“Look, I was the one being a wise guy — I could have just as easily tapped her on the shoulder when you first asked me, but I was being a schluck. And you were in a hurry.”
“Yeah, but in retrospect, I forgot that Slue is a really serious student, and she doesn’t like to be interrupted when she’s deep into her intellectual stuff. I was intruding.”
“No you weren’t,” insisted Hieronymus, who found it strange that he was engaged in a bizarre apology contest with Pete. “What kind of an intellectual is one who can’t be tapped on her shoulder, Pete?”
Pete had no answer for that, but he looked of into the passing countryside with an expression of contemplation.
“Well, anyway, Slue explained the whole thing to me, and I realized that I was not very nice to you — or her — that day.”
“Don’t worry about it, Pete.”
“You’re a really good friend of Slue’s, aren’t you?”
Hieronymus shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve known her since the third grade.”
“She talks about you a lot.”
“Have you seen much of her lately?” Hieronymus asked, slightly nervously.
“Yeah, a bunch. I took her to the tellball previews between Lovettown and Gagarin last Saturday. She loved it.”
“Really? I had no idea that Slue was even interested in tellball — or any sport.”
“Oh, she gets into it if the game is good. We have a deal going — she comes with me to see games and sports and stuff like that, and I go with her to museums and films and poetry readings. I’ve opened up her world to athletics, and she’s opened up my world to…you know, old films, novels, even paintings, and all this music I never heard of before. And you know what we totally agree on? My car. I have a three-year-old Prokong-90. It’s in great condition! Slue loves my car, and I think our favorite thing to do together is go for long drives under the Earthlight during the wee hours when the highways are empty.”
Hieronymus forced himself to smile and paused before he spoke.
“That’s great, Pete.”
“I even read that book you just did the presentation on in your class last week. Slue made a copy of the one your uncle translated — it was really great. Very bizarre, but great.”
“I’m very pleased to hear that, Pete. You know, Slue was supposed to work with me on that one but she just quit, out of the blue, and worked on another book with another student instead.”
“Yeah, she told me that.”
“She just stopped speaking to me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. In fact, it started right after we saw you at the rotunda. How long ago was that — three weeks, right? She’s ignored me since. Until two seconds ago when you told me that she made a copy of The Random Treewolf for you, I had no idea she even listened to my dissertation on it.”
Pete shook his head, laughing.
“Man, she wouldn’t shut up about it. She thought it was the most brilliant thing she had ever heard.”
Hieronymus said nothing. He only stared ahead, then out through the window at the passing neon-covered apartment complexes in the distance.
Pete leaned in a little closer.
“Look, man, I really have to ask you something.”
“Sure, Pete. Anything.”
“I know that Slue is in the Topper classes. I know that you have to be really, really smart to get into those classes. Usually, it seems that if someone is in one Topper class, they tend to be in all of them. Like Slue. Now the other day, she told me something totally unbelievable about you.” Pete lowered his voice to a whisper so that neither Bruegel nor Clellen could hear him. “Slue said that you are only in three Topper classes, and that the other half of your subjects you take with the… Loopies?”
Hieronymus smiled, then raised his eyebrows in such a way that jiggled the goggles on his face. He was expecting a weird question on lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis, or on the fourth primary color, or on the goggles, but of course, it was the old Toppers and Loopies thing once again.
“This is true. I am a Topper, and I am a Loopie.”
Pete was impressed and astonished.
“I’ve seen you running through the hallways, sprinting through the crowds of kids just walking to their classes. Everyone talks about the goggle-guy — sorry, I mean One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy who’s in both the best and the worst classes and who has to run the entire length of the school just to get to his classes on time. It’s you, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Pete, that’s me.”
“You know, you’re incredibly fast. That’s why you are both a mystery and a legend among the bulk of the students. We just see you zip right past. I’ll be walking to class with five or six others, the hallway will be really crowded, we’ll be talking about normal stuff, like last night’s game or something, and then all of a sudden, whoosh! This phantom darts right past us, a tablet and a stylo-point in his hand, and in the blink of an eye, he’s gone. It happens every day. Nobody knows who you are because you are in no one’s class and you don’t seem to associate with anyone who is not a Topper or a Loopie. When I met you three weeks ago in the rotunda, I had no idea that you were The Phantom. You’re that fast.”
Hieronymus was not sure where Pete was going with this story — but the big fellow appeared to be genuinely impressed with his running abilities, which, till this moment, he’d never considered in any kind of way.
“Listen,” Pete continued. “Try-outs for the track team start in three weeks.”
“Oh…” Hieronymus suddenly understood what this was about.
“Me and some of the other guys, after making fun of The Phantom — that is, making fun of you — realized that you were a lot faster than any of us. You would be such an excellent sprinter for our team.”
“I thought you were already on the tellball team?” Hieronymus asked, surprised and fattered by this unforeseen appreciation for a talent he did not even know he had had.
