LunaDome: A Novel

by Olin, a. Paul

  The lovely blond assistant, Persona, didn’t come back on the screen after the call was over and for that, he was very thankful. He brushed his palm over the resort’s stationery and fanned the pages, toiling his mind trying to think of something, anything to write about. The room’s west window looked over the empty canals and desolate landscape of the Sea of Tranquility. One of the most appropriate names for the place he was now visiting. He wondered again what to write about. He had to keep it within the one-hundred and forty character range.

  How stupid, he thought. How could anyone just cut and chop a conversation up into a fucking cooker-cutter template and expect it to be anything of contemplative or judicious merit?

  He ran a hand through his hair and eased back in the chair, tapping the pen on the blank pad.

  He wrote out his heading and then counted the characters.

  To Zwitter:

  Stupid, mindless affair. Counting characters. Programs did that.

  He was already counting nine. Phonetically rendered language was a possibility, even though he was old-fashioned and didn’t care for that blasphemous dissection of words.

  Then he found out it was easier accepting the derelicts of the English language. Strip the words, eliminate the vowels, and abbreviate everything in sight. Give me acronyms, give me colloquial terminology, give me an entire fucking nation of lame-brained and vacuous human beings.

  The entire, painstaking endeavor took a little while longer than he was expecting. He spent the next hour contemplating the one hundred and forty character message. The task wasn’t easy. He pulled his laptop out of his book bag, and fired up Microsoft Word 2028 Edition.

  Crass wrote out his message using his vocal cords. The text flew across the screen as he mouthed short sentences to the program. It didn’t understand, and thought he was speaking the Gibberish dialect, a primitive language created by cavemen centuries ago. He would have to manually utilize the keyboard.

  “How many characters now?” he asked the assistant.

  “One hundred and sixty-seven.”

  “With, or without spaces?” he asked again.

  “With spaces.”

  “Thanks.”

  He exited out of the help section, returning to the seven sentences at the top of the laptop’s screen. The cursor blinked at the end of the last one. This silly effort was taking more creativity than he’d originally hoped to put in.

  He worked on it for another thirty minutes or so, cutting here, sliding sentences together there, losing the vowels, and using phonetics as a new hybrid language. For a little while, he was a social medic for the social media.

  After it was all said and done, and the character count had been minimized the furthest he could take it without losing his clarity, he had the assistant analyze the character count again, with the bloody spaces. Because that was the rules, or so they said.

  “One hundred and forty,” the assistant said, and was gone.

  Crass looked it over again, reading it aloud to himself.

  To Zwitter

  Wrtng frmda Moon 2nite.Wish u were hre.

  Sold my$coins.MltiMlnarestat.Pers-nicer.

  Tanks 4 dat.Feel2x as dmb winactly rd whts wrttn.

  Not bad, he thought. Not bad at all.

  XI: Gift Shop

  Crass was kicked back in the chair when there came three quick raps on the door. He got up and scanned the monitor seated in the wall by it. It was Mickey. He waved with a goofy expression, like he’d gone mental in the last few hours.

  Crass tapped the release button on the screen, and the door slid into the wall. Mickey was smiling at him, and then stepped inside to ask something discreetly.

  “You have any more space cakes left?”

  He had to think. “Maybe five or six of them. Maybe.”

  He grabbed his bookbag off the bed and rummaged through the big pocket where he’d stored them before leaving Earth. The aluminum briquettes lined the bottom of the bag. He counted them.

  “There’s seven, actually,” he said, zipping up the pocket.

  “Good, save them,” Mickey said. “They’re showing The Astronaut Farmer tonight at the Crescent. That’s the name of the theater over by the café.” He declared it with a certain pride in his voice. He’d probably been reading up on the place.

  Crass stopped and looked at him in disbelief. “Are you being serious?”

  “Showtimes all night buddy-o,” Mickey replied, walking by the window and sitting down at the nook where he’d been working earlier. “Who’s Zz-wheater?” he asked, spying the encrypted message Crass had worked very hard on in the last two hours or so.

