by Alan Osi
“Sure dude. Whatever.”
At the top of the stairs, we reached a ladder, climbing up into the rooftop hatch, in typical New York style. She dropped the wash-bin at the bottom rung. “Okay. I’m going to go up first, and you can hand this stuff up to me. Alright?”
“Alright,” I said, hoping the procedure wouldn’t get any dirt on my coat. I thought of taking it off. But, I didn’t want to have to come back for it.
I watched her go up the ladder. Her ass gently swayed as she climbed. Not a bad view. She opened the latch, and then pulled herself up and out of eyesight, and reappeared as a disembodied head and arms reaching down out of the square hole, with dark sky behind her.
I picked up the wash-pan. But, lifting it up to her proved quite a challenge. Just standing on the floor and holding my arms up left it just out of her reach. But, if I were to stand on a rung of the ladder, I’d need at least one hand free to hold the ladder; and holding the bin took two hands.
“Have any ideas how I should do this?” I asked.
“Um, yeah,” she said. “Hold the ladder with one hand and give it to me with the other.”
“Yeah, because it’s just that easy.”
“No, you’re right, it’s rocket science. Do I need to come down there and do it for you?”
“No.” if the bin fell out of my hand, I could blame her. I put my left palm under the center of its weight, and balanced. With my right hand, I reached for a high rung, grabbed it, and pulled myself on the ladder.
The wash-pan almost fell, it was like balancing a broom in your open palm as a kid. But, harder. Somehow I managed and, with difficulty, lifted it above my head. The muscles in my shoulder burned. There was no way she’d have been able to handle doing this herself.
Hailey pulled the wash-bin up the rest of the way and disappeared from view. I gave myself a minute to rest, before following her.
By the time I clawed my way up onto the rooftop, she was halfway toward making a fire in an old, rusty barrel. She twisted and crumpled newspaper and threw it in the barrel. But, she had some ways to go before she would finish the stack she brought. I took a second to look around. Below us, Brooklyn spread out like an oil slick, punctuated by anemic streetlights and the red blaze of advertisements over corner stores. Despite the hour, children played in the street, teenagers hustled in shadows. Like cockroaches, the people tended to avoid the puddles of light, except for the pretty young women and decked-out hip kids heading into Manhattan. The island glittered off to the west, diminished by the distance only slightly. When you stood outside of the human soup that was this city, even for a moment, it was impossible not to stare in awe.
A hard wind whipped my coat and my hair all around. I tightened my cinch to keep my coat from getting out of hand. It whistled in my ear enough that I doubted whether the recorder could pick up anything at all. So I did a quick test. I held it in down at my side, and said, in a normal voice, “Eenie meenie miny moe,” while recording. I pulled out my earbuds. But, on the playback, white noise howled, drowning out my voice.
I did another test, this time speaking directly into the microphone. This playback sounded audible, and I decided if she said anything worth quoting, I would repeat it into the microphone like so. I could take any notes I needed that way. I took a moment, in fact, to give a quick description of the rooftop, and the city’s dregs below me.
By the time I went over to Hailey, she had the fire lit. “All through talking to yourself?” she said, then looked sheepish, as if she regretted speaking. I must have misread her expression.
“You mean checking my equipment, and yes. Point of order, I won’t be able to pick up your voice at all up here, there’s too much wind. If you say anything I need to remember, I’m going to repeat it into my recorder at close range. As long as that’s okay with… you.” I almost said ‘your highness.’ It would have been funny for two reasons. But, she’d proven too volatile to josh. I found myself missing Percival, who at least could take a joke. She was that much of a psycho. The horror.
87. HAILEY
“You mean checking my equipment, and yes,” he said. “Point of order, I won’t be able to pick up your voice at all up here, there’s too much wind. If you say anything I need to remember, I’m going to repeat it into my recorder at close range. I may also, as you say, ‘talk to myself’ every now and then, kind of a way to take notes. As long as that’s okay with you.”
I nodded, watching the fire begin to take hold of the newspaper. When I felt sure it would hold, I straightened up, a bit relieved. On windy nights like this, it could be a bitch getting the paper to burn.
Now that the fire had taken, there wasn’t much to do, but wait and have the talk I dreaded having. We hadn’t exactly hit it off. His eyes—all up and down me as he watched me work—made me wish I owned a burka. Or a shotgun.
I sighed and started talking. “Okay, Slappy, there are a few things I need to tell you. First, this process is pretty strange. It’s affected by mood. If we don’t both find a way to be in good spirits, it’s not going to take.”
“Wait. Give me a second,” he said as he started speaking into his recorder. “She says, ‘This process is pretty strange. It’s affected by mood. If we don’t find a way to be in good spirits, it’s not going to take.’” He glanced up at me, but still spoke with his mouth near the recorder. “What do you mean, take? And how could my mood affect the stuff? And what’s with the burning newspaper?”
If he started repeating everything I said, it would take way too long to say anything to the dude. So I held out my hand. It took him a second, but he got the gist and handed me the recorder, which I put to my mouth.
“The newspaper is burning to make ash. The ash will ‘take’ into moondust. But, only if we’re both chipper. Do you feel chipper?” I handed the recorder back to him.
