20. We Are Stars

A link is found between starlight and stories.

Chapter 20

People are like stars

1978

If I was the projectionist of my own little palace, I could change the picture thread, make it stop whenever I wanted, sometimes it seems there is a blurring between these fake things and real things, there is an obvious line between them both, but the story they represent is the same.

Maybe adults are just playing the same games with the same fake story toys they had as children? If I think about it, these adult props given to children like the sweeties disguised as cigarettes, are just as fake as the real props adults play with. I would watch other children pretending at smoking the candy cigarettes, some of which had a powdering of sugar dust so that if you blew on the cigarette the powder would rise in puffs of sweet smelling clouds. Not only did it feel like a cigarette, but it also made smoke. Ok it was fake smoke, but imagination fills in the gaps to make it feel real. From a distance, the child would confidently puff away, knowing that it looked just like those other kind of cigarettes, the ones which make the kind of smoke that look just like sugary puffs of sweet clouds. Something about all this troubled me though. How do I explain this? Well I think these toys are full of rules, to be like something you are not, or to put it another way, it takes away the imagination, or rather it uses it to follow a story path which you shouldn’t really be on yet. If I look at the children puffing on their sweet cigarettes, I see frowns appear on their faces, they become, without knowing, like actors, copying the faces of their parents or the adults they see around them when they smoke. Similar to how toy guns provide a story of war, the sweet cigarettes was a story I did not want to be part of.

It was like giving a rule to me to be like this and not like myself. I didn’t trust toys that came with rules, that shaped my story, and used my imagination in a way which would make it feel no longer unique to me. These props handed to me belonged to adults, were part of their story, not mine. That’s when I made the connection, between story and these fake toys. They felt as if they wanted to tie me to another person’s story, one that I didn’t want to belong in. They were toys with stories built like cages, with bars made out of rules, and a lock made from that feeling I got that it was better to fit in with others and be the same.

There was a moment after I waved my hand before the projector that I began to understand what rules may apply to this story. I don’t think anyone expects to be playing a part when they are not in it though. There’s a reason why I and everyone else is not a face on a story poster. My sister and I play at making up stories, we pretend to be characters we have seen, but we never expect these to affect the actual stories we saw them appear in. They don’t get changed, or if they do it’s never me or my sister that does that, it is the teacher, or our parents or whoever is telling it. There are stories of course told by other children, but as far as I know none of these have the power to change one we have been to see at the Palace or have read in a book. The people on the screen reacted when I touched the light, I’m sure of it. It was frightening in the beginning but I tell myself they are only made up of pictures, lots and lots of still pictures, and it must be a mistake. The cars crashing that was just a coincidence, along with the crowds collecting around television sets in shop windows showing the strange shadow in the sky. It was like a hand, my hand, but it cannot be that, it must of be something else. I am not playing with toy soldiers here, this is not a game of war, it looks real, especially the people, their faces don’t have the calm plastic expressions for a start. For some reason this makes it harder, if I choose to play this game, that is, without the blank faces.

I remember the broken seat and the other story I had watched with my father, how it had suddenly changed unexpectedly when my seat broke. Had I done that I thought? The story of HAL killing the astronauts still seemed unexplained, my broken chair could not have caused that to happen in the story. But then everything that had occurred since that point had been unexpected, getting lost behind the curtain, finding the projector, seeing two moving picture threads, a forest and a city at once on a screen, with spider shadows and thinking voices. Now all of that should belong in its own story. But I had brought it all about. If I hadn’t decided to try and read between the lines and touched the picture thread none of it would have happened. Not only was I part of this story now, I was also the one who had created it all. If it had a poster my face would be stuck in the middle, I wondered what it’s tag line would be. Something silly like: “Whose story do you belong to?” I looked around at the room and decided that I was no longer where I wanted to be. This was not meant to be my story. I should be with my father at the Palace of mirrors. I had to find that broken chair and maybe then I can put it all back to how it should have been. If the chair had never broken then I would not have found the car and ended up in the projectionist’s room. The story of how I got here had already happened, would it be possible to undo it all?

