Bieke Depoorter Blinked Myself Awake
I am counting down the days until Christmas Eve. Two more weeks. I am 14. I recently moved my bed next to the window so I can look outside while lying down. There will be a full moon soon.
I take out my diary, the one started in 1997, or maybe earlier, with many pages torn out. I write about people looking at the Moon throughout history, having different ideas about the exact same object. I write about wanting to die in space, how, if I ever get diagnosed with a terminal illness, I will jump out of a spacecraft. I will float around a bit, until finally I see everything that no one alive knows exists. I will understand everything, knowing there is no going back because “No one here on Earth can know what goes on there. If they did, that would be the death of nature.”
I write about my admiration for the Moon. Then I go downstairs to grab my first camera, a gift from my father, and I take my first-ever photo of the Moon. In my diary, I explain that I want to try to frame the picture so that the window is visible, including my handprints on the glass, the Moon in the background.
I conclude the diary entry by writing that I hope if someone ever secretly reads it, they will need to see this picture too. Otherwise they will never understand how I felt tonight.
It’s cold and snowing. I’m 27. My sister, brother, and I are road tripping around the United States in a red rental car. Every so often I ask them if we can pull over so I can climb onto the roof and make a picture. I am working on my second book. My sister is quietly reading in the backseat while my brother drives, enthusiastically pointing out sights in the landscape.
My sister says we will only really know if this was a good trip once we’re back home. She says that only once it’s all over will we know the true nature of the experience. I tell her I disagree; we are having fun right now, and that seems more trustworthy than any memory we might have later.
We stop at a restaurant with wood-paneled walls. It’s warm and cozy, and we’re sipping cheap beer from oversized glasses. A handful of old people are dancing on an otherwise empty dance floor while a few loners on the periphery hope someone will ask them to dance.
I think I should talk about it now. I think this might be the right moment. I hesitate, but I know I will have to tell them eventually. I begin by talking about our childhoods. Then I talk about my childhood. I describe memories and half-memories, some I have only recently recovered. I struggle to help them put together a puzzle in a few minutes that I have spent years trying to solve. I ask them if they remember the nights babysat us when our parents were out with friends.
My sister asks me how old I was when it happened. I tell her I’m not sure. She asks me how many times. I tell her I’m not sure. She asks me to describe details. I tell her I can’t remember any. I want her to ask different kinds of questions. Then she does, asking if I am sure of any of it.
I leave. People coming and going hear me crying in the parking lot, but I don’t care. I walk around the restaurant a few times. I sit in the red car for a while. No matter how hard I try, I don’t remember specifics. I don’t see details. I wonder if I did, in fact, imagine it. All I can see is his big brown dog.
I have the impulse to drive away and disappear but eventually I go back inside. My sister and brother are still there, waiting for me at the table surrounded by wood paneling. We sit in silence, close together but not touching, and order more beers. Before we drive back to our motel, we dance on the empty dance floor.
It’s raining hard, and there is barely anyone else on the highway. I switch off the radio. I am 30. I like the sound of the car’s wheels on the wet road. I wonder what my first memory is, the earliest moment I can consciously recall. Was it that day with the helicopter? Was it something earlier?
I try to visualize the pictures in my first photo album, the one with a blue-striped cover and white rings that my mother helped me put together. There was a photo of me and my sister in our sandbox under the willow tree full of caterpillars. A photo of us in our tiny swim trunks, sharing a bottle of milk at a camping site in France. A photo of us in a grassy field on a mountain in Austria; we picked a bouquet of flowers to give to a kind waiter at our hotel’s restaurant.
There are photos of me posing among the large plants in ________’s garden, always smiling for the camera. There’s also the crooked one of him sitting on his dirty brown couch, brown dog in his lap, brown bottle of beer on the windowsill, a half-burned cigarette in the ashtray. His mouth is open slightly as he sternly instructs the photographer how to properly take his portrait. On the back of the print, in my childish handwriting, it says this is the first picture I have ever taken.
The rain continues as I reach the coast. When I heard my sister’s voice on the phone saying she had safely delivered her first child—my godson—I felt the need to photograph the sea. It was too late to go to the hospital, but I want to document this night so he will be able to see it when he is older. I want to give him access to a memory he will never have.
