The Moondust Sonatas

by Alan Osi

  Ultimately, we decided on the simple solution, even though it was imperfect. We tested out various arrangements of fans and found that, with the size and shape of the main ballroom, the best way to get the highest wind speed was the most obvious: Put the fans in the corners of the room, angle each upward and to the right, and create a sort of vortex effect. In the middle of the room, we would attach a fan to the ceiling, if we were feeling lucky, and that would hopefully help to cancel out the eye-of-the-storm phenomenon, which would make the most active part of the dance-floor the dead-spot in terms of moondust saturation.

  We were unsure about the ceiling fan idea only because it would take a good amount of time to set up, and our time was running short. We’d have to secure it to the ceiling, secure its power cable and extension, and secure a safety cable to it that would keep it from killing people if the main supports failed. That could take a while.

  We also had to set up a remote activation system, so that with one push of a button, we could empty canisters of moondust into each fan, all of which we’d keep on all night. That was going to be the difficult, and we’d spent a good amount of time discussing possible ways to get moondust into the fans. There was, of course, the analogue method—a bunch of dudes standing behind the fans, pouring moondust into them. But, that method had disadvantages, the main one being that once the pourers got moondust in their own eyes, they’d be completely useless. Ultimately, we decided that Bob, who had some random and mysterious experience in such matters—Bob said it was from doing special effects for off-Broadway plays; Nico rolled his eyes dramatically—was going to rig up simple electric blasting caps, using gunpowder and the guts of automatic lighters. The gunpowder was coming from a stash of illegal fireworks that Bob and Nico kept around for special occasions: Roman candles, mostly, by their telling. We were going to put the moondust in a series of large balloons, and glue the balloons and blasting caps together, and put them behind the fans.

  We argued for a while about the aesthetics of this: it would be ugly, decided Nico, if we had a bunch of balloons behind fans in the corners of the room. Actually, Nico and Bob argued, and I mostly listened. Ultimately, the simple solution came from me, probably because I wasn’t entrenched in their dynamic: We have no better ideas versus that is going to look so damn ugly, I just can’t stand it. The solution: More balloons, sparsely spread around the walls and ceilings. Sure, it would be really a junior high prom. But, once the moondust went off, we were pretty sure people would understand why we’d done it. It would create a theme and keep the surprise.

  In fact, we decided to put moondust balloon clusters on the ceiling, too, to explode and drop moondust on everyone and into the vortex of wind. We’d also have clusters that wouldn’t be attached to wall or ceiling at all, loose around the party. And the balloons would all be black.

  The walls in the room would be a dark sepia color, kind of a combination of chocolate brown and orange, and there would be red, shiny confetti everywhere. As upstairs would be very white, we were going for sort of a Heaven-Hell dynamic. But, subtle. I really thought it was going to work. But, lighting would be the key. Two of the girls in their collective specialized in that, and I was told they were excellent. The only trouble was time: There was so little of it. But, we were hustling, and they were pros, and Mark, Perce and I—well, we were simply excellent at everything. It had to be said.

  So it was decided, and Bob went off to build the blasting caps, and Nico went to buy balloons, which he and I would fill with moondust, blow up, and tie shut. Which was probably going to be pretty tricky. While Nico was out, I had to place the fans and see if I could figure something out about putting one on the ceiling, which was going to be a bitch, even with our extra-tall ladder and such. I would definitely need help.

  There was nothing to do about that, but to do it, while attempting to contain the fluttery feeling in my belly—some alien kind of excitement, reminiscent of something ancient and barely remembered, like the landscape of a dream. And try not to spy too hard on Percival—who was flirting with one of the girls and seemingly doing alright—and try not to think about what tomorrow might be like.

  Tomorrow: Me, Hailey, in a different world. Tomorrow: A day viewed across this chasm, a threshold event planned for, but not understood. And so I had to tell myself, over and over, the truth: The dream of tomorrow never comes true. Every day is today.

