“My parents?”
“They will be following shortly.”
“Why are you coming?”
“I need to personally hand you over to my counterpart on Earth. Once there, you will spend a week in a special hospital for observation because your exposure to the color was a very severe one.”
“What will happen to him? Will he disappear?”
Finally, she acknowledged it. “We will send him to a special school where people with LOS learn to safeguard themselves and the ones around them more carefully.”
“I am very frightened.” She looked at him. He was taken aback. She looked at him directly in his real eye. “That color…”
“I know. But it’s over.”
“I’m sorry I insulted you.”
“Oh. It’s nothing. You…you were upset…”
Of course, he had been completely unprepared for that. As soon as she apologized, and apologized sincerely, for she really believed that her Lunar Boy had been captured and that they were going to Earth, he was frozen. He was unable to continue with the clever line of questioning he had planned, hoping to extract the name of the Pixiedamned young man. It was only a hunch, and it had worked. Sometimes, the forward trail of the fourth primary color could predict a direction that lasted for hours if the person looked at was especially beloved in the eyes of the beholder. He noticed in her face, as he questioned her earlier, an unmistakable resignation, of fate, of severe melancholy. He understood very well that in order to catch someone who can see shadows of future movement, you had to somehow create the very shadows yourself, then jump in, like a cat, and catch them. This is what he did. Of course the boy knew she was leaving the Moon, because that is where her forward projection went. He must have told her this; she carried it on her face as soon as he came upon her in the hotel room. Strangely enough, none of this gave him the usual sense of satisfaction. All he had to do now was get the criminal’s name, but Dogumanhed Schmet himself was unable to speak. The ship itself only took seconds to get into orbit, and he watched the girl cry and cry. He did not know what to do, and he was utterly shocked at the state he found himself in. If Belwin were not piloting the ship, he could instruct him to sit next to the girl and say reassuring things to her, but that was not the case. It was up to him. He stood up and moved closer to her so only one seat separated them from each other.
And then he slipped. So moved was he, and so uncharacteristically saddened was he, that at that tiny moment, he forgot everything and he forgot himself.
“I’m sorry, Selene…” he said.
She looked at the strange plastic man leaning toward her. His real eye must have been the sad and distracted one.
“My name is not Selene.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Windows Falling On Sparrows. You just remind me so much of someone, that’s all. You look exactly like her, your mannerisms are so similar to hers.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. She was my older sister. You know, I used to have seven older sisters a long time ago. Imagine being a boy with seven older sisters! They spoiled me so much! I was like a prince, a child prince if you can believe that. Selene was my favorite. You remind me so much of her.”
“Wasn’t Selene an ancient Greek goddess of the Moon?”
“Yes. Selene was a goddess. She was.”
Belwin piloted the sturgeon-shaped vessel exactly as he was programmed. Which meant there were only moments left before Windows Falling On Sparrows understood that they were returning to the Moon, and Schmet was locking her up in jail. Schmet gave up on spoiling this moment, trying to extract the name of the boy. Soon, he was going to return to his old miserable cruel and manipulative self. He would later get embarrassed and angry that, for a few minutes, he’d slipped into such sentimentality, but that was bound to happen to a man who had no sentimental life at all. She would be furious. She would feel betrayed. Rightfully so.
And so he sat next to her, this girl from Earth who jarred loose a few memories of his sister whom he missed so much, and decided to enjoy these minutes of not being himself. They looked out the window together as the neon-illuminated Moon-world passed beneath them. It glowed, and they wondered, as everyone did, why the Moon is so full of neon. An aesthetic decision made so long ago that its own forgotten reasons had fossilized. The small ship lurched itself farther, and the Moon’s curvature was revealed. Only half a sphere illuminated—the other side a colossal, somber shadow. A pure, lonely darkness. Windows Falling On Sparrows tried to reconstruct the fourth primary color in her mind, but it would not return.
She placed her hand on the glass. It left an imprint, then faded.
chapter eight
Hieronymus covered his face with his hands. He felt like a criminal. He kept recalling the events of the previous evening, looking for a loophole where the police might be able to put two and three together to make five. Big question: Did anyone call the police? Would the clerk in that hotel have called the police? No, that guy was in too deep with the hooker business. What did that girl’s parents do when they saw her? How could they not call the police? She looked positively horrible. Was she still even on the Moon? No, it was impossible. And yet he promised—eight o’clock in front of the Ferris wheel. He wanted to be wrong about what he thought he saw. Oh, how he wanted to be wrong.
Like the goddamned criminal he was, he had to quickly think of an alibi in case there was a knock on his door. But why would they knock on his door? There were thousands of others, other One Hundred Percent Lunar Boys who could easily have been there from any of the surrounding suburbs. But all she would have to do was tell the police his name was Hieronymus, and it would all be over. LEM Zone One was crowded, but he was certain that he was the only bearer of lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis with that first name.
Would the police figure out that there was a class trip? Would they call the school if they knew that a class from Lunar Public 777 had been in the area? Even if they did call the school, he knew his name might not even come up—after all, the Loopie class was supposed to go, but except for himself and Bruegel and Clellen, they had all cut.