  “It’s called sarcasm, or satire. The word is German and you can look it up anytime you feel like it,” Crass said with a smile. He walked over and brushed the white LunaDome pad from the slanted wood desk. Mickey tried deflecting his interception and missed, popping his knuckles against the ball of Crass’s fist.

  Crass laughed, and walked to the other side of the room. The book was still lying on the carpet by the base of the CloudBed. He picked it up (light) and placed it on the spongy, rolling white bed. Clouds, like waves, sprung underneath the stretched blue fabric, rolled over to the sides, and shot back to meet each other in the middle, killing both momentums slowly from each bounce off the wooden walls.

  Mickey was shaking his hand loosely and grinning, laughing. He took his phone out and went after some piece of information.

  “That’s a nice touch, Crass,” he said, laughing it up. “Very unique.”

  “Glad you like it. Have you seen the gift shop yet?” Crass asked. “It’s supposed to be the crème de la crème of this trip.”

  He walked back over to the large window, scanning the silvery landscape as the lunar Sunlight grew on his skin, edging higher on his face as he came closer to it.

  “Not yet. I was waiting on you. I called your room, but there wasn’t any answer.”

  “I was dreaming some loony shit,” Crass said, thinking about the problem he’d had with the starboard wing in mid-flight.

  “Really?” Mickey asked excitedly. “So did I brutha, let me tell you. There was some business committee that strapped me to one of those cannonballs you used to see at the circus, and shot me all the way over to Mars.”

  He shook the hair out of his eyes, and grinned slowly, continuing his talk: “What topped that was I landed at an airport out in the red highlands and had coffee with a white-haired man with thick, large glasses and a friendly smile. Said his name was Blackberry, I think,” Mickey mused.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t Bradbury?” Crass asked with curiosity.

  Mickey’s eyes went as big as firework explosions. “That’s it!” he nearly yelled. “How did you know that?” He had a scary look in his eyes, kinda like he thought Crass might have clairvoyant skills. Like Travis, the broker from earlier.

  “Ray Bradbury wrote The Martian Chronicles,” Crass said. “And from everything you were telling me, it was the likeliest guy on my radar.”

  “He was nice,” Mickey said. “I stayed quiet and listened to him tell me about some kind of alien race that wore masks over their face.”

  “I only remember that vaguely,” Crass said, trying to recall his memory of reading it.

  Years and years ago it must have been, shortly after the black President had entered into a second term. The book itself was older than that, going all the way back to a time before NASA, when a wide-eyed President from Missouri was testing out atomic bombs, and the United Nations was busy moving forces into South Korea.

  “How did you make it back?”

  Mickey grinned. “I didn’t. I ended up staying with some friends in a neighborhood up the road from the airport,” he said. “The strangest thing I remember about it was everything was an exact replica from Earth. The roads, the signs, mailbox numbers, and even the shit inside the house.” He shrugged his shoulders in an I-don’t-really-know-what-happened gesture.

  “Interesting,” Crass muttered. “Were
they hospitable?”

  “Oh yeah, nicer than on Earth. It’s unbelievable how much the Red Planet works wonders on people.”

  You’re telling me, Crass thought. Maybe you should visit Venus sometime and call me from a pay phone in the desert.

  He stood up off the bed, and walked towards the white door leading out to the main floor. Mickey caught on and bounced over to the door beside him. He too had his balance shoes on, and reached down to press a small button on the side of the holographic emblem.

  “If you’re too bouncy, you can increase the weight of the soles with (+) and (-) button here.” Mickey pointed to the upper lip of the shiny decal; there sat a big, black N with light blue trim.

  Crass tapped the button for the door and it slid into its usual spot. They walked out and onto the bright floor.

  “You’re a well of information, Mickey,” Crass said, stopping to adjust the sneakers. He found the tiny button and deflated down, watching the weight readout on the bottom sole. Sixty pounds was the current reading. Light enough to bounce off the walls. He tested the theory out, and indeed, it did put a little spring in his step.

