There was a loud and hollow echo of metal on metal that rang throughout the avenue. Outside, the fallen radar dish must have shifted.
More hummingbirds entered, and some perched up on the pipes that ran across the ceiling, while others just hovered, staring at the lost teenagers. Three or four landed on the floor, then disappeared down the same drain where the moose had just stuck his long tongue.
Do you remember the last time we worked together in school?
The rotunda? We were working on The Random Treewolf.
You started to tell me something.
What did I tell you?
About something that happened on the Moon ninety-four years ago.
I wanted to speak about the Regime of Blindness. But you didn’t want to listen…
Do you think that this is one of those camps?
Yes.
I thought so, too. The remains of the gate. The big eyeball…
Anyone like us, they would round up. They would do unspeakable things to us. That wall…you know what that wall was made of…
That time, you began to tell me something else.
What else did I begin to tell you?
The reason I am called a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy. The reason why you are called a One Hundred Percent Lunar Girl.
It’s an old expression from former times. Back then, a person was labeled as being either One Hundred Percent Lunar, or One Hundred Percent Human. There was no in-between.
A strange silence had descended. The moose had all left the area, but the hummingbirds remained. Only the sounds of the creaking ancient antennas and broken radar dishes in the wind could be heard over the refined buzzing of the floating birds’ swifting wings.
They were alone on the far side of the Moon. They were alone. Alone. Far away from everyone. Not a trace of neon light. No authorities. Just them, hiding in shadows.
“We won’t die,” she said to him, both of their hearts beating so uncontrollably.
“And even if we do…” He smiled.
With only inches separating their faces, they took of their goggles and looked at each other.
An outstanding thing happened. The hummingbirds all launched into the air with an excited vigor and suddenly, as if by clarion call, hundreds more swarmed into the room with an inexplicable urgency, empowered. They came in through the open windows where the glass had long vanished. They crawled out of the drain on the floor. They emerged from pipes. They squeezed in through cracks on the walls, filling the room with the futtering of thousands of feathers, no longer white, as these birds were suddenly triumphant in their natural lunar color, the fourth primary color. They swarmed around the boy and the girl, astonished, on the concrete floor, eyes to eyes, a cloud of hummingbirds, a cloud of hummingbirds enveloping them. Filling the void, these hovering beasts matched their eye color, birds of the fourth primary color electrically shifting the cavernous room from empty ruin to palace of bright splendid forbidden hue. They transformed and they arrived by the thousands, all at once, from all corners, to create a sphere around the two, a moving sphere of fast moving birds glowing and pulsating as the fourth primary color. Huge birds, pointed beaks, hovering, forming an orb that breaks free of the obscure, the resplendent glowing announcement to all eyes that this fourth primary color cannot be hidden nor diluted nor outlawed, that it exists loudly as the Moon’s color of all things lunar. Where blank white once lay as a non-pigment, it arises on the wings of magnificent hummingbirds answering the call of the lovers’ long suppressed eyes.
Surrounded by thousands of swarming birds, bathed in their nameless color, everything felt truly normal for the boy and the girl. For the first time in their lives, they were each able to look at another person, directly, no goggles, no consequence, no drama. It was normal. Your eyes are beautiful he told her, and she laughed, the blue-haired girl. You know what? she replied your eyes are beautiful too and she reached forward and touched the side of his face, and he did the same, his fingertips tracing the surface of her cheek. I have never looked another person in the eyes like this before. It was true. It was remarkable. They could have looked away, they could have seen the future and past projections of their own selves, objects, the bending of time with space, they could have looked up into the wondrous void of the infinity, but they wanted only to look at each other. The normal wonderfulness of a young man and a young woman looking at each other. The light of the purple sky, the cold murky concrete floor, the dark sinister walls, all comprised of blue, yellow, red, all obscured now by the true lunar color, vivid in the feathers of a thousand hummingbirds and their own eyes before them, meshed together to make their world normal. Normal. You look so different, he said, smiling at her. You look like a girl from the countryside. I don’t even notice that you have blue hair. She laughed. You look different too, for the first time, you don’t look uptight. I can’t believe how not-uptight you are!
They continued with these revelations until they had nothing left to say. Then at last they kissed, and that too was a completely normal and wonderful thing to do.
chapter fourteen
They heard the sound of a car. The hummingbirds around them pointed their beaks in the direction of the mechanical hum. Then they dispersed as quickly as they came. They returned to their blank-white, colorless selves as soon as the teenagers stopped looking at each other. The birds all fled, like bats from a cave. And they feared the reverberation of the human industrial machine. It got louder. A deep, purring engine, humming along with the crackle of glass and pebbles getting crushed under a large tire.
Hieronymus and Slue got up from the concrete floor and ran over to the square hole in the wall that at one time had held a window.
Pete’s Prokong-90 was cautiously moving up the boulevard.
They saw Pete in the driver’s seat, Clellen right next to him, and Bruegel in the back. And as they did not wear their goggles, they also saw the projection of the car continuing farther, themselves entering the car, then the vehicle driving in a straight line under the collapsed radar and out of sight.
