The Starry Sphinx

by V X Lloyd

  Frustrated and bored, he put his hand in his coat pocket and his finger brushed something metallic. The Gypsy's lorgnettes. He took them out, leaned back, and looked at the mall's passersby through them.

  "I'm in some sort of a game. And it seems like someone else's game. I'd like to make it my game. It's my life. Why shouldn't my own life be my own game rather than someone else's?"

  He stood up and found that both of his legs had fallen asleep. The hardness of the chair and its inhuman shape had sneakily but definitively cut off his circulation. His thighs and ass were so painfully tingly that his breath caught in his chest and he had to sit back down. There was no hope for composure in this moment.

  How could something so nonchalant be so incredibly painful?

  He tried positioning his body onto the zany chair in a way that was dramatically different, so that his circulation would be restored rather that simply blocked off again.

  It was in this moment, Moony grimacing, resting awkwardly on one butt cheek, leaning forward, that he saw Celia walking past. Her arm was linked with that of a tall, handsome man wearing an Italian leather jacket and maroon jeans. His hair was curly, much like Moony's own, but better styled, and his face was supernaturally chiseled. Everything about this man exuded confidence and class.

  Celia looked very stoned. It was good to see that she was definitely safe and not in the Gypsy’s clutches.

  "I bet they're just friends," Moony thought. "Coworkers, even. On their way to a photo shoot."

  The two of them stopped and kissed, the maroon jeans guy's hands moving down to Celia's ass.

  "I bet that's part of the photo shoot," Moony's delusion continued.

  He looked around and saw no cameras, and no one but him even watching the two lovers. A sinking feeling in his heart. His guts felt black garbage sack full of boiling soup.

  The tingling from his fallen-asleep lower half had faded in his right leg, though his left leg was still painfully stiff and numb.

  He decided to brave it and stand up. Maybe he would go and say hello. Probably there was some misunderstanding, and it was best to clear things up sooner rather than to presume the worst.

  But what was the worst? That Celia was seeing someone else? Recalling his recent unrequited fantasy for Kitty, he and Celia had never talked about wanting to be exclusive. He knew she had gotten involved with Deb, and maybe other women, but because Moony was operating under many of the common misogynies of the era, he believed that trysts with other women were somehow different than with other men. The truth was that since he had fallen for Celia, he hadn't wanted to seriously pursue other women. He just hadn't realized that he held expectations for her to maybe do the same.

  But by the time Moony had taken his first hobbling steps outside the store towards them, they had made it well out of his range unless he wanted to jog or run after them.

  He stood there in the mall's wide, high walkway, listening to the reverberations of commerce and commotion, wondering whether he had a right to feel a bit of a broken heart in this situation.

  OK, sure. So the real thing was that Moony felt sad seeing Celia in another man's embrace. But where had this sense of possessiveness come from? He hadn't known it before. He reminded himself they hadn't expressly made any sort of terrestrial monogamy pact. If Moony's expectations had changed, that was his responsibility to communicate. The main thing was that Celia was happy. She was pursuing what she wanted.

  With a thrilling rush, Moony felt like he should be doing the same, not ferrying his mother to shoe stores.

  He paused, recalling he had driven them here in her car.

  She could very well drive herself wherever she wanted.

  Moony called himself a cab.

  *

  The taxi arrived at Sod Hill, but before getting out, Moony changed his mind. He asked the driver to drop him off at the bank where the art show had been.

  He sauntered up to the counter and smiled.

  "It's you again," said the teller he had spoken with briefly before. She was petite with long straight blonde hair and striking eyes. Her skin was pale and softly radiant like a 17th century aristocrat.

  "Listen, I'm sorry about what happened earlier."

  She looked entirely confused. "It's not. . . your fault. Mr. Whitecomb warned us about the jellyfish idea, but we thought it would look nice, so we went for it. The woman who got stung in the face, it was actually her idea. The jellyfish was her idea, not the face stinging," clarified the teller.

