He sat at the edge of the mountain steppe and stared at the sky. The northern lights had begun streaking across the stars in their telltale musical fashion. They curved fro and to, multiplying and turning in the same pattern he had been shown for years on TV.
It was surprising. Children’s television and eighties movies really captured the Aurora Borealis like it really was? They didn’t exaggerate or change anything, it just really looked like that? That’s not the kind of thing he was used to out of media. But it was relieving to see them doing something right. And it didn’t cheapen the moment either. Knowing what it looked like didn’t make it any less magical. It was prettier than any fireworks display, took up more of the sky, and always took him by surprise. Every time he thought he saw a pattern in its movements, it would bend, going a different way and defying his understanding of the laws of physics.
He gave physics the benefit of the doubt, because as far as he had heard, studying how light behaves has become some what of a crap shoot in the field of science. He laid flat onto his back and watched it more, studying harder, looking for something non-specific but looking hard, certain if he overlooked one detail he might miss it. The lights turned and tossed about his head, hiding their epiphanies just out of view, and he strained ever harder to find them.
“Anything?” Layla asked, having finished clearing the path for the fire. She stepped closer to him, but not so close that she kicked snow into his face. Keeping his eyes on the sky was of utmost importance. He stared deeper, attempting to discern whatever he could from the rays of the night, hope dwindling quicker and quicker, as reality caved in on him. He slowly turned his gaze to meet Laylas, and gently shook his head.
“Are you kidding me?!” She exclaimed. “The greatest natural beauty on earth and you’ve got nothing?!”
“I mean yeah its pretty its just…I don’t know…isn’t exactly inspiring.”
“Not inspiring?! The Aurora Borealis is not inspiring?!”
“Well…..yeah.” He stammered. “I mean no offence, its magical, its crazy, its exactly what I envisioned and so much more. The light plays off the trees like a Mozart made painting and then displayed before my eyes…”
“That was poetic! That was something! Write that.”
“Gee, one sentence. My book is saved.”
“Oh you’re such a pill. I don’t know how I could ever top this. If this is uninspiring to you than maybe you’ll never finish that book.”
He took his attention off of her and looked back up at nature’s light show. There had to be something there to cure his writers block, there had to be. How in the world could you top this? She was right if this couldn’t cure writer’s block, nothing could.
He got to thinking about that term, “writer’s block.” It felt like an odd phrase, because that’s never what it felt like to him. Writer’s “block” implies that you know exactly what words to say, there’s just a big block in the way of you actually writing them. And that feeling wasn’t fictional, he had felt that before. He had stared at a laptop for hours on end making no progress yet somehow having written the whole book in his head. That’s not what this was. This was like the laptop had climbed inside his skull with a headlamp and a pickaxe, was mining the depths of his subconscious and was now coming up dry. There was nothing. Zilch, nada, desert, bone dry not a plant can grow, absolute zero, no ideas. His hands felt like ghosts attached to his arms, limp and thoughtless as no energy could power them to type even a single syllable. He had pulled out all the stops. He tried writing the word “penis” several times to make himself laugh, he tried editing the last chapter to get himself back in the mood, he even tried having ChatGPT come up with something and none of it worked. Nothing could start the thirty year old car engine he had instead of a brain.
That was a good one actually, “dead ignition” he called it, him not knowing much about cars. Turning the key and stomping on the gas pedal to hear that weaselly clicking noise to no avail felt like exactly what was happening in his mind. So much so he would catch himself reflexively twitching his foot in symbolism. Now he lay at the summit of Denali, Alaska staring at the most gorgeous visual phenomenon the living world could offer, stomping on the gas pedal like it owed him money, and absolutely no ideas would generate in his mind.
“What a stupid way to make a living.” He said aloud, realizing that if he didn’t come up with something in the next few days he could lose his book deal. He started counting the stars just to stimulate activity, beginning first with an organization system. He found constellations he could use as borders, making a rough square or polyhedron, then counting all the stars inside each one. He figured each square wouldn’t have more than ten stars in it, he was wrong. He got up to four hundred before he decided this wouldn’t work. Four hundred stars in the one square he drew and that was just a start. There were thousands of equally sized shapes he could be drawing in the sky and each of them would have as many, if not more than the one he started with. He heard on a YouTube video when he was a kid that the human eye could see about two billion stars from here on earth. He doubted that before, two billion is quite a large number. If you had two billion words on a page that’d write twenty-two thousand books, and the font would be smaller than an atom. But looking at it now he believed it. There were so many tiny specs of light up there it really could be two billion. He wouldn’t be surprised if there were even more. Not that he was going to count of course, he did four hundred, that was enough.
He wondered how they figured that out. You can’t count to a billion in a single lifetime, let alone two. Did they use some kind of algorithm? No that kind of immense sorting tech is only coming into common parlance now. Did they organize into teams? He guessed so, because how else would you count that many without dying of old age. But then again, keeping track of which stars have been counted and which ones haven’t would be a nightmare, plus the earth is spinning, and orbiting around the sun. Every night there’d be a whole new batch of the fuckers, and how would you even know? Was this a project that took place over many human generations? Were the ancient Greeks counting stars and we only finished in the nineteen nineties? He chuckled at the idea of a group of ancient Greeks getting together to count the stars back in whatever B.C.
“Ok Maticus, you lay over there and start counting from Ursa Major up, try not to get the batch to the left though, Bradicus already did those.”
“I thought Bradicus did the batch to the right?”
“Do YOU wanna argue with the copper abacus and the paper map?”
He chuckled again, envisioning himself on that team. He’d be a pretty sorry star counter if he gets bored after four hundred. The night sky would never bow to man with him on the squad.
He started wondering how many stars man could see period. He asked himself, if you were in space, deep outer space with no obstructions in your view, how many stars could you see? If your entire point of view from top to bottom and side to side was filled with stars, how many would be in there? Double the night sky? Maybe? The night sky is pretty large, its harder to take up more of a pov than this. Or would the outer space factor kick the number into overdrive? Would you be able to see trillions, quadrillions of stars beaming you near blind by their shear scope and infinity of it all, as you grasp in futile horror that the universe is never ending and always growing, teaming with life and exploding with spectacle, reminding you of how small you truly are. You’d see the depth of frontier before you and feel bitter-sweet love at the prospect of being utterly tiny, but never alone, as entire planets the color of Jolley Ranchers twirled away and created cities beyond the consent of you. You’d be an observer, not a consultant, as stars gave birth and detonated, as meteors crashed and nebulas grew, the universe could be the greatest lightshow nature could ever make, and you’ll never see it because you’re stuck here in front of a laptop, creating images your vapid mind never see as some form of morbid amusement for an audience to whom this seems to never get old. Distant races, foreign concepts, languages beyond human comprehension would twirl away in your head like the Milky Way Galaxy and for some reason you can’t type a single word of it onto your computer, because the horrible thing about wonders beyond the human mind, is its kind of hard to find the right words to describe them.
“Got anything now?” Layla interrupted, the fire being lit and roaring now.
He stuttered for a moment, his train of thought being derailed, before finally answering “aliens.”
“Aliens! That’s…something…”
He stood up from his spot and sat down by the fire, poking at its contents with a stick of wood.
“Your book is high fantasy of course…” Layla said, ever the doubter.
“I’ll figure it out.” He said. “Just give me more time. Nothing cures writer’s block like a deadline.”