The Authentic Life: stars

When Paul installed a security camera in our cottage in Maine, I felt a celebutante’s dread that I would become the victim of a leaked sex tape. When I expressed this concern, he brushed it aside with a wave of his hand and said “It only records when we put it in ‘away’ mode.” In theory, this is true, but in practice it is false. The camera never records, because we never put it in away mode. But it is always on, a watchful eye streaming to an app on our iPhones with a five second delay. It is on demand déjà vu.

“Show me something,” Paul says as I walk into the kitchen.

I face the camera and give it a Kardashian caught without make-up look.

“No, I mean something good,” he says holding his iPhone up in front of his face while sitting on the sofa in the sun room and flicking his index finger and thumb, zooming in. He then offers some directorial advice “Do a sexy little dance.”

I perform my best Magic Mike moves.

“That was mechanical,” Paul sighs.

The life of a reality star is difficult and if being under constant surveillance were not enough, there is a microphone on the camera that is controlled by the iPhone app.

“Oh yeah, slice those limes,” a gravelly porn star voice, aka Paul, emanates from the speaker on the camera. “Now squeeze them, baby. Squeeze them real good.”

Correction, it is on demand porno vu.

When we are not home, Paul will occasionally say “I wonder what’s going on in the cottage,” which is my cue to open the app. I’m not certain what I expect, but every time I am chilled to see a creepy stillness, a kitchen table and four empty chairs in the shifting light of the late autumn New England sun, shadows in the shuttered sun room, the glint of sunlight on hardwood floors where the click of our footsteps have long since vanished. Perhaps even more eerie is the sound of our absence, white noise.

All of this makes me feel as if I am somehow cheating. Unless we have jumped off of a bridge on a snowy winter night and been pulled out of the abyss by a bumbling guardian angel, we’re not meant to see the world without us. But I do, and for all of the changes it has made to me, I am surprised to find it unaltered. The air does not quiver, as Isak Dinesen ruminated, with a color I have had on.

If our nearest possible alien neighbors were to poke their telescopes through the cloth of space, it would take at least twelve years for any images from Earth to reach them. This is the nearest “habitable zone” of planets, scientists say. The image of my sexy dance in a pair of boxers while slicing limes would echo through the cosmos, bumping into a passing comet and drifting over stars for more than a decade before reaching the blinking eyes of some extra-terrestrials.

I imagine two alien lovers discovering my ethereal sex tape and looking at each other in that knowing way, touched by the absurdity of the universe and this gives me comfort. They would glance at each other and exchange thoughts without speaking, as Paul and I often do, then smile, turn on the microphone and whisper a gravelly message across the void.

“Get out.”

The stars floating above our heads on this Cool Maine evening look the same to me as they did when I was a thirteen year old boy surviving North Carolina. Every Sunday night I would flick on the garage light, throw open the back screen door and noisily drag the wheel-less trash cans down the gravel driveway. After placing the metal cans on the curb there would be a sudden piercing silence. Looking up at the starry sky I would imagine what life on a planet circling one of those distant points of light might be like; wondering if there was some lonely alien boy looking back at me.

But I was certain that any civilization existing on a distant planet would be far too advanced to be touched by divorce, discrimination or Sunday night football. This was the year that my kind- hearted eighth grade teacher, Sister Mary Claire asked us to write a letter to our grown up selves; a message in a bottle to be delivered sometime in the distant future.

I remember feeling self-conscious about what to write. As a thirteen year old gay boy in the south, I didn’t talk about my feelings, I suppressed them and goodness knows I didn’t eat them, I was far too skinny. So, I wrote a generic letter:

Dear Bill,

Wow, I can’t believe you are an adult now, congratulations!

I hope that life is good for you now and that you are happy. I am sure that a lot has changed. Are you still best friends with Willy? I bet you are.

Do you still live in Greensboro?

Well, I better go now.

Sincerely,

You (Ha, ha!)

I don’t recall ever receiving the physical letter. Perhaps Sister Mary Claire threw them all away in a rage after catching most of the eighth grade class in the field at recess smoking marijuana. Or maybe she lost them when she was transferred to a convent in a crime riddled neighborhood of Baltimore. Many years later I heard that she left the Catholic Church. Perhaps the yellowed letters written with a number two pencil sit in a shoebox under a disenchanted aging woman’s bed who stares out at the expanding galaxy of her own past. But it was less the actual delivery of the letter and more the act of writing it that spoke to me. That there would be a future Bill in a distant world was enough of a message.

It did not occur to me then that Sister Mary Claire might have written a letter to herself. But we are all made of stardust. I think we both searched the heavens looking for answers while the world around us spun out of control.

When Paul and I bought our cottage in Maine I bought two solar “sun jars”. We place them under the full sun during the day and sit by their soft yellow light under the stars at night. Tonight, I look up at the stars, and see their history; see the light that left on its journey through space years ago. Looking across the table at Paul’s face I see the answer to that thirteen year old boy’s question and more importantly, the delivery of his message.

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