Waking the Moon

by Elizabeth Hand

  I. Was. In. Love.

  “…do you understand?”

  I started. “Huh? I’m sorry, Dylan—”

  He traced the line of my calf. “I was just saying that it’s not weird for me to talk about my mother. It’s that she’s weird—really weird. I love her, I really do; but I don’t really know her. I was always away at boarding schools, and she’d be off on all her digs, and even when she took me along there was always someone she paid to take care of me—tutors and stuff. She was always nice to me, it’s not like she was mean or something, it’s just—”

  He stopped and sighed. I wanted to put my arms around him, I wanted to tell him I understood—that I knew what Angelica was like, that it was okay—but I was afraid to. I was afraid I’d seem too quick to comfort him, afraid I’d seem too maternal. So I just sat beside him on the bed and waited for him to go on.

  “It’s just that she’s so fucking intense,” he said finally. Against his tan face his eyes burned like midnight blue flames. “She has all these bizarre ideas, these mad prophecies; but a lot of them come true.”

  “Like—what?” I asked guardedly.

  “Like earthquakes. Remember that big quake in L.A.? Well, two days before it hits, out of nowhere she calls me at school and tells me that she’s taking me with her to Minneapolis for a few days. Minneapolis! But I thought, okay, I’ll check out the music scene there, which I did.

  “But meanwhile, everything back in L.A. goes fwooom—”

  He slapped the bed with his open palms, with such vehemence that I jumped.

  “All our neighbors’ houses slide into the canyon, but our house—Mom’s house—it doesn’t even move. Now you’d think my mother would be upset when she heard about this earthquake, right? That she’d be on the first plane back there to make sure everything’s okay. But no—she takes her time, which is a good thing, considering how violent all those aftershocks were. And when we finally get back to L.A., and get to the house—nothing has moved. I mean, nothing. All these rare statuettes and icons she brought from Crete and Italy, they haven’t even shifted on their shelves. The books haven’t moved. The dishes haven’t moved. Nada. I asked her, I thought maybe she’d paid someone to come in and clean it up before she got back, but no. An earthquake has leveled the entire West Coast, except for my mother’s house.”

  He fell silent, and stared fiercely out to where the wisteria leaves hung limply from their woody vines. I waited before saying anything. My mouth was dry, I felt chilled in spite of the torrid heat; but if it killed me I wasn’t going to let Angelica and her weirdness into my carriage house.

  “So she had a premonition,” I said at last. “Well, thank god she did, or you might have been hurt, right?”

  “Oh, sure,” Dylan said bitterly. He shook his head, his long hair spilling across his shoulders. “A premonition! My mother has nothing but premonitions! Hurricane Andrew, Mount Pinatubo, some mudslide in Bangladesh—she’s always got an inside track on natural disasters. This woman told me once that my mother had told some scientists—women scientists—to leave Finland, because there was going to be some kind of disaster, and it turned out she was right: it turned out she was talking about Chernobyl. Her and her followers, they’re always on the first train out of town, a good twenty-four hours before the storm hits.”

  I took a deep breath. “So—what are you telling me, Dylan? Do you really think Angelica knew about all those things before they happened?”

  Dylan turned those burning blue eyes on me. I saw a sort of desperation in him: that I didn’t believe him, that I thought he was crazy. For the first time I could see how it might have been hard for him—despite his beauty, despite the gold earrings and Doc Martens and all the other trappings of flaming youth—to find a girlfriend. Hard maybe to make any friends at all.

  “Yes,” he said, daring me to argue. “She did.”

  I waited. Then, “I believe you, Dylan,” I said softly. I reached to touch him on the shoulder, half-expecting him to flinch or turn away. But he didn’t. He turned and took me in his arms. I could feel him trembling as he whispered, “She scares me sometimes, Sweeney. I know she’s my mother, but she scares me…”

  “Me too,” I murmured, and stroked his tangled hair, the two of us holding each other so tightly that not even the golden air could slide between us.

