They might find out anyway. One of these nights, they might notice the tape machine. And surely if I spread flour all over the floor it would tip them off.
The day passed. I ate stuff from cans for lunch. I got no reply from Joanna. I must be pretty far down on her priority list these days.
I couldn’t find anything else to eat for dinner so I skipped it. There was still beer, but not too much.
I meditated with the TV for a few hours but never could achieve meaning. Around eleven I decided I really would leave them a message. It was night again and too quiet and bedtime and I had to do something. I tore a piece of paper from a notebook and wrote, “Who are you?” in big bold letters.
Now what? Should I pin it to my chest? What if they didn’t find it? I wadded the paper up and tossed it in the trash.
I could write really big letters on the wall.
I dug through kitchen drawers but found nothing I could use to make big letters. I checked the bathroom. Women never leave a place without a trace. Maybe there would be a lipstick. There wasn’t. So much for generalizations.
I had pink stomach stuff but it looked too runny, and I had colorless roll-on deodorant, so the wall wouldn’t sweat, but you’d have to smell the country fresh letters to puzzle out the message.
Ah ha. An old old bottle of tincture of merthiolate. Good god, I bought that before I met Abby. What was the expiration date? Most of the label was gone, but it looked like 1980. I had put the stuff on countless cuts. It still had a nice sting to it. This was one of those products that one bottle lasts you a lifetime. The company had probably gone out of business.
I stood on the bed and, using the little plastic applicator, started my message again on the wall. Rats. The applicator was too small. It would take forever. I poured merthiolate into my hand and smacked my hand onto the wall and dragged it down and up and down and up in a big dripping orange double-u. Okay. The rest went pretty quickly.
Who are you?
If they looked at me, and I seemed to be pretty much all they did look at, they could not fail to see my message.
My hands were orange. The orange stain wouldn’t come off with soap and water. To hell with it.
How about the flour?
Okay, okay. But do it carefully. Get undressed first. Start at the bathroom door and work your way back to the bed. Yes, like that. When you get to the bed just toss the empty flour sack out of the bedroom and get into bed. That’s it. Nothing could move across there without leaving a mark. Good. Good. Goddamn it, you forgot to pee.
I plopped down on the bed. I tossed the empty flour sack over the side. I took a deep breath. Then I walked straight across the flour to the bathroom. One straight path. I would use the same one coming back. Anything off that path would be my visitors.
Except that after I used the bathroom and carefully walked back to the bed, I realized I would need one more path to the dresser so I could turn on the recorder. Okay, one more. I walked to the dresser, turned on the machine, and walked back to the bed. Two paths. Footprints going in both directions. I got into bed.
I stared up at the ceiling, feeling like an absolute idiot. I would have to get up and make another path if I wanted to turn off the light. I got up and walked to the light switch and flipped it off. Then I made my way back in the dark. I knew I was not keeping a straight path. And as I walked, it occurred to me to wonder how they would see my message in the dark. I had probably ruined the wall for nothing. I stopped and closed my eyes to think about it. If they could see me, they could probably see the wall, but what about the orange letters? Would orange letters be visible to ghosts who could see in the dark? Maybe it would be like red light to fish. You put a red light in your aquarium and the fish all think it’s night and you can watch them and they don’t know you’re watching.
I opened my eyes and stumbled forward and saw the street glow through the bathroom window and realized that I’d gotten way off the path back to the bed. The flour seemed mostly pointless now.
I turned, and then stood peering through the dark at the bed. It didn’t look entirely empty. Those shapes could be my pillows. The slight movement I saw, like the quivering of a horse after a good run, might be just the kind of thing you see in the dark. I took a step back.
“Aren’t you coming to bed,” she said.
I cried out.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Joanna?”
“I heard the tape of you snoring,” she whispered. “Kind of a strange apology, but what the hell. Come on, hop in. It’s late.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. She put her cool hand on my shoulder. I crawled in beside her. She pulled me in close.
“Is that really you, Joanna?” I asked.
“Of course, it isn’t, you moron,” the man behind me said.
Meet Me in the Moon Room
Maybe we’ll meet again on the moon,” she said, and it hadn’t sounded so strange in 1967, hadn’t been altogether out of the question. It was just another one of those impossible things we dealt with before breakfast in 1967.
“And when do you expect this meeting to happen?” I asked.
“Give us thirty years to mellow,” she said. “We’ll have a solstice reunion in the nineties.”
I’d had a lot more hair in those days, and a slimmer, trimmer prostate, flat if not exactly rippling abs, endless optimism. I was her rocket man, nerdy before nerdy was cool, and I always embarrassed her in front of her friends. Louisa, whom everyone called the Star Girl, wore flowers in her hair and bellbottoms, and I undressed her in my mind every 15.7 seconds.
I wondered if she would expect me to call her the Star Woman tonight.