“It appears that it is our fate that we should run out and meet them…” Hieronymus said, putting his goggles back on.
“Wait,” Slue said, a genuine sadness in her voice. ”Let me look at you one last time before you do that.”
Pete and Clellen could not figure out just what kind of a place they had driven into, and to them, Bruegel’s explanation made no sense at all. When they finally discovered Slue and Hieronymus running out from the building they were hiding in, they were, of course, relieved, and for a few moments, Pete was utterly embarrassed, till he saw that they were holding hands. Clellen was overjoyed to see her friend Hieronymus, and she giggled and turned to Pete, exclaiming, "See! I told you! They are together!”
Pete was a little confused about all of this. For weeks he was dating Slue. Then he met Clellen and decided to cheat on Slue for some action with this…more adventurous…young lady. He did not exactly intend for Clellen to automatically become his girlfriend, but, in the space of a few hours, he managed to get light-years with her as opposed to the admittedly boring time he spent with Slue. Clellen was up for going to a motel right away! With Slue, such a fun subject like that never even came up. Slue was, despite being really good looking, a snob. She was not a good kisser either, and the goggles thing got tiresome after a while. Clellen, on the other hand—hot, good looking, hilariously funny, liked sports (or at least she claimed she did), and best of all, she did it—well, he had never known anyone who did it like her before.
Bruegel remained quiet as he sat in the back. He too saw Hieronymus and Slue approach the car holding hands. All he could do was quietly sulk. He liked Clellen, but she chose Pete. He liked Slue, but alas, she chose Hieronymus. He knew for a fact that Clellen had made out with Hieronymus, and that Pete had dated, and thus probably kissed, Slue. Another night where the other guys get all the girls. The girls I like don’t like me. He pondered at the injustice of it all. And the girls I don
’t like, they like me.
Hieronymus opened the door and slid into the back seat of the vehicle next to Bruegel. Slue followed, sat next to Hieronymus, and closed the door after herself.
“Well.” The One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy grinned. ”Here we all are…”
“So, Mus…” Clellen smiled as she turned from her position in the front passenger seat, her winning smile hiding the utter madness that navigated every moment of her life. ”What about this party! Slue-Blue told me about this amazing party, but Bruegel has just informed us that the party was moved?”
Slue was about to answer when, at that moment, the Prokong-90 turned a corner, and they suddenly found themselves on an avenue they had been on before. Straight up ahead was the terrible domed building. The number of cars parked outside caught Pete’s attention.
“Hey! That must be the party you guys were talking about!”
“NO!” Slue shouted. ”Pete! Turn around! Don’t go there! Don’t go there!”
But Pete just glanced at Slue for a quick, grinning second. ”I don’t know,” he declared, heading directly for the building with the wall inside. ”If Slue thinks we should stay away, that can only mean that it must be FUN!”
Hieronymus leaned forward to Pete.
“Listen, man, you don’t even want to go near that place. It’s not a party.”
As they drove closer, Hieronymus and Slue realized yet another car had arrived a short time earlier and parked very close to the entrance. There were three men in their early twenties who were busy with a rope—one fellow had tied it around his waist and the other end of the line was attached to the car. He was walking toward the entrance and his comrades were uncoiling the rope.
Pete drove right up to them.
“Hey!” he called out from his window. ”What’s up? What are you guys doing?”
They looked up at him with worried expressions.
“Are you a cop?” one of them called.
“Do I look like a cop?”
They exchanged glances, their eyes wide with nervousness. Then Pete continued before they could answer.
“Look, I’m not a cop, okay? I’m still in high school for crying out loud. What’s going on—is there a party in there?”
“Pete!” insisted Hieronymus. ”I told you, it’s not a party!”
“What’s with the rope?” Pete then added.
“We need it. We can only go in one at a time. After twenty minutes,
we pull the other out, and then another one of us gets to go in.”
Pete laughed. ”What’s going on in there? You need a rope to pull each other out? Don’t tell me—it’s an orgy!”
“No, no, nothing like that!” one of the fellows insisted.
Slue leaned forward. ”Pete! We have to get out of here!”
Then Clellen leaned forward.
“Did you just say there was an orgy in there?” she asked with an odd sort of spark.
Before Pete could answer, he sniffed the air.
“Ugh! What is that rank odor?”
The stumbling figure of a nineteen-year-old girl emerged. Like the bearded fellow they had encountered earlier, she looked and smelled like she had not bathed in weeks. She wore a disheveled paisley dress. Her dark hair was hopelessly matted into large filthy clumps. One of her stockings was ripped all the way down to her ankle. She wandered right up to Pete as he poked his head from the car window, her eyes extraordinarily bloodshot. For the first time, the athletic teenager heard the moaning and bizarre chanting from the domed building. The filthy girl pressed herself against his car.
“Hey!” the healthy tell ball player exclaimed as he rolled up his window. “Don’t touch my car!”
“Obscura Camera Projection Techbolsinator!” the girl exclaimed with a parched voice.
Pete stepped on the gas pedal and the vehicle began to go forward, but Slue reached forward and touched his shoulder.
“Wait. Don’t go yet.”
