Moon Regardless

by Nick Manzolillo

  “Paul?” Johan’s curiosity is on the borders of a merry bout of laughter as if Paul’s pulling some kind of ditzy space out. Meanwhile, Paul can hear his heartbeat, louder than Johan’s words, and it is singing a berating tune of its own. How could he allow the pressure and failure to bring him here?

  “I have a gun I could keep….” He tries to mention the revolver he keeps under his mattress at home. Fuck Johan, Paul’s taking a seat, leaving one hand on his desk to support him. No Catholic man could claim to be this blind, but murder…at what point is this now some real and tangible shit he’s got himself caught up in?

  “Paul, you’re not one of us. You’re above who we are, respectably. You will live your whole life without firing that thing at another living, breathing being. I’m merely informing you that there is a potentiality for…sloppiness, and, not that you have anything to be afraid of, but concerning our guests, there are going to be a few unfamiliar faces that will be loitering in the lounge, walking around the hallways at the most dismal of hours, watching us from the Omni Hotel across the street.”

  “Then why even tell me about a….” Paul keeps his voice in check. Johan is in control because there is no other alternative. The anomaly is over. Everything is already handled. He needs to welcome Johan’s affirmations.

  “Because you deserve to know what’s going on. I want you to know that you’re valued and safe,” Johan says. The menace, hanging over the air like a translucent gas cloud, evaporates. Paul knows bullshit. If an expert in nothing else, he is versed in the universal truth of politics and human maneuverability.

  “I’m flattered, but I don’t mind riding this all out, back here, until the next election if you’ll have me,” Paul says. The “maybe” that Johan keeps promising him is something special that helps him fall asleep at night.

  Johan’s nodding, as if a child’s guessed his birthday present. He’s making his way to the corner of the room. He is beyond all political merits, to the point that it’s clear he has one thing and one thing only that he thinks about, that he spends every idle thought slipping into: the Moon Shack. If only Paul knew anything about that damned thing. His best guess is that it’s sort of like reaching Nirvana, only, instead of fat jolly monks, you get oddly tattooed and socially awkward men who pretty much have the word occult branded into their foreheads.

  “So, what you’re basically saying, in the most complicated and gruesome way, is that I might have to deal with something like a couple of bored cops asking questions about why they had to detain a hysterical college boy or two?” Paul asks.

  “I’m only leaving the cards you refuse to touch face down on the table. People like you and me have to be careful with our mistakes because when we do make them, we create ripples that form tidal waves; candles could be extinguished.”

  “My mistake….” He’s already regretting talking back to Johan to the extent that he has.

  “Paul, how about you follow me into the next room? In addition to the wonderful people I could introduce you to, I could also tell you a fine story about why you don’t want to be anything like Mayor Franco.” Johan’s slipping behind Paul’s chair, and the hairs on the back of his neck are spiraling into goosebumps as Johan lowers his lips to Paul’s ear. He can feel the hot moisture from his breath. “I’d say it’d be worth your time just to hear about what I, personally, make her do.” And Johan’s so close, Paul can feel his lips molding into a wicked grin.

  Franco was the one who came up with that jagged little campaign, the one about how Paul’s smile was “too” big. There was that whole thirty second commercial on a certified FBI technique on how to tell a liar, accompanied by pictures of Paul giving speeches that he spent weeks, sunset to dream-scorched sunrise, writing. Johan isn’t the mob. He’s a part of something stranger. If Providence has claim to anything, it’s the right of its inhabitants to follow their religious pursuits, wherever their faith may take them. If anybody’s to blame, it’s Roger Williams, for not specifying his Puritan-hating scope and encouraging religious diversity.

  “You’re telling me there’s somebody who hates your organization enough to, ah—to mutilate somebody, and you just get through telling me that I’m not in danger because I’m not actually involved, which is all true, hopefully, but now you’re offering me a peek behind your curtain? Come on now! I mean…,” Paul says, before Johan raises his hand from his shadowy corner of the room and cuts him off.