  “The way she talks,” he went on in a low voice, like a child comforting himself. “All this crazy goddess stuff, but the way she goes on about it in her books and all, it almost makes sense. You can really see how these women fall for it. It’s not just that she knows about these things. I can believe that. I mean, animals know when there’s going to be an earthquake, right? But some of the people who’re into all her New Age stuff, they think she makes it happen! Like in Hawaii they think there’s this goddess Pele who makes the volcanoes blow up—these people think my mother can actually do that!”

  He rubbed his forehead as though it pained him. “Sometimes, I think my mother believes it herself.”

  “Oh, she does, Dylan,” I whispered, but he didn’t hear me.

  “You know what she’s like?” he said at last. “This picture I saw when I was at Lawrenceville. An X ray of the inside of a nuclear blast, taken out at White Sands. Have you ever see that? Outside you can see all this smoke, this huge mushroom cloud and flames everywhere. But inside it’s just all this fire, and then in the very middle, there’s a black hollow core. Like there’s all this destruction around it, but in the middle there’s nothing there at all.”

  I shuddered and reached for my glass. “Maybe we should think about going out to get something to eat,” I suggested, finishing my wine. “You hungry?”

  Unexpectedly, Dylan laughed, as though we’d been talking of nothing more serious than the weather, then rolled over to slide his arms around my waist. “I could be,” he said, nuzzling my throat. “Maybe. If I had the chance to work up an appetite—”

  Later, we went out to eat.

  When we returned that night, Dylan tried calling Dr. Dvorkin, to see about picking up his things from the main house. But Robert was out, no doubt caught up in selecting the new regent, or else with the Aditi or the Mall’s Independence Day celebrations or any of the million other things that consumed his life. I finally gave Dylan my key, so he could get into the house and retrieve his things. He returned to the carriage house with a knapsack, a gym bag stuffed with clothes, a personal CD player, and a couple of paperbacks, Shampoo Planet and Pylon and a book about the Neanderthals.

  “That’s it?” I stared at the overflowing gym bag. “That’s all you brought for the entire summer?”

  Dylan shrugged. “My mom’s coming out for my birthday. She’ll get me some more clothes then.”

  We called in sick the next day, and the day after that. We stayed in my bedroom in the carriage house, with the wisteria trailing through the open window and the old fan in the belfry humming like a hornet’s nest. At night we’d venture out onto the Hill, walking as in a trance through the blue-veined air, drunk on sex and heat and wine, both of us not a little stunned to find the city still around us, the sound of firecrackers and police cruisers crackling somewhere just out of sight. At twilight government workers filled the outdoor cafés, crowding the little round marble-topped tables. Street kids vied with each other along the southeast strip of Pennsylvania Avenue, kicking through spent blossoms and McDonald’s wrappers and the frayed blackened tails of firecracker strings. At 3:00 A.M. the streets filled with revelers leaving the bars, and their laughter became part of our sleep and our lovemaking, laughter and the crash of bottles breaking against the curb, like surf pounding a far-off shore.

  “I love you, Sweeney,” Dylan would whisper, his hands warm against my breast. Before I could fall asleep again, I would wait to hear his heavy breathing. I would wait, to make sure that he didn’t disappear.

  When I finally awoke, it was as though I had awakened to find myself in another city. The city I had first glimpsed years before, the cit
y that Oliver had shown me, with its ghosts and transvestite hustlers and phantom cab drivers. Sometimes Dylan and I heard gunshots and far-off screams; more often the tired banter of lawyers and nannies, and college students walking home at 4:00 A.M. from tending bar and waiting tables on the Hill.

  Best of all, early one evening, we saw a little family walking from Union Station: mother, small boy, father in military uniform, the exultant boy swinging between his parents and then suddenly bursting free, to run shouting into the empty traffic circle with its lines of American flags, arms raised as he yelled at the top of his lungs,

  “ALREADY I LOVE IT!”

  Dylan fell onto the sidewalk, laughing helplessly. I joined him, and we watched as the family raced gleefully toward the Capitol.

  “Sweeney, this is a great place,” said Dylan, wiping his eyes and turning to drape his arm around my shoulder. “Already I love it.”

  So that, too, he gave back to me: the city I had fallen in love with once, the city I thought I had lost forever—

  Always you will arrive in this city.