“I can’t say I do at the moment, no. Can you explain why my mood plays into this?”
“No,” I said, after another hand-off. “No I can’t. If you’re not willing to go with me on this, then you can watch as I go through the motions. But, nothing’s going to happen.”
He took the recorder, but didn’t speak into it this time. He held it at his side and glared at me for a while. Then he said, “Hailey, are you wasting my time?”
“No,” I said. “You’re wasting mine.”
He sighed. “How the hell am I supposed to magically make myself happy?”
“You’re right. Maybe you should go.”
I turned around with my back to him, leaving him to make his decision. Better for me if he left, because by myself I felt sure I could manage to make this count. But, then again the reporter was the whole reason I stood here instead of with Perce and Mark.
In the barrel, the newspaper burned well, releasing chunks of floating ash to the air. More ash stayed still barrel-bound, and that began to stifle the fire under its weight, as packed newspaper had a tendency to do. I kept a broom-less broom handle up here for this reason, so I grabbed it, and stirred. Sparks shot up like stars. Then rose a flotilla of lazy gray planes, former headlines, articles, pictures of important events. They poured outward and upward, sailing on currents created by the heat. And the moon shone down, striking this ash that filled the air like snowflakes.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Making ash.”
I managed to bring enough still-burnable paper to the surface of the fire to keep it going, so I leaned the broom-handle against the barrel, crossed my arms, and watched it go in silence. Focusing on happy things, how I loved this process, how it felt like a poem, or a prayer. Umbrellas of ash dancing slowly in the air, floating up then down again, dropping out of sight into Brooklyn. The world around us was glittery and surreal, the fire leaping out of the barrel, trying to escape the boundaries in which I gave it life.
Technically, my level of peace and joy wouldn’t matter until I combined the ash with the pre-made moondust. But, it made sense to start now.
“Do yo
u mind if I ask a question?” the reporter said behind me. I turned around; he sat on an overturned bucket someone left on the roof.
“What?”
“I know you said you don’t know why it’s important to keep our mood up. But, if you had to guess… what would you guess?”
He held out the recorder, and I walked over, took it from him, reminding myself this had been my idea, getting the word out. I needed to realize I wasn’t dealing with him alone, because through him I dealt with everybody.
“If I had to guess? I don’t know. The thing about moondust is it’s all tied up in us. Who we are, you know? How we think and how we feel. It can show you other lives, it can show you places and things that you just can’t see anymore, because they don’t exist anymore. Can you imagine what it could do for, like, science? You can be in the French revolution, or in ancient Egypt. Wherever.”
I paused to stir the ash some more. Then I returned to putting my thoughts about moondust into the recorder.
“Anyway, it’s so much about our brains, somehow this powder interacts with our mind to put us in the mind of someone else. So somehow it’s got to be able to link up with us, right? Maybe… maybe when it’s being made, it can only do its thing if the minds of the people who helped make it really, um, are in tune with it, because there’s something joyful in moondust. You get a huge wallop of joy when you first take it and then only a whisper. But, the whisper is a lot, and it feels good… maybe there’s something about that good feeling and our feelings here that are connected with it. Maybe that joy is important, kind of some part of a bridge moondust builds. I don’t know.”
“But anyway this whole thing is impossible, right? Nothing about moondust is logical. So what’s so strange about it being strange now, when it’s made?”
I handed the recorder back to him. “Good?”
“Yeah. What’s the next step?”
“I’ve gotta finish with the ashification, first,” I said. And checked it. I gave the fire a quick stir, making sure enough oxygen reached the paper to fuel the fire, releasing more ash into the air. It blew all around, taken by a gust of wind.
He hadn’t handed me the recorder again. Instead he spoke directly into it. “Okay, you check the ‘ashification.’ And then?”
“I strain the ash.”
“Why do you strain the ash?”
“Because I need it smooth to make powder. Why don’t you just sit back and watch?”
“You need it smooth to make the powder. I’d sit back and watch if something was happening. But, I’m asking questions instead because little is happening.”
“Yes, there’s not much happening,” I said, and pulled my cigarette pack out of my pocket, and a smoke out of the pack. “While the fire’s burning the paper down there’s not much to do, but stir the barrel and think happy thoughts. Are you thinking happy thoughts?”
“Am I thinking happy thoughts? I’m trying.”
I needed happy thoughts too, so I made myself smile and forget about him, lit my cigarette. Unfortunately the fire in the barrel began choking, so I grabbed the broom-handle and gave it another stir. It took both hands, and as a result I got cigarette smoke in my eye.
“You look like Rosie the Riveter,” said Maxwell. I flexed my bicep in response.
88. MAXWELL
She responded to my ‘Rosie the Riveter” quip well enough. Flexed her arm, sort of made a joke in so doing. I still needed more information out of this, so any ebb in her crazy helped. What was it about women that made them like this? Probably how society dealt with them. Or the hormones?
With the cigarette cocked to one side and an eye shut against the smoke, she went back to stirring her burning newspaper. If I hadn’t taken the results to my chemist to be verified, I’d have trouble believing this had a point. We were in the neighborhood of tin-foil helmets.