  “This constant air of secrecy has you in pieces, and I’m sorry, Paul. You are one of the finest men I’ve ever met. You represent what makes being a man…a human being, so comprehensively true. Above all things, people trust you. If one man is to truly lead Providence, it is going to be you, and here’s the part you don’t want to hear. When the time is right, when those....” Johan’s heading toward the wall, raising his hand to the ceiling. “…beady little eyes in the sky are aligned, you will be that man who will lead an entire city.”

  If this is all shit coming out of Johan’s mouth, then Paul can’t even pick through it for the nuggets of gold anymore. “Thanks for your vote, I guess, but I can’t take any more promises.”

  Offbeat piping, like a flute or a wheezy bagpipe, begins tinkling from behind the hidden door Johan is about to enter. Something about that piping and its chaotic lack of synchrony starts to chip away at Paul’s lucidness.

  “Paul.” Johan reaches back for him. Droplets of Paul’s sweat are glistening all over the desk, his legs are shaking, and there is a shame akin to perhaps pissing his own pants or crying in the middle of a crowded room. Another man’s hand is clasping his own, pulling him along, and Johan’s soft and nauseatingly warm embrace is awkwardly pulling him close. “I’m going to show you the perspective you’ve been looking for. You’ll sleep well tonight. You’ll believe in something at last, I swear.”

  Johan takes Paul’s hand and leads him to the half ajar panel along the faded wood. The sliding wall opens with a click, locking in place with a shudder. Paul’s foot dips over the threshold. The mess of wind instruments spouting like frightened geese becomes an echo. The odor of burning meat drifts down a cold stone corridor. There is the drawling whine of metal dragging upon metal, incalculable clapping hands, and then the distant, weakened cry of an infant goat.

  “Come now, my man of the Miskatonic. I’m going to give you a real tour.” Johan’s voice becomes a snicker in the darkness as the world of schedules, appointments, and plans for the future becomes irrelevant.

  Chapter 3: The Providence Detective Agency

  As the weeks pass, Hap stops crying, quits glancing at his phone, and finds that he can’t bring himself to sleep in past eleven. The last semi-decent dream he has of Tiff involves him lying in their bed at the old apartment. He could hear the familiar jingling of keys in the hallway outside the apartment and prayed that it was somehow Tiff returning home, as she’d done so many times before. As if summoned by his lucid will, there was a clink from the front door popping open. “Babe, what are you doing?” she said, from just outside the bedroom door. He opened his eyes before she could enter, and there was no reeling that dream back in. From there, all of Hap’s dreams have become formless nightmares, and with their oozing dominion, he knows he has to go back to Providence.

  The Miskatonic didn’t press charges. The cop who met him and that prick bellhop outside the hotel’s front doors ended up driving him right to the bus station. They all felt bad for the crazy kid.

  A four-hour drive in the Ford Focus he got as a high school graduation present somehow offers more therapy than every conversation he’s had with his parents, his brother Doran, and the wise-cracking therapist he was sent to. There is a numbing effect to the endless lanes of the highway. Providence, inching closer mile by mile, is better than sleep.

  His parents’ grand response to his moving back to Rhode Island is to give him extra money for the apartment for which he and Tiff had already put down a deposit. Her
name is still on the lease, but there’s little more he technically has to do besides pay every month. Of course, his mom tried every which way to get him to reconsider going back, but Hap has led her to believe he actually has a position at the Providence Journal. Short of a Google search, she doesn’t know how small and selective the newspaper branch actually is. Meanwhile, Hap’s resume only has three months of valet work and a college-level education, like a sole spine and femur with little else to explain why he can even stand on his own two feet in the adult world.

  A phone call to Tiff’s parents’ house goes straight to a voicemail they may not even check. Without Tiff, there remains no way for Hap to even have the slightest inkling as to their cell phone numbers. The information flow that was always filed away right beside him in Tiff’s phone has been severed, proving just how fragile his perfect world was.

