Meet Me in the Moon Room (17 page)

How can that be, Victor?

It’s all here, I said, the whole ball of wax, from soup to nuts, liver and lights, every last scrap, the works, his very essence.

I can bring him back.

This book is a symbolic map of his mind and can be reinstalled now that the proper technology is available.

I’ve only to pop the book into the hopper here and hook up the hoses and crank the crank and the corpse will dance again darling put out your hand and wake the Finn again.

Oh my, yes, she said, and we said what she said, and he said, so encouraged by this realization, this sudden spacklesparkle in dark eyes, you know we know, I swept the sheet from the body.

You can’t imagine the trouble I went through to get the parts. Knocked together from boneyard bits and pieces picked up at the sites of auto accidents, I sewed a lot of it together myself.

Ugg, she said.

Oh, we’re not done, I said, we’re definitely not done. We still have to idandify the body, I said. Mucho! Bring me the pearls and the red high heels! I pushed at the cheek of the corpse with my finger but it didn’t push back. What would you think of a spot of rouge?

Rouge is nice, she said.

And this, I said, and put a small wrapped package next to the body.

What is it?

A mustache.

I peeled back the waxed paper and she leaned in close to look.

So small, she said, one might even say, prissy.

But just the thing, considering the rest of the getup. If it ever gets here. Mucho! There. Just look at how it seems to anchor the nose.

I think you’ve got it upside down.

Quite right. Look now, isn’t that nice?

My assistant ran in with the pearls and shoes, and Elizabeth grabbed my arm and hissed in my ear, my god that dog has hands!

Mucho Poocho is also an early model, I said, he said and reached out a hand to the Wolfhound who snarled and stepped to the rail and stood gazing out at the gray sea.

It’s not like you’re born knowing how to put bodies together. Feeling a little defensive, and more than a little put out at the hangdog look on Mucho’s face, I snatched the red shoes from his hand and fitted them onto the feet of the corpse. The sudden color chased away my irritation and I pulled the head up off the table and draped the string of pearls around the neck.

Next we hook up the hoses, I said.

So in the name of the bladder and of the bones and of the doily moist upon his head, be quiet, Elizabeth, it is not peeing on you, and hold still, that one goes there yes, push, push! Help her Mucho. Our lad’s on the way. Hold this now. And this while I crank out a new song for a new age and a new King of the Yeast.

Oh, look, Elizabeth, can’t you see the body becoming more inwardly mobile?

I cranked the crank, and the machine chewed pages, and the body moved like a fleshy sack of puppies. Sparks danced from every silvery surface in the lab and our hair stood on end and Mucho Poocho howled a long low Irish howl of lost green days and lost green places.

The body sat up.

Telegram for Mr. Juice!

I knew it, he cried, I knew you couldn’t start the melodeum without me, not without me, you wouldn’t, you couldn’t, not without me. Two thousand and fun! Oh look at all the pretty lights! I explode from the wilderness, your Dudeoronomy daddyo, all dancing shoes and swinging pearls, with a new message to be fluteful and signify! But you want to know about, you say you’re just wild about, you say you cannot live without your neither shall, neither shall, neither shall nots. And I say knock it off, cut it out. Cease Co. is talking new rules, a whole new policy. In our winding down, we are winding up. This time the rabbit hole opens into a new century where everyone talks the talk now that Mr. Juice is loose.

He ripped the hoses from his body and swung his legs around to dangle over the edge of the table, and the sun suddenly tossed through the skylight a horseshoe halo around his head, and he pulled at the hoses and dragged the machine to the table and picked it up and threw it across the room where it shattered into twelve inthesink pisces. It’ll be better than Dracula’s nightout, he said, it’ll be wilder than a piece of Mississippi pie from Mr. Chew Chew.

His noodlerumble headnoise, the horrible sound of greaseless wheels turning and turning and turning, shook the walls and made my beakers jitterbug rattled my test tubes my retorts as he rose on jellyjuice legs and spread his arms wide and grinned his fair-weather grin and said what you seize is what you get and said ad albiora alba sanguis agni drink my blood in a cut crystal goblet liberally laced with vodka and stirred with a stalk of fresh celery. He held out a dotted palm and said use this missing period at the very end of things.