  110. LEONARD

  A little after noon, I took Shelly with me and went down to the address that the reporter gave me for the drug party. We took an unmarked NYPD vehicle, an older model, dark blue, perfect for this kind of thing. It was the type of car that blended into the city like salt into the ocean. Not that I expected the socialite set to really notice that they were being marked. In fact, I figured this was going to be the easiest stake-out of my career.

  The idea was to get a sense of what was going on down there, before we had a team swoop in and drag every one of their sorry asses off to the station for questioning. Once again, I thanked my stars for homeland security legislation. That, plus unspecified grayish powder, equaled free reign for us boys in blue. I could’ve gotten a whole SWAT team down there to help an old lady across the street.

  The problem was this: Nothing was going on. The site referenced in the text Maxwell Smith had sent me was in Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, and it looked like an ordinary factory-type building, turned into lofts, one of those sad, frightened outposts of bohemia in neighborhoods full of sharks, hustlers, and trapped unfortunates, who knew how to keep their heads down. Kind of reminded me of home, actually.

  But like home, in the daytime, not much was going on. You had to figure that for one of these events, especially one as hyped as the text message made “The Moondust Sonatas” sound, there had to be people going in and out with supplies. Maybe paint. Maybe liquor or party favors. But, there was almost no activity at all. Matter of fact, the ground floor looked like an open-space lobby. Hard to figure how there was going to be some big party there at all.

  Shelly came to the same decision. “Either these guys are excellent at covert ops, or nothing’s going on here,” she said, after a few hours of a whole lot of boredom. I had to agree. It was possible that we’d either not recognized the players or they hadn’t been using the entrance we’d staked out. But, I had this bad feeling in my stomach.

  “I don’t like it, either,” I said as I took out my cell-phone and made the call.

  “Hello?” answered Smith, the reporter, and his voice was weak with nerves. Like he expected my call and knew the reason for it. Made me suspicious.

  “Smith. This is Detective Greene. I’m outside the address you gave me.”

  “Oh, really?” he asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Yeah, really. I think you know why I’m calling. Don’t you?”

  “Can’t say that I do.”

  “Nothing’s here, Smith. This does not make me happy. You don’t want me grumpy, trust me. So how are you going to make me happy?”

  There was silence for a second, and then he answered, “But I did what you asked me to do, everything you asked me to.”

  “You gave me a bullshit address, Smith.”

  “Then they gave me a bullshit address,” he said, voice tight and rising.

  So I made mine quiet, even dangerous. “Are you yelling at me?”

  “No, sir,” he sighed, “but I don’t know what you want from me. You asked for the address, I gave it to you. You don’t like it, okay, sorry about that. But, what am I supposed to do?”

  I believed him. He’d given me the intel they’d given him, which meant that either it was actually good or they didn’t trust him.

  I had to make the decision, which meant instinct. So, I looked at Shelly, who was staring out the window at the door, an expression of annoyance clear as day on her face. She was sure no one was in there, and we were wasting our time.

  “I believe you,” I said to Smith. “Nevertheless, we got the same problem. Th
is address is bullshit. Your people don’t trust you.”

  “For good reason,” he mumbled, with a lot of petulance.

  “They’re lowlife drug dealers so their trust ain’t worth shit. What is worth shit is protecting the public interest. I need a good address, and I need you to give it to me.”

  “How am I supposed to give you an address I don’t have?” Smith asked.

  “Get it. As soon as you can, however you have to. You know how to contact them, right?”

  “But as we established, they don’t trust me.”

  “That’s your problem. My problem is that I got to bring someone in today. It’s them or it’s you, your choice. Keep in touch.” With that I hung up.

  Shelly, sitting in the driver’s seat, took the initiative to start the car. She didn’t move out of the space, however, until I looked at her and nodded. Then she pulled into the street and headed back toward the station.