  Do not hope for any other—

  When at last we went to work again we walked with arms linked down Pennsylvania Avenue, disentangling ourselves when we reached the Mall and putting on our best sober faces when we got inside the museum. No one seemed surprised that I’d taken time off. Whenever I passed Dylan in the hall, whenever he ducked into my office, I felt as though wisps of smoke must hover above our heads like Pentecostal flames. But no one else seemed to notice at all, or if they did, no one cared.

  Still, we tried to be discreet; at least I did. Dylan seemed immensely pleased to be carrying on an affair, and I suspected he was just waiting for someone to ask him so he could spill the beans.

  “Don’t,” I cautioned him, almost daily. “I could get in trouble for this.”

  “How? We’re consenting adults.”

  Well, one of us is, I thought. But I only said, “Dr. Dvorkin is very, very paranoid about this kind of thing, okay? This is government work, and there are big problems with sexual harassment in this city, and I just would rather we be discreet, all right?”

  Dylan rolled his eyes and slung his hands into his pockets. “Of course. Discreet.”

  Although I hadn’t seen much of Dr. Dvorkin since Dylan arrived. He had greeted Dylan when we finally made it back to the museum. He seemed pleased enough to see him, and didn’t appear to have taken note of the fact that neither of us had been in to work for some days, not to mention that Dylan was supposed to be staying in Dr. Dvorkin’s guest room, rather than my bed.

  “Your mother is well?” Dr. Dyorkin asked absently. He was even more preoccupied than he normally was. The phone in his office kept ringing, and his comments to whoever was on the other line were unusually terse. “Please give her my best, will you? Now then—”

  He sighed and touched his brow with a handkerchief, and we followed him down the hall. “Katherine, I’ll be out again all day. If you need me, talk to Laurie—”

  “Has Dr. Dvorkin ever met your mother?” I asked, as Dylan and I stared after him.

  “I don’t know. He and my grandfather were good friends, I know that.”

  I glanced sideways at Dylan. He was wearing baggy khaki trousers and a white oxford cloth shirt, the sleeves rolled up loosely to expose smoothly muscled forearms and bony wrists, his tousled hair slipping from its ponytail. He leaned on the curved banister, staring rather mournfully down at Dr. Dvorkin’s retreating figure. I wondered if Dylan knew about the Benandanti—it struck me that he should be a legacy of theirs, if anyone was. The thought was dispiriting, almost frightening, and I pushed it aside.

  “Hey,” I said, and turned away. “You got work to do.”

  “See you at lunch?”

  I nodded and smiled. “Yeah. Au revoir, kiddo.”

  Summer was usually a slow time of year, despite the annual onslaught of tourists. While I’d been playing hooky with Dylan, only a few messages had come in on my machine—the usual inquiries for photos and videodiscs, a message from Jack Rogers, a few intelligently worded calls from Baby Joe in New York.

  “Uh, yeah, hija, what the fuck you doing? Call me.”

  “Jeez, hija, it’s Thursday. Where the fuck are you?”

  There were several more variations on this theme. I played them back and grinned, wondering how Baby Joe would react when he learned I was fooling around with an intern. But the idea of telling him about Dylan himself, and Dylan’s parentage, was just a little too much to contemplate. So I didn’t call Baby Joe back right away. I figured I’d wait a couple of days, until I’d caught up with everything else.

  It wasn’t just me: that summer, everything was slightly skewed. The weather was strange—had been strange, for months and months, which made Dylan’s comments about his mother even more unsettling. After a long and terrible winter, with its earthquakes and blizzards and record cold, there came a terrible spring—floods and mudslides, more earthquakes in places with unpronounceable names, unexpected volcanic eruptions in Indonesia that dumped a fine layer of ash into the atmosphere. That did not bode well for the coming winter, though scientists seemed to think we might be graced with a cooler summer.

  But then summer came, and by the second week of July we were experiencing a record heat wave—a record even for D.C., which is really saying something. The temperature stayed up around a hundred, and scarcely dropped in the evening, when the streets and sidewalks would be covered with immense cockroaches and water bugs trying, like everyone else, to find some respite from the heat. At first the brownouts came weekly, then every few days; but I soon got used to hearing shouted curses and shrieks from odd corners of the museum, whenever the power cut and the computer network crashed.