  Mickey and him followed the polished lines on the floor again, and it brought them to the directory sign. Employees shuffled by with reports and cups of coffee in hand.

  “It’s over here,” Mickey said, waving his arm in a swooping motion.

  He eased by the welcome desk, and a slew of pamphlets and coupon books stacked in neat rows across the front. The LunaDome emblem stood out the most. It was pasted in the middle with tall, bold lettering, and tiny morsels of bright light showcased its beauty like the neon aura of a gentleman’s club in the middle of a lonely night.

  Behind the registers, on the back wall, were three television screens like the one in his room, except they stretched nearly fifteen feet long on the walls here. At any point in time, one was running World News, another showed a promotional video of all the wonderful amenities of LunaDome, and the one furthest to the right steadily flickered different views from the surveillance cameras posted all around. He saw himself on the screen (staring over the desk at the wall of screens) for about three seconds.

  Mickey grabbed him, pulling his attention away from the welcome desk, and further towards the gift shop up ahead in the distance. A sign above the large entrance read GRIFTERS, and below it, in a smaller and more elegant typeface: the words Unltd.

  We were in the O part of the plaza. To see this place on a map was like looking at an old keyhole, only it was filled with rooms, and stores, a giant Welcome Desk, and other amenities he was slowly beginning to discover. By the end of his three-day sabbatical on the moon, he figured he’d have a dainty good schematic of the place, should he decide to visit again in the near future.

  Mickey led the way in the store as the floor switched over from glossy white tile to the grey-stitch carpet again, the same from the room of the hotel. Shirts hung on racks, and were scattered all over the floor just like a department store.

  Off against the far wall, positioned between large windows overlooking the site of the first lunar landing, were giant bookcases stretching high above the valley of shirts with brand names like—Luna Reef, Silica Life, and Marasong.

  Crass ignored them, and weaved by quickly on his way over to the bookcase. The sleeves of shirts and pants legs brushed his sides like he was trudging through rows of thick cotton in the rural South. He came out into the clearing with lounge chairs and a coffee table.

  Sitting in one of these over by the wall was Captain Don. The lunar Sun’s angle was just right, and fell in a sharp beam on the paperback copy in his hands. Crass thought he saw a rocket on the front cover.

  The Captain looked up at him as he walked over and inspected the high bookcase for a treat. Any treat. He was a dog, and all he needed was a bone. After that, everything would be OK.

  “Are you a littérateur?” he asked, shifting his legs. He looked at Crass with a face that said it all: You’re fucking kidding me, right?

  “Sometimes,” Crass said. He ventured to the A’s on the bookcase and found Asimov, then started working his eyes across the dust jackets of the books, making his way to the B’s and C’s rather quickly.

  He shifted around, and asked the Captain a question.

  “Is it all science fiction?”

  Captain Don placed his bookmark inside the pages and closed the book, setting it down on the coffee table in front of him.

  “You’d better believe it,” he said. “We’re in Grifters Unlimited, not the public library.”

  Crass stopped looking at the books aimlessly, and turned to ask yet another question. “Is there a library up here someplace? Is that what you’re saying?”

  The Captain kicked back in his chair, sighing as he did so.

  “There is a library a few doors down, in the plaza. The selection is a little better, but not by much kiddo. You may find a Faulkner or two, most definitely Hemingway and Steinbeck are hanging around, and for the truly uninhibited folks, they have about four Palahniuk novels, which are all lovely disasters waiting to happen.”

  He sipped his coffee (most assuredly bitter) from a stainless steel mug.

  “Where is this place?” Crass asked, eyeballing one of the Arthur C. Clarke books on the shelf. The cover was dark and stars jittered across the shiny dust jacket. He took it down, inspected it, and frisked its contents happily.

  The Captain’s brow came down, the smooth lines wrinkling on his tan forehead. “Over by the LunaRealty office. In between it and the F.P.S. mail station. You can’t miss it.” He crossed his leg and took another sip from his thermos.

