The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

“Do you ever think about how many stories are out there?” she asks, placing a finger on the glass. “How many dramas are unfolding around us right at this very moment? I wonder how long a book you would need to record them. You’d probably need an entire library to hold a single evening in Manhattan. An hour. A minute.”

“Did you have a nightmare?” Eleanor asks from across the room. She is adjusting her maps. “I used to have nightmares and I would write them down and fold them up into stars and throw them away to be rid of them. Sometimes it worked.”

ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS has pictured many a character from a book never dreaming he would end up face-to-face with one of them, and even though he knew that Simon Keating was an actual person and not a book character he’d had a character pictured in his head anyway who was not at all the person he is currently looking at.

“We are the stars,” he answers, as though it is the most obvious of facts afloat in a sea of metaphors and misdirections. “We are all stardust and stories.”

He wonders how many people have passed through this space before, how many people breathed in this air that smells of smoke and honey and if any of them felt the way he feels now: unsure and afraid and unable to know which decision is the right one, if there is a right decision at all.

A man this far into a story has his path to follow. There were many paths, once, in a time that is past, lost many miles and pages ago. Now there is only one path for Zachary Ezra Rawlins to choose.

“Be brave,” she says. “Be bold. Be loud. Never change for anyone but yourself. Any soul worth their star-stuff will take the whole package as is and however it grows. Don’t waste your time on anyone who doesn’t believe you when you tell them how you feel. On that Tuesday in September when you think you have no one to talk to you call me, okay? I’ll be waiting by the phone. And drive the speed limit around Buffalo.”

They asked if I thought he would have done something—like jumped-off-a-bridge something—and I said I didn’t think so, but I also think most of us are two steps away from jumping off something most of the time and you never know if the next day is going to push you in one direction or another.

He complains that she should be doing something instead of just glowing there and then apologizes, for who is he to question the actions or inactions of the moon?

You may be by yourself but you are not alone.”

He tells her how he worries that none of it means anything. That none of it is important. That who he is, or who he thinks he is, is just a collection of references to other people’s art and he is so focused on story and meaning and structure that he wants his world to have all of it neatly laid out and it never, ever does and he fears it never will.

“You can talk, can’t you?” he asks. “No,” says the cat. It bows its head and turns, walking off into the shadows, leaving Zachary staring dumbly after it.

“Or is this an ‘I know too much already’ situation?” “You do, but I’m not particularly concerned about that. If you were to tell anyone what you know, or what you think you know, no one would believe you.” “Because it’s too weird?” “Because you’re a woman,” she said. “That makes you easier to write off as crazy. Hysterical. If you were a man it might be an issue.”

He is mad at himself for so many things he did and didn’t do and how much time he wasted waiting for his life to begin and now it is over and then he has another thought and is suddenly, distinctly livid at someone else.

He tries to decide if he’s changed since this all started because isn’t that the point and he feels different than he did but he can’t weigh feeling different versus having changed from inside himself with no heartbeat, standing on a shore with no shoes.

I think the best stories feel like they’re still going, somewhere, out in story space.

Or maybe that’s what I got out of it and someone else hearing the same story would see something different.

As soon as there’s an unquestionable truth there’s no longer a myth.”

“Allegra saw the end,” Mirabel says. “She saw the future coming on its wings and she did everything she could think to do to prevent it, even things she didn’t want to do. She wished she could preserve the present and keep her beloved Harbor the way it was but everything got tangled and restricted. The story kept fading and the bees wandered back down to where they started. They followed the story for a very long time through Harbor after Harbor but if things don’t change the bees stop paying as much attention. The story had to end closer to the sea in order to find the bees again. I had to trust that someday someone would follow the story all the way down. That there could be one story to tie all of the others together.”

Rhyme wonders if he knows that Mirabel hears him, has always heard him, will always hear him through distance and lifetimes and a thousand turning pages. This is not where our story ends, he writes. This is only where it changes.

This is where we leave them, in a long-awaited kiss upon the Starless Sea, tangled in salvation and desire and obsolete cartography.

“Better now. He didn’t think I’d let him have a happy ending. I’m kind of offended.” “Perhaps he did not believe that he deserved one.”

A note on the naming of things: I borrowed the name Madame Love Rawlins from a tomb in Salem, Massachusetts. Any resemblance to the actual person is coincidental. Kat and Simon are named after Kat Howard and Simon Toyne because each of them happened to e-mail me while I was hunting for character names. (Kat’s friend Preeti found her name in similar fashion from Preeti Chhibber.) As noted in the text, Eleanor is named for the character from The Haunting of Hill House. Zachary and Dorian were always Zachary and Dorian, even though I almost changed Dorian’s name multiple times. Mirabel was, of course, named by the bees.