It’s completely silent and still, as if I’m inside a vacuum. I don’t know how old I am. I see a man with a flat head. He looks hand-drawn with charcoal, filled in with watercolors. He has large, weathered hands and a slender, curved body. I can’t tell if he is big or small, whether he is standing or sitting. He seems almost translucent. Tangled hairs grow out of his head in all directions. For a moment, I wonder if I am inside an Egon Schiele painting.
The man tilts his head and looks at me with a gaze I do not understand. It’s an empty but intense expression. We are looking at each other, examining each other. I feel curious but scared, wanting to know more, wanting him to know less.
My left wrist is tingling. This sometimes occurs when I feel vulnerable, exposed, or hurt. I know I am dreaming and, in the dream, I am worried I will forget the way this man is looking at me once I wake. I rewind, going back to his gaze. When I was a teenager, I figured out how to rewind my dreams like a film. I watch him watch me again, then go back again. Over and over, I try to re-experience and re-see, but every time the dream continues, I still become worried I’ll forget. I’m stuck. I want to photograph his gaze so I can remember it.
I suddenly have the idea that blinking my eyes in a dream might be similar to taking a picture in the real world. I rewind but, this time, when the man looks at me, I blink and blink and blink. Then I’m awake. I blinked myself awake.
It’s almost dark by the time I arrive in a small village on the other side of the country. I am 33. I meet David on a dead-end street. He doesn’t talk much and has a soft voice when he does. He is a fireman. When not working, he looks at stars.
He sits on a stool in his backyard and looks through a telescope for minutes without moving. A second telescope is set up a couple of meters away. It automatically takes a picture of the sky every five minutes. David will look at the results in the morning.
After I met Henk, I felt a strong but inexplicable desire to meet more people like him. I had never been particularly interested in astronomy, but I wanted to understand why some people spend so much of their time looking at the night sky. I wanted to know if they are somehow comforted by the cosmos. I wanted to ask them about their dreams, if they ever have trouble sleeping. Mostly, I wanted to observe the way they observe; while they look up, I want to look at them.
David slowly moves his eye away from the eyepiece to draw something inside a circle on the paper in his lap. He switches on his red headlamp and picks up his pencil. When he finishes, he switches the headlamp off and brings his eye back to the eyepiece. He keeps his body completely still. He says he must wait long enough for the light of the star to imprint onto his retina so he can reproduce the image on the paper.
He repeats this process all night, from telescope to paper, paper to telescope, turning the headlamp on and off, until the Sun begins to come up and the stars become invisible again. He looks peaceful, carefully positioning the small points and filling in details. I envy him. I want to draw stars too.
I feel the cold concrete through my jacket. My hands are freezing. I am lying down near a telescope on a platform in the middle of a field of tall grass. I am 33. I can’t tell if I am happy or sad, but I do know that I don’t want to look through the telescope anymore. I arrived at this astronomy farm three nights earlier, after impulsively driving 700 km because of an urge to draw the stars instead of photographing them. I wonder if drawing will help me remember what I see better than photographing it. When the clouds ruined the first night of stargazing, I was relieved.
Over the past few days, I have had long, interesting conversations with Xavier, the man who runs this observatory. He patiently answered my many questions, explaining theories about time and space, the concept of infinity, the impossibility of counting every star. He has been telling me about the Carte du Ciel, the nineteenth-century project initially undertaken by eighteen observatories around the world in hopes of creating a complete map of the night sky at an agreed-upon telescopic magnitude. We talk about how looking up at the sky is like looking back in time because a star’s light reaches our eyes after traveling many light-years. I start feeling dizzy again.
It was just after midnight as I looked through my telescope, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. Two sharply focused stars appeared: one blue, one orange. Double stars. Sister stars. I was amazed to see that they really do twinkle as we are told stars do in stories. They seemed to be close together, almost intimate, but I knew they are light-years apart. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I started drawing the sister stars, but then felt anxiety building.
I lay down on the concrete slab and now stare into the darkness. I try to locate the sister stars, but I can’t find them—with the naked eye, they appear as one. I look at my drawing, but it doesn’t remind me at all of what I saw.