“That weird girl outside touched my car!” complained Pete, who stopped the vehicle nevertheless. The mysterious girl with the bloodshot eyes caught up to them and pressed her face to the glass. Clellen laughed, then said mockingly to her fellow Loopie, "Bruegel! Your girlfriend is here!”
“Shut that rat cage you call a mouth, Clellen!”
Hieronymus reached forward and faced Clellen just inches from her nose, mouthing the words Don’t don’t don’t…let it ride, don’t answer. And while Clellen fumed, Slue leaned over to speak to Bruegel, who was quietly brooding.
“Bruegel, do you have the Omni-Tracker I gave you earlier?”
He nodded, reaching into his pocket and handed her the instrument.
Without explaining anything to anyone, Slue quickly exclaimed, "I’ll be right back!” and opened the door and jumped out.
“Slue!” Hieronymus shouted as he watched her jump over discarded cables and piles of junk, carrying the Omni-Tracker, running past the boys with the rope, running right back into the entrance of the domed building.
“Would someone please explain to me,” Pete, who was utterly confused, shouted, "just what the Pixie Hades is going on!?”
Hieronymus didn’t answer, all he said was "Wait!” as he too jumped out and ran directly toward the terrible domed building.
One of the young men who was preparing the rope so his friend could go inside without getting trapped, realized Hieronymus was wearing goggles.
“Hey! Look! It’s a One Hundred Percenter!” one of them shouted. They automatically blocked his way.
“Show us your eyes!” they immediately demanded.
“There’s plenty of this eye color where you’re going,” he answered.
They paused, and then just nodded to each other. ”True,” one of them simply remarked. Then the fellow who had the rope attached to him came up with a bold proposal.
“How would you like to make some money?”
“Guys, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not here to hang out. I know what’s in there, and the only reason I’m even standing here talking to you is because you are in my way, and I have to get my friend, who just disappeared into that hellhole you three seem so eager to visit.”
“Yeah, but you have LOS—that color in there won’t have any effect on you. You can be our guide. You bring us in, make sure we have a nice place to sit, then bring us out so we don’t get all caught up in it all and starve to death. We’ll pay you.”
“There are dead people in there!” Hieronymus shouted. ”The place smells! And that color! You shouldn’t even be looking at it! Don’t you know what it does to your head?”
One of them smiled.
“Oh, we know. We’ve been here before.”
“You’re crazy! You spend enough time in there and you will destroy yourselves!”
“That’s why we have this rope, man.”
“You are a complete fool! You’re willing to mess up your head just so you can have a cheap thrill like this?”
“Dude, you are so wrong,” the fellow who stood in the middle of the three added.
“Wrong?” exclaimed Hieronymus.
“Wrong. We are not here for any kind of cheap thrill. We are here to experience truth. Just because we cannot comprehend the fourth primary color does not mean it can’t exist.”
“You’re right about that. It exists. But you shouldn’t mess with it, either.”
“We are not messing with anything. That color exists in nature— your eyes prove that. We have the right to experience it just as much as it is your right to live your life without having your eyes covered by goggles!”
“Fellas, I would love to get into a discussion with you on this matter, but you don’t understand—”
“You are the one who does not understand. Your eyes and your mind accept this color, so you miss out on the incomparable experience that we have when we see it.”
“I have to go. I don’t know what happened to my friend. My other friends are waiting back there in the car.”
&nbs
p; But the three young men continued to blocked his path. Hieronymus noticed that one of them wore a sweatshirt that had Sea of Nectar State University spelled out in big letters.
“Suppose I were to tell you that if you were to go into that room, you would experience something incomprehensible, something like death, for example,” the man said.
“Death?”
“Death.”
“There are dead people in there already. Why don’t you ask them?”
“What if, in that room, the incomprehensible spectre of death could be experienced for a temporary moment. Would you not be curious?”
“That’s a false and morbid and stupid comparison. Now get out of
my way.”
“I only say death because it’s impossible to imagine. It’s the opposite of consciousness. The fourth primary color exists because you say it does, and the government says it does not. When we look at it, we see it for a brief and strange moment, but then our minds push it away, like a forgotten dream. That’s why there are all those silly stories about Jesus and Pixie and how it is the Devil’s color, but in reality, our mind is simply comprehending the abyss of truth, and in that moment, the truth of physical reality far surpasses our own means to comprehend it.”
Hieronymus looked at the young man’s sweatshirt. Of course it made sense. These fellows were all students at the Moon’s most notorious party school.
“Is that what you study at Sea of Nectar State University?”
“Not oficially. The three of us are philosophy students.”
“Oh. And is this your homework assignment?”
“No, but our professor told us about this place.”
“Yeah, well he sounds like an irresponsible kazzer-bat. There are dead people in there.”
“Don’t knock SONSU. Gordon Chazkofer, one of greatest philosophers ever, wrote The Perceptive Analysis of Social Mercantile Transgression when he was a graduate student there.”
“Right. A hundred years ago. When it was a good place. Now it’s nothing more than a beer distributor’s wet dream. Look at you guys. You’re just a bunch of stoners.”
One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy Page 26