One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (18 page)

She felt herself collapse.

Her own eyes rolled so far back into her skull that her optic nerves vibrated with painful strain.

She bit her tongue. She tried to scream but could only mumble. She wrestled with herself. She could not remember her own name; she could not remember where she was. She only knew that she was in a small yard with brick walls on all sides and the muddy brown Earth directly above and, of to the side, the glowing edge of a nearby Ferris wheel twirling, the light bulbs blurry. She could not focus as her eyes were uncontrollable. She shouted words she did not understand. She tried to pull her own hair out, her fingers went into her ears to get at that insane ringing. The brass bell inside her skull. The silhouette of the boy-god circled her as she writhed on the filthy ground. He did not know what to do. She screamed at him. She tried to close her eyes, but that mad fourth color stayed imprinted, and she could not get rid of it. She crawled over to one of the brick walls and as she tried to smash her head against it, she was taken into the god’s arms.

He struggled with her on the ground, but when he spoke to her, she could not understand because she could no longer place words with meaning and she could no longer place sounds with words. He held on to her mad thrashing form and he became all covered in dirt as well. They were both filthy and clouds of dirt rose in the air as they tussled against each other as she desperately wanted to smash her head against the brick wall, and he desperately wanted her to be completely still and stay alive and wait. And she suddenly understood what he was saying. He was asking her to wait.
The color will fade, your mind will reject it completely, wait, you will go back to normal, you will be exactly who you were, but you must ride it out, you must wait, you must wait…

Two hours later, she sat next to him on a boat in the middle of a crater lake. They were covered in dirt, her hair matted with an industrial grease that she had rolled into. The abandoned yard they had chosen for their tryst had been filled with broken car parts and puddles of black oil. Hieronymus’ white plastic jacked was covered with black spots and had a large rip in it from a sharp slab of broken windshield glass propped among the rusting junk he fell into. One of his fingers was in terrible pain—she had bitten it. The whole experience was far worse than either had imagined. He wanted to take her to the hospital and then turn himself in to the police, but she wouldn’t allow it. Instead, as soon as she felt fully recovered, they left the small yard and wandered aimlessly through the amusement park. When they found the dock where small boats shaped like floating dogs were rented out, they decided to row out as far as possible into the middle of the circular lake. They wanted to be away from everyone.

The water was completely still, and under the dark red sky, appeared almost black.

Both of her knees had been badly scratched. She leaned forward and looked at the water, the glowing amusement park on the distant shore. She did not face him as they sat side by side, the oars making a small splashing sound as he drew them into the boat. He looked up at a distant floating Mega Cruiser. They were alone on the lake. From far away, the muffled sound of music. The occasional cackle and roar of the roller coaster. She could not look in his direction. He looked at her sad lump of matted hair.

“I love you,” she said to him.

Hieronymus never told Windows Falling On Sparrows how happy he was to look at her and at the world without those damn goggles. The fourth primary color made him feel good—made him feel normal and complete. It was a sigh of relief to see things as they really were without those goggles filtering everything. Sadly, it was a moment of pleasure that lasted only a couple of seconds. Her reaction to his eye color had been thoroughly awful and he himself was surprised at how badly she handled it. And he knew that this type of thing was going to happen just before it did—when his goggles were of his eyes, he saw everything laid out in front of him, almost like a road map. He knew she was going to have a bad reaction, but it was too late because she had already seen his eyes. He saw the path she would take—the color trail bouncing itself of the walls, through the junk piles, intersecting with his own future trail of color where he would tackle her down, trying to prevent her from hurting herself. He was relieved to see ahead of time that her episode of confusion would be limited to the yard, as he could see her color trail as it left, but side by side with his—a calm, less confused marking of the same color. And then he had seen something profoundly sad. He didn’t know how this was possible, but he recognized her trail of color from far away—it was a distinct and powerful one. He saw it rise up into the sky from somewhere of on the horizon and head directly toward Earth. This line of ascension he knew would happen soon. He was able to read these trails of colors with a natural exactitude simply by their intensity, by the steadiness of their form. The longer he looked up into the sky, the more he saw countless other trails of movement emerge. The trails of Mega Cruisers, the trails of thousands of other smaller vehicles, and indeed, the largest trail of them all—the one before and after Earth itself, soon filled the cosmos. But he was not concerned by them. The unwritten, unspoken language of pure color already conveyed to him the inevitable—that she was leaving the Moon extremely soon, and she was not going to Chez Cracken San with her family—she was going to go back to Earth, and she would be leaving very soon.