  Elsewhere it was worse. In the Midwest a drought ravaged crops. A biblical plague of locusts swept from Missouri to the Dakota Badlands, leaving dust and mounds of hollow carapaces in their wake. More flash fires devoured the West Coast, where people were still trying to rebuild from the earthquake. On the Baja Peninsula an outbreak of rodent-borne hantavirus caused a temporary quarantine to be set up. Up in Acadia National Park a devastating fire swept across Mount Desert, brought on by the hot weather and a careless hiker’s match. In the Pacific Northwest a full-scale war broke out between loggers and environmentalists, with tree-spikers getting picked off with AK-47s and logging trucks blown up in the middle of Route 687. The locusts were blamed for at least one major airplane crash; in D.C., cockroaches literally smothered a child sleeping on a front porch swing.

  “Jesus,” I said when this last news item came over NPR, and switched stations.

  There was the usual talk of apocalypse, of the coming millennium and the failure of schools, and god only knew what was going on in the Middle East. So yes, it was strange and disturbing and even frightening, but it was also so much business as usual—you know, Texas Cult Claims Entire Town. Bus Crashes in New Delhi, Thousands Die.

  And I just didn’t care, I just didn’t want to think about it. I just didn’t want to think about anything but Dylan. I bought some boric acid and a new fire extinguisher at Hechinger’s, and laid in a case of decent chardonnay from the Mayflower. I stopped reading the front section of the Post, and started hanging out with Dylan at Tower Records and flipping through Pulse.

  It was harder for me to ignore that something odd was going on in the museum, something that took up a great deal of Dr. Dvorkin’s time. I saw him leaving his office at odd hours, always with a strained expression, often heavily laden with sheaves of papers, manila folders, even wooden boxes. When I went down to Laurie’s desk to ask her about it, she only shrugged.

  “I don’t know, Katherine. It might be another one of those Native American things—”

  I groaned. Like a number of museums across the country, we’d come under fire for having sacred objects in our collections. There’d been a few lawsuits, a few out-of-court settlements, a lot of unhappy-making press, and one of our Native American galler
ies closed for renovation when its permanent collection of kachina dolls turned out to be not so permanent after all. “Am I supposed to be doing something? Like, not talking to the press? Or talking to the press?”

  Laurie jabbed at her computer with a paper clip. “Too late. Somebody from the Post was in already—oh, but you were out sick, weren’t you? Well, anyway, there’s supposed to be some big story coming out soon.”

  “More Indian stuff?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so—I think it’s something bigger than that. Something with Turkey, maybe.”

  “Turkey?”

  “The country, Katherine.” Laurie tossed the paper clip into a corner and looked at me suspiciously. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? You still look a little out of it—”

  I gestured feebly. “Nothing. A sinus infection. What’s going on with Turkey?”

  “I’m not sure. Robert hasn’t told me, but everyone down in Paleo is having a cow. I think Robert’s just trying to get some damage control going.”

  I tapped a handful of papers against my palm. “Guess I chose the wrong week to be out, huh?”

  “Or the right one.” The phone buzzed and she turned away. “See you later, Katherine. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  I walked slowly back to my office. I wasn’t terribly concerned about whatever might be happening in Paleolithic Europe, except insofar as it might cause me actually to think about my job instead of Dylan.

  But whatever storm was brewing, it wasn’t ready to break quite yet. The rest of that week was quiet—unusually quiet, even for the curatorial wing of the Museum of Natural History in mid-July. Dylan and I played hooky, coming in late, leaving early—the sort of thing that gives civil servants a bad name. I barely pretended to work. Instead I walked around in a Technicolor haze, feeling as though I’d somehow wandered from the world I knew into the Bombay Film Board’s version of my life, the Mall outside magically transformed into an exotic festival complete with fireworks and sloe-eyed boys and girls, Hindi puppet shows, and little stalls selling bird cages and fighting kites and puri. The heat wasn’t so bad, if you didn’t actually have to move. Dylan and I took three-hour lunches, and I found that Jack Rogers had been as good as his word: Pink Pelican beer was now being sold at all Aditi food kiosks. I arranged to use up some of the million or so vacation days I’d accrued over the last eight years, and basically did what everyone else in D.C. did that summer: not a damn thing.