  The floor of the bank, draped in towels and taped off, reminded Moony of something. It wasn't a deja vu. He couldn't quite place it. His foot seemed to sink a little too far into the carpet. His foot was welcomed into the floor with an insidious squish.

  "Are you OK?"

  "Oh," said Moony. "Yeah, I guess I just feel guilty."

  The teller, Zelda, wrote her number down on a card. "If you're interested in exploring these guilty feelings." She handed it to him. "I have a degree in Psychology, actually. Maybe I could give you some counseling." She laughed. There was a very attractive venom in it, he thought. He took a half-step backward. "I get off work soon. But only call me if you're feeling guilty already," she said. “Otherwise I don't know what we would talk about.”

  "I used to think that only crazy people talked about aliens and nonphysical things," he heard himself saying out loud. "But these days, they're on my mind a lot, and I don't know about you, but it's hard to tell sometimes the difference between crazy and just normal in the, uh, ordinary ways."

  "'Normal in the ordinary ways...'" she repeated, eyeing him. "I mean, I agree that the world doesn't make a whole lot of sense sometimes. But ... aliens?"

  Moony nodded, then shrugged. "Yep. Aliens. I've had many encounters with them. And... I'm one myself. And... I don't think I'm crazy. But if you examined me, you'd probably think I was."

  "'Crazy' is not really how we psychologists like to describe people. We try to be less judgmental and more specific. That way, we can help people. Sometimes crazy people just see things differently, and it's helpful for them to find a different pathway towards... something they want." She emphasized "want" and held eye contact with him. As you know, Moony was what you'd call a rather dense fellow, but he got the hint. This enchanting woman was flirting with him. Meanwhile, a few meters behind her, he noticed a man in a dark suit with heavily lidded eyes, probably a manager, glaring at the two of them. Moony craned his head to make sure no one was behind him in line.

  "Am I getting you in trouble because we're talking like this?"

  "Probably," she said. "My manager would rather I stand here staring blankly at nothing rather than having a brief conversation with a customer."

  "Maybe he's crazy."

  "Everybody's crazy."

  "Although, the fact of the matter is I'm not a customer. I don't bank here."

  "I don't blame you."

  At this point, the conversation was much, much less about the words than about the hints and subtext beneath them.

  "It feels like we're standing at the center of the world right now," he said. He smiled, and Zelda laughed.

  “If that were literally true, I guess I’d be filled with molten lava, and I’m afraid that’s just not so.”

  Behind her, the manager showed signs of having reached a decision. His jealousy at the two flirts had reached a threshold. Moony said goodbye.

  He left and walked four blocks back to Sod Hill. Standing at his door, he felt foreign to it and thought about knocking on the door. Instead, he used the lobby phone to call Zelda.

  *

  Moony reclined even more on Zelda’s bean bag chair, pressing the back of his head into it to hear that squish sound. He was exceedingly inebriated. He thought, "Very recently I have definitively escaped from all my troubles."

  She sat across from him, happy as a lark, naked as a jaybird, and high as a kite. She stared at her hands. Moony began staring at his hands, musing of something The Gypsy had told him during their fi
rst meeting: “Due to the existence of intercellular space, your brain has infinite surface area; therefore, you can know everything.”

  Her living room was a cute rainforest full of fuzzy pink accessories; she had pink lampshades, fuzzy coasters, shag carpet picture frames, and penholders full of fuzzy-topped pens, yet somehow the room managed to look only slightly less than mature and sophisticated.

  Moony toyed with the idea of actually receiving some counseling from Zelda, but while he deliberated, she commented that his face was all screwed up and it looked like he was crying. They got even higher and he struck up a conversation.

  "If you could go on a vacation someplace in Europe tomorrow, where would you want to go?" He wanted her to say Spain.

  "Ancient Prussia," she said.

  "I was thinking someplace warm."

  "France," she answered in an instant.

  "Warmer."

  "Modern Russia," she said.

