Strange Stars

A small book about the little things —like interdimensional space travel, UFOs and how to make a decent cup of coffee. Also, the more simpler questions like do ghosts exist? Are we all alone in this universe? What is the meaning in life and what the hell do you do with it, will of course be answered here.

A girl, let’s call here Anna Smith—a lie, but oh well, that is the name she goes by for the night—is just riding her car, minding her own business, running away from some stuff. Checking into the Deserted Inn however, will not give her the good night sleeps she’s paying for. There she meets the penniless photographer, Sam, claiming her name is something else and constantly hinting to know more than anyone else. And as the night progress, the motel pool overflows with lies, the numbered rooms closes and the stars keep their secrets. But under them, those sparkling nightly glow, Anna will happen to run into a coincidental meeting with fate.

***

Those down on earth turn off their little lights, leaving the cities and forests in darkness. The mountains, the sea, as well as the desert. Ah, the desert, blacker than black down below, driving the light away. Don’t drive the light away—don’t drive away. First then—the stars turn on their own—ready to dance in the sky.

One star decides it’s time to travel, shooting across the freckled stratosphere, never to be seen again. Thousands and thousands of years ago, the starlight went out of this star, and died. Now it’s back to put the night in motion, driving the light away.

Among the stars there are fake stars, glowing for all the people on earth to see—and the people will never know. But the stars do, they always know. The phonies are satellites, spying on the ever changing nightly city lights. Drive away, drive away.

But the real sister stars, the planet you and the mother moon are also doing their part of spying on those below. People have the advantage of good hiding places: In a deep dark forest, in the blinding yellow windows of a big city, or under the vast big ocean. But not here, not in the desert. Here, everyone can be spotted—everyone with their own little spotlight following them around. The light, the light.

Tonight is a night of traveling stars—real stars, fake stars. Don’t drive the light away—don’t drive away. One light travels the highway above the atmosphere at a speed no human or satellite can ever dream of. It’s much bigger than the rest and a glowing white halo. The halo changes sometimes to a blue hue, pulsating. It goes around in circles, looking down at the Nevada desert—searching. Little by little, edging closer and closer, testing the waters for descent. But: Time is not here yet—not yet, not yet.

On the lonely highway in the desert, the blackness from the deserted sun breaks. A car is going full speed, not bothering with the speed limit, it’s no use for it here, not yet, not yet. No one will see, the driver probably thinks. How naïve those human beings can be.

Kicking up dust, the car's headlights shows the sand is red, not blue or gray as the night paints it to be. Music blasts through the metal box, cutting the numbing silent only a deserted place can give off. Like interrupting a deep sleep, or a loud voice in a library. The car heads towards the neon lights in the distance. The only thing the driver can see is the paved road ahead—but just barely. The darkness is strong tonight. Even the best of headlights would have problems penetrating it.

Tires screeching, sounding like a cry for help in the night, slams the slow hours into action. The driver hits the brakes so hard the car spins, leaving a trail of burnt rubber on the worn road. Dust swirls around, hazing the surroundings in smoke. A man is standing in the middle of the road, bathing in yellow light from the car. Don’t drive the light away—time is not here yet. Don’t drive away—not yet, not yet.

The driver kicks the door open, a young woman. A moment she is just frozen by the open door, not sure what to do next. As she opens the door, it’s as a wall of sound breaks and the buzzing radio floods out with her into the desert. The signal is weak, the words from the radio host just hearable through the screeching box, the voice metallic as an echo from something real.

"And tonight folks! I will reveal the secrets of the sand—If I can bear to stay alive so long in this dreadful world that is. You are listening to Melancholic Melvin with Mushroom talk," the radio host tells no one in particular. Neither the woman nor the man in front of her are interested in listening for the moment being.

Her age is difficult to establish as she only wears black: Black trousers, a black top and a black leather jacket. She has erased all her natural attributes with her harsh makeup, making her look so much older. Her hair is long, years of bleaching it again and again has left it dry with split ends and a cotton candy feel to it. It’s like the desert itself, dry and stripped of colors. It's possible she doesn't even remember her natural hair color, some forget stuff like that.

It’s still something innocent about her that no smokey eye-shadow and cat-eyed eyeliner can cover up though. Her hands are still soft, her face not yet blessed with lines that come with wisdom. Her wide eyes, like a frightened deer, are also giving her away.

