The Night Sky

Adrienne Pilon

Huntington Beach State Park is a stretch of coastline in South Carolina that goes dark at night: no hotel lights, no boardwalk lights, no house lights. There’s only a nature center and camping facilities set just inland, because this place is a tiny refuge designed to protect the nighttime perambulations of sea turtles who lay their eggs on this stretch of beach, and whose hatchlings must find their way back to the water. Turtles, like other fauna or flora, are beholden to light and dark to regulate circadian rhythms, which for sea turtles means the ability to lay eggs.

On that beach one spring, I lay on my back in the sand. It was near midnight and the constellations were spread out across the dark expanse. The Milky Way appeared not at all milky, not so smooth or comforting as its name implies: it is luminously, starkly white against the black, thrilling and immense and almost frightening. I hadn’t known this about the Milky Way, about how ravishing the sky could be in such deep dark. So seemingly near were the stars that I instinctively reached out to try and touch them.

Despite an introductory course in college, I understand nothing of astronomy. The class was incomprehensible to me; math and physics were foreign languages. The instructor was kind and patient, and I slid through with a C, but in truth, the stars were so far away and the idea of the universe so abstract to me that it all felt meaningless. NASA seemed like a government welfare program for geeky scientists and I couldn’t have bothered with moon landings or meteor sightings. I am grounded here, on earth, I told myself.

Then came the solar eclipse of 2015. My family was in Venice that semester, and my husband and children and I stood on the Accademia Bridge with a throng of Italian schoolchildren, all of us wearing protective glasses to watch the celestial action. I was reluctant to look. My right retina had detached the year before, and looking into the queer light, even with protective measures, seemed risky. But it occurred to me that I might not see such a thing again. I noted the crowd’s mood of contained excitement, the odd sky over us, the surreal quality of the gray, washed-out daylight. And then: the day darkened as the moon stole the sun and hung over the world, ringed with a rim of fire. 

Since that eclipse, and my eye troubles, the skies have intrigued me, perhaps because I cannot take for granted seeing the sunlight, the starlight, the phases of the moon through the month. If my sight were to go, I would miss watching moonlight on the ocean, would ache to miss rosy-fingered dawns or sunsets that spread across the sky, turning orange or pink or lavender with the end of day. I would long to see the stars come out.

* * *

Four years after that eclipse, my right retina detached for the second time. It was different than the first detachment: less interesting, faster. It was more a sensation of submergence into darkness than the first detachment, which had been a progression of events that started with a smattering of moon dust, an inverse milky way of black stars and dark webbing that appeared in my vision over the course of an hour.

Both detachments were initiated by a posterior vitreous detachment (PVD) in which the vitreous—that jelly-like substance over the eye—strains and pulls away. This creates floaters, which are a common occurrence, especially for the nearsighted, and are usually inconsequential. In childhood I’d called these “sunspots,” and they had always been part of my visual landscape. Summers spent on the beach meant UV damage which I coupled with incessant reading and nearsightedness. As a daydreaming child, I would lie on my bed and, with a roll of my eyes, send the lines, which resembled strands of swimming bacterial cells, zipping upward; they would then softly cascade down.

With the first detachment there’d been a sudden rush of floaters. Then, my right eye went completely blind, fading into a gray wash through which nothing was visible. The vitreous, already pulled thin, had tugged on a blood vessel, and blood behind the eye obscured my vision. It could clear up in a month or more on its own, I was told by the eye doctor; it might not. In any case, it required continual monitoring to see if the retina was still attached as fluid behind the eye exerted pressure on the retina, and, according to the medical student who was along on rounds that day, I had an approximately 75 percent chance of detachment. He sounded nearly gleeful at the prospect.

