Meet Me in the Moon Room (18 page)

He dropped his arms and moved away from the door. He couldn’t force her to stay. Now was the time for innovative action.

“I’ll shave!” he cried and dashed for the bathroom. “Don’t leave!”

Tess looked around the room. “Okay,” she said. “Once more. Just one more time.” She straightened her clothes and crossed her legs and settled back on the couch to watch the bathroom door.

Lewis was a long time in there banging around and running the faucets and finally flushing the toilet. When he emerged, he’d put on a big smile below what might have been mistaken for a milk mustache.

Tess gasped.

“It’s the Band-Aid isn’t it?” Lewis touched the white strip under his nose. “Well, it’ll take some time for the ah . . . residue of My Mustache to wear off.”

Tess couldn’t tear her eyes away from the creature glued to Lewis’ bald head. The turtle clawed at the air, moving all four legs and stretching out its neck as if it were swimming to Bermuda, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

“What?” Lewis said. “What?” He patted the turtle. “My New Hairpiece? You don’t like it. Is there no pleasing you, Tess?”

We Kill a Bicycle

W
e’ve hidden ourselves along the bike path. Everything is so green and wet and restless, rustling with the river breeze. Ants keep getting on my arms, but I flick them off with my fingers and imagine their tiny screams as they shoot through the air and fall and fall into the moldy leaves around my knees. Laura is out there somewhere. I want to put my tongue in her ear. I want to hear her suck in her breath when I do it. I want to make her smile. She’s so serious these days, so far away, somehow.

What I hear instead is Rodney whispering. I want to tell him to knock it off, but I know it wouldn’t do any good. He’s into one of his stories about the old days, about killing skateboards, easy meat, and I want to say to him, Rodney, I want to say, so if they were such good eating and if they were so silly, like the way you could hear them a long way off trying to get up on some curb or low concrete wall for no reason a person could figure out, and if they were so easy to catch the way you make them sound, what I want to know is why you old farts killed them all. How come you didn’t leave any for us? None of you could have been that hungry. Why didn’t you think of your grandchildren?

All of us are hungry now. Old folks to babies. I dig through the leaves around my knees and find a slick stone and toss it into the brush from which comes Rodney’s voice, and he says ouch! and then some other nasty stuff, he’s worse than the children, but then we all hear the treetop scout whistle, bicycles coming, and even Rodney gets quiet. I can smell my own excitement, peppery sweat, and I rub my wet palms up and down over the hair on my thighs. We don’t get bikes every day.

We’ve hidden ourselves just inside a long green corridor of trees and thick brush. There is a small rise in the grassy stretch of ground before the bike path enters the forest, and I now see a bike pull up and stop. No other bikes come up beside her, and I wonder if maybe I should be not believing our luck. Can she really be alone? She puts a hand above her eyes to shade the late afternoon sun. She pulls her shoulders up, and I see her tanned breasts rise, then she lets her shoulders drop. She looks behind, then peers into our leafy corridor again. She’s going to chance it. I know she is. Sometimes I have a feeling for these things.

She puts her hands on her handlebars and moves back and forth like she’s winding up to make a run for it. Then she’s rolling right at us, pedaling for all she’s worth, white thighs pumping, long gold hair flowing out behind her.

Once she gets into our corridor, a couple of us, I don’t look to see who, probably Magdalen and Holly, step out to block any retreat she might make. I get ready to jump. Laura has insisted on being the blocker for days now, but this is the first time we’ve had a bike for her to actually block. It’s like she’s got something to prove. She doesn’t know that I always put big Sidney up ahead of her in case the bike gets by her.