  Hap doesn’t need the GPS once he takes an exit that dumps him onto Broadway. A shirtless kid on a bike holding some kind of metal pole cuts Hap off just as he’s crossing a left lane to turn onto his new one-way street. Horns blare behind Hap, jostling up an instinctual road rage like a Taser prod to the stomach. The kid’s pole makes him as wide as a garbage truck, and the Ford can’t pass him. This is why Hap originally left his car at home. At least Tiff had a single parking spot behind her building. In a city this small with as many one-ways as it has and a nightly parking ban between 3AM and 6AM, owning a car in Providence is a nightmare he never thought he’d experience.

  As prepared for the move back as he is, go figure, Hap forgot the Xbox, and for that, he can only blame the all-consuming idea of death. Each virtual soldier he killed in Halo seemed to matter. Life is something bright and near infinite in its impossibilities until the moment it shuts off with a click.

  After squeezing into a parking spot, Hap finds the sidewalks on either side of his building empty. Typical little Providence. At best, you’ll see somebody smoking on their front stoop, and even then, they’re usually still and silently blending into the loneliness around you.

  The key Hap was sent in the mail fits; the apartment becomes real as he steps into a near-blinding, white-walled living space that’s partially furnished with unwanted relics from prior tenants. How many other couples have lived here? Hap dumps everything but his backpack into the bedroom, taking note that he needs to buy bedding unless he wants to sleep on a naked and potentially piss-stained mattress. It’s nothing he needs to worry about for tonight, though.

  There is a single moment when Hap glances at the couch and finds it hard to breathe. The couch is just big enough that all six feet of Tiff could lie on it without having to curl up. Tall people are often neglected such comforts. If they were moving in together…hah. Well, their clothes would be on the floor, and everything would still be unpacked, save for a couple of bed sheets.

  Tiff liked running things. Churning onwards since freshman year, she had been the one making all the plans, and Hap was more than happy to oblige. She was only his second girlfriend; he barely ever got past a few make-out sessions and one overenthusiastic hand job in high school. Tiff would have had this new apartment in tiptop shape, fully decorated.

  Hap sighs, leans his head against the door, welcoming a brief shower of hot, useless tears. He debates punching the door, but then he’s thinking about it instead of doing it. He’s always hated those kinds of people who yell and hit shit and then walk around with a cheap athletic cast for a couple of weeks. “Fuck you,” Hap mutters. Whether he’s talking to Tiff or to himself, he’s not sure.

  If you can kiss somebody before they leave and feel fully satisfied with that last kiss until the next time you meet, then you don’t love them. It was morning, the last he saw of her, and he was only a quarter awake when she brushed her mouth across his and wished him a nice day. Where did his lips send her?

  Hap slinks a backpack over his shoulders and leaves his new apartment behind. Stepping out onto Broadway once more, the Miskatonic, his true destination, looms in the distance.

  The night’s sweeping in by the time he gets downtown, his day drained by last-minute packing and driving. How many Indian-looking boys are there in Providence? School’s out, so already the city’s population is more homogenous. Sure, combine the Indian-boy category with any Arabic or dark-skinned Spanish-speaking guys, and maybe there’re enough young men walking around who look like Hap, which buys him a little anonymity. Six weeks of diluted memory should help, too. Or maybe that stone-faced employee of the Miskatonic will recognize him and have him in the arms of another cop on foot patrol. Could be after the month and a half that Hap’s been away, they’ll just check him into his damned room.

  Either way, he took one of his dad’s surplus Phillies caps to tilt partially over his eyes. He paid for the room online with his own credit card. His mom will see the charge if she looks, but Hap has plenty of bullshit explanations to choose from.

  Readjusting his cap and keeping his head low, Hap avoids making eye contact with the valet guys lingering near the main entrance. Waiting months, even a year, would be better than hoping he’s been forgotten after six weeks, but by then, this thing in his chest, swimming up through his blood and into his head every night, this gnawing thing inside of him would be starved and weakened if Hap let any more time pass. He needs this hurt if he wants to find any trace of her.