“How long before the newspaper’s done?” I asked.
“It’s about halfway there,” she said. “Happy thoughts.”
“Hey, you know what would make me happy? Um, Percival told me how you guys got hip to moondust in the first place. But, I want to verify his story.”
She looked at me, amused. “How we got ‘hip to it?’ Sure thing, Daddy-o. Why don’t you tell me what he told you, and I’ll tell you if it’s true?”
“What, you don’t believe me?”
“I don’t know, it sounds a little Nancy Drew. Get information out of someone by claiming you already have it.”
“I’m telling the truth. He said you guys took some acid and the next morning you had moondust and the recipe to make more.”
“Yep,” she said, putting her stirring rod down and exhaling more smoke.
“Care to elaborate?”
She didn’t say anything for a while, smoking. Not wanting to be too forceful, I raised my digital recorder and gave it a waggle. She took it, composed her thoughts, and spoke into it.
“It’s impossible to remember a trip well. Like, there are details, but they’re disconnected. It’s like trying to remember a dream.”
She took another drag on her cigarette as she seemed to recall or contemplate details of how it happened.
“I know at some point we were in this bar, and some guy came in bleeding. I think he had a bloody nose. We started talking. Maybe he gave it to us, he’s the only person I remember speaking to. Other than that? We wandered around the city. I know we went to an art gallery, and the art there flipped my shit. I remember Percival threw his shoe at a fire hydrant for some reason, and it took us a while to convince him to put it back on. I have random memories like that, and none of them answer your question.”
I could only shake my head in response. These people.
I took the recorder back. After that, there wasn’t much to say. I didn’t have any follow up questions for Percival threw his shoe at a hydrant.
In about ten more minutes, the fire burned itself out. “Okay,” she said, “we’re done. On to step two.”
“What’s that step like?”
“The ash gets strained. Any chunks are taken out, what’s left is powder.”
“The ash gets strained,” I repeated into the recorder. “The chunks are taken out. What’s left is powder.”
She probably wasn’t pranking me. But suddenly I wondered about this whole enterprise. What the hell was I doing up here? The wind went right through my clothes. I was cold.
“Won’t it be difficult,” I said, “To touch hot ash?”
“That’s why I wait for it to cool down.”
In my brain, a straw floated gently onto a camel’s back and broke my patience.
“Look,” I said, “I appreciate you showing me this. But, I’m wondering, could you just tell me what comes after this step?”
“Yeah, alright, guy. After it’s strained, the ash goes in the wash-pan. Some already-made moondust goes in with it and gets stirred around, and then we leave it out in the moonlight. Even if it’s cloudy it doesn’t matter as long as it’s the night of the full moon. But, it has to be outside, under the sky. In the morning, we pick it up, test it out, and if we did it with our hearts right…” She shrugged. “It works. That’s it.”
“So you just put moondust in with the ash, and the ash becomes moondust?”
“As long as it’s a full moon night, yeah. And remember the part about mood.”
What a bunch of malarkey.
“Well,” I said, “Maybe it would be better if I weren’t here because of that last part. I’m a bit skeptical.”
“By all means,” she said, gesturing toward the hatch.
“Okay. Well, bye.”
There was no way I could put this in the article; no one in their right mind would believe it. Fact-checkers would scoff if told that the process required euphoria. But there must be some spin, some angle I could use.
Rather than risk walking to the train station again, I called my car service for a pick up. Expenses be damned, it wasn’t worth the risk of a mugging to save a few bucks by going
home on public transportation.
89. PERCIVAL
While I stirred up the last of the burning paper, freeing it from a whole lot of ash, I got a call on my cell-phone. I checked the little screen and read Hailey’s name.
I handed Mark the stirring stick. “Hailey’s calling,” I told him. Then I answered her call. “What’s up?”
“Percival. It’s so good to hear an honest-to-goodness human being.”
“Ah,” I said. “How is our friend Maxwell?”
“That jackass is nobody’s friend.”
I chuckled. “Finally you feel my pain. How’s it going? Are you done?”
“No, not done. But, at least I’m alone. The dude left before we finished.”
“He left?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t think he believed in it.”
“Believed what? Which part?”
“I don’t know, any of it,” Hailey said, but especially how all the ash becomes moondust. I told him, he left, and to be honest, I felt relieved. Where’d you find that guy?”
“I pulled him from a puddle of primordial ooze I stepped in on West Ninth one day. This city has everything.”
She laughed. “Listen, I’m going to go. But, I wanted to tell you. I think we may have to go to a plan B. I’m really not sure how this article thing’s going to work out for us.”
“Don’t trust him?” I asked.
“Come on, do you?”
“Of course not. You’re probably right, we need a plan B. We’ll talk.”
“Cool,” she said. “Until tomorrow then. Good night.”
“Yeah, you too.” I hung up.
Mark finished the stirring, and dropped the stirring stick, leaving the last of the paper to burn away. “What’s the story?” he asked.
“The reporter bugged out. Didn’t believe in… this.”
“He did seem like the small minded type,” said Mark.