The water was black, and he looked at her lump of knotted, filthy hair. The rowboat hardly moved. There were no waves nor current. All was still. It was completely artificial.

“You don’t have to answer me,” she continued. “I know you love me, too.”

He said nothing. She was right. He hardly knew her. But he loved her so tremendously, even though the words could not form themselves.

“Don’t you want to know what I saw?” he asked her.

“It is irrelevant to me what you saw. What is more important is what we did.”

He reached forward and caressed the back of her head. His fingers were already covered in grime and blood, so it was pointless to wonder if he was making her hair any worse than it already was.

“You look like a complete wreck. What are we going to tell your parents?”

“
We
are not going to tell them anything. You are going to bring me back to my hotel. I am going to tell them that a gang of thugs chased me and that you rescued me. And we had to hide in that yard.”

It did not occur to Hieronymus until that moment that he himself was very far from home. Certainly, his school transport had already left. He was on his own, and he had almost no money. “Do you live around here?” she asked him.

“No. I live on the other side of the Sea of Tranquility.”

“How will you get home?”

“There’s a subway.”

“Will you be in trouble if you get home too late and looking like that?”

“Yeah. My father will have a fit. He always waits up for me. I just wish he would just go to bed and let me stay out as long as I like, but that’s what he does. He’s a pain in the ass.”

“Well, he can’t be as bad as my mother…” Windows Falling On Sparrows was about to recite a list of complaints against her overbearing mother, and had they been on Earth, that’s what she would have done. But instead, she looked at the black water in front of her. It sat still. No waves, no ripples. Just the division of element between gas and liquid. Then she remembered something from her science class: On the Moon, water and air had a strange relationship to each other. Because the atmosphere was artificial. And it was put in place by artificial means. And it was maintained artificially.

“You speak a lot about your father,” the Earth girl said. “What about your mother? Do you have a mother?”

Hieronymus looked that the back of her head. At the incredible mess it had become.

“I…I don’t really know. My mother. I don’t really know my mother. I have lived in the same apartment with her all my life, but she has never spoken to me. She’s actually mad. She stays in bed all day. All she does is cry. She wears a plastic raincoat in bed. She’s…well, she is…it is impossible to communicate with her…”

Windows Falling On Sparrows listened to him describe his mother.

He knew a little about some of the things she had done in her life before she turned into what she was now. She once worked in a geological institute on Earth. She was born and grew up in so-and so, before this or that disastrous event led her to leave her country. Then she met Ringo. She was very secretive about her past. There were some major things, one in particular, that she could not bear to tell Ringo about. But it haunted her, and eventually Ringo found out, and he did his best to make her happy and to put it behind her. She tried to rebuild her life, and so they got married. For a short period of time, she attempted to become a writer, and she even succeeded in getting a novel published, but it failed to go anywhere and so she quit that. It went out of print and all traces of it were lost. Then, one day, she and Ringo were ofered positions on the Moon at an Ulzatallizine refinery station. It paid well, and they figured that they would spend five years on the Moon, then return to Earth. But into their third year Lunar-side, she began to slip. She was already pregnant and so naturally Ringo just thought it was related to that, but by the time Hieronymus was born, she was pretty far gone. She lost her position at the refinery station, and because her son was registered as a bearer of lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis, she was condemned to spending the next eighteen years on the Moon.

“That is a very sad story,” said Windows Falling On Sparrows, still unable to look away from the black water in the crater lake.

They walked to the foot of the Ferris wheel. There was a line of tourists waiting their turn, and the Ferris wheel itself looked extremely unstable. It was covered in light bulbs. It had been painted several times over, as there were peeled-off sections where a layer of maroon could be seen under the layer of turquoise it was currently covered in. They had no intention of going on, but they wanted to mark this spot. This was where they would meet the following evening. At the foot of the Ferris wheel, at eight o’clock. He told her that it would never happen. He knew that she would be gone, very soon, placed on a Mega Cruiser and sent back to Earth. She didn’t believe him. He promised her anyway that he would be there.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you were proven wrong,” she said, the revolving light bulbs of the moving wheel reflected in her black eyes.

“This would be a great thing,” he sincerely agreed.

