She’s got a point. If I get out of this alive, I’m going to have to bone up on my tap dancing. She knows she’s scored a hit. I must work fast. I can feel the membranes that close my ears move back and forth, back and forth, holding fast. Surely they will break soon. I must be ready. When the air streams through my ears and into the back of my throat, I must play it cool, take little breaths, no great chest heaves.
I hit her with another thought. I can chug more beer than you can!
That makes her pause. I can tell a little person such as herself couldn’t chug much beer.
I could run circles around your beer belly.
She’s good. I decide to try another angle. I can name more vice presidents than you can!
She thinks about it. She doesn’t seem worried. I have a wild moment of panic, but I fight it down. I won’t give in. I’d die of shame if I lost to this woman. My vision is blurring, and muscles all over my body twitch and jerk. I make fists of my hands and put them under my thighs to hold them down. I can see that Marcia won’t quit either. This is like being married again. Women just won’t quit, no matter what you do to show them who can do more, who knows more, who should say what’s what and when. No, they always have one more last word waiting.
I shouldn’t have thought that. She jumps right on it.
I can maintain a relationship longer than you can, she tells me sweetly.
Oh, yeah!
My longest was three months.
Ah ha! Got her. My longest was six months!
I lied. My longest was a year.
I’m stunned. A year!
Marcia’s turning an ugly shade of blue, and there are red blotches around her mask and tape, but I don’t think I can outlast her. I must look worse. The shame sits heavy in my stomach, like too many tacos. It doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to breathe through my ears after all.
You didn’t last long with me, Sonny. Her thought is all ice.
That’s it. She’s been playing an unfair advantage. She knows me. I dig in my memory, and find her there, in Maine, that winter of the lobster-eating contest, the night we had after I beat the bib off her and everyone else.
I’m better in bed. I must make up lost ground.
I love better.
Even she must know how weak that is. She hesitates, but before I can fire another round, she gets in her best slash so far.
I know where my mother is.
That unhinges me. My brain is starving for oxygen. I shoot wild. I own the railroads. I’ve got Park Place!
Somehow the spectators know I’ve missed. They know the end is near. Her fan club chants, “Marcia! Marcia!”
Her cheeks are puffed up big, and she looks like a frog or a trumpet player, but I see the cold fire in her eyes as she delivers her coup de grâce. My father’s not squatting in some doorway drinking shaving lotion and puking on his shoes!
Darts, balls, hoops, scoops, pucks! I cry. No air is ever going to come through my ears. I’m bouncing on my butt in the sand and making little whimpering sounds behind my tape. It can’t end like this.
Even when you win, Sonny, you lose.
I’m snatched away like a tablecloth, leaving Marcia, the black rocks, and the spectators trembling in their places on the beach. I appear some two hundred yards up the beach on the deck of the SeaView Restaurant. I rip the mask from my face, the tape from my mouth. The air I gulp is god-I-died-and-went-to-heaven good. Thank you, Dad. Oh, thank you. Lots of eyes on me—old people in their Sunday best, young couples with wine. I see I’m about as welcome as a little accident Muffy the pooch might have left behind. A waiter is moving swiftly my way. He’ll tell me to get lost, keep moving. I open my arms to the sky.
“It isn’t fear that moves me, Dad,” I tell him, wherever he is. “It’s chagrin.”
Fancy Pants
He pulled into the repair lane and stopped. She twisted around in the passenger seat to look back, ready to give him the signal, and he stared down the exit ramp watching the bridge. They didn’t worry about the complicated cloverleaf above them. The trick was to wait for a gap in traffic and then make a dash for it. At this time of morning, it wouldn’t take long.
“Now,” she said.
“No good,” he said, meaning either there were too many cars coming the other way on the freeway or too much activity down on the bridge. Someone might see them enter the secret place. There would never be a time with no traffic at all, but it was only the close traffic they worried about. Anyone seeing them leave the road from a distance might not believe their eyes or more likely would pretend they hadn’t seen it at all.
A few moments later she said, “Go.”
This time it was okay. He stepped on the gas and speeded onto the exit ramp, but instead of continuing to the bridge below, he suddenly pulled off the road and down the steep embankment. This was the tricky part. If he didn’t hit the exact spot, they would probably crack up, damage the car, maybe hurt themselves. Certainly they’d have to call someone and make explanations.
But he’d gotten it right again. They bounced over the uneven ground, down the green slope of wild grasses and dandelions, down into a space that was surrounded on all sides by highways but was lower than them all, a hidden valley in the city. At the bottom, the freeway itself was some fifty yards above, the exit ramp twenty yards up, and the cross street running along the bridge maybe thirty yards above them. There was a tight line of trees on the freeway side.
In the valley itself, more trees and shrubs grew. He tucked the car into a place he knew could not be seen even if someone stopped and walked around the perimeter of the secret place as he had done once after parking and climbing back up the embankment.