"Oh, shit,” she cries out as she rushes towards the man in the spotlight. “Are you okay?"

It’s only then she realizes he wears no pants. In only his briefs and his huge glasses he turns towards her in slow motion, as if she’s waking him up from a slumber.

"What are you—how..."

She looks around bewildered, but can't determine where he came from—there's nothing there. Nothing but sand and darkness.

"You shouldn't be out here. Can I take you somewhere?"

He tilts his head and studies her.

"Have you decided to go with the lights or not?"

Something ominous is coming. It’s in the sand, it’s in the air and darkness. She feels a chill in the hot summer night, taking a step back to brace herself, as if her body knows it’s a warning her brain is too slow to know about.

"If I have what? Sir, where do you live? Can I call someone?"

"The stars are spying. They know it all. Saturn is not what it seems," he says, turns away, walks off, gliding out of the spotlight. She’s speechless for a moment before his action gets a reaction.

"Hey, hey you," she says, going after the man. "Don't walk away, I'll get some help!"

She steps on something and trips on her own feet. Clothes. It’s all of his clothes. Recovering from the near fall she looks up again.

Too late, he keeps walking towards the mountains, just behind the horizontal line. She pulls up her cellphone, but there is no signal to reach civilization—is there ever? For a split second she wonders if she should follow him, but the night is dark and full of shadows she dares not to explore, not now, not yet. The first decision of many she will take that night. Don’t drive the light away—don’t drive away.

"Fuck," she exclaims so eloquently, pulling her hair as she bites her underlip. She did not just leave trouble behind to get tangled up in more. She tries to look for him, but the sand has claimed him as its own.

Instead, she gets in her car and drives for a couple of minutes. Don’t drive away. Her hands shake as she clings to the steering wheel. Again, it’s only the radio speaking in the car:

"They told me to be quiet and it was only the mushroom talking. But I’m telling you all out there listening that we are not alone… and now, the weather."

She doesn’t even listen to what Melancholic Melvin has to say—no one does to be honest. But maybe just tonight, and maybe her especially, could have some use of Melvin's mushroom talk.

She sees neon lights blinking at the side of the road when Melvin plays Life on Mars. She speeds up and reads out the sign: Deserted Inn.

Isn’t that the truth, she thinks to herself as she pulls up in the parking lot. She steps outside again and looks around in the empty place. The sign of Deserted Inn sways in a wind that isn’t there. It can only mean that the screeching noise cutting through the silence is a cry for help from the motel itself, oozing off decay and loneliness.

Only one other human being is visible. On the first floor a gray-haired lady is on a walk in a miniskirt. Her body tan and stretched, her face like an empty canvas no one has bothered to paint. There are no expressions, no feelings to read. She walks outside the numbered doors with a cat on a leash, looking for relief. Her bracelets are rattling around the bare and skinny arm. You can see her hunger for escape in the way she drags her feet, swaying. And in her high heels she walks upon the ruins of an American dream.

The young woman is unable to move her eyes away from the old lady, worn out by the time and the harsh motel life. Her first impulse is a feeling of repulsion. A hatred of the fallen and withered ones. But then it comes sneaking up on her, a feeling of empathy, of a certain recognition she would refuse to speak about out loud. Are they really that different? Don’t drive the light away—don’t drive away. Can it be that all separating them is time? Can it be that she’s looking into a not so distant future? They both live the motel life, both alone. Thoughts of never breaking out of the rootless cycle passes through her head.

The motel is a white painted stone building: Two floors in an L shape. It’s withered and sanded down by the desert wind as its residents. The only light except small, buzzing lamps next to every door comes from a small pool, enclosing the motel like a horse shoe. From it, there is a misty steam flowing up from the sandy blue depth. Sand is covering the tanning beds. No one has taken a dive in the pool for a long time.

Feeling a chill in the hot summer night she pulls out her bag and slams her car door shut. She heads for reception and steps into an army of fluorescent yellow lights blinding her. As if stepping into another world, the dub-step music deafens her hearing for a moment.

Behind the reception is a guy with his back turned to her. He fist pumps the air as if he’s at the best raving party in existence, not noticing her arrival. His dark skin makes the baby blue t-shirt pop at her together with the pink scarf he wears draped around his neck.

