Meet Me in the Moon Room (13 page)

“Lend me your ears,” he said, and she grinned sadly, then hugely as the meat of her cheeks popped off like hubcaps from explosive high speed blowouts—both sides at once, and she might have lost control, might have missed a beat, botched a note, but she didn’t, and he was proud of her control and hoped his would be as good. It was getting hard to hold the slippery bleeding fish his flute had become.

Her hair slipped forward into her eyes, and she shook it away, and it flew from her like a startled brown cat. They bled and bled until there was nothing left to bleed. Their picnic looked like the site of a barnyard butchering or the scene of a ghastly murder. The two wooden chairs on the bloody blanket.

All of that meat.

The flute (now part of his metal arm) became a steel hammer.

She stood up, and her cello became her hips, the rich wood dulled to tin and rusting.

“I don’t understand why I’m not totally freaked by this,” she said.

“It all seems somehow familiar,” he said.

“You look like a bunch of spare parts,” she said.

“I think we should find something to wear.” His voice crackled and popped.

“Fig leaves,” she said. A seam opened around the equator of her head, and the northern hemisphere swung up and away over the dark cave of her new mouth.

“Would you knock off all the goofy smiling?” he said.

He dug into a pile of tin boxes, broken mirrors, and oily rags and came up with a pair of fuzzy pants.

“Hey, these look good,” he said.

“Too fancy,” she said and nudged him aside to dig in the pile. “This will do.” She held up a pair of ragged gray slacks. “Oh, and look, a box of shoes. Watch out. I’m going to smile again!”

“Very funny,” he said.

He got into his fuzzy pants; she got into her gray slacks. They picked out shoes. They walked back to the bloody blanket.

He leaned over and picked up a few scraps of flesh. “Don’t you want to keep your face?”

She made a dismissive gesture with the hook at the end of her left arm.

“Well, I do,” he said. He put his face back on his metal head, but it wouldn’t stay there. After picking it up off the ground a couple of times, he tucked the hair above his old forehead into the waistband of his new pants, and his face hung down like a short apron.

The raccoons were just spare parts now, but the squirrels had mostly held their shapes. He picked up a mechanical squirrel head and put it on his pants. It stayed where he put it, as if his pants had been waiting for the carcass all along. He added another squirrel head along with what might have been an old clock or the happy face of a beaver. He plucked a windup bluebird hanging upside down from the grove of TV antennas and stuck it to his pants. He hooked a monkey playing cymbals over the pocket in back where he once would have carried a wallet.

The brook was now a sluggish stream running from the side of a hill of oil drums. On all sides, the debris was heaped so high you could only see a patch of smoky sky. Piles of old French horns, bent trombones and tubas hid the car. He pulled the horns down and crushed them underfoot and made a path. She followed.

The car looked like a thing that had never moved. It might have been a big soda can crushed by a giant. A fan of broken glass spread out in front of it.

He got in behind the wheel. She wrenched the passenger door off and got it, too.

“What now?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

He put the hammer at the end of his arm on top of the steering wheel.

“Do you want to hear my theory?” he asked.

She sighed.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. “My theory is that when it became possible to exchange our biological bodies for mechanical bodies that might last forever, because you could always get spare parts for them, we were the first on our block to do it.”

“I suppose that does sound like us,” she said.

“Of course, there was the matter of expense,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Life is always about money.”

He knocked himself on the head with his hammer, and it sounded like a dull gong. “I mean, how much do you suppose we could afford to spend on these?”

“Not much, if you ask me,” she said.

“Not to mention the integrity of the flesh that seemed to be layered over the basic frame.”

“Yes, let’s not mention that,” she said.

“So, my theory is that our illusions have been repossessed,” he said.

“How do you mean?”

“We’re like this,” he said, “because the bank or whoever has come and taken back all of our pretty fantasies.”

“There’s a name for the trouble with your theory,” she said.

“Oh? And would you like to enlighten me on just what that could be?”

“It’s called the Continuity Problem,” she said. “If, as you say, we were once biological and we decided to move, so to speak, how do we know we’re the same people?”

“I don’t see the problem,” he said.

“Let’s suppose our brain patterns were duplicated exactly and ported into our new hardware,” she said.

“Right. That’s just what I’m saying.”

“Okay,” she said. “So, at some point our patterns must have existed both in our old heads and in some device at the same time.”

“So?”

“So, was it really you in your old head or was it you in the new device?”

“Both,” he said.

“But, the old biological you didn’t continue into the new mechanical you,” she said. “From those people’s viewpoints we simply died. That’s the problem with your theory. We wouldn’t really be ourselves.”

“That could be true, you know,” he said. “We might not be our old selves.”

“But it isn’t true,” she said. “I think we’ve always been as we are. My theory is that someone is beaming evil illusions at us this very moment!”

“You’re thinking we’re not really robots?”

“And we never have been robots,” she said. “We think we’re like this because some malevolent force is imposing dreams on us. It’s a trick.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “Your theory demands some evil outside force beaming illusions at us. Metaphysical hocus pocus.”

“Your theory,” she said, “demands some evil outside force repossessing our illusions—some silly cyber-repo-man.”

They spent a few quiet moments staring out the empty front window at the freeway pileup the world had become.

“Our beautiful life,” she said. “The house. Your wonderful job.”

“I managed a hamburger joint,” he said.

“Yes, but it was a very good hamburger joint.”

“It’s nice of you to say so,” he said.

“The music,” she said.