He took his first step, then another, monster moving across the scrubbed laboratory floor toward us. Elizabeth took my arm and huddled close. Mucho hid behind us but still peeked around my leg.

He’d seen us at once, but now he seemed to be really looking at us and I could see my error written large on his face. Something had gone terribly wrong.

A certain cruel cunning came alive in his eyes, and he questioned me closely, saying, what is that you’ve got there, my cold mad faery father? He took Elizabeth’s arm between a thumb and first finger, very plump, in her slopery slip, my mouseling, little frogchen, touch me with your girlick breath.

I put Elizabeth behind me.

Make me one of those, he said. He could look right over the top of my head and I had no doubt what he meant. I want one of those.

It was easy to see that the experiment had failed. Maybe everything necessary had not been in the book after all, or perhaps my machine had simply failed to extract it all. Or maybe you never know what you’ll get until you get it. In any case, I had created an abomination, and now he wanted me to make him a bride.

Never, I said.

Maybe I’ll take that one if you won’t make me one of my own, he said and lowered his chin and looked up at me like a buffalo calculating a charge.

Leave her alone, I said.

Mink you, Pop.

Oh yeah, well you can just read my mind!

He slapped me to my knees, grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around and got me around the neck in a wrestling hold from which I had little hope of slipping. Help, I shouted to Mucho Poocho. Attack! Kill! Mucho hunkered down on the floor with a whimper and the monster snortled.

Shall we fiddle with fido?

Not fido, I told him.

Tease fido, eh tease fido, eh eh tease fido.

Mucho put his hands over his eyes, he said, and we all looked at the dog who had been looking back at us over his shoulder but who now looked back out to sea.

It’s not my job to make you comfortable, the monster said, and we said maybe he’s got a point, lazy poach dogs, the lot of us, and he gave my neck a twist and tossed me to one side.

Perhaps somewhere in his dark semisubconscious he had some feeling for his creator that constrained the twist and left my neck unbroken. Even so I was sorely stunned and quite unable to help Elizabeth who scooted away from the brute in little fits and sneezes.

She avoided him until she reached the wall, then he grabbed her, and she crumbled like a dried flower in his fingers and he looked around in surprise like what happened is that all there is how could she be so fragile this is all so embarrassing.

Birds darkened the skylight and beat the glass with their black wings, thunder sounded, and a cold wind found every crack and stirred my notes, and tossed my hair, and Mr. (call me Cease Co.) Juice blew CEO cigar smoke from his wide nostrils, said we are the Doggymen, and leaped into dance, lifting his knees high happy grape stomping goofy grin, this sad patchwork graveyard doll, celebrating something foul, and dropped to his knees and scrambled bugfast across the room to me, ripping at my clothes, dogcurious nose and doggy lips in the crack of my ass, blew me up justlikethat with smoke and I floated away, a fat macey man balloon belching smoke rings and drifting upright then drifting upside down.

The skylight shattered and black birds like Brimstoker bats swarmed into the lab and settled everywhere, mostly on Elizabeth.

May you have a million years in hell to think about what you’ve done, I said.

It’s the Count who thinks, he said.

I’ll have my revenge.

Eat your selfish, he said, it will be cold comfort.

And then he was gone and I swam down to Elizabeth and shooed away the butcherbirds and read the note written on the bottom of her foot: cheep. When had the monster found time to defile the body?

Struck by a sudden suspicion, I sat down on the floor and pulled off my boots. Yes. Notes on the bottoms of both feet. On my left foot, most significantly, a quote from the book itself: I am speaking to us in the second person. On the right foot: Direct quotes from the book will henceforth, both forward and backwards in time, be printed in a holy color that only true believers can see.

So you will agree there was nothing I could have done but hound the monster to the very ends of the earth, and that is what has brought me to these icy wastelands, he said and put his head down on the deck and died like the Easter bunny you’ve hugged too tightly and we said but hold on a moment, we keep getting the monster and the doctor mixed up. Mucho Poocho spoke then, said, so just who do you think rode the moocow into the sea?

My Mustache

I
n lieu of the whiskers which never looked any good anyway—sparse and weedy like someone’s neglected strip of lawn on the wrong side of town during a drought and after a yard fire, Lewis superglued a foot-long garter snake to his smooth upper lip. The snake had some trouble adjusting and nipped his face often that first morning, and Lewis was, for probably the first time in his life, thankful he wore glasses, but after a few hours the two of them, snake and man, came to know and love one another. Lewis called the snake My Mustache. He would fed it bugs and baby mice and bird eggs.

