The stars, baby, the stars.

I have always looked up at the stars. I can grasp the science. Burning spheres of plasma, held together by their own colossal gravity. Visible electromagnetic radiation beaming down to become pinpricks of light in the void. I understand that people have tried to assign significance to their presence and patterning, making myths and drawing astrological shapes between the dots. Thinking that the light shining through the cracks in the crystal spheres will give our existence and mortality meaning. Believing that when we die the stars, or what is beyond them, will become our home. I once read that the iron that’s bound to every hemoglobin molecule in our bodies was once part of a star. That all elements that make us up, from the carbon to the oxygen to the trace elements of rare minerals, are all products of our starry universe. I imagine when our planet is obliterated by the eventual expansion of our sun, what makes up our bodies will return to the blackness, swallowed up and spat out to swirl and eddy in the cosmic streams like so much space dust. Like a return.

But I can’t see any stars in here. In fact, I can’t see that much. There’s the walls of my room. Painted a calming taupe. The machines I am plugged into, their blinking lights. A few photos in frames. Some flowers, wilted in a vase. There’s a window, high above my bed. It is light in the day and black at night. When the sky is cloudy the square I see is grey, and when it’s clear it’s blue. But at night, with the light pollution of the building, all I can see is a black square. No stars. On sunny days sometimes the nurses open the window. The pane leans backward from the top, pushed back against the bracket. If it’s still I can hear the waves in the distance. Even though I only saw the beach from the car the day I was admitted, I still remember what it looks like. A long thin strip of white leading to a rocky headland. A grassy foreshore with palm trees. When I hear the waves I imagine them crashing into the rough promontory of weathered stones, slowly wearing away the softer rock until all that is left is the cratered pools. I see water churning up the sand with every rolling heave, dark rips and sand banks and a murderous undertow.

I am going to die soon. I accept this as a reality rather than a concept. I think that I am the only one at peace with it. Every day I undergo a succession of treatments that are designed to prolong my life. I find it ridiculous as on a long enough timeline we all meet our end at some point. We are all returned to the earth or atmosphere, the particles and elements that make up our bodies breaking down to become something else. The only thing that will be missing, of course, is our consciousness. Our sense of who we are.

Whoever I am is not going to die in this room. I have quietly decided that this is the case, and before I am too weak to move I will leave this space. I will see the stars again. I will see the sea.

Before I was sick I would slip out of the house after my parents were asleep. Silently unlatching the front door, slipping my shoes on my feet, I would walk away from the house into the home paddock. In winter the dewy grass would wet my shoes, my toes quickly numb from the cold. In summer the dead grass would crunch under my soles. Our water tank was cut into the hillside below the house. In the darkness I would climb its concrete walls and then lie back, my legs dangling over the lip into the void. The milky-way would be spread out above me, its galaxial cloud a haze of light, the individual stars burning into the night sky. Staring up into the emptiness, the cold roughness of the concrete pressing into my skin and bones, I would imagine that there were other people looking at the stars as I was. Even if they were in a different place or in a different time zone, we were threaded together by the constellations above. Stargazers in the company of other stargazers.

I have planned my escape assiduously. Because I am legally under the guardianship of my parents I am unable to refuse treatment. I begged to be allowed to say no to the drugs that make me feel nauseous, woozy and tired. When I asked my mother if I could stop she rested her head on the bedcovers. Her body shook. My father left the room. I heard something bang outside in the corridor. I have not asked again. From what I have been told the only hope I have of surviving my illness is to go onto a clinical trial. It has not been tried before. I would be the crash test dummy, so to speak. I have no desire to have chemicals whiplash my blood stream, wrenching my cells and catapulting me through a burning shattered windscreen of pain. So I have decided to leave.

To begin there is the timing. I have studied the rotation of nurses and have decided that the best time to leave is just before the midnight rotation, when one team is packing to go home and the other is setting up their work. Then are the machines. They need to be turned off in a very specific order so as to cause the least disturbance, and even then there will only be so much time before someone is alerted and comes to check on me. Then there is the CVAD. The central venous access device. I won’t bore you with the details of my treatment, but given that it has been going for so long the tubes feel like they are part of me.  Sometimes I imagine the whole thing as an internal game of Pacman, the treatment running around madly trying to clean up all the dots, only to be swallowed up by something new that comes around the corner.