I see Laura step out in front of the bike. No way a bicycle would stop for a person as small and fine-boned as my Laura, Laura with her black tangled hair and her dirty feet, but she jumps up and down and waves her hands in the air and makes a lot of scary noises, and it’s enough to make the bike swerve to the side, and that’s just when I jump out and deliver the soles of my feet to the bike’s upper body and the side of her head, and she goes tumbling, and the rest of our group is on her, everyone with a shout and a stick, everyone whooping and swatting the life out of what will be our lunch and dinner, too, maybe even some left over for tomorrow. Everyone participates. We make no apologies. No one is allowed to be squeamish; if you want to eat it, you’ve got to be willing to kill it. I shoulder my way in for a few licks of my own. It doesn’t take long to kill the bicycle. She doesn’t put up much of a fight.

I move everyone back, and I pull the bicycle’s legs up over her handlebars and then up to her chest so I can get at her tailbone where the metal parts join the meat parts. I run my fingers up that shaft until I find just the right place where metal becomes bone. I put my hand out for the bolt cutters. Someone takes the bike by the arms and legs and applies light pressure, and I put the bolt cutters on the place I’ve located. I’ve gotten it right. The cutters snip through the shaft easily with a satisfying crunch.

I carry the bolt cutters over my shoulder as I follow the People dragging the meat back toward camp. I get way down the green corridor before something makes me look back at the metal parts of the bike. What I see freezes me inside. Laura is just standing there looking down at the metal parts, but it’s something about the way she’s standing that frightens me. She nudges the front wheel with her foot, then she bends down and picks up the horrid thing and sets it on its wheels.

“Laura!” I shout.

She looks up at me, and I imagine she’s already got the look of a startled bike in her eyes. I run toward her.

She quickly swings onto the machine, and I groan. I see her tremble from head to toe as the merging happens. She squeezes her eyes closed, and her tongue pokes out of her mouth.

Just before I can grab her (not that I would know what to do with her now anyway) she screams and her eyes go wide and she wheels around and pedals for the grasslands. She still hasn’t figured out how to get her tongue back into her mouth. I run after her, but a person can’t outrun a bicycle.

I run some, following, then I walk. I lose sight of her, then I see her again. This following feels entirely fruitless, but I can’t stop. I know she’s gone, but that fact hasn’t yet hit me down low where I live. Soon though, I see Laura join a herd of bikes congregating on a small grassy hill. The big male wheels up and lightly touches her breasts then nuzzles her ear. They look so good together, like centaurs. I want to kill him. I walk to the foot of the hill.

The bikes watch me closely, but they don’t move off. They know I am no danger to them out here. In fact, if I keep walking, there is a good chance they could be danger to me. I stop.

“Laura,” I call. “How can you do this? What about us?”

She pushes away from the big male and wheels around in a circle then comes down the hill a little until I can see her eyes. He watches her closely but doesn’t try to stop her, poised as he is pointing down the hill at me with one foot on the ground the other on a pedal, his hands on his hips, ready, I guess, to rescue her if I try anything funny. The rest of the herd titters nervously behind him.

“I want the wind, Desmond,” she says.

“The wind?”

Her look destroys me. She doesn’t see me at all. She wheels around, and the bikes make way for her as she moves up the hill. She gives me one last glance back over her shoulder. I don’t follow.

The wind? I have been abandoned by a woman who wants the wind. What can that mean? It makes me crazy. I want to kill something, and I’m not even hungry.

Okay, I’ve snapped. That’s the way it is, and if that’s the way it is, maybe I’ll go out and do something daring, maybe do something a little foolish, maybe do something that will show what I’m made of.

Maybe I’ll go down into the streets and kill myself a car.

Or die trying.

Be a hero.

Get slapped on the butt by the guys.

Listen to the crowd roar.

Get the girl back.

Be happy.

Sure.

A Holiday Junket

S
o we teleport for the holidays to a world where everyone is required to carry a huge fishbowl all of the time. It takes both hands to hold the heavy bowl, and once you’re holding it, there’s no way to let go. The fish in the bowl is a barking goldfish. It likes to eat spiders. The so-called kamikaze spider is as big as a basketball, and it always goes for your face. Once you have a spider trying to suck out your eyes, you have very little time to perform the only course of action open to you. What you must do is plunge your head into the bowl so your barking goldfish can eat the kamikaze spider. None of this was explained in the brochure.

