of it.”
“Then help me,” he whispers. “Help me pretend.”
I swallow hard. “I can’t. I’m sorry, I really can’t. I can take you to the hospital, but I can’t help you any more than that.” My legs are shaking again. Damaged people can’t take care of damaged people. Everyone’s got to follow his own stars.
“My blood’s oracle,” I tell him, trying to explain. “My gift’s in dreams, and I never planned for my dreams to crawl out into my waking world. Oracles aren’t guardians.”
“I can taste the saline solution when they flush it through me.” He’s not even listening. My jaw tightens and I’m about to say something nasty, but then I flash a look at him and find that he’s intent on me, holding out one of the PICC line tubes. “Tastes like the sea. My blood’s siren.”
I laugh, a little strangled. “Yeah, somehow I guessed.”
“I don’t want to go back to sleep,” he says, putting a little power into it this time, enough that I veer too close to the curb and snow flies up in a white wave. I swerve back, terror tight in my chest, a hard knot of:
The spin of the wheels against snow.
Too much snow.
I’m off the road.
I can’t stop.
I gasp for breath. That’s it. That’s the moment I will always remember.
I’m off the road.
I can’t stop.
Everything else was over in a blink. Everything else was aftermath to that one frozen moment.
I’m off the road.
I can’t stop.
I watched the car spin as if from a great distance. I watched the guardrail come. And then everything was glass and noise and chaos, and stars in the darkness that exploded around me, like I was a star myself, going supernova.
“Breathe,” Sam says, with enough force to rattle my teeth. I obey automatically, sucking in air like I’ve almost drowned, and my vision clears enough to see that he’s climbed into the front seat, his face very close. That gives me a jolt, and I realize that I’m still driving, still on the road. “We’re a block from the hospital.”
He doesn’t say it’s okay, which I appreciate. It’s not okay, and never will be.
“You want to talk about it?” he asks.
“No,” I say automatically. Then, “Yes. I—” Words tangle and catch in my throat.
“Car accident, right?” Sam asks. “Maybe I should be the one driving.” His mouth quirks. The irony of the situation dawns on me — equally screwed up, each of us trying to save the other — and I start laughing, no sound to it, just great shudders through my chest and shoulders. I take my foot off the gas and let the car ease to a stop, giving up the battle against the snow clotting the road. No other vehicles are in sight — we’re alone in a white universe, just us in this metal capsule of potential destruction.
Sam begins to sing, softly, “I read the news today, oh boy / About a lucky man who made the grade…”
I press my forehead to the steering wheel, freezing leather against my skin, and shake. I don’t even know if I’m laughing any more. I could be crying, or shivering.
Sam’s voice is honey, smooth and deep golden, but he gives it the slightest mocking twist at the edges of the notes. “He blew his mind out in a car / He didn’t notice that the light had changed…”
“You missed some lines,” I say into the steering wheel.
“It’s been a while since I’ve been able to listen to the Beatles,” he says. “Not a lot of music in the hospital.”
“Not a lot of anything in the hospital,” I respond.
“Except pain,” he says softly, finishing my thought.
“The smell of antiseptic,” I say. “The smell of blood.”
“The smell of hospital lotion,” he says. “Hospital soap.”
“The slow seep of drugs,” I say, “dripping from your pounding head down your body.”
“Meaningless time,” he says, and power seeps into his voice. “Haze time. Time measured by the quick, bright pain of the needle and the chemical taste of saline in your throat.”
“And the shift change of doctors and nurses,” I finish. “An endless sequence of unfamiliar faces.” We glance at each other, our last unspoken thought drifting through the air like dandelion fluff, wispy and fragile: Except you.
I look away, out the windshield to the white world. We don’t know each other, I remind myself. We only came through the same fire, the same destruction and rebirth.
After a small eternity of half-conscious pain, after I returned to a world that used to be familiar, they told me I almost died. Instead, I emerged with a hole the size of a man in my field of vision, and a tangle of scars across my hands.
Once you’ve been broken, you see the cracks in the world itself. You understand that there is no going back to who you used to be, to what you used to see.
“This is the lame leading the blind,” I say, hoarsely.
Sam shrugs. “Lead on.”
“The hospital,” I remember. “You’re going?”
“I won’t go back to the Centre,” Sam says. “But the ER is different.” He squares his shoulders, broad even under the pajamas. “I can handle the ER.”
“And what about the uncomfortable questions?”
“I’ll think up some story,” he says, and a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “They’ll believe me.”
#
The emergency room is nearly empty when I bring Sam in, so we get quickly to patient reception. When I give our names, Sam gives me a funny look, and, blushing, I realize I’ve never told him mine. “I’m Luke,” I tell him.
“Nice to meet you,” he replies, and smiles. Even glowing with sweat, his blue eyes feverish, he looks more celestial than the stars I see. I remind myself that could be dangerous. Stars are suns, after all, and you know what they say about looking directly into the sun.
But they must not see stars, because this I know: you won’t go blind.
“Are you his emergency contact?”
I glance up. One of my stars is sitting behind the desk, looking at me. White light leaks from the corners of dark eyes, and for some reason I’m sure this is the same one as the roaches, although all the stars look alike. There’s something in its face, something almost familiar. Then I recognize its eyes, and realize why it took me so long.
They’re mine. I never look into mirrors these days.
“Sir?”
“Yes,” I say, and ease my fingers carefully into my pocket to take out my wallet, feeling the scar across my knuckles pull. “Driver’s license and insurance?”
The star behind the desk winks.