“You could come with me,” she said in 1967.
But, of course, I couldn’t. No way I would have thrown away a career in space to do dharma in Tangiers. We’d been a cacophony of becoming, the two of us, but I’d fooled myself into thinking I knew exactly where I was going.
“You could stay with me,” I said.
“I’m already gone,” she said. “You’re talking to an afterimage.”
Several years later, just after the first lunar landing, I heard she’d been killed in North Africa. I didn’t want to know the details.
Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Louisa called me up to say, “Meet me in the Moon Room.”
Right out of the blue.
“Not out of the blue,” she said. “It’s our thirty-year solstice reunion. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” I said. “But what the hell is the Moon Room?”
“It’s on the West Side.” She gave me the address and hung up. For a long time I stood there looking at the phone wondering if I’d made her up.
Then I got in the car and drove though the mostly empty streets to a neighborhood I would not have come to voluntarily. Most of the buildings looked deserted. Half the streetlights were dead. The only other car I saw passed me and the driver gave me a dark and sullen look like he was sizing me up for a mugging. If I’d been in a movie, my headlights would have surprised a dirty white dog skulking out of an alley with the bloody remains of someone’s arm in its mouth.
I finally found the address Louisa had given me. The building looked like an airplane hanger. Metal walls and big windows with many small square panes of cloudy white glass set up way too high for anyone to actually look out of them. A crudely lettered sign nailed onto a wooden door that didn’t quite fit its doorway said, THE MOON ROOM—WELCOME ABOARD!
I pushed open the door and peered into the darkness.
“Go on through,” someone said, a man.
I sucked in my breath and stepped to one side, but didn’t embarrass myself with a yelp. “What?”
“Through the airlock,” he said. I still couldn’t
see him.
“The airlock?”
“Here.” He moved out of the shadows, beer, sweat, and peppermint, and I heard the distinctive sound of Velcro being separated. Noise and light flowed from a slash in the darkness.
“Thanks,” I said and stepped through into a huge bright space. The building was one big room, many stories tall, with track lighting. My first thought was that the place was full of people swinging from vines while dark monkeys perched far above them on metal girders.
I looked across a lunar landscape of scattered gray moon rocks and craters with starched Stars and Stripes, like flags marking golfing holes, to a huge blue Earth on the far wall.
“We are all gazelles in the Moon Room,” the man who had showed me in said, and zipped up the airlock. I never did see his face.
Elastic straps—perhaps bungee cords, perhaps not—depended from the ceiling and attached to harnesses worn by all the patrons of the Moon Room. They weren’t swinging from vines. They were moon walking—big steps, long leaps, getting from here to there in an unearthly hurry.
But those really were monkeys up there—howler monkeys. I could hear them now.
“We also suck strong drink from plastic bottles with plastic straws.”
I turned to the voice and saw Louisa bobbing up and down in her harness—definitely Louisa, big grin and fuzzy red hair, baggy jeans and tie-dye, holding a couple of squeeze bottles. “Get hooked up.” She tossed me one of the bottles and jumped away like a deer—or more like, I suppose, a middle-aged woman on the moon.
Someone came putt-putting up to me in a lunar rover. Her nametag said, HI, I’M RITA!
“Hi, Rita,” I said.
“Ho ho,” she said and plopped a floppy red Santa hat onto my head. “Here, your harness goes like this.” She took the drink from my hand and helped me get into my harness.
“Why the howler monkeys?” I asked.
“Not what you expected, hey?” She gave me my drink back, put her hand flat against my chest, and pushed me onto the moon.
I jumped around like crazy, slurping what turned out to be rum and coke, looking for Louisa, but when I found her I was suddenly shy. What could I say after all these years? How could I break the ice? “Did you know,” I said, “that the chances of being attacked by a hippo are really quite small?”
She laughed the clear crystal laugh I remembered so well. “As it happens,” she said, “I really do know that!”
“Amazing,” I said. But it wasn’t really so amazing. Of course she would know that. She would have learned many things on her travels around the world while I was selling insurance in the seventies and teaching high school in the eighties and coding COBOL as a resurrected relic working on the year 2000 problem in the nineties. I imagined her skiing and skydiving and hobnobbing with witch doctors. She would have been chasing lions in a jeep while I paid off the Ford.
“So, did you ever get into orbit?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Did you ever manage to meet Paul Bowles?”
“Actually, I did,” she said, “and thanks for not asking about the book.”
She meant the Great American Novel she’d run off to North Africa to write.
“Are you a ghost, Louisa?” I asked.
“Touch me and see,” she said softly, and I reached for her, but nothing is easy on the moon. Especially not when the place is crowded with desperate drinking people bouncing around doing the bunny hop, singing Christmas songs, forming and dissolving conga lines. Louisa was swept away. I bounded after her.