  We didn’t say anything on the way back. There was nothing to say, really. The situation was simple: Looking for one event in the whole city was like looking for a needle in a hay field. We needed Smith to come through. Without him, we didn’t have shit, and we’d be left holding our dicks. Or at least I would. I wasn’t sure what Shelly would be holding in that situation, and I was actively trying not to guess what it might be. It was really none of my business. I was married, maybe not happily so, but happily enough so that I wasn’t trying to screw it up by sexualizing a broad who wouldn’t sleep with me even if I were dumb enough to want to. I needed a sexual harassment charge like I needed gangrene. But, I digress.

  111. PERCIVAL

  This neighborhood wasn’t exactly chock-full of restaurants, so when I took June out for a quick lunch, I had to think fast. The day wasn’t cold at all, there was only a hint of autumn in it, so I managed to come up with a fairly romantic option, a simple one: eating tortas on some strangers’ stoop.

  Torta, a Spanish word, translates into “tasty fucking sandwich,” like an Italian Panini. You could find corner grocery stores that sold tortas on most streets in Latino-heavy neighborhoods, if you walked far enough. So June and I took a stroll, until we noticed and dipped into a neighborhood shop with a deli and bought ourselves two of them.

  While I watched the pretty girl behind the counter stack the chicken, cheese, and condiments onto the thickly sliced and toasted pieces of bread, June was off getting drinks. She came back with two deuces of Heineken.

  “What kind of weirdo drinks before sundown?” I said.

  “Oh, God. I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  “You know I was kidding, right?”

  She responded, “That’s good because the mistake was accidentally doing lunch with a Puritan.”

  I had to laugh.

  The woman behind the counter was less impressed, slit her eyes, and smacked her gum with sublime boredom. And her foot—tapping without real rhythm to reggaeton blaring from some hidden stereo—seemed to scream so what at the world. She handed me the two sandwiches, now tightly wrapped in the white paper that held them together. She rang me up, I paid, got change, and we were off.

  We sat on a stoop of a building in mid-renovation. New York sounds assaulted us from every angle: radios blaring, pedestrians greeting neighbors as each rushed off toward some destination, men playing dominoes and smoking cigars outside of a laundromat, kids wearing hoodies making secret deals, cars imposing vicious, heavy beats on the world, distant sirens wailing.

  “This torta is delicious,” said June between bites.

  “Beer ain’t bad, either.”

  She nodded. “I hardly ever get over to this part of town.”

  “Oh yeah? Where do you live?”

  “Off the G,” she said.

  “You like your neighborhood?”

  “I can’t complain. Rent’s pretty good, no one bothers me.”

  “That’s all you can ask for,” I said.

  “I’d kill for a grocery store in a two-mile radius.”

  I didn’t answer, and there was silence for a second. It went too long, so I said the first thing that popped into my mind, which ended up being pretty strange.

  “Do you like my belly button?”

  She gave me the look this question deserved. “What?”

  “My belly button. What do you think?”

  “I… haven’t seen it,” she answered. But, her mental wheels were turning. She was deciding if this meant I was a total weirdo. I had to turn it into a joke or the game was lost.

  “But you’ve imagined it. I know you have.” And I poked my stomach out at her, rubbing it with my hand, pretending to be seductive.

  A quizzical smile. “Who has belly button fetishes?”

  “Word on the street is, girls who reference Nietzsche and say things about object permanence can’t get enough of them. Umbilical envy, you know.”

  I got a laugh, thank God. She shook her head and said, “You’re such an asshole,” But, her voice got misty. The breeze blowing by us was perfect, and a wisp of black hair that’d fallen out of her pony-tail’s conformity danced on it. Gracefully, she brushed the strand behind her ear with painted fingers. When she moved, time slowed a little. I smiled.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Your smile.”

  She grinned again.

  Then my phone rang. I was tempted, very tempted, not to answer, to let the moment develop. But, that would have been too obvious, forcing the flow of events. I said, “I need to see who it is.”

  “Of course,” she took a sip of beer and stared at something across the street.

  It was Maxwell, douche reporter to the stars. “Yeah,” I said, when I answered, not at all hiding the fact that I really didn’t want to be speaking to him, hoping it would be quick, painless.

  “Percival. How are you?” he said.

  “Fine. What do you want?”