Also big news to us is the fact that this is a world where the dimension necessary for long distance telepathy is missing. Just as sound cannot cross a vacuum, here thoughts do not travel in the ether. I could beam my intentions at her until I was blue in the face, and it wouldn’t do any good.

What we must do is somehow touch heads. If we can touch heads I can ask her if maybe we shouldn’t get out of here. If she agrees, and I can’t imagine that she won’t, we can hotfoot it through the forest and across the creek to the exit portal which if I’m not mistaken I can actually see from here. Touching heads, however, is going to be a big problem, since we’re both holding these really big fishbowls.

The sky is sea green, and the puffy pink clouds racing across it move too quickly to really be clouds, not that I thought there were clouds in the first place, since we came to know everything we needed to know about this world as soon as we popped into existence here. None of it makes me feel like singing Christmas carols.

I suppose I could just take off running. Would she get the idea and follow? Or would she misunderstand and think that I’d known what this world was like all along and that I’d lured her here to abandon her?

I cluck my tongue at her trying to get her attention so she’ll come over here so maybe we can touch heads, but she’s looking around fearfully like something might jump out of the feather duster trees and grab her, and the look on her face would be funny and adorable, oh you silly goose, if it were not the case that her fears are entirely justified. Even the little bugs on this world are as big as your feet.

She finally sees me making faces at her and comes over and our fishbowls clink together as we try to go head to head. Our fish thrash around barking like crazy and snapping at each other through the glass. Whenever we lean in to touch, the fish leap up out of the water and nip at our chins. Boy, if I ever do manage to get a thought in edgewise what I’ll think is maybe we should have opted for a more traditional holiday with growling mall crowds and a rented uncle albert singing drunken sailor songs and fruit cake and santa clauses and colored lights and disappointed children and eggnog.

I walk around her hoping we can touch from the rear, but as it turns out, and this is not something I’d realized earlier, our butts are almost perfectly matched height-wise. And the bowls are so heavy. I can’t lean far enough back to touch my head to hers without spilling water out of my fishbowl, and if I spilled too much water and the fish got stressed and became maybe moody and lethargic, who would eat the kamikaze spider surely even now tensing for a leap at my face?

I feel a sudden flash of irritation, and I’m glad we didn’t connect just then. Otherwise we might have exchanged unkind remarks about our respective butts.

I move to her side but no matter how we arrange ourselves we cannot connect. Front to back? No good. All we do is produce a clinking clanking splashing and barking cacophony of goldfish.

Our struggle to re-establish the connection we have always had suddenly becomes desperate as I realize, and I can see it in her eyes that it has dawned upon her too, that we may never hook up again. We could be stranded and alone like this forever. We spend a couple of minutes jumping around making hopeless and helpless hooting sounds, grunts and cries, whimpers and finally barks not too different from the barks of our goldfish.

Then there is a quiet moment. The eye of the storm. And then we panic. I can’t see her fishbowl; I can only see her. She fills my vision, and nothing matters as much as our reunion. I cannot rationally appraise the danger we face as we rush together and meet like belly-bumping cowboys and our bowls shatter and our fish fall into the high grass, and she wet, slippery and shivering rushes into my arms.

There is a momentary riot of chewing sounds from the grass, and then the worldwide bug symphony that I’d scarcely noticed before stops absolutely. The pink non-clouds gather above us like a fastforward weather report. Those black drops dropping will probably be spiders.

I pull her in close and we touch heads, and in an explosion of color and big bands, jungle orchids and satin cat feet up and down my spine, it’s like a big part of your mind has just wondered off whistling, and now it’s back and all the pieces snap into place, a cosmic ah ha and she me we spiral down and down to a perfect state of not quite seamless sameness, the two of us, the one of us. You can phone your congressperson, and you can write a letter to the editor. You can curse your luck, and you can shake your fist at the sky. You can drop to your knees in an eleventh hour appeal to magic. But in the end there is really only this.

We make a dash for it.