It will soon be morning again. I stand up and ask Xavier to help me connect my camera to the telescope. I position the stars perfectly in the frame and make a picture. I adjust and click the shutter again. Adjust and click. More adjustments and more photos, but I can’t capture the two stars in focus. Xavier notices me struggling, comes over, and puts his hand on my shoulder. He reminds me of the anatomical poster of the human eye that hangs in the observatory’s kitchen, the one that explains human sight: light enters the eye and is projected onto our retinas, reduced and upside down. It is then converted into electrical impulses and sent to the brain, which combines these two sets of information into one upright sharp image—the one we ‘see.’ This telescope and my camera don’t have a brain. We never see what the eye sees on its own.
I nod and spend all night trying to make a better picture. They all come out blurry.
It’s cold and dry in the air-conditioned corporate office. I am 35. The prospect of having this conversation makes me so anxious that my neck aches, but, in some ways, I am looking forward to it. I have brought along papers covered with handwritten notes, a careful chronological list of the few memories I can recall. I left some blank space, room for lost memories that might be found or those I was too afraid to put in writing.
My mother once told me that it’s best not to keep a diary. She believed that if you do, what you write becomes fixed, unchangeable, something you cannot undo or take back.
My sister is with me. She seems calm, but I suspect she is nervous too. I am surprised and grateful she agreed to come. We sit next to each other at a large gray conference table. Her red notebook is in front of her, open to an empty page. She has carried a notebook with her everywhere her whole life, always scribbling something down. She once told me that she often uses keywords because all she needs is a single word to recall what her past self was trying to get her future self to remember.
I ask the lawyer if I can record our conversation on my phone because sometimes, in conversations like these, my listening gets cloudy. She nods, as if she expected me to record.
I speak. She listens for a while without interrupting. When I pause or get stuck, trying to fill in the blank spaces on my papers, she waits patiently. The first thing she tells us is that we are brave. The second thing she says is that she needs dates, as specific as possible because of various statutes of limitations. I glance at my sister’s notebook, still empty. Again, I feel dizzy.
I try to concentrate, telling her about the letters I found in ’s bedside table. I tell her that I did some research: he was in jail decades ago; he did this to someone else. We ask if she can help us access his arrest record, as that might help me trust my mind, to quiet our doubts. In a gentle but formal voice, the lawyer explains that the records are from a period when Belgian court administrators were using ink that, unfortunately, has faded over time. At this point, the dossier would be blank.
It’s cold and sunny in the parking lot. I am one of the first people on the bus. I am 37. I choose a window seat towards the back so I can watch everyone get on board, mostly enthusiastic men over 70 years old. Many of them seem to know each other and are happy to be reunited. The guide crosses names off a list every time someone enters the bus and hands them a bottle of water.
I feel like I’m on a school field trip, but I am an adult, and my classmates are scientists here to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Vatican Observatory on Mt. Graham. Once all the seats are filled except the one next to me, a man with kind eyes asks if he can sit. Before I can say “Of course,” he tells me that I don’t have to worry: he has a wife. I laugh, uncomfortable but not wanting to make him uncomfortable, and tell him he is welcome to join me.
For the next four hours, Robert talks to me as if I am just another scientist. He tells me that he is an optical engineer and software developer. He developed the code that maximized the suppression of stray light on the Hubble Space Telescope. I do not understand most of what he says, but I am intrigued that he seems to know so much about sight and light, the human eye and photography. He is an expert in how to create the best conditions for seeing and documenting stars. As the bus rolls up and down narrow mountain roads, I ask him if he trusts images.
He answers by explaining that, every night, he sits down and writes about his day. For example, the Belgian woman on the bus will appear in his writing when he gets back to his desk later in the evening. He keeps these meticulous diaries because he is writing his memoirs for his children and grandchildren. He doesn’t want them to have to rely only on images to understand his life.
We arrive at the observatory. I watch Robert all day. While everyone else photographs Mt. Graham and the observatory’s equipment, he doesn’t take a single picture. Once we’re back on the bus he tells me that the only time he censors his writing is when he is in an argument with his wife. He never writes a bad thought about her. He doesn’t want those situations to be misunderstood.
I ask Robert if he trusts what he sees with his eyes. He says it’s what we don’t see that matters. He points to the window in front of us— “Tell me, Bike-y, what do you see now?” I describe the Sun shining off of the metal telescope at the top of the mountain. He nods but then points to the bus’ windshield, much closer to us, covered with dirt, grime, and greasy handprints. “Did you see all that?”
