“No, no, sweetheart. I strut in here with my Manolo Blahniks on. They were an anniversary present from Brett and when he bitched out after watching that stupid safety video, I gave them back proudly. I don’t know much about the Japanese culture besides sushi, but I’ve heard Buddhists believe we suffer because we’re always striving after things that will make us only temporarily happy.”
“I gave the shoes back as a testament to my faith,” she said and crossed her arms defiantly.
“And the surgeon’s booties?” Crass asked, his eyebrows starting their dubious crawl.
“Oh these,” she says, reaching down and popping the elastic band around her ankle. “I wear them when I do the autopsies. Gets messy in there. It’s unbelievable how much blood one body contains.”
Crass stopped and had to think for a moment. She looked to the left, smoking her cigarette in slow burns, and then turned backed suddenly to meet his doubtful glance.
Smiling, she says: “I’m only joshing you. I’m a CNP at a cosmetic surgery clinic. We turn the ugly ducklings into beautiful swans, sometimes. Other times we know this is a field advancing everyday and it’s not a perfect science, even now with all the advanced technology and lasers we have.”
There was a slow whirring sound rising up from somewhere in the room. It sounded like Mickey had turned on the A/C and the motor was coming to life with a slow and deliberate reluctance.
“Got ya.” Mickey says saliently, and then walks over to the ebony vanity again.
Crass watched as a round and shiny contraption protruded forth out of the ceiling tile. It sat hoisted in place by aluminum rods running off into the darkness beyond the ceiling. The mirror showed Mickey’s reflection and another face, this one digital and blue, and talking to the person on the other side of the glass.
“Welcome to HomeDentist Version 5.1,” the friendly voice said. “What are you in the mood for today? Cleaning? Floss? Anti-Cavity Coating? Whitening? Gold or Diamond Caps? We are at your service.”
Crass saw a menu bar with the options laid out in a touchscreen grid on the mirror. He’d read about these in the home decorating magazines, but never had seen one up close and personal.
“I’m going to pee.” Eva, the new bathroom visitor, said and scurried off to the stall.
“Ok.”
Crass stood up and walked over to Mickey. His eyes, however, followed the round bump in Eva’s jeans. It lapped over like a plump muffin top, disappearing behind the black door of an empty stall. The green boots made gentle whisking sounds as she crossed over the stone floor.
Mickey pulled the metal contraption in front of the mirror and set his chin on the soft rubber there. Metal doors came open like a birdcage and disappeared into the top of the apparatus. The face in the mirror looked back at us with a blue LED smile.
“How long to install the gold caps?” Mickey asked the assistant on the wall.
Crass stood back and watched. “You sure we have time for that Mick?” he asked, wondering how long they’d been in the bathroom now.
“Full procedure is one minute and forty-seven seconds and you’re out the door, looking beautiful!” the woman in the mirror said.
“Roll with it baby! Let’s go!” Mickey yelled, his reflection lighting up with childhood glee. Crass shook his head and looked back at the painting on the far wall.
The colors had swirled again and changed forms, creating a globe like the ones you sometimes see placed on bookshelves in middle school classrooms, Social Studies maybe, if that even existed anymore.
The lighting was dark around the imitation Earth, and it sat on top of a behemoth mahogany desk with ornate, blood red drapes hanging in loose clusters behind it. Crass thought it might be a senator or lawyer’s office. The globe was for those days when they were talking on the phone and needed something whose axis they could control and that was always consistent, or in other words, they could count on it not going sideways. They had the control over it.
The shiny dentistry tools came out, controlled by tiny robotics that sparkled under the lights. A timer was beginning to count down on the mirror in front of Mickey.
1:45…1:44…1:43…1:42…1:41…
Things had really sped up since the last time he’d been to the dentist for any work. He always thought it a bit morose—an educated person spilling their beans to strangers in tiny bright rooms—while nervous patrons sat there with razor sharp tools in their mouths.
And here on the Blue Planet, people were thinking it was a crazy idea to go to the Moon. Crass laughed a little and shook his head, thinking of an old, old song. By now a classic. How did it go?