  "How about Turkey?"

  "I’m a vegetarian. It'd need to be Tofurky for me."

  "Or we could just drive up to Boulder."

  She lost interest, saying "You know when you go to the supermarket, and all of those coffee beans are in different sacks?"

  Several minutes passed.

  "Mmn?" asked Mooney, wondering at the phrase Eurasia + Oneness = Horatio.

  "Beans from different companies and different regions. On the one hand, some of them are organic, sustainably harvested, handcrafted, small batch, local, artisan, live culture, fair trade, compostable, non-GMO, not animal tested, and on the other hand, some are just Folgers? What if they all just mixed together, the packages dissolved into each other, then when we went to buy coffee we'd have things the way they really are. Instead of getting a fair price for an unfair trade, we'd get a semi-fair price for mixed beans."

  Moony remembered his balcony flag from Portugal had fallen. Maybe that was a sign. "A trip to a country near Portugal would be nice. Do you want a coffee or something?"

  "No way, not here. Not now. Not like this." She ran her fingers down the hem of her skirt, preparing to put it on.

  She’s weird, thought Moony.

  Using Zelda’s computer, he looked up some information on travel to Seville, thinking what is intimacy, anyway? He was pretty sure he was not good at it.

  "These tickets all suck. There are literally no non-stop flights from Denver to Seville. It sucks to fly on commercial airlines."

  Zelda curled into a ball and decided to stay undressed. "Oh, we should go there." She mused about the times when she was a girl and loved to order things in the mail. She loved to get packages in the mail, and if the delivery day was not the expected date, she would obsess over not getting the package—not verbally, but to herself. She was able to project all the possibilities for her fulfillment onto the moments where she opened packages, gifts, presents. She would keep her mind on the mailbox all day—the mailman had no idea what he meant to her. Four-to-six weeks was the perfect amount of time for waiting to receive a package, since the first week she spent in anticipation, then either distracted herself or otherwise moved on from it during the second or third week. Once she had fully moved on from her anxiety about the package, it surprised her one day in the mail, and she had never felt so good. The purity of the thing she received, its suchness, and that it was entirely external to her, filled her with a threshold dose of guilt along with her actual joy from its presence. Musing about going to Europe reminded her how so much is like that desire. Moony would be able to get them there tomorrow, if that's what they decided to do. Looking at him, memorizing his looks, she wanted to become him, he was such a stranger. "No, not Seville. A real place. Let's go to Spain."

  "It's on a beach. Or maybe a little farm, this place I'm thinking of."

  "I grew up on a farm," she said. "In Tennessee. It was all right."

  "I didn't know that. Why didn't I know that?" Moony realized the familiarity he felt for her was misleading; Her name is Zelda – that’s a first, he reminded himself, reflecting on their fucking. Her weight on him – assuredly not great – he had been enamored of it. The burden granted him the opposite feeling of floating; he felt grounded, himself. Freedom of movement was not present, so there was no struggling to handle himself. Even if he tried, he could not feel distant from her.

  "You want to stop by the farm for a few days on the way to Spain?" he asked.

  "Not really. We should go to Africa sometime."

  "Africa is a whole continent," he said, thinking, she’s one of those idiots who doesn’t know geography, then shrugging it off. "Bring absolutely everything you want. Beachwear, dresses. Pretty things. Are doilies clothing?"

  "Have you ever thought about sending yourself a postcard when you're on vacation, so that you see what a nice time you had when you get back? A letter to yourself in the mail? I think I'll do that," Zelda said. “Did we use a condom?”

  "Sort of. Why, are you horribly diseased?” She shook her head, and that was good enough for Moony. “Send the package right before we leave, so you don't get it right away. Call in sick,” Moony said, clicking around on her computer. “My family doctor can give you a note. You want to say you came down with rickets?”

  “Above all else, I don’t want to get sick. I can’t go to Spain with you.”