So I begin. First the nasal cannula. I sit up. Then I disconnect the IV line, leaving the picc still attached. I swing my legs over to the edge of the mattress. Then the machines. I have rehearsed this so many times in my mind it feels automatic. Three switches. Then the electrode patches. Free.

I look down between my legs. My feet hang bare over the blue grey floor, scored by scratches from heavy equipment. I shut my eyes and concentrate on my lungs and try to find the moment of silence between breathing in and breathing out. I open my eyes to the fluorescent light, and gently slide down off the edge of the bed. I know I probably have a minute before someone comes to see what it going on. My feet touch the surface. It is cool under my naked soles, and then I am walking. Looking at the floor in front of me. Through the door to the corridor. The glowing green exit sign in my vision. The diagram that signals a staircase. Hand and shoulder on the wall, lurching to the fire escape. Push down the bar and into a floodlit stairwell. And down the stairs. One at a time, holding the bannister. My field of vision focused and small. Stars dance on the periphery. The edges are hazy, but I descend. I know that by now they would be looking for me. The concrete floor feels like it is about to rush up and swallow me. I am on the ground. I vomit onto the stairs, take a moment and step over the mess. I feel better.

Time passes and I am at the end of the staircase. I push the exit door and it only partially opens. I lean my shoulder into it, and close my eyes. The black swims like plasma and it gives before me. A dark carpark underneath the building, mostly empty. I can see a street light, and head towards it. Even though it is dark it feels like a new day.

Out in the street the air feels warm on my skin. There is a wind blowing through the trees above. I look up at and see their palm shapes black against the darkness. The light given off by the hospital renders the sky an orange charcoal.   

The sound of the waves in the distance lead me to the beach. Every now and again the swell strikes with a deep thump, and as I get closer the sound of each set becomes more distinct and clear. I can hear the waves hiss onto the sand and there is wind in my ears. The whistling makes it sound as if I am under water. The concrete gives way to grass, which then becomes sand.  Up and down the beach it is completely black. I am alone. I don’t look to where I have left, and place one foot in front of another as I walk towards the headland, away from the light. The sand is coarse and hard and wet. There are crunches of shells under my feet, made soft by my time in the hospital. It hurts when I step on them and l like the pain.

I walk for what seems like a long time and then stop. The rocky shelf is a black shape just away in the distance. I take off my clothes and sit down, naked and exposed in the dark. I look to where I have been. The beach curves away. The hospital is just a distant haze behind the trees. There is a sheen of light on the sand, the sluicing, hissing water and scrabbling shells. My footprints have already become indistinct as the rising waves erase my passing. I close my eyes and lie back, lying my palms flat to the beach. Inside my eyelids it is utterly black. The wetness of the sand soaks into my skin. It is cold, but not unpleasant. The sound of the crashing swell and the fizzing surf fill my ears. I can feel the granules of beach sticking to the pads of my fingertips. So many larger things broken into smaller things. A strip of sand made up of trillions of grains, all unique, and all at the whim of the water and the currents.

I open my eyes. The stars, baby, the stars. Exactly where I thought they’d be and exactly where I left them. Spread out above me, the constellations and ungrouped pinpricks, all drawn across the sweep of the night sky. The crystal domes illuminated by the countless points of light, burning eons away, expanding and contracting, sending streams of space dust across the universe to land where it will. I could be anywhere underneath these stars, but I am here.

As the stars circle so the tide rises. The water reaches my feet, my hips, my shoulders, my head. I have never felt so fearless nor so calm. The water closes over and the stars disappear.

Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.

Martin Toman is a writer of contemporary fiction who lives in Melbourne, Australia. He studied at the Australian National University before becoming a teacher of English Literature. Martin has been published online and in print, and recently in publications such as Big City Lit, Minute Magazine, Across the Margin, Anti-Heroin Chic, Fresh Ink, The Raven Review, Haunted Waters Press, Trouvaille Review, Abstract Elephant Literary Review and Literally Stories. He is currently writing his first novel. Martin can be found on Facebook at: MP Toman Author.