He got out of the car. The air was cool, and he could smell a farm somewhere, or at least cows, or at least things that crapped wherever they were standing, whenever they felt like it. Or maybe he was smelling a memory. He leaned back down to give her a smile where she still sat looking straight ahead in the shotgun seat.
“I need to use the bathroom,” she said.
“So, use the bushes,” he said. “ You could have gone before we left the house.” He walked around the car and opened the trunk.
She got out and slammed her door, and the sound was loud enough to silence the birds and bugs for a moment. She came to him and looked down into the trunk and hugged herself as the wind blew her skirt around her legs.
“Where did the chairs come from?” she asked.
“Wherever chairs come from.” He grabbed one of the wooden chairs and pulled it from the trunk. He set it on its feet and then reached in for the other one.
There was a big brown wicker picnic basket.
“Here I’ll take that,” she said.
“I thought you had to use the bathroom?”
“I can wait a few minutes.” She took the basket from him and moved into the trees. He picked up the chairs and followed her.
They walked through waist-high grass and then thorny undergrowth for a small distance and came to a meadow. The bridge was directly overhead. There was a brook with tiny silver and blue fish darting about. He put the chairs down beside the water.
“No, over here,” she said.
She shook out a big red, green, and white checked blanket and let it settle to the grass like a magic carpet. He carried the chairs over and put them on the blanket. She slipped off into the forest, and a moment later he could see a bush quivering like there were many frightened quail in there, instead of just her, peeing.
He sat down on one of the chairs. A moment later, she returned and knelt on the blanket. She opened the picnic basket and took out a black case longer than his forearm. You had to wonder how it fit in there. She handed it to him. He put it on his lap and opened it. Inside were the three silver pieces of a flute. The si
ght of the gleaming instrument sent a little shiver of anticipation down his spine, and he looked up at her and smiled.
She had taken her place on the other chair, the bow of her cello poised to play over the instrument itself.
“Where did the cello come from?” he asked.
“Wherever cellos come from,” she said.
“What about the wine and cheese and baguettes?”
“Later,” she said.
He lifted the flute to his mouth and ran through several scales to loosen up. “Okay?” he said.
She answered by drawing the bow across the strings of her cello. He listened for a moment, then stepped in just where he was expected. Vivaldi. Late in a concerto in G minor. Allegro.
“You flute guys are the best when it comes to oral sex,” she said.
He blew a low, middle, and high F justlikethat, and she laughed, but you had to wonder how he was hearing her over the music.
“My Russian grandmother used to say look for a fellow who plays the flute.”
You had to wonder if her Russian grandmother had had oral sex in mind when she used to say that.
She said, “It has everything to do with lip control. All your little flourishes.”
Yes, her lips were moving so he probably wasn’t reading her mind. He might have made a snappy comeback, but his mouth was busy with the flute.
“It’s that fine control of air,” she said. “Like a thin thread tickling from the lips, moving here and there, just there. They say you guys develop muscles you don’t use for anything else but flute playing. Little do they know. And I haven’t said a word about tonguing.”
She laughed again, a high soprano laugh that blended perfectly with the music, and he felt absolutely wonderful. Bluebirds hopped out onto their branches to whistle along with the music. Squirrels came out to swing and sway. Grinning raccoons gathered at the edge of the blanket.
“Aren’t we happy?” she asked, and then she answered herself, “Yes, we’re so very very happy.”
Danger. Danger.
Hadn’t he warned her that if you do so much smiling your face might freeze like that, and then where would you be? She wouldn’t listen.
“So very happy.”
She sounded a little desperate.
He could see that her hands were already bleeding. With every stroke of the bow across the strings, she left a smear of aggressive red blood across the smooth wooden face of the cello.
He was in no better shape. He could see now in blurry close-up the contrast of his own blood on the silver flute keys. That contrast reminded him of the difference between the meat and the machine, the knife and the muscle, a sudden silver slice across the vein.
Her nose fell off.
She looked startled for a moment, but she didn’t stop playing. He could feel his face slipping. He smiled. A mistake. He knew all that smiling would get him in trouble. He saw her eyes widen a little, and he figured he must look pretty frightful.
“Lend me your ears,” he said, and she grinned sadly, then hugely as the meat of her cheeks popped off like hubcaps from explosive high speed blowouts—both sides at once, and she might have lost control, might have missed a beat, botched a note, but she didn’t, and he was proud of her control and hoped his would be as good. It was getting hard to hold the slippery bleeding fish his flute had become.
Her hair slipped forward into her eyes, and she shook it away, and it flew from her like a startled brown cat. They bled and bled until there was nothing left to bleed. Their picnic looked like the site of a barnyard butchering or the scene of a ghastly murder. The two wooden chairs on the bloody blanket.