  Moony turned to look at her. They were both hyperbolically stoned, but plenty of truth was still making its way through to him. He knew enough to know that either she didn't like him or would never trust him.

  “Not now, but soon?”

  “Very soon.”

  They never spoke again.

  *

  Moony returned to a note on his door:

  Joanna says your dad is ill. She also says it’s nothing to worry about, but I’m not convinced. It’s none of my business, but maybe you should visit? I have her new phone number if you want to call.

  Perry

  P.S. Get a phone.

  “Heart disease will do that,” Moony said, discovering that there was another note underneath Perry’s. It was a series of numbers in no noticeable sequence. On the back of the note was Heath’s handwriting: these numbers spell similar words forwards and in reverse. He threw the note into his trash can.

  Moony stopped for a second. His apartment had the same carpet the bank did, white with vague clouds of red, brown, blue. “Can you have a déjà vu in advance?” he asked.

  Heath, eating cereal, perked up. He didn’t have an answer, but the proposition blew his mind.

  Moony sat down at the table across from him. I'm counting on you to give me the blend of nano-3 that will work against the whole network. Can you do that?"

  Heath grinned and pointed to a tiny enameled clay jug with a screw-on cap. On the side of the jug was a hand-stenciled drawing of a naked woman with small shapely breasts, a round belly, and an enormous ass. "Already did, man."

  "It's in there?"

  "That's a concentrated dose of the latest and greatest, the absolute top shit. I sent the whole thing through a post-processor that dehydroxymylates it in the seventh orbital."

  "Oh, that's good to hear."

  "My post-processor is modeled on some para-Atlantean technology, man. How do you think I've been able to work for the Gypsy without losing my own structural integrity?" He tapped his head. "I know permafry when I see it, and I see it every time I look at my face in the mirror. I've done plenty of stuff wrong. Like I said, art is almost always a failure. But I have also done a few things right. I set me up a bonafide firewall. Not like yours, but the Gypsy can't read me. She doesn't understand how, so she keeps me close. She wants to learn my secret. Meantime, I know hers."

  "I know her sister. That's all I need."

  "That's right, man. She thinks people being afraid of the dark keeps her safe. It doesn't. I don't know how I know, but I know that meeting Shane will open the door for you."

  Moony went to his room and packed some stuff in his European handbag. “I’m going to be gone for a few days. Hold down the
fort for me.”

  Heath nodded and poured himself another bowl of cereal.

  "Actually, wait. Come to think of it, I may need your help."

  "If you need me in Spain, man, that’s actually a harmonious proposition. I'll be there too. I'm flying there with the Gypsy to go inspect more of her new batch. I'll have my same phone. If you need me, that's how you can reach me."

  4. Search for the Sacred Cave

  Moony and Celia, after some brief bickering, made it to the airport. Celia had agreed to come on the condition they brought both Perry and Deb.

  "I want to go as a couple. As two couples. I think we have a lot to learn from each other."

  That was the reasoning she shared with Moony.

  He figured it made as much sense as anything, and it would be nice to have them both along. If nothing else, it would help keep things civil between he and Celia. And by "civil," what he meant was that he and she both would be freed of the expectation that they should discuss any recent infidelities, supposing what had recently happened could be considered infidelity. And besides, it would be great to have Perry along. Alien human backup would come in handy if he was to locate Shane Shakahara in his darkness.

  The four of them ambled along the bright soaring amphitheatre that was the Denver airport and said little. Deb looked interested in getting something from Cinnabon but since she was the only one, decided that the line was too long and said she wasn't hungry anyway.

  "Anyway, those things could kill you. Did you guys know that nobody in my family lived very long? I'm the longest living of all the women in my line since they immigrated here from whatever miscellaneous European countries they came from. I guess what I'm saying is... Well, they all died in their thirties."

  "That is very depressing."

  "Death isn't depressing. I'll tell you what's depressing, and it's craving something that isn't good for you. Like... like a cinnamon roll. Or monogamy with multiple people."