He had to find out. This type of thinking was beginning to drive him completely nuts. He called Bruegel on the bubblephone in his room after he took a shower. As he waited for the connection, he glanced down at the pile of clothes on the floor. He was immensely sad that his white plastic jacket had been torn and ruined by oil. He looked at it sitting there on top of everything else. It was the price paid for being so goddamned stupid…
Bruegel’s fuzzy image appeared on the screen. He grinned when he saw Hieronymus.
“Hey,” he said, a little bleary-eyed. “What happened to you? You disappeared with that girl yesterday. You missed all the action.”
“What kind of action did I miss?”
“Well, Clellen and myself and that friend of yours, Pete, the sports enthusiast you had a long conversation with, we decided to take an alternative study lesson at some bar in the area. We got kind of drunk. Pete and Clellen were really misbehaving. I think Pete really likes Clellen a lot.”
“How did you get home last night?”
“We got back on the transport along with everyone else. What about you?”
“I need to speak to you about that, as soon as possible. I think I’m in a skukload of trouble, and I have to straighten out a few things, and I need to talk to you.”
“Where do you want you meet?”
“Let’s meet in front of O’Looney’s in twenty minutes.”
“I’m kind of hung over.”
“Good. I’ll buy you a zag-zag. I’ll even buy you a sugar wafflestomp. Just get out of that hovel you call an apartment and meet me. It’s really important.”
From far away, Sun King Towers looked like a gaudy red candelabra. A housing project built several centuries earlier, it was a mishmash of poorly arranged residential concrete monstrosities all clustered together and festooned with sizzling neon. Hieronymus lived in a tower in the center o
f the colossal housing project—Tower Ayler. The Rexaphin family’s apartment was on the eighty-eighth floor.
There was a subway stop at the foot of the towers. Every morning and every evening, a congested mess of humanity squeezed itself through the single concrete stairway that led down and up from the depths. Whenever it was empty, the huge white hummingbirds ventured down there, flying in and out, scavenging for whatever edibles could be found on the tracks and on the platforms and often in the trains themselves. Hieronymus took the subway every morning to Lunar Public 777, although it was not really necessary. The school was only a kilometer from Sun King Towers. However, it was a bland walk through a no-man’s land of concrete avenues and graffiti-covered walls just in front of the huge antenna stations that separated the housing project from the school.
Hieronymus was fond of O’Looney’s—not so much because it was a wonderful place, which it wasn’t, but because it was incredibly easy to get to and marvelously low tech. It was physically connected to the bottom of Tower Ayler. To get there, he took the elevator all the way down to the ground floor, walked through the abandoned and cavernous lobby, and as soon as he left the building, made a sharp left and walked about thirty meters and there was O’Looney’s.
O’Looney’s itself was a run-down grocery store and café, and for most residents it was an unavoidable eyesore on the way to the subway station. It tended to attract homeless people as it sold cheap bags of instant food and snacks, along with reasonably priced forty-ounce bottles of generic beer. For years, several neighborhood associations and developers had been trying to get rid of it. It was a simple aluminum and washed-out Plexiglas storefront, and was the last remaining business from a bygone era, when the foot of each tower had its own economy of shops and cinemas and restaurants and cafés and bars. All that remained were boarded up ex-establishments and squats. O’Looney’s stood alone.
There was always a crowd of regulars. Most of these were homeless. O’Looney’s was known for attracting elderly eccentrics. No one knew why, but on any given afternoon, it was difficult to find anyone milling about or sitting in some of the vinyl booths who was under the age of seventy-eight or seventy-nine. Hieronymus figured that a lot of the people who hung out there were leftovers of the old society that existed there long ago—when the plazas and gardens and restaurants at the foot of Sun King Towers were open and enjoyable public spaces, as opposed to the bleak and paranoid vacant lots they had become. O’Looney’s itself looked out onto a concrete plaza of benches and small circular platforms that were designed to hold trees, but now sat cracked and filled with dirt as the attempt to fill the area with greenery had failed long ago. The boarded-up walls of the tower’s base was a spectacle in and of itself—the plastic board was extremely old, as was the graffiti upon it, painted over and over, in some areas, for many decades…
Bruegel resided in the next building, an even taller monstrosity known as Tower Zhoug. Slue was also a neighborhood resident—her apartment was situated near the top of Tower Pelikanhopper. Many of the students at Lunar 777 came from Sun King Towers. Others came from another complex further down the subway line—Telstar Towers, which was well known for its squalor and higher crime statistics. Clellen lived there. So did Tseehop. In fact, a large part of the Loopie class was disproportionately represented in the run-down housing complexes at Telstar.
Then there were students like Pete. Pete did not live in a tower or even an apartment building of any kind. His home was but a modest single-family dwelling with a yard in the Marigold Estates section. That was on the other side of Lunar Public 777. A lot of Toppers also lived in Marigold Estates—it was considered a step up from the mundane tower existence so many lunar residents found themselves in. Needless to say, there were not many Loopies there—one or two, as of course Marigold Estates was far from upper class. Verdesker Vank Gardens was the local posh area, and none of the children from there went to Lunar Public 777—they all attended Armstrongington Academy.