“I am. But the season is almost over. And we were knocked out of the semi-finals by Lunar Public 64, so we’re not even playing anymore. However…” He paused. “With The Phantom on our track team, I think we can have an unbelievable next season.”
“The Phantom…” Hieronymus considered it. “I like that. And it sure beats goggle-guy.”
Pete laughed, gently slapping himself on the forehead.
“Sorry about that.”
For the rest of the transport ride to LEM Zone One, Pete stayed with the three representatives of the Loopie world, talking to Hieronymus and especially Clellen. Bruegel was uncharacteristically shy. Clellen had her flirt siren on, blazing and blaring, and Pete was happy to accommodate her.
“Do you like being on the tellball team?” she asked
“Sure,” he answered. “Do you like being on the Beautiful Girl Team?”
Clellen laughed and slapped him on one of his biceps.
“Stop it! There is no Beautiful Girl Team!”
“Really? You should start one. You’d be captain…”
“You!” She laughed as she slapped him again, this time on the shoulder, before changing the subject only slightly.
“Do you think I’d make a good cheerleader?”
“Cheerleader?” Pete asked.
“Yeah, you know, all those ring-top girls really getting their frazzles on, doing shake-shake on the ring-side while the boys just get the innacaws-drive going on the other teams’ ace ball!”
“What?” Pete asked, his middle-class brain unable to comprehend Clellen’s last sentence.
“You know, buck.” She laughed, standing up in the aisle and throwing her arms in the air. “Cheerleaders!” She shouted as she started to do this incredible dance while singing a song, her body gestures and leg-kicking both violent and sexual and clumsy and utterly copied from ancient films when cheerleaders actually existed on Earth, their image exploited and exaggerated for reasons long ago forgotten…
Superman, superfux
I’m a sloppy, out
of luck
meet me in a pick-up truck
go-packa-macka-facka
Ring-arounda-rollie-pollie
roll-me-with-your-holy-rollie
I’m a sloppy silly slut
go pack me in the gut
Hieronymus and Bruegel hardly paid any attention to her. Clellen performed this and a thousand other identical routines about five times a day in their classroom. Pete, on the other hand, had never seen anything remotely like this in his entire life.
“Wow!” He cheered, applauding with his big hands. “I like your song!”
She jumped up in the air and landed on his lap, where she immediately placed her open mouth on his, giving him an unbelievably long, wet, tongue-thrusting kiss.
“My gosh!” Pete exclaimed, his face flush with excitement. “I am so joining the Loopie class!” he yelled so loud half the entire transport could hear.
Moments later, the transport arrived at LEM Zone One. Hieronymus noted to himself that he alone among the four knew what the LEM actually was — the others simply didn’t care. Pete stayed with the Loopies, chiefly because Clellen kissed him a few more times, and as they walked to the site of the ancient broken spaceship, he went out of his way to introduce Hieronymus to some of the other kids, saying things like, this is Hieronymus The Phantom. I got him to join the track team!
A hundred students arrived at once. They disobeyed all the rules regarding the old metal ruin from Earth. They climbed on it, they jumped off, they wrestled, and they all threw things at each other. The teachers yelled and when the kids got themselves in order, the teachers explained what had happened on this very spot two thousand years earlier. The students quickly got bored and some of them began to goof around again — this was a story they had all heard hundreds of times before, and they were more attracted to the glittering casino lights in every direction and all the strange adults crowded around than a pile of broken-down metal vaguely resembling a giant spider sculpture. One boy found a rusted can of beer that had been tossed under the LEM and shouted out loud, hey, do you think they left this here too? and everyone laughed. Hieronymus climbed up and jumped off the contraption a few more times, running around with Bruegel and Clellen and Pete.
He was standing on top of the thing when he saw her. She was looking directly at him, walking in his direction.
The girl from Earth.
He froze. The way she walked. Her face. He had never seen anything like her.
chapter six
It is not a disease. It is inexplicable. There is nothing wrong with me. They gave it a name that sounds like a disease, but it is nothing of the sort. I don’t know what it is. But I am certain that there is nothing wrong with me.
What do you see when you take your goggles off?
I’m not allowed to talk about it.
But you do take your goggles off.
Sometimes. At night when I sleep. When I wash my face.
So you sometimes can go to the window, like in the middle of the night maybe, and look out.
Yes.
What do you see?
I see everything that normal people can see. And then some.
And then some. What does that mean?
I am not allowed to talk about it. If I am caught, I will be sent away.
I’ve come all the way from Earth.
Then you will go back to your normal life on Earth and forget you ever had this conversation with me. You will forget you ever met me.
Do you know that only One Hundred Percent Lunar People can pilot Mega Cruisers?
What are you talking about?
It’s true. If you want to pilot a Mega Cruiser, you have to be able to see whatever it is that you see. I heard they pilot all the ships in the entire solar system and they don’t wear goggles when they do it.
I don’t believe it.
It’s just a rumor. But I think you would know right away if this idea makes any sense. Certainly, at some time in your life, you have looked up into the sky, into the forever that is the same outer space that we see on Earth. You just told me that you sometimes looked out your window at night. How could you not have looked into the sky? What do you see?