  “I’m outside the address you sent me. I’m hoping to get in there, maybe look around a little, for the article. Can I come in?”

  My brain switched gears so fast, I could almost smell oil burning.

  Yesterday, when I sent Maxwell the information on the party, I pulled an audible. I changed the address on him, because I didn’t trust him. I had no evidence that it was necessary. But, bottom line, the guy had his own agenda. On paper that agenda was his precious story. But, who knew what he’d do to get it?

  And why was he trying to prowl around the party’s future sight this afternoon? What could he possibly hope to learn? We’d already given him everything he said he needed. I smelled a rat.

  “You there?” Max said.

  “You’re outside?” I said. “Why?”

  “Um, well, you know, I thought maybe I could get the inside look, find something interesting. You know, before people got there.”

  “It’s like one o’clock, man. Little early, don’t you think?”

  “I like being thorough.”

  “There’s such a thing as too thorough. No back-stage pass for you.” With that, I hung up.

  He was lying to me, and it wasn’t a very good lie, either. I’d seen him con the guys outside of my apartment, impersonating a gangster, so I knew he could bullshit well enough, when necessary. Such an obvious, ham-fisted bluff was hard to figure.

  It would have been obvious to him, if he was at the address I’d given him, which we weren’t there. Why not call and ask me, straight up, why I’d mislead him?

  He wasn’t there, either. It was the only conclusion. He was trying to make me think he was. But, he wasn’t. Why?

  “Everything okay?” asked June, reading the worry on my face. So I wiped it away.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just another tiny bit of bullshit I have to deal with. Se la vie.”

  “Your life is bullshit?”

  “Don’t be literal, baby,” I said.

  “Baby?”

  I grinned at her. “Sorry. Are we not there, yet?”

  My playfulness diffused the tension; she laughed. “You’
re fast.”

  “When I have to be,” I said and took another bite of my sandwich.

  112. MAXWELL

  After Percival hung up on me, I resisted the urge to hurl my blackberry into the wall, smashing it into a million pieces—or to scream.

  “He’s suspicious,” I said, when I called the detective back, “He didn’t tell me a thing. I don’t have a new address for you.”

  “What did you tell the guy?”

  “I said I was outside and wanted to be let in.”

  “And you’re surprised he saw through that? I told you it was a bullshit address, you jackass. If you were there you’d know that.”

  “What would you have said?”

  “Aright, never mind. You sit tight. They gave you a bullshit address, and you called and flubbed it, so there’s nothing more that we can do until they give you the real address.”

  “If they do,” I responded. “This might have cost me my story, officer.”

  “Don’t get snippy with me. You fucked this up.” Then he hung up.

  I poured myself another glass of whiskey.

  113. MARK

  And so time did its thing, speeding up because of all the tasks we needed to complete; we, of course, being Hailey and Percival and my friends of The Disconnect. Tonight we would throw a party that maybe would become New York mythology.

  Time was a bitch, sadistic and callous, playing with humanity like a little girl with dolls: When we wanted her to linger, she danced by with dizzying speed, laughing; but, when we were low, trapped in the misery of a moment we only wanted to end, she stalled, passing as slowly as rush-hour traffic.

  Today she became a madwoman, flying in a suicidal rush, devolving into sequence-less moments. Henri, Percival, a girl named June, and I unloading sofas from the Haul-It truck, pushing them upstairs, cigarettes perpetually dangling from our mouths. Discussing the amount of red confetti strewn throughout the main ballroom with Bob: too much, or did we need more? Helping Hailey somehow, magically, attach a heavy fan to the ceiling; sweeping dust-storms from the floor upstairs; stocking the bar; catching a moment of what seemed to be heavy flirtation by Percival and June, while scrubbing an unknown ancient stain off the wall; sanding down a section of floor that had splintered so much it looked as if a porcupine had been fused onto the wood; pushing the furniture around while Nico and Bob argued about where the couches should be; throwing tarps over furniture when some tenuous compromise was reached; finally taking a moment to breathe, to be, to let the madness settle.