With that, I entered the world of ophthalmological patients. Biweekly visits to the eye doctor were sandwiched in between work and life, navigated with one eye. I drove well enough, learned to compensate for the lack of depth perception, and, except for one rather spectacular fall (heels, curb) managed fine. On one level—the level that was not abjectly terrified at the thought of blindness—the process was fascinating. Since it was difficult for doctors to see behind the eye with all that blood, I had regular ultrasounds, in which the world’s tiniest ultrasound wand was rolled all over my eyeball. It was a lesson in the bodily submission I would need to navigate life as a patient. Reclining in a surgical chair, gel rolled over the eye, I had to be perfectly still, unblinking, as the wand rolled and I looked up, down, left, and right, as the technician took images. If I shifted or blinked, we’d have to start again, and the thought of prolonging this was motivation—is always motivation—when I visit the eye doctor. So I reclined and breathed and thought about the many ultrasounds I’d had during pregnancies, pregnancies in constant danger of ending in premature labor. After the gel was smeared over my belly, I’d hear those mysterious clicks and beeps, the whoosh of the heartbeat, but I refused to look at the screen. I didn’t want to know if it was a boy or a girl, and I didn’t want to know if there was something wrong. Not until I was reassured that all was okay did I say yes to an image of the baby-to-be. One ultrasound of our first baby showed pronounced black spots in the head. “The baby is looking right at us!” the doctor told us, excitedly pointing out the spots, which turned out to be eye sockets. While I doubted the fetus was looking anywhere, I was glad to know that this was ok, normal, good.

During an eyeball ultrasound there are no exclamations, or play-by-play of images by the technician. No one smiles or offers frozen images of the eye to take home, to share with family and friends, though I wish now they had.

Over those weeks when my eye was blind, I looked for some clearing. Briefly, a glimpse of the world became visible in a sliver of my peripheral vision.  Other things appeared in the gray haze, though: specks and sparkles and bits of flotsam, almost the way dust is backlit in the dark and dances like snowflakes in a ray of light.

Then, one morning I awoke to see something new: a black semicircle with a halo of sun, a miniature eclipse. It was magnificent.

It was also bad. The retina had detached.

After surgery, a period of over two hours in which propofol absented me from the living world, the eye was repaired and patched. And when the patch was removed the next day, there was the world again, through a gas bubble inserted to keep the retina in place. When I closed my eyes, my vision was full of color and bursts of light. While the meteoric showers have lessened over time, they’ve never gone completely. I have my own asterism, particular to the universe in my head, replete with flashes and starbursts of gold and green and lavender and blue, color words I use to explain these visions which defy description.

Soon after surgery, the doctor ordered a retinal imaging session. The machine used was like a small, private astrolabe with which measurements of the eye were taken and the entire eyeball was visible, permeable, knowable. I sat in a chair with my head pressed against a rail while lights were beamed into my head. The images that formed looked like outer space: in a black void, there was an orb, lit up from within. Different perspectives showed depth and dimension to this orb, which could have been a planet seen through a telescopic lens. There was a tiny universe in my eye socket. Magnified, it was enormous and magical; it looked like a sun suspended in a dark sky, yellow and orange, rivers of blood vessels, tiny moons of light inside.

* * *

A nebula is an astronomical term for clouds of dust and gas which are visible in the nighttime sky as shadows or bright patches. It is also ophthalmological, meaning a clouded spot on the cornea, clouding the vision, as with the formation of a cataract, which has happened on my right eye and now on my left as well.

In space, a nebula can be a place where matter collects and new stars are formed.  In the eye, they are the by-products of age, sun, retinal issues, or medications. Cataracts are common, and easily remedied through surgeries. I have great faith in these surgeries, these surgeons, for this small matter in my eyes. Your eye is pretty straightforward, a cataract surgeon told me, and he shot lasers into my eye to destroy the existing, clouded lens and then suctioned out the floating particles. There were pulses and sparks and loud noises and Led Zeppelin playing in the OR. Lying there, I thought how often what I see with my eyes closed or my vision obscured has become more vivid and colorful as my sight declines.                              

Visiting the ophthalmologist is now mostly routine: the numbing drops, which sting; the dilation drops which also sting and make my head feel full; the pressure checks with a tonometer, a wand held on the surface of the eye; the blinding light of the phoropter; the straining of the eyeball to look hard in every direction. What has been more difficult is the Binocular Indirect Ophthalmoscope—the portal phoropter, or examination instrument, that the doctor wears atop the head, like a miner’s helmet. With this, the doctor is hands-free, but this provokes anxiety because I have not become accustomed to the speculum, which is used to press around the eyeball, after turning the eyelids inside out for a better view. I have learned to relax my body to get it over with, but it is effortful. When the exam is complete, I await the verdict from the chair. Will I be sent away until the next examination with a thumbs up, or is there bad news?

