When Maciek was older, living in America and his grandmother was long dead, he would still think of those nights with her at the window. He would remember the full meal in his stomach and his grandmother's cool hands leading him to the stars. When his father died in the war, he had placed him in the stars like Cepheus. His father's constellation was there still, anchored by the North star. For a year after his death, Maciek had traced his father's face in the sky until the starred outline was more real to him than the man.
In America, Maciek succeeded. He attended a university and studied Physics. Astronomy would have been much too obvious. He enjoyed his math studies. The satisfaction of equations and their sums. He loved how numbers could always be depended upon. Not like people, who die or leave or disappear. Numbers are steadfast and reliable. Constant.
He lead his class and, after graduating with honors, he went to work on projects that would eventually lead to American men walking on the moon. He enjoyed his work, but after some years, the pace began to wear him down. At heart, he was neither competitive nor ambitious, so he accepted a teaching position at a university in a northeastern state much like the country he had left as a child. He was happy enough with the job. He had only one enemy and that was loneliness, but he had learned to live with silence and separation if only because it was familiar.
Sometimes, leaving his office at the university in the early Spring, Maciek would look into the stars and see only what his grandmother had shown him. The shapes of bears and plows. For a moment, he would negate the randomness he knew and had proven existed there. Then he would button his jacket and walk across the wet earth to his car. He would finger his keys in his pocket, take them out, unlock the car door and climb into the driver's seat. In his car, the night sky would assault him again. A slap at all his attempts to gauge, monitor and delineate. Maciek knew would never be happy. He started his car and steered it to the roadway.
There were times when he did not know what day it was or month or year. He would mindlessly follow his route home. He would repeat this trip faultlessly tens of thousands of times. Then, one summer evening in the closed heat of his car, his heart would stop and, even though the evening was bright, he would see the stars. They would appear to him, harsh and white, admonishing him once more before a dark burst of red, then deep violet and finally black overtook him. A student, a young girl in her second year at the university, found him. His keys in his hand. His eyes open and as dead as all space.