Something like…People are people…or something? Is that right?
He thought of it more and more, and it slowly came back to him, skittering across the radio frequencies in his memory.
VI: Suit Up
The tiny mechanical gears of the robots were whirring away like a blender, the arms moving to and fro with calculated precision. Zzrrer…Zzrrer…Zzrrer…like the sounds of a pneumatic impact drill zipping off lug nuts in the pit at Daytona Speedway.
Somewhere a toilet flushed and the door came open to the bathroom stall. Turning around, Crass saw Eva standing there, wrapped up in toilet paper like the glittery tinsel on a Christmas tree. In her hand she held a few heaping runs of paper still attached to the roll on the black wall.
“After I wiped, I heard this funny sound,” she said. “About like paper ripping. I looked down and the roll had grown back the sheets I’d just used, even correcting the off-angle rip I made when I tore it.”
Crass wanted to laugh so badly. She looked like a B-movie version of a mummy, something clearly intended for teenage boys looking for cheap thrills at the local theater. Deathly cute and highly charming—the personification of beautiful, all wrapped in soft and billowing streams of cotton. The bottom of her feet looked as if she was reading some ancient scroll that was as long as the Great Wall of China.
She walked over towards us, the roll of paper spreading out behind her like one of the floats in the Macy’s Day Parade.
She says, “Here, have some. It never runs out.” And places a roll around Crass’s neck, as if to lasso him in and bring him closer, make him into some kind of crafty bridesmaid using her hands. White streams of cotton fell around his ankles, clinging to his pants leg on the way down. Eva was almost continuously feeding the soft paper streams out, and the whiteness worked up and bulged around his stomach.
“Do we have to do this now Eva?” he asked.
She tore the feed and started wrapping the stalls and floor, the wooden bench below the interchanging painting, the HomeDentist robotic device, and Mickey just as soon as he finished up with his glimmering gold smile.
We all looked like Christmas trees covered in white streams of tinsel, thank you Eva. In fact, the entire surface area of the room had went from barren and desolate, to covered in gentle heaps of four by four inch sheets of crisp cotton, giving the once modern décor more of a homey-kind of feeling, almost like someone had filled up an entire pool with mashed potatoes and then asked if we wanted to take a swim in it.
Of course we wanted to. The only question Crass wanted to ask was: Where is the Jacuzzi with the goshdamn gravy in it? His interest lied there, and you can’t have one without the other.
Crass heard the bathroom door come open and a thin black girl with straight hair peered around the corner cautiously, as if she was expecting to meet the ghost of Davy Jones there.
“Is everything ok?” she asked, softly stepping out onto the pillowed floor and testing it for solidity. “OHHHhhhh…my GOODness…Is that toilet paper?”
“Sista,” Mickey said. “That’s twelve-hundred thread count, Egyptian-cotton sateen toilet paper. The finest I think I’ve ever seen in my life.”
She bent down and picked some off the floor, and rubbed her face with it. “I want to lie down and take a nap in this stuff. It’s softer than cashmere or anything else I’ve ever owned. Like the hem
of Jesus Christ, oh God help me.” She wrapped her arms in it and caressed it with her hands.
“If you do it, I’ll join ya. I promise,” Mickey said, smiling big and showing off a mouthful of lustrous, golden molars and incisors, both rows completely covered in shiny deposits of glistening gold. Was it a smile was worth a thousand words? Or a painting? It all seemed jumbled up, like the piece of art on the bathroom wall.
“I can’t right now darling,” the black girl replied. “I came to use the bathroom. If ya’ll are going to the Moon, the crowd took off about five minutes ago to get suited up.” She stepped across the layers of cotton, heading for the stall closest to the one with the roll of toilet paper feeding never-endlessly out of it.
“Don’t mind me,” she said. “May be a while yet. That video really put a knot or two in my stomach.” She closed the door of the stall and locked it. Mounds of white cotton lay nonchalantly around the black base of the stalls, hiding most of the beautiful stonework that shone so brightly before.