  “Thanks Captain.” Crass shot him a quick wink.

  “Mmhmm…Crass is it?” he asked, holding out the palm of his big hand. “If I’m remembering it right.”

  Crass put his hand out and shook with the man. “That’s right.” His grip was strong, vitalizing.

  “My parents had trouble naming me when I was born. One day my mother was nursing me while my father watched the big game on TV, the 2004 World Series I believe. Anyways, one of his favorite players fouled out and my father dropped the f-bomb right there in the living room, in front of his wife and the newborn baby. Me.” Crass pointed at himself.

  “What did your mom do?” Captain Don asked with a twinkle in his eyes. He was hooked—line, sinker, hook, the whole entire setup.

  “She said, ‘Jack, don’t you go being crass around my baby. We’re not teaching him foul language until he’s older, much older.’ And that settled it. They fought for the next hour my mom tells me, but by the end of the next day I was named Crass Saigon Duvall.”

  He smiled through the lines of his little family story.

  Captain Don laughed. “That’s a good story to tell the grandkids.” His bald head glimmered under the Sun steeping over the lunar horizon in the distance, beyond the glass.

  It never seemed ready to go down, and probably wouldn’t for another week and a half, then Boom! Darkness for fourteen days as the nights took over and cold temperatures began to settle in.

  Luckily though, they were only into the early dawn of the lunar day and would enjoy this natural phenomenon the extent of their stay on the Moon.

  The Captain looked at ease. Crass explained he was going to find Mickey and hopefully get out of this place before he went on a full-fledge shopping spree.

  “Good luck,” he said, picking his book off the table. “I’ll see you around sometime. Nice meeting you.”

  “Same here,” Crass said.

  He had another question to ask, but couldn’t quite recall what it was. Something about throwing a rock across the lunar surface? It was a question buried deep, deep within a shadowy cave.

  He passed it off, and cut a path through the mundane racks of clothes, looking for Mickey. His long black hair was destined to be what gave him away in a large place like this. At least, that’s what Crass thought at first.

  When he did find him, some twenty minutes later, it was no s
hock that he’d missed trying to spot Mickey’s long hair. He was bent over at the knees, and staring at something behind the glass case of the checkout desk.

  It looked to be quite lustrous.

  ~

  After Crass had walked Eva to her room (right after lunch at the café), she had went inside and took a shower, and then a very short nap. Not by choice though. God no. She could’ve slept until tomorrow had someone left her the hell alone.

  She was awakened by the obnoxious sound of her phone ringing. And ringing, and beeping fifteen times a minute. Mistakenly, she’d place it beside her head on the wavy bed, which felt weird to her, like it was moving around without her consent.

  Who would you call when you’re on the Moon? she thought. Who would care that much to hear from Eva Morrows?

  She swiped her thumb over the phone’s scanner and checked her calendar of events, and all the missed calls. There were eight long text messages, mostly from Brett. Her boyfriend of the last two…what was it? weeks? months?

  It should have been weeks, only it’d lasted longer than she expected. A surprise of sorts. Brett was easily pussy-whipped into submission and everyone knew it, even him.

  Checking her email, she found four video messages, each looking to require a serious investment of her time, and she just didn’t feel like dealing with it, dammit.

  I’m on the Moon, Brett! Are you blind? I know that you watched me walk away at that island resort place with the rocky mountain faces everywhere. Why don’t you go back to Mardi Gras and eat a frolicking moon pie or something, you jackass. Stay there, ok? and I’ll (Eva Morrows) just keep my ass here. Maybe for a while if they let me.

  We’ll see, she thought, and grinned silently. Sooner or later, everything came around. And some people were better off left behind, or to their own devices, or whatever it was people said.

  She rolled over on the bed and brushed the long hair out of her face, and then wrapped it up in a ponytail. She sat up and crossed her legs in the Lotus position, inhaling several deep breaths, slowly, and then exhaling; she did this over and over again. It calmed her body and supplied the muscular system with rich oxygen and nitrogen deep from within her lungs.