"Hello?" she tries to yell, but it’s like she’s talking in a vacuum with no air to carry her voice. After a couple of deep beats from the bass he turns around, making the rodeo dance move before seeing her. He doesn’t look surprised to find a strange woman watching him—the benefit of always being the strangest, no doubt. With a flaring last twirl he skips over to the stereo and pauses the music. He turns around, folds his hands on the reception desk, now all of a sudden so professional as if in denial that he just a moment ago treated his workspace like a nightclub.

"How may I help you?"

His voice is so much more high pitched than his height suggests. But he can’t mask the sarcasm behind the phrase, bored and tired of guests interrupting his dance off.

"I… I... there was a man walking with no clothes along the highway. I couldn't get a signal there, but could you call it in?"

He looks at her for a moment, studying her hair, her make-up and her clothes, trying to read past the disguise. Working in a place like this however, disguises are all you get. He bursts into a short laugh.

"Eh, I could, but I dunno. What for?"

"What for? Well, if he needs help, of course."

"He doesn’t though."

"How do you know?"

The receptionist sighs, clicking his tongue, already bored of the conversation.

"Honey... shit like that happens all. The. Time here. No use calling the police on those loonies. They are long gone by now. Trust me, love," he says, moving into a more natural position for him. One elbow on the desk, the other on his hip as he arches his back. Like he decided that acting like a professional receptionist would be wasted on this stray woman. His bracelets rattled as he tweaked on his earrings.

"Trust me," he says, but the last thing he gives off is a trusting vibe.

"He looked lost—"

"Ain't we all, hon... look, he's probably one of those stoners, just out here to have mushrooms without being caught. Nothing new, nothing special. Want a room for tonight or what?"

The young woman thinks about the gray-haired lady in miniskirts outside. The walls of the motel are already closing in. She will definitely not be staying.

"How far is the next motel?"

He pulls a face as if offended and waves his finger in the air.

"Baby would drive all. Night. Long. Besides, we have HBO," he says, like it would mean all the difference. She bites her lip and hesitates for a moment. After all, she's tired and hungry, all ports are home in storms and all those excuses. Her second decision for the night is made.

"Fine, a room then."

"Super duper," he says, clapping his hand and pulling out the register form. It’s on a purple colored paper.

"You can have the glorious suit of... ah, 205. Perfect for a babe like you miss..."

She looks up as she writes her details. She spends an awful lot of time writing her own birthday. The home address she leaves blank.

"Anna—Anna Smith."

Too fast. He peers down from the counter and gives a little wink like he knows so much more than she ever will.

"Smith, huh? Yeah, I got a lot of Smithsesses here. Family meeting?"

"What?" she tries to wipe off the worst of the black eye-shadow that has smudged under her eyes. But he doesn’t care to hear an answer.

"Here's your key, wifi-password and the direction for the Deserted Diner if you feel for some late-night snack or something."

"Do they deliver?"

Again he takes her words as an offense and steps back.

"Do they—girl, does it look like there is a freaking Dominoes or what around here? No!"

Anna lifts her hands.

"Ok... I, ah. Are you sure though, not calling someone about that man. He looked—"

"Ah ah, no more of that talk. Just be on your way and get a good night's beauty sleep. You definitely need some freshening up, I’ll take care of any loonies wandering the desert."

Ending the conversation, he turns to the stereo again. Like touching his newborn baby he hits the play button again and throws his hands in the air. She fades away, backing out from the reception, key in hand.

Stranded outside the reception, the old lady is nowhere to be seen. She gives her car a longing look as she passes it on her way to her room. Her true home. Drive away, drive away.

As Anna, as we’ll call her now, walks up the stairs, she glimpses three people getting out of their truck.

A latino family with a son around eleven or twelve, a mother and father gathers their things from the truck. Anna reaches the stairs to the upper floor. Ambling, she keeps her eyes on them. It looks like they are arguing—or rather, it looks like the father is yelling at them. Don’t drive the light away—don’t drive away. The boy drops one of the bags from the trunk and the father is pulling his ear while scolding him. The mother, looking older than she probably is, comes running over. She tries to pull the father away from the son as she pleads in Spanish. Anna stops as she can’t turn her eyes away, but she doesn’t act either. Drive away, drive away, drive away.

Annoyed at the mother, he shoves her so hard she hits the car, hitting her head at the open lid of the trunk. He then lets go of his son, who is now crying silent tears, and yells at his wife. The woman looks to plead with him in a thin voice and Anna looks to both sides of the motel, to see if anyone will intervene. But no one but her is outside.