Stories don’t work that way I decided. And then it struck me with that very last thought. I have a thinking voice no different to Pages, could someone else therefore be listening to it? Am I on a screen in a moving picture being watched? Trapped in a thread of my own? Or might I be caught in the words of a book? Waiting to be read by a stranger? My story freed from its pages. That was a very scary idea to hold onto and it made me recall a wooden toy my sister had. The doll contained within it another doll which also had within it yet more dolls, each getting smaller until there is one tiny doll the size of a seed at the centre. I noticed that as the dolls got smaller their decoration including their faces became less detailed until the smallest one had tiny dots for its eyes and mouth. That way you could line them up and put each correctly back into the other. But what if each doll looked identical including in size, how could anyone tell them apart? You would not be able to line them up in any order, or tell how they fitted together. Maybe, I thought, stories work in the same way. They could be connected to each, fitting inside one another and yet be part of something much bigger. Whatever that could be? The threads of pictures on the screen seemed at first to be unconnected but they were not, they each were part of a much bigger story. Like the apes finding a monolith or an astronaut travelling to a distant planet. These appear not to have any connection, but they do in the way they are told. If I look carefully now at the two picture threads might I see a bigger story behind it all? I remember thinking about the projector at home with the moving pictures of my family at parties or on holiday. If they were all stuck together they would make an amazing story of our lives, perhaps I need to find the missing piece, a third part to link the two stories on the screen.

Clickerty clack went the projector as if in answer to my question. Sometimes a thought strikes before I can think it. The projector; of course! It stood between the lines of picture threads, at the centre of them, it and everything that surrounded the machine, including the room it stands in. All of this is the link, and I brought it into being by trying to touch between the lines. But while I am thinking about my own story I realise the thinking voice is still speaking. It is a strangely calm voice I recognise belonging to someone Pages spoke on the telephone with. It was Robot, the one who told her to go to the Perpetual Forest.

“There is a haze up ahead. I see myself approach, a humanoid figure emerge out of the mist, and close by there is Coffee sniffing the ground, her ears upright and alert.”

Now it’s odd how my imagination is able to see the pictures when you can just hear words. I have my own internal projector! Whoever said words can paint a thousand pictures was definitely onto something. But I think words can paint a whole lot more. In fact if I think harder, the reverse is also true. A picture can paint a thousand words. But if you are a character trying to escape it’s picture story, then disappearing into words would be a clever hiding place. Because those words can create more pictures than could ever be counted. And if they could be thought up very fast then it would offer a safe place. You can squeeze a lot more pictures together if they are shown as words. Some of the books my parents read are made up of hundreds of pages, and if each page represents a different picture then it’s possible to fit a lot of them into a size no larger than a coat pocket. I am actually surprised how all this comes so easily but it does, it seems so simple and clear an idea. The threads running into the projector, rattling through metal spindles, also contain pictures, but these would not fit into any pocket I have. The slots in the wall where the threads appear from then disappear into after travelling through the projector must lead to another room. That space must be very large to fit all the picture threads arriving and departing. I imagine it being very busy in there with all these story threads coming and going. There must be someone feeding these threads into the projector room, it can’t all be working away on its own. Perhaps that is where the projectionist is? Pulling out a story thread like a book of a shelf. If they cannot see the screen they won’t know there is a problem with the two threads getting caught together or that I can somehow make changes to the story on the screen by waving a hand in front of the projector. My sister and I would make shadows when the home projector was being used, but these never affected the stories on the screen. Although my parents told us we shouldn’t do this we did it anyway. I was about to leave and look for the door to the other room when I overheard the thinking voice.

“My name is Robot.” I interject, knowing this Dogman would not reply with a counterattack. “How did you get here, can you explain that please?”