“I suppose we should try to climb out of here,” he said.

“We could just sit here until it goes away,” she said.

“I really don’t think it’s going to go away,” he said.

“You’ll see,” she said.

“Fat chance,” he said.

“Those horrible pants,” she said.

“Look who’s talking,” he said.

Her head burst into flames.

“Watch it!” He scrambled out of the car. A moment later she got out, too. Flames raged up from her head.

That was so just like her, he thought and turned and walked toward the embankment.

“Hey!” she said. “Hey! You can’t set my head on fire and just walk off. Come back here!”

“What do you want from me?” he said without turning to look back at her. He didn’t stop walking. “This is the best we could do.” Why was she blaming him for her head anyway? Her fire and his hot words could be totally coincidental.

“Please.” There was something in her tone, something helpless, something speaking to their long history which had not always been happy, but had been often good, or at least not too bad most of the time.

He signed. He turned. He would have recognized her anywhere. Even without flesh. Maybe it was the way she stood, her shoulders slumped, her metal head ablaze.

“Bang it,” he said, “maybe you can put it out if you bang it.”

“I won’t bang it,” she said.

“Oh, all right,” he said. “Okay. Hold still.” He walked back to her.

He had no lungs and couldn’t blow, and when he waved his hands and slapped at the flames, they just got bigger, so maybe it was good he couldn’t blow. He glanced around the junkyard and spotted a bent and rusted metal bucket. “Hold on,” he said.

He dumped nails and dirt from the bucket and put it over her head.

“How’s that?” he asked.

“I don’t think it’s working.” Her voice was muffled.

She was probably right. There were still a few flames licking out of the black smoke billowing from under the rim of the bucket.

“Grab on,” he said. “Maybe it’ll go out as we walk.”

She groped around blindly and then seized him with the alligator clip of her right hand.

He led her around the perimeter of their secret place. Piled high on all sides were mountains of oil drums and old tires, hills of twisted metal lawn furniture. Smashed television sets. Piles of kitchen gadgets. Steam whistles. Buckets of bolts and pails of nails. Dead cars and broken bicycles.

There were no sounds from the freeway above, no sounds from the exit ramp, no sounds from the bridge. If there were other machines out there, they weren’t making any noise.

“My peacock,” she said.

“Will you get off the subject of my pants?” he asked.

“Who said anything about your pants?”

“Maybe your head would go out if you didn’t talk so much,” he said.

They made another circuit around the junkyard. There was no easy way out, no gentle slope, no simple climb. He took her back to the blanket. Most of the meat was gone, some stains, bits that might be meat and might be metal. “Sit down,” he said and guided her into a chair. “I want to see how hard it would be to climb the slope.”

He walked back to exit ramp-side. The distance here should be the shortest. He took a look back at her sitting with her hands folded in her lap, a little black smoke still drifting from under the bucket over her head. A mechanical woman in a metal garden waiting for her mechanical man to come back so they could open their wicker-wire picnic basket and eat aluminum foil sandwiches. Someone should do a painting.

He looked up the slope. He couldn’t tell where the top was. It might go on forever. He bent at the waist and put the hammer at the end of his arm down on an oil drum. It rolled away from him, and he fell. He got up and tried again, and brought an avalanche of junk down on top of himself. He fought his way to the surface. His body was just not built for scrambling up hills of junk.

He could probably keep bringing down the junk on his head until he made a path through to the dirt, but it would take a long time. And then what? He had a sudden picture of himself crawling to the top at last and looking down at her and realizing that she couldn’t climb out and he couldn’t climb back down.

He wouldn’t let that be the way they ended.

He went back to her. She was humming something under her bucket. There wasn’t much smoke now.

He walked around the edge of the blanket, righting the upside- down windup birds on the TV antennas. He lined up the mechanical squirrel skulls and cobbled together enough old parts to make a couple of raccoons, if you knew they were supposed to be raccoons and didn’t look too closely and weren’t too critical.

He sat down on the other chair.

He leaned forward and pulled the bucket from her head. “Raccoons,” he said.

Her head split open in a smile.

He turned the bucket upside down and held it between his knees and tapped out a rhythm with his hammer.

“Our music,” he said.

“La la. La la,” she sang.

In the Refrigerator

S
o I come home to find her sitting on the hide-a-bed with this brown paper bag over her head. She hasn’t turned on the lights. There are shadows everywhere. I can just make out the name of the grocery store printed in upside-down letters on the front of the bag. She’s wearing one of the big bags.

“What are you doing?” I say.

“Don’t talk to me,” she says.

I reach across her and turn on the table lamp. I see that she’s wearing basketball shoes untied, and that her hands are folded in her lap.

I look her up and down, becoming strangely aroused, knowing that she knows I’m looking at her but can’t look back.

“I’m looking at you,” I say.

“Leave me alone.”

I sit down beside her, being careful not to touch her but sitting close enough on the sagging couch to make her lean in my direction. She moves away from me in prissy little annoyed scoots. Her bag wobbles, but when she’s gotten as far from me as she can, she straightens it, then puts her hands back in her lap. I sigh and settle back with my arm across the top of the couch, my hand just behind her head. I stretch out my legs. They don’t quite reach the opposite wall. Otherwise, we’d never be able to fold the couch out into a bed at night. I could reach to my side and take something from our tiny refrigerator if there was anything I wanted in our tiny refrigerator. The place smells of her. The place smells of me. It’s uniquely our smell now, merged in the end by these close walls.