What do you see?
Here she was. Beautiful was too cheap a word. She was an image. A revelation. Fragile. Invincible. An orchid. A silver antenna. She was electricity. She was a fairy. She was a firefly, a silkworm, an imp, a demon, a goddess. A black-eyed, black-haired girl from another planet, from the sphere just above their heads. He felt himself unable to breathe as soon as he came upon her approaching form. He was standing on the lopsided contraption of junk that had at one time carried the first human beings to the Moon. There was a crowd of people, students and tourists, and from them, she emerged, an apparition, her eyes already on his, making him feel childish, her other-worldliness inherent in her awkward walk, her gaze belonging only to him.
She climbed up the ladder the ancients had once climbed down. She did it with the ease of someone from a world where the gravity is harsh, and thus, here on the Moon, can practically float.
He could not move. He was paralyzed with such pleasure as she approached him. Surrounded by the buzzing neon lights of the casinos, standing on a junk pile, an archaeological contraption, broken, so hard to believe that humanity had once tossed this thing here — a symbol, an endeavor of such high expectations, it rests crumbled and surrounded by tourists, half of whom do not even know what it is, she walks upon it as if it is her alter, constructed eons ago to mark her arrival on this spot, at this particular time.
She walked right up to him and his world slowed to a halt. Silence enveloped the atmosphere. Huge hummingbirds hovered in the air as she approached.
Humanity took a breathless pause.
Her lips moved.
“Hello. I’m from Earth. I saw you from over there. Are you a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy?”
“Yes, I am.”
Her smile widened. A volcano split the Moon in two, but all he saw were her wonderful black eyes. Her accent when she spoke…
“I would love to speak to you. Do you have some time?”
“Yes. Yes I do.”
His comrades from school quickly became insignificant. They were transformed into shadows, gray and brown and fading into the neon lit cityscape. There was only her. She was from Earth, the forbidden place. She was the most astonishing thing he had ever seen and she came from the tumultuous world of his ancestors.
“What would you like to talk about?”
You can not comprehend what it is that I can see. It can not be explained in words.
Everything can be explained in words.
Not this.
As they walked away from the ruin of the LEM, only Bruegel and Clellen and Pete noticed. Pete, being the by-the-book kind of guy he was, immediately expressed concern that his new friend Hieronymus could get into trouble by cutting. Bruegel, who by now had warmed up to the tellball player, explained that in this case, leaving was not really cutting, but it was more or less deciding independently when to pursue academic pursuits, or, in Bruegel’s pseudo way of making up words to sound more educated, it was a fuxitation of the romular behavioral mode ingrained in the Lunar constitutional triad that allowed for immersions and slegisonic sidemorgraphic thinking in a carpikular sense. Pete thought this explanation sounded logical, especially when Clellen interrupted again and gave him yet one more extraordinary, spine tingling, outrageous kiss on his open mouth with her wondrous yet bad, very bad and beautiful lips. Pete felt his heart palpitate. Where did you learn to kiss like that?! he exclaimed between breaths. As the rest of the class made their way to a nearby museum, Bruegel and Pete and Clellen snuck away to a bar — Bruegel had a fake ID and Pete had a few extra dollars and so they ordered several rounds of beers and the three of them got quite drunk before making their way back to the transport three hours later for the ride home. Hieronymus was nowhere to be found. None of the teacher chaperones made any effort to locate him because he was, in th
at circumstance, just one of the Loopies, and who really gave a damn about those criminals, that’s all they do is cut class anyway. The bus ride home was uneventful except that Pete and Clellen got a little out of control in their making out. Bruegel fell asleep, and luckily for him, when he finally got back to the apartment he shared with his mother, she did not notice the smell of alcohol on his breath because she herself was pretty smashed as it was, passed out on the living room floor. Clellen was dreading what her father might think if he caught her again with the stink of beer on her lipstick-smeared mouth, so she bought a pack of mints and ate them all — luckily, at the moment she arrived in her own fat, her father was busy in his bedroom with one of his girlfriends, so Clellen did not have to test her mint-favored scheme of covering drunkenness. She sneaked into her room and locked the door by shoving a chair under the doorknob. Pete had never been drunk before in his entire life and he was physically unprepared for his body’s own adverse rejection of it — not to mention his parents’ horrified reaction to the spectacle of their son puking up the unmistakable bile of stinking excess in the living room.
That night, Ringo Rexaphin was beside himself with worry when his son never came home. He called the school, but no one even knew Hieronymus was missing. He dreaded the idea of calling the police. He did not trust them, and they were notorious for singling out One Hundred Percent Lunar People and charging them with the crime of Ocular Assault when, in fact, nothing of the sort happened. Still there was this terrible thing that had happened on the subway just the night before, and he was worried beyond all reason. He spent the night pacing the apartment. Several times he got so worried he almost hyperventilated. He had never known such anxiety. He drank three glasses of whiskey. It changed nothing, and he didn’t even feel it.
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