Considering his bald head, Lewis figured he’d say things like my hair just slipped down onto my face. Maybe wink and wiggle his eyebrows up and down lewdly.

Ooo la la.

My Mustache would punctuate his points with its forked tongue.

He couldn’t wait to show Tess.

Tess didn’t like it.

That night, Lewis sat at his kitchen table, absently stroking My Mustache, eating pitted black olives, tempting the snake with one now and then, chasing away Tess’ cigarette smoke with a Queen of England wave, pretending the eruptions in her Spanish eyes didn’t really mean anything, making small talk, talking fast and imagining she gave a rat’s ass about what he was saying. She’d stare at My Mustache like a hypnotized rabbit then jerk herself erect to shoot him an icy look, then her eyes would be drawn back down to the snake.

“Must you stare, Tess?” Lewis said. “Put out your cigarette and eat your spaghetti. You don’t like my marinara?”

Tess jerked her eyes away from the snake. “Lewis,” she said. “We have to talk.”

“I know that line,” Lewis said. “It’s what women say just before they show you the door, just before they tell you to hit the road, Jack, and donchoo come back no more no more, donchoo . . .”

“Stop it, Lewis. This is serious.”

“I know. I know.” Lewis put his hands over his eyes. “I get like this whenever someone special just can’t see beyond appearances to the real me.” He opened his fingers to peek out at her. “It’s not how you look that really counts, Tess.”

“Lewis, you have a snake glued to your face!”

“You don’t like My Mustache?”

She grabbed her long raven hair with both hands and pulled it away from her head like a tent. “I can’t stand this, Lewis. It’s always something! This is just one more way you push people away.”

“By growing a mustache? You’re saying I’m pushing people away by growing a mustache?”

“Ask yourself, Lewis,” she said and leaned across the table and put her hand on top of his and squeezed. “Who will want to touch you with a snake glued to your face? You don’t want me or anyone else to get too close. That’s what the snake is all about.”

Lewis looked away, finally pushed into a sulk.

“Just look,” she said, not ready to let him withdraw altogether. “Look at the way people are staring at us, at you. Don’t you care? Can’t you imagine how I feel?”

“Concentrate, Tess,” he said. “This is my kitchen. There’s no one else here.” He pushed the wicker basket of garlic bread in its red checked napkin across the table. “Have some bread.”

Tess bit her lip. He thought she would try to convince him again of the reality of the people who followed her everywhere, but she looked down at her hands, then took a deep breath and said, “If there were other people here, Lewis, they’d likely be thinking unkind thoughts about you. And about me for having anything to do with you.”

“Screw ‘em,” Lewis said, deep proletarian indignation emerging and then exploding in his eyes at last. “What made this country great is the way we’re different, not the way we’re alike.”

“This isn’t a political question, Lewis.”

“Everything is a political question, Tess,” he said and snatched up his wine and tossed it at his mouth, splashing Chianti onto My Mustache who hissed and sputtered and spit and fixed Tess with smoldering black snake eyes.

“What?” Tess cocked her head to the side to listen to a voice Lewis couldn’t hear. “Yes, I suppose you could be right.” She snatched the napkin out of her lap and tossed it onto the table and got to her feet. “We’ve agreed, Lewis. All of us. We can’t have anything more to do with you until you get some help.”

He watched her walk for the door, watched her long legs, listened to her heels click on his polished hardwood floor, watched the way her red and green checked skirt swayed first this way and then that way, saw the sad look she gave him over one shoulder as she reached for the brass doorknob, saying, “I guess we’ll all just leave you alone, Lewis.”

“Wait!” Lewis pushed up from the table, trotted across the room, came up behind her, and put his arms around her waist and pulled her close. “Don’t leave, Tess.” He kissed her ear. My Mustache stretched its head around and looked her in the eye.

Tess screamed and elbowed him in the ribs.

He couldn’t let her leave. If he let her go now, she’d be out the door and out of his life, probably forever. He tossed her toward the couch and moved in front of the door and spread his legs and opened his arms over his head, transforming himself into a giant X to block her exit.

“Oh, Lewis.” Her tone was so sad and disappointed.