For the first time, it occurred to Hieronymus how Pete must have met Slue. Many of Slue’s friends lived in Marigold Estates. Pete lived there. They must have met on the subway, or at a party, or some place where mutual acquaintances could have introduced them. Something like that. But after what happened the night before with that Earth girl, his whole complicated paradox with Slue seemed so far away. As if her presence in his life had suddenly faded a notch. And the unspoken pain she caused him by refusing to work with him once she discovered his secret—that he took classes in the Loopie section seemed, in comparison to last night, practically null.
As he got closer to O’Looney’s, he discovered that Bruegel was already there, waiting outside, grinning at Hieronymus as he approached.
“Looks like you had a rough night!” His friend laughed. As usual, he had that same disheveled look of a stunned knight just knocked of his horse. “But not as rough as Pete, from what I heard.”
“Yeah, well…” Hieronymus was about to make comment on what else can one expect from the volatile mix of Clellen and a barrelhead like Pete but stopped himself. He walked through the usual gatherings of lost drink-ravaged men and women who always spent their entire days outside O’Looney’s. One guy, his face as red as the sky, his eyes gray blue, his nose full of little purple gin blossoms, greeted the two teenagers.
“The rickety horse has a breath like black roses!” he said very matter-of-factly.
“Yes,” Bruegel answered with a grin.
A woman who smelled like fermented old wine held the aluminum door open for them as they entered. Hieronymus gave her a coin.
“They call me Mad Meg! Mad Meg! Can you say it?” she cried at the both of them as they entered.
“Mad Meg!” said Bruegel cheerfully as he also gave her some money. “I can say it better than you can! Mad Meg! Mad Meg!”
O’Looney’s itself lacked the usual presence of neon lights. Instead, light bulbs cast their bland gray light here, as they always had. Hieronymus thought of the strange amusement park at LEM Zone One. It too, like O’Looney’s, was a land of light bulbs. Here, several hung by their wires from the ceiling, a system of illumination considered quaint and very old fashioned.
When the boys entered the café section of the shop, they noticed no one was sitting at the counter, where Chahz O’Looney, the proprietor, stood sorting through some utensils. He looked up and acknowledged the arrival of his two young customers and immediately began preparing their usual—a mug of fedderkoppen for Hieronymus, and a bottle of zag-zag for Bruegel. The boys paid, then went over to the section just in front of the grocery aisles where some ancient vinyl booths were set up. They had to be careful where they sat, because often a drunken customer could be found sleeping in one. The last time they visited O’Looney’s, Bruegel almost sat in a puddle of vomit that had been left behind by an anonymous, inebriated patron. Chahz O’Looney shrugged his shoulders when Bruegel told him, in his pseudo linguistic way, Excuse me, Mr. O’Looney, but one of your perpendiculatrix consumertedders has decided to blofigate upon your trixelliphon! The proprietor was used to Bruegel’s pretentious way of talking, and when he peered over at the mess, only said something to the effect of best to let it dry— I’ll brush of the fakes later.
The walls were painted a muddy yellow, and whenever one glanced at the groceries, only alcoholic beverages and junk food could be seen on the shelves. Hieronymus never told his father he frequented this place—O’Looney’s was a thoroughly depressing experience on so many different levels that he knew his father would be worried as to why his sixteen-year-old son chose a place where old alcoholic men and woman loitered with change in their hands, trying to decide if they had enough pennies for the vilest pint of factory vodmoonka…
A hummingbird, trapped inside, circled one of the hanging lighbulbs.
“Listen,” Hieronymous began as Bruegel sat in front of him. “I might be in a lot of trouble.”
Bruegel’s grin got wider.
“With that girl?”
/> “Yes, well, sort of.”
“Hieronymus, I would be very disappointed in you if you were not worried about being in trouble after walking away with that incredibly hot-looking young foxentrotter…”
Hieronymus looked around for a couple of seconds. What was good about O’Looney’s was the simple fact it was discreet. “I let that girl take my goggles off. She saw my eye color.”
Bruegel drew a complete blank. As if he was waiting to hear something interesting.
“And?” he finally asked.
“And? Is that all you can say?”
Bruegel was already distracted by other things in the shop. Like the fact that O’Looney’s had a special sale on completely generic brands of beer.
“Look at that!” he exclaimed. “Generic beer! Isn’t that funny? Plain cans with just the word Beer on their white labels! My mother would love that! She always told me about generic beer brands like that when she lived in Collinsberg. It’s so funny! I don’t know why it’s funny, but it just is! Hey look, Hieronymus! Just next to the beer—they have cans of dog food! Same cans! Totally same labels! Except one says Beer and the other says Dog FooD! Isn’t that hilarious! What, is there some kind of factory where they get the same cans for everything and some guy just shovels dog food into one can and pours beer into the other? Hey, O’Looney! Mr. O’Looney! Where does this BEER and this DOG FOOD come from! THEY ARE BOTH THE SAME CANS? ARE THEY FROM THE SAME FACTORY?”
One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy Page 16