Now, in my right eye, there are black bubbles suspended over my vision: they spread, separate, come back together to form clusters. These floaters are like a murmuration of birds, a phenomenon I find beautiful when it is in the sky, and not in the eye. The pupil no longer constricts or contracts fully, as the nerves were damaged in surgery, making me spectacularly light sensitive. In bed, after turning out the light, I watch the sparkles and stars in my head until they fade. Seeing “stuff,” my latest surgeon says, is a normal by-product of all the surgeries. He feels confident that the retina won’t detach again, but the future of my eyesight, I know, is less than certain.

I’ve tried, for the past six years, to obliterate references to blindness, to hide from the possibility of going blind. But like any worry we have, it seems a bulletin is sent out in the world. I now seem to see blind people everywhere I go; references to blindness, to eye disease, pop up constantly. Thus, I’ve decided that running away was the wrong tactic. Given that I’ve now had five surgeries in the right eye, and that the scar tissue piles up and the vision is forever compromised, I have forced myself to consider the possibility that I will lose the sight in that eye. Given I’ve had a retinal tear in the other eye, I could face more difficulty. One day, I might be blind. I might not. My vision might maintain its status quo into my old age, fates willing. Shuddering with fear and evading the possibility doesn’t change a thing.

I’ve tried to make friends with blindness, I guess you could say.

I sometimes enjoy the dark, and have started taking nighttime walks, though true darkness is impossible in this city where I live. I’ve thought back to when I was small, and would go into my closet, pull the door shut, and sit in the dark. I would hold my hand in front of my face, fascinated by its disappearance.    

* * *

On the back deck, I lie on my back during all seasons and contemplate the sky. Winter is lovely where I live. Impossibly tall oaks scrape the blue of the sky with their bare, almost bone-colored branches; clouds form, drift, separate. Early spring, when the trees just leaf out, is ever-changing and beautiful; full summer makes a canopy that is rich and green, the blue of sky just peeking through the trees. I spy on the birds: cardinals, chickadees, towhees on the lower branches, woodpeckers high up on the tree trunks, hawks circling high overhead. At nighttime, in the warm weeks of early summer, the trees and grasses teem with fireflies.

To see the stars in their fullness I go to state or national parks, or wildlife refuges, places where darkness is protected. The universe above is spectacular and magical, and when I look up, I understand how my tiny world has nothing on that big one in the sky. It isn’t a new revelation, but it comforts me immensely. There’s a steadiness to the constellations and the moon, so far away that we cannot affect them—at least not yet, not in the way that we affect and are affected by other things here on earth, like sea turtles, or wars, or viruses, or starlight in the cities, cities where birds crash into buildings at night and trees stop growing because they have no dark.

* * *

My oldest nephew was just a preschooler when he learned about the phases of the moon. Like all young children, he was eager to share his knowledge; he recited the names of the planets, and tracked the moon’s progress each night, explaining which phase it was in, what it had been and what it would be.

The moon was predictable, unlike the wind, which terrified him at about that same age. The likelihood that one of us would be carried off by a strong gust seemed not far-fetched to him. At the time, it seemed like a neurosis, a manifestation of an anxiety he couldn’t express. In some abstract sense, though, it seems like a reasonable fear. What could be in the wind? What invisible threats loom? Now, this nephew has his own child, his own worries and fears that are perhaps more concrete, and no less terrifying. In this magnificent world of ours there are many things impossible to control, events coming that we may not foresee, strong and invisible as the wind.

I recall carrying that nephew in my arms one night as we went outside to have a look at the heavens during his astronomy phase. I can perfectly conjure the moment in my mind’s eye, can still hear his voice, bell-clear, in my ear.

“It’s a crescent moon, Auntie A,” he said to me, pointing upward.

It was indeed a crescent moon: predictable, glorious, shining. We looked up into the expanse of the night sky, eyes opened wide.  

Adrienne Pilon is a writer, editor, teacher, and booster of small literary magazines. Recent work can be found in Mobius, Eclectica, Plum Tree Tavern, Vita Brevis, and elsewhere.