Elbowing my way through all the lunatics looking for lost dreams, I managed to grab her. I turned her and we sat facing one another in our harnesses. I put my hand on her knee.
“Not there,” she said, but I didn’t let go. Her knee was metal or plastic or both.
And then I’m thinking that she’s thinking that I’m thinking I would ask her to come home with me now out of some misplaced sense of obligation to the past we had once shared.
A hard look came to her face, and she took my other hand and put it on her other knee. It was artificial, too.
“Tangiers?” I asked.
“Tangiers,” she said.
And I’m thinking that she’s thinking that I’m desperately looking for some excuse to end this right here, right now, but what I’m really thinking is how hard it is to know what to do next after you’ve finally figured out the meaning of life, after you’ve seen it’s all nothing more than a couple of people huddling close for comfort in a cold universe.
I couldn’t let her go again.
Her expression softened.
And I’m thinking that she’s thinking that she really does know what I’m thinking.
She squeezed my hands on her knees and said, “Okay.”
About the Author
Ray Vukcevich was born in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and grew up in the Southwest. He spent many years as a research assistant in several university brain labs but is now writing full time. His short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Asimov’s, Twists of the Tale, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Rosebud, and Pulphouse. His novel, The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces, was published by St. Martin’s Press. His latest book is a collection of short fiction called Boarding Instructions. Read more at www.rayvuk.com.
Publication History
These stories were previously published as follows: The Barber’s Theme, Sirius*Visions, 1995; A Breath Holding Contest, Pulphouse, 1991; By the Time We Get to Uranus, Imagination Fully Dilated, ed. Alan M. Clark & Elizabeth Engstrom, 1998; Catch, Twists of the Tale, ed. Ellen Datlow, 1996; Ceremony, Pulphouse, 1991; Doing Time, Pulphouse, 1992; Fancy Pants, Imagination Fully Dilated, Volume II, edited by Elizabeth Engstrom, 2000; Finally Fruit, The Urbanite, 1997; The Finger, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), 1995; Giant Step, F&SF, 1994; A Holiday Junket, F&SF, 1998; Home Remedy, Talebones, 1996; Meet Me in the Moon Room, Rosebud, 1998; Mom’s Little Friends, F&SF, 1992; My Mustache, Asimov’s, 1993; The Next Best Thing, Talebones, 1998; No Comet, F&SF, 1994; The Perfect Gift, Asimov’s, 1994; Poop, F&SF, 2000; Pretending, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, 2001; Quite Contrary, Pulphouse, 1994; Rejoice, F&SF, 1999; Season Finale, Pulphouse, 1995; There Is Danger, Pulphouse, 1993; We Kill a Bicycle, VB Tech Journal, 1995; Whisper, F&SF, 2001; White Guys in Space, F&SF, 1996.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch who were there for me early on. Thanks to Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm for wise words and wonderful examples. And thanks to good friends who fed and drove me around during a mostly blind summer: Jerry Oltion, Leslie What, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Bruce Holland Rogers, Holly Arrow, Alan Roberts, and Rob Vagle. Not to mention all the folks who come and go at the Tuesday night workshop, and Diana Blackmon, Tom Lindell, and Nicole Brown, who slipped through the cracks last time.
Short story collections and novels from Small Beer Press for independently minded readers
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, A Life on Paper: Stories
First translation from the French of “The celebrated Châteaureynaud.”—New York Times
Peter Dickinson, Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures
“Mining folklore for ideas is routine in modern fantasy, but not many can add the surprising twists and novel logic that Peter Dickinson does. These are beautiful stories, deft, satisfying, unexpected. They deserve to become classics of the genre.”—Tom Shippey, Wall Street Journal, Best of the Year
Karen Joy Fowler, What I Didn’t See and Other Stories
“In all these stories, Fowler (Sarah Canary, The Jane Austen Book Club) delights in luring her readers from the walks of ordinary life into darker, more fantastical realms. . . Fowler’s closing story, “King Rat,” is a masterpiece.”—Seattle Times
Ben Jonson, playwright, poet, satirist . . . detective.
Elizabeth Hand, Errantry: Stories
“Elegant nightmares, sensuously told.”—Publishers Weekly
Kij Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees
“Johnson’s long-awaited first collection is full of thought-provoking and often emotionally wrenching stories that traverse the spectrum of speculative fiction.”—Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2012
The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin
Two volumes: Where on Earth & Outer Space, Inner Land
“No better spirit in all of American letters than that of Ursula K. Le Guin.”—Slate
Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo
Mythopoeic, Crawford, Carl Brandon Parallax, & Frank Collymore Award winner
“Filled with witty asides, trickster spiders, poets and one very wise woman, “Redemption in Indigo” is a rare find that you could hand to your child, your mother or your best friend.”
—Washington Post
Vincent McCaffrey, Hound
Meet Me in the Moon Room Page 21