The man with an angry expression takes a bag, cursing all the way to the door. He slams it shut as hard as he can. The woman goes over to her son, checking his ear and kissing it better. She whispers in a gentle voice to him, calming him down so he stops crying, but snivels unhappy. The mother takes the rest of the bags and slams the trunk shut. Anna can stay quiet no longer.

"You okay? Should I call someone for you guys?"

Too little and all too late. Staying out of trouble yourself often leads to other people staying in the trouble.

The woman stops, looking up. For a moment, Anna is afraid that she doesn’t speak English at all. But a small smile grows on the woman's face, turning her younger by years.

"No need," she says, rolling her R's softly, making Anna trust her words, even if there’s no reason to.

"We will be okay. But thank you."

The husband comes out again, still yelling. He notices his wife is looking up at the second floor and follows her gaze. Locking eyes with Anna he frowns, and Anna gets busy trying to open her door. Away, away, away, away. She opens and shuts it behind her, putting every lock on it.

She stares out from the peeping hole for a second, ashamed of not acting when she could have stopped things, happy that she was alone and no one could harm her like that. Then lonely, because she was exactly that. Alone.

She lets out a big sigh before letting her small bag fall on the floor looking around in the ‘suit’ she’s been given. A bed covers most of the room and sucks all the attention with the grimly sad duvet cover. The cover has a flower print on it, but it’s been washed too many times so the happy colors of the flowers have faded. Over the bed, a picture of the night sky takes up most of the wall, like an excuse for not being a room with a view. The TV blinks at her with an actual antenna as ears, something she thought was long extinct by now. There is no way it has HBO.

Sinking down a deep pit, she sits down on the bed. The dripping of each drop from the bathroom sink is all she can hear together with the muffled sounds from the TV in the room next to her. She can see dark spots of the once white wallpaper that has turned yellow, dark shadows crawling over it, lurking in the corners. She has to be tired because it’s like the spots start to float, tainting the wallpaper even further. Shrinking in size, the walls enclose around her and her breathing takes off without her in control. Drive away, drive away, drive away.

Gasping for air, she stands up, rushes into the bathroom, turns on the tap and lets the water run. Splashing some on her face, she lets the cool substance wake her up, putting all memories and past where they belong. Fights to get control of her breathing again. Deep behind the wall she has set up in her brain, she awakens with the cold water.

The makeup is now smeared, and she wipes it away with the washcloth by the sink. She sighs as if trying to exercise her demons and puts her hands on the edge of the sink. She lets her hands cool down on the cold surface as she peers into her eyes, red shot and tired from driving all day. Or is it something else? Looking in the mirror, she raises one of her hands and pulls it through her hair. For a moment she keeps her hands in the hair, twirling the split ends with her fingers. But she’s at the same time frozen. Without the ability to make a sound she's forced to only watch her twirl her hair with a faint smile on her lips. Nothing worth freezing up over if not for the small fact that it’s only in the mirror it happens. When she looks down from the reflection, both of her hands are still in place at the edge of the sink.

With a rush of motions she pushes herself back from the sink and meets the wall with her back. Wide eyed she looks from her hands into the mirror. Now the reflection is following her movements to perfection—as they should. For a moment she can only stand there rattled, out of breath and close to tears as the evening only seems to get worse by the minute. Shaking her head, she breaks out from the trance and stumbles her way to the bed where her bag is, opening it with great difficulty as her hands shake violently. She gets hold of her pack of cigarettes and jumps for the door.

It’s like that feeling you get when you’re alone, but still sense someone is on to you. You are panicking and physically feeling an entity rushing towards you, and you have to leave the room before you're chased down. Away, away, away.

Who are you when no one is watching? Even the tiniest part of us, smallest particles, the electrons knows when they are being monitored. That is why humans will never know, not truly. Not when the electrons can feel and know when they are being spied on. And so does Anna. She can feel the tingling sensation on her shoulder, the grey spots in the corner of her eye. Who is she really when no one is watching? No one will ever know.

Ripping the door open she doesn’t dare to look back at the mirror still visible from the door. Shame really, because if she had, she would have seen the reflection of the scared girl smile and take an elegant pirouette, before she again becomes the shadow she was supposed to be and follows in her footsteps out the door.