Dogman! That’s a name I heard Pages mention. Then I thought of the question Robot had asked Dogman. It was a question I could very well be asking myself. I was still in the Palace of Mirrors but something about it felt different. And I had the urge to walk back to where I had left my father. He must either be waiting for my arrival at the entrance or is searching for me. I should have been found by now if this were the case or at least come across someone else. Therefore it was up to me to find him. And if he was standing at the entrance then I had better go there and tell him I was sorry for getting lost behind the curtain. I could describe the projectionist’s room and the story I had seen but I already know my father will probably be very angry when I see him and won’t be interested in everything I had done. My father will have some strong words for me. I can imagine being told I was in a lot of trouble. There was no way I could escape this I knew.

“Right, now that’s out the way, I want to start by saying you are mincemeat. Do you hear what I am saying? You are so deep in it you might as well be reclassified as hazardous waste, locked in a lead lined box and buried.”

It sounded like Robot was in big trouble too. All I had waiting for me was my father, but Robot and Coffee, his speaking dog, were being held by soldiers. Whatever they had done must be far worse than choosing to get lost in the palace of mirrors to watch a story. As I listened further I could tell he had been to a place, along with Pages and a few others, where he should not have, so it did sound a bit similar to what I was doing now. There are some things that occur in stories I find unsettling, like the astronauts suddenly being killed in their sleep, something I never expected to see. To put it simply in the stories I usually saw bad things are carried out by people who seem intent on flagging up their badness, as if it were a T-shirt being worn the moment they appear. But what is more disturbing is when they don’t follow these rules. My father called these twists. I like to think of these as when stories themselves go wandering off the path and into places they were never meant to go. And this applies to the characters in those stories too. A hero turning bad would only be a twist if it was suddenly revealed in a dramatic way the hero was bad all along. I don’t think Robot and Coffee or Pages were bad, but they were being accused of wrong doings. The idea that what they were was being turned on its head and reversed. Not only that, but the story of Pages and Robot I had seen and listened to from their thinking voices seemed to be about people who could move through doorways into other worlds. They called themselves the Travellers and they did not appear to be harming anyone else. And yet now they were all being accused of committing a crime by investigators. Who was acting for good now? I could no longer tell for certain, except I had to rely on my feeling on who I would choose to trust. If I could I would undo what I did. I think of my action of hiding from my father, exploring the Palace and finding the projector. I did not understand all the accusations being listed at Robot, but I knew that he was being scolded in the same way I expect to be when my father finds me. I can see Robot held to the ground quite clearly, the light in his eyes, the armed interrogator is talking about weird things such as memory invasions. Don’t we all exist in someone else’s memory, I thought? Asking permission to be present in another’s memory is a bit like asking whether you can cross their path while walking along. You’d never get to where you want to go if at every moment you were about to see a stranger you had to find out if they were happy for you to be part of their memory. I guess some people like their privacy and do not wish their memory space to get too overcrowded. Forgetting is an option but there will be some memories that cannot be forgotten.

I think adults are more precious about this than children, they like to talk of the past as much as they do the present. Children have very little past to remember so it’s all about the present for us and what the future will be. For my grandparents it is the complete opposite, the balance tips the other way toward the past.

I think the older you get, the past and the present all join up into one long experience. But by then it must seem like it’s all made up of the past with very little space remaining to squeeze in the present let alone what is yet to turn up. I think people are like stars. I know that the older the star lighting the night sky, the further back to the past I have to travel to see it. And perhaps with people it can feel the same. The older someone is the bigger their window into the past appears to be. Even those distant stars looking back would only ever be able to see a past, including my own, a past long before I was born. But if I could open doors at points along their paths of light then would I not be able to visit all of their past? Now that’s definitely another of those odd ideas that appear to pop into being before I know I must have thought it. Could these doors be the portals that Pages and Robot were using to travel by? I thought of the picture screens lit by their own projector stars, portals to the past. Are they as old as real stars and the stories they tell I wondered.

I decided there and then what I had to do. I must travel by portal to help Robot, Coffee and Pages.