All of that meat.
The flute (now part of his metal arm) became a steel hammer.
She stood up, and her cello became her hips, the rich wood dulled to tin and rusting.
“I don’t understand why I’m not totally freaked by this,” she said.
“It all seems somehow familiar,” he said.
“You look like a bunch of spare parts,” she said.
“I think we should find something to wear.” His voice crackled and popped.
“Fig leaves,” she said. A seam opened around the equator of her head, and the northern hemisphere swung up and away over the dark cave of her new mouth.
“Would you knock off all the goofy smiling?” he said.
He dug into a pile of tin boxes, broken mirrors, and oily rags and came up with a pair of fuzzy pants.
“Hey, these look good,” he said.
“Too fancy,” she said and nudged him aside to dig in the pile. “This will do.” She held up a pair of ragged gray slacks. “Oh, and look, a box of shoes. Watch out. I’m going to smile again!”
“Very funny,” he said.
He got into his fuzzy pants; she got into her gray slacks. They picked out shoes. They walked back to the bloody blanket.
He leaned over and picked up a few scraps of flesh. “Don’t you want to keep your face?”
She made a dismissive gesture with the hook at the end of her left arm.
“Well, I do,” he said. He put his face back on his metal head, but it wouldn’t stay there. After picking it up off the ground a couple of times, he tucked the hair above his old forehead into the waistband of his new pants, and his face hung down like a short apron.
The raccoons were just spare parts now, but the squirrels had mostly held their shapes. He picked up a mechanical squirrel head and put it on his pants. It stayed where he put it, as if his pants had been waiting for the carcass all along. He added another squirrel head along with what might have been an old clock or the happy face of a beaver. He plucked a windup bluebird hanging upside down from the grove of TV antennas and stuck it to his pants. He hooked a monkey playing cymbals over the pocket in back where he once would have carried a wallet.
The brook was now a sluggish stream running from the side of a hill of oil drums. On all sides, the debris was heaped so high you could only see a patch of smoky sky. Piles of old French horns, bent trombones and tubas hid the car. He pulled the horns down and crushed them underfoot and made a path. She followed.
The car looked like a thing that had never moved. It might have been a big soda can crushed by a giant. A fan of broken glass spread out in front of it.
He got in behind the wheel. She wrenched the passenger door off and got it, too.
“What now?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
He put the hammer at the end of his arm on top of the steering wheel.
“Do you want to hear my theory?” he asked.
She sighed.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. “My theory is that when it became possible to exchange our biological bodies for mechanical bodies that might last forever, because you could always get spare parts for them, we were the first on our block to do it.”
“I suppose that does sound like us,” she said.
“Of course, there was the matter of expense,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Life is always about money.”
He knocked himself on the head with his hammer, and it sounded like a dull gong. “I mean, how much do you suppose we could afford to spend on these?”
“Not much, if you ask me,” she said.
“Not to mention the integrity of the flesh that seemed to be layered over the basic frame.”
“Yes, let’s not mention that,” she said.
“So, my theory is that our illusions have been repossessed,” he said.
“How do you mean?”
“We’re like this,” he said, “because the bank or whoever has come and taken back all of our pretty fantasies.”
“There’s a name for the trouble with your theory,” she said.
/> “Oh? And would you like to enlighten me on just what that could be?”
“It’s called the Continuity Problem,” she said. “If, as you say, we were once biological and we decided to move, so to speak, how do we know we’re the same people?”
“I don’t see the problem,” he said.
“Let’s suppose our brain patterns were duplicated exactly and ported into our new hardware,” she said.
“Right. That’s just what I’m saying.”
“Okay,” she said. “So, at some point our patterns must have existed both in our old heads and in some device at the same time.”
“So?”
“So, was it really you in your old head or was it you in the new device?”
“Both,” he said.
“But, the old biological you didn’t continue into the new mechanical you,” she said. “From those people’s viewpoints we simply died. That’s the problem with your theory. We wouldn’t really be ourselves.”
“That could be true, you know,” he said. “We might not be our old selves.”
“But it isn’t true,” she said. “I think we’ve always been as we are. My theory is that someone is beaming evil illusions at us this very moment!”
“You’re thinking we’re not really robots?”
“And we never have been robots,” she said. “We think we’re like this because some malevolent force is imposing dreams on us. It’s a trick.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “Your theory demands some evil outside force beaming illusions at us. Metaphysical hocus pocus.”
“Your theory,” she said, “demands some evil outside force repossessing our illusions—some silly cyber-repo-man.”
They spent a few quiet moments staring out the empty front window at the freeway pileup the world had become.
“Our beautiful life,” she said. “The house. Your wonderful job.”
“I managed a hamburger joint,” he said.
Meet Me in the Moon Room Page 10