Mickey started tearing his tinsel off with both hands; indiscriminate shreds fell around the other pile around his feet. Eva’s green booties showed only the top part of her ankle, where Crass thought he may have spotted a very small splotch of black ink. A tattoo or birthmark of some kind.
“Time to don the suits!” Mickey said excitedly, already pillaging his way over toilet paper mounds, around the corner, and to the door outside.
Eva looked at Crass, her eyebrows shaping high on her forehead, making a few wrinkles, and she’s just looking at him. Looking him over hard, almost like he’s not standing ten feet from her, and voilà, she’s caught red-handed.
“Like something you see?” he asks, squinting his eyes to look at her.
Thinking for a minute, she finally says, “I haven’t made up my mind yet.” And then quickly asks, “Would you be a gentleman and escort a lady out, kind sir?” She turns her body getting ready to walk out, cocking her head a bit and smiling with all lips.
“No, but I’ll walk behind you and make sure you don’t trip up in this high school, toilet paper massacre.” Crass says behind a smile, making his way across the cotton sateen Alps, and stepping high like he had snowshoes strapped to his feet.
“So you’re like my rear safety, huh?” she asks.
Crass pushed her softly on the back above her waist and said yes. We have to protect the assets, Eva. There is no story without you, and I’m not sure what kind of insurance policy they carry around these parts, so move it and stop asking all those pesky questions.
She had the bathroom door open and was slipping outside when Crass thought he smelled something deliciously greasy, perchance it was dipped in flour and fried a crispy, golden brown. He dropped the thought as he walked out the swinging door, following behind Eva’s hourglass figure.
She stopped at the trash can and pulled off the remaining shreds of toilet paper. Small white fragments fell around her and the trash can like abstract and disorderly snowflakes, falling down further towards the green footwear she wore so elegantly, like it was the most natural thing in the world to do.
Crass stopped at the aluminum trash can, looked Eva over briefly, and began checking out the wide hallway he was standing in. The walls were like the speedways of most NASCAR tracks, forever running to the left with a sharp radius. Large windows circled the inside walls in wide sections like doors, revealing a concrete and stone garden on the outside with a moldy green water fountain placed in the center. Jetting up from the middle was a slender frog (Kermit?) holding a lotus flower above its head.
Water ran down the porous stone arms, and directly over the frog’s expressionless eyes, collecting in a giant pool beneath. The lights of the fountain cast off small glimmers of bright copper and silver.
The forgotten wishes of yesterday.
The ceilings above were by far the most curious thing he’d seen all damn day. Sistine Chapel inspired—about that there was no doubt—though the skies above…but that’s not right, is it? The limitless universe above his head was like a black film strip with planets and stars painted therein, as wide as the corridor and moving.
This small-scale solar system was living, breathing, taking on all the qualities of the painting in the restroom—temperamental, anti-static. Ahead in the distance, Crass saw two thirds of the terrestrial planets come into view: Mercury and Venus, the Earth, and just a tiny sliver (a fingernail) of the Moon. All of them were moving, rotating, doing what they did most naturally, right here on the ceiling in front of him.
Crass wondered how much artists like that got paid for their work. Where would you find this kind of niche piece at? Sotheby’s maybe? Right where he could throw his whole fucking lot of Bitcoins down the drain. He thought he’d have better luck casting all of them in the make-a-wish fountain just beyond the glass windows.
He heard someone chatting lightly and realized Eva had been talking the entire time he was stargazing at the ceiling.
“…uses what I mean to say is do you think it’ll be as amazing to us up there as it is down here on Earth?” she asked. She was staring outside at the moonlight dancing off the cobblestone walkway. “I have great expectations for it, have ever since I was a little girl, and then I see a commercial on my Facesnap account advertising trips to the Moon, like they knew all along how badly I’ve wanted to go up there.”
“My dad use to tell me I had the heart of the explorer and I believed him. When college came around after graduation was over, I sure did a lot of exploring then. Timothy Leary would’ve been pleased with my results,” Eva said. She stopped and looked around as if disoriented, or out of place.
