Night’s Curtain

Concepts, conception, and constellations.

A satisfying pop punctuated each hole poked through the heavy, dust-coated curtain. The boy used a sturdy, thick-gauge yarn needle that he slipped secretly from his mother’s sewing box. Pop, pop, pop. Orion’s belt. Pop, pop. His legs. Pop, pop. And arms. He worked steadily and only occasionally glanced at the open book on the floor. Most of it was memorized from so many nights looking up.

The room was full of windows. The windows were full of light. The light flooded the room, bleaching out colors, blinding the eyes. The windows had WWII blackout curtains. Southern California prepared for Japanese air raids. The war ended the year the boy was born. Still the curtains hung, thick, old, and now, full of his holes.

During the day he drew the curtains and sat in the gloom of the room looking at daylight concentrated, focused down, forced through the holes meant to be the stars.

Sometimes the light shot through in shafts, streaking the room, striping it with bright lines. Other times the holes glowed and swelled, obliterating patterns, as if the light were too big to push through such tiny holes.

He added stars, clusters, constellations, that became perforations and started to tear. They opened up into each other, white giants expanding, black holes absorbing. Rips in the fabric of his outer space.

The weight of the heavy curtains pulled down. Gravity won. One by one, each curtain fell into tatters.

Conception. The boy overheard his mother talking to her sister over tea. He was in the hall folding clean sheets of paper into planes. He tested the speed and glide ratio of one design against another. He used the long hallway with its horizontal strips of hard wood to count distances for comparison.

They talked about him in the hushed tone of voice that he knew meant ‘secret’. He stopped to listen. His mother said he was conceived in that room. The window room. The star room. His own room, during an air raid. Or a drill. A blackout. The curtains were down. The sirens were wailing. In the midst of the fear and adrenaline, something rose up and took hold in that room. They already had two children, 12 and 14-years-old. That was enough. They hadn’t planned anymore. Usually she took precautions. But that night, in the middle of what might have been a real attack, not knowing whether or not Japanese planes were flying over Pasadena, all precautions were forgotten and they fell into each other’s arms.

The boy didn’t understand most of what they said.
But he liked the word conceived.
Conception. Concept. An idea or thought.
Like a thought, like a concept, he was conceived.
In a room he filled with his own stars.