They eventually found the Hotel Venice. She still wouldn’t allow him to walk her up the stairs and explain to her parents why she was in the worst shape possible. Even the hotel clerk and the hookers who were hanging around could not believe how horrible the teenagers looked.
Would you like me to call you an ambulance?
the clerk asked, a little wary as he realized Hieronymus was a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy. One of the prostitutes shot an angry look at him.
Did you do this to her? You looked at her with your goggles off, didn’t you, creep?
He ignored her and walked Windows Falling On Sparrows to the stairway.

She turned, one of her hands on the banister. She looked at him, but neither spoke a word. He wondered what she was going to look like some day, and he had no doubt that she would still be as beautiful in fifty years as she was at that very moment, looking at him so questioningly.

He had the urge to beg her not to leave, but then where would they go? What would they do? A hummingbird hovering close to the chandelier cast a strange, flickering shadow on her.

She blinked both of her eyes very slowly, then she turned and walked up the steps.

He knew he would never see her again. He cursed his own certitude.

To be wrong.
Oh, to be wrong!

Were all One Hundred Percent Lunar People as paranoid as he was? As he ran out the hotel lobby, the clerk strained his neck to watch him. He probably contacted the police. Hieronymous was a guilty bastard for not taking her to the hospital right away. But then, if he did that, it would mean having to admit that he had purposely done it.

He ran. He looked like a strange homeless man running in ripped rags, speeding away from one dirt pit and into another. Considering the dregs who surrounded him, all the prostitutes and junkies and addicted gambling losers, this was an extraordinary accomplishment. He sprinted directly into traffic, challenging the drunken drivers to apply their breaks for the speeding phantom in goggles. He ran through the flashing neon streets of LEM Zone One, past the tourists in their sheeplike formations, their tasteless attire, their bland way of staring at things as low and pre-fabricated as casinos with an expression of wonderment.
Where do these people come from?
Hieronymus wondered.
And why would they come here of all places?
Of course, he got his answer as he sprinted past the LEM itself, the thing from Earth. It used to be the main tourist attraction, but now it was only a pile of junk that nobody cared about, and soon it would probably be replaced with a chain drugstore. He swerved to avoid running into it, and he also dodged any kind of visual contact with the police, because this time, he could not lie his way out of trouble, because he did it, he did it, he really did it—what a stupid jackass thing to do,
jackass!
He had endangered that girl’s life, and he risked getting thrown into prison, never to be seen again.

Beyond two neon flashing skyscrapers, the underside of a Mega Cruiser passed slowly, a behemoth floating directly above, and he was reminded of what she told him, and what might indeed be happening to all of those One Hundred Percent Lunar Boys and Girls who disappear into the criminal justice system. Was it true? He imagined how the ability to see the fourth primary color would be applicable in the cosmos. He was so used to repressing it that he felt guilty just contemplating this idea. The world of neon passed him by. The annoying hummingbirds hovered out of his way the faster he traveled. He sprinted on sidewalks, and he sprinted through gardens and dilapidated storefronts. He turned a corner onto a residential street, and within seconds, he found himself running through an incredibly chic part of town. Expensive cars, expensive apartments. Expensive jewelry on the middle-aged women who were out walking their dogs. Some regarded him with extreme fear—he must have looked like such a freakish criminal in his goggles and torn white plastic jacket that was completely destroyed by oil and filth. Again, as he passed onto a busy avenue known for its chic nightclubs and fashion models and movie stars, he figured that, once again, a call was made to the police that
one of them
was running amok in
our
neighborhood. He realized how absurd it was that he should be hunted down like this, that they needed his type to drive the Mega Cruisers. Of course, maybe that was why they hunted him down—so they could lock him up and then force him to use his eyes for them like a high-tech indentured servant, a slave. That’s what they wanted, to make him a slave who had to keep his mouth shut. To use him like captured men and women were used for centuries in the pre-ancient times, his talents exploited, his vision exploited. They needed his vision, as his vision was the vision of outer space. He had been born in the cosmos. The Moon was not a real place, but he was a real human being. And so what do human beings do but grow thumbs? His eyes, his vision, had a pair of thumbs that no one else but the explorers of the heavens could contemplate. It was not a question of looking at objects and people and predicting which direction they would walk in, and it was not a question of how freaked out people got when they saw your eyes—the real question was none of that, as he had the vision of a true star-gazer and his eyes were for looking across the vast reaches where the curving of time and space made sense to those who could see it in front of their faces — he was one of them, and all else was unfocused.