“Have you seen the group? Where the hell did Mickey go?” she asked frantically, twisting her chin and pushing Crass in the soft spot below his ribcage. “Crass! CRASS!”
“Hey!” Crass yelled back. “Geez, I don’t know Eva. Your perfume distracted me while you were talking. Didn’t catch much of it, ok. Sorry. There’s a lot going on…around here so forgive me if I get lost once in a while.” His eyes caught a bright glimmer of metal bouncing off the walls of the fountain.
The lotus flower above the frog’s head was changing colors swiftly, moving from a slate grey to the luminous throes of pure white.
What the hell? Crass thought. Am I the only one seeing this happen?
Eva looked indifferent. She was examining the cuticles of her trimmed fingernails closely, brushing them off and looking at them in the glare of the large window.
“You’re a bit unrefined, huh?” Eva asked, her reflection looking in his eyes carefully. “A little rough around the edges?”
He looked at the frog again. It had the head of a bullfrog posted on a ballerina’s slender legs, and anytime now Crass was expecting him to sling off the mortar and concrete and start twirling around in the shallow pool.
Nothing happened, though.
“Well, my name is Crass. I think it goes without sayi—”
Eva intervened. “I know what the word means, asshole. Don’t patronize me. We’ve got to find the group if we’re going up there. You think you could help me? Please, please, with a cherry on top?” she pleaded, holding her hands together in the shape of an A, teepee, wigwam, or whatever. It was a strange maneuver.
“Only for you,” Crass said. “We should check the Moon Room out. I have this feeling we’ll find them there.”
Turning to his right, he looked the hallway over and pointed in the direction of the Earth on the high arched ceiling. A shooting star shot by Venus, the only planet that appeared to be rotating clockwise.
A door opened close by and both of them looked over to see the black girl coming out of the restroom door. Streams of toilet paper twisted and weaved behind her soft steps. She saw us standing there and smiled.
“Did ya’ll find them yet?” she asked. “I think everyone went to the Moon Room for orientation and to change outfits. Follow me, c’mon.”
Eva hurried over, eager for female companionship, leaving Crass to trai
l behind her again. It wasn’t all that bad. He fell in line and caught up behind them.
“I’m Skye with an e,” the black girl said, smiling and walking peacefully toward the blue planet on the ceiling. “Not that it matters speaking wise, just a force of habit I guess.”
“I’m Eva Morrows, and the cute boy behind you is Crass. Just slightly,” she said, laughing.
Skye joined in with her, and Crass forgot what was going on when he saw the contraption jutting out of the wallpaper ahead. It was a beige drinking fountain like what used to be in schools, before people were afraid to drink the water.
Skye opened the wooden door with a round porthole cut directly in the middle. Instead of glass, there was an artist’s drawing of the Moon with human features, and it was smiling back at him. The man on the Moon. Eva held it open, calling out his name. He was only ten feet away, staring at the orange and white plaque posted above the drinking fountain.
Could it be? How long had it been since he’d seen it?
He couldn’t remember.
“Hold on,” Crass whispered. “I’ve got to know.”
He walked over to it and stopped, bending his back and leaning over the spigot attached to the left corner. He pushed a button and orange fluid pumped out in a solid stream. His lips came closer, and the liquid went from sugary in his mouth to a bit sour, causing his lips to pucker for a moment.
This wasn’t false advertising. This was Tang, flowing out of the goshdamn water fountain. Crass was in love.
~
After his thirst was quenched, he opened the wooden door (Eva had proved to be rather impatient) and entered the Moon Room. Stepping across the slate grey floor, he noticed his steps feeling lighter somehow and his body movements feeling easier, swifter. It felt as if gravity had lifted, if only for a little while.
A crowd of people had gathered in lounge sofas and chairs lining the center of the room. Indistinct chatters filled the cool air, sending chills up his arms and legs. Some had gathered by the large bay windows, looking out over the night surf, maybe even taking a look at the shuttle making its final preparations for launch.
LunaDome: A Novel Page 4