  He makes it to the front desk, where there’s a pretty girl his age with curly blonde hair. It takes an awkward moment longer than he’d like to come up with a comprehensible combination of words to let her know he’s ready to check into his room. He catches a whiff of the blonde’s perfume. He and Tiff would hook up twice a day most days, sometimes more, sometimes less, but nearly two months into this nightmare, and he can’t think about even nuzzling somebody. Every morning he wakes up with that usual biological arousal, but then he’s paralyzed. If Tiff’s out there somewhere, hurt and incapacitated, thinking about him, crying constantly, pleading for him to find her, how could he even fantasize about anything but freeing her?

  The blonde, forever typecast by the keratin proteins sprouting from her scalp, calls Hap “sir,” and after looking up his information on a computer too sleek for a building this old, she makes eye contact with him and frowns. Hap readies himself to bolt right out of the room. This is taking too long. She sighs and obnoxiously pokes a button on her keyboard. “Here we go,” she finally says, smiling. “Thank you so much for being patient. We’ve had a lot of crazy and rude guests lately.”

  “Glad to not be one of them.” Hap slips into convenience-store-style pleasantry before realizing this is his chance to actually talk to a reasonable employee who may know something. “What do you mean by crazy? Anything interesting?” His words come out too quickly. He knows he’s onto something. The gold of this girl’s hair is treasure.

  “Oh no. I mean, everybody’s nice enough, just impatient people in a rush to get to their rooms, you know? Here ya go.” She gives him a plastic card with the Miskatonic’s dark-edged star emblem blazoned across its face, nested in a little paper slip labeled 347 in scrawling red ink. “Let me know if you need anything else,” she says quickly, dismissing him.

  With his head down, Hap resists the urge to gaze up at the golden, flowery designs across the ceiling alongside those two sphinxes and their vase. He will study them later, perhaps around three in the morning when the building is practically shut down. He plans on scrutinizing every stray portrait, anomalous doorknob, and spare room in this place. Already he notes a strange absence of security cameras in the lobby.

  There are several people waiting for the glass elevator, and Hap wonders if they’re even staying at the hotel. For that matter, a hotel in the city probably sees all manner of non-guests coming in or out. When he went down to New York City for a weekend with Tiffany, they couldn’t use the elevator without swiping their room keys, which seemed to be a deterrent to keep the homeless away from the upper floors and maid carts. The Miskaton
ic has none of that. Anybody can walk into the building whenever they please. Hell, Hap caused a big scene, and even he made it past the front desk with a little friendly banter and a working credit card.

  His main purpose for riding the glass elevator comes with the closing of its doors, as he presses his forehead against the glass, scanning the front lobby while trying hard not to appear suspicious. He keeps his eyes off the blonde girl and her equally attractive partner at the front desk, instead eyeing some of the people sitting down in the plush lounge chairs. As he glances at some of the men and the way they’re dressed, he can’t trust the pulsing paranoia throbbing through his cardiovascular system.

  There are strange rings, suspicious tattoos, funny hats and suits and ties that are too removed from context to be anything but alien. You always catch your odd types when people watching. Thing is, the most normal guy in the lobby could become a perverse howling thing when the lights are dimmed. Hap scans the dark glasses of what may be a blind man, sitting in the farthest corner of the lobby with a buttered bagel on a napkin across his lap; it seems as if he’s looking right at the elevator. As the elevator rises, the lobby is cut away by the cement separation between floors, and the rising view of Providence consumes the viewing panel of the elevator. As the other passengers gasp with delight, Hap looks away. He loved this city. In return, it ate his heart.

  Overlooking the predictable pattern of a bed, a plain desk with scraps of notebook paper, an ancient TV stand, and a half ajar bathroom door that leads to a trove of easy-to-steal soaps and lotions, Hap is left with the dim feeling that he should be excited for something. Hotel rooms remind him of the few Caribbean vacations he went on with Tiff and his family.