It ’s cold, and when the enormous metal roof begins to rumble open, it gets even colder. I’m shivering even though I am wearing a thick coat, gloves, and my sister’s scarf. Tom seems comfortable even though he is wearing far less clothing. I am 37.
M ore and more of the night sky appears as the roof opens until the rumble stops and it’s quiet except for an owl in the distance. Then the ground beneath me begins to shift. The 100-inch telescope rotates until its muzzle points through the open dome. Tom smiles—he does this every night, and it still excites him. He wears a white headlamp while he removes the cover from the mirror at the heart of the telescope. He will switch to a red headlamp later.
H e sees me hiding on a platform in the shadows and waves for me to come down and look through the eyepiece. I have looked through many telescopes in the last year, some in small backyards, some in the world’s most well-funded, well-equipped observatories, and still I don’t feel comforted by the cosmos. I still don’t enjoy looking into the past of deep space the way astronomers do.
Tom shows me the Andromeda Galaxy. He says that, in 1925, Edwin Hubble saw this sight and realized he was not, as it was believed at the time, seeing a cluster of stars and gas within the Milky Way but another galaxy entirely. He notices me looking at the two huge portraits of women propped up behind the telescope. They were members of the “Harvard Computers” and laid the groundwork for Hubble’s discovery.
T he more stars and space objects Tom shows me, the more I feel like retreating to the observatory’s dormitory, where I will sleep in the same bed Hubble slept in 100 years ago. Women were not allowed to sleep there until recently. In the past, female scientists had to stay down the mountain in Pasadena. The observatory had only one bathroom. These “limited facilities” were used as an excuse to discourage women from using the telescopes at night.
Tom calls me over again. I decide to climb the ladder one last time. I bring my eye to the eyepiece and suddenly feel much calmer. I can’t believe what I am seeing: the sister stars, the same ones I observed in France with Xavier. Still close but not touching, still there.
It’s so dark that even with my eyes open, it looks like they’re closed. I am 37. I am in my old bedroom, but it’s full of new-old furniture from my late grandmother’s house. After I left home to study photography, my mother renovated the entire upstairs, as if she wanted to renovate the past. There is a tower of cardboard boxes in my parents’ garage full of my childhood possessions. She begs me to take them with me every time I visit.
I wonder if my diaries and first photo album are in those boxes. Maybe my stuffed animals. I used to give each of them a kiss and a sign of the cross every night before I went to sleep. When my aunt, a nun, gave me a plastic Virgin Mary full of holy water, I added baptisms to my long, compulsive routine, shortening the nights.
The only remnant of my childhood left in the room is a red dream catcher hanging near the window. Earlier this evening, my mother gave my niece—my sister’s second child—a similar dream catcher as a Christmas gift. My brother and sister have already gone home, but my boyfriend and I decided to spend the night because we have to be at the airport early in the morning.
It’s been almost 14 years since I slept in this room. My boyfriend is asleep, so I close my eyes too. My sister’s old bedroom is across the hallway. The door was usually closed, but I liked knowing she was in there, reading, listening to music, or writing in her notebooks. I always wanted to be like her, with her, near her. Whenever she came into my room, I would bring up topics of conversation I thought she liked so she might stay longer. I remember an earthquake when we were children, my sister screaming in her bedroom. I was scared too but didn’t scream, and then felt jealous as I watched my father come running, pick her up, and carry her down the stairs.
I try to relax so sleep will come. I breathe in and out, in and out. The familiar pain in my neck. There was a pink ribbon tied to my bedpost my entire childhood. It’s not there anymore, but I can see it as clearly as if it was. It anchored the room, no matter what happened. I start to feel panic. I consider waking my boyfriend but instead allow my mind to adjust to the darkness as if I was observing space through a telescope. I try to accept the emptiness, to allow it to remain empty. And then, just as I’m about to drift off, a new image flashes in my mind’s eye—a pair of white long underwear, the kind old men wear on cold nights. I feel a weight pressing down on me.
It’s difficult but I look for a while, letting very faint light from very far away imprint on my retina. Then I open my eyes and go open the window, looking into space some more. The Moon, whose light takes 1.26 seconds to reach Earth; the stars, whose light can take hundreds of years to do the same. For the first time, I feel the comfort I envied in the astronomers I’ve met. I crawl back into bed, take my boyfriend’s hand, and close my eyes. For the first time, I allow images to come and go, appear and disappear, and I fall into a dreamless sleep.
