One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (15 page)

“What?” Pete asked, his middle-class brain unable to comprehend Clellen’s last sentence.

“You know, buck.” She laughed, standing up in the aisle and throwing her arms in the air. “Cheerleaders!” She shouted as she started to do this incredible dance while singing a song, her body gestures and leg-kicking both violent and sexual and clumsy and utterly copied from ancient films when cheerleaders actually existed on Earth, their image exploited and exaggerated for reasons long ago forgotten…

Superman, superfux

I’m a sloppy, out of luck

meet me in a pick-up truck

go-packa-macka-facka

Ring-arounda-rollie-pollie

roll-me-with-your-holy-rollie

I’m a sloppy silly slut

go pack me in the gut

Hieronymus and Bruegel hardly paid any attention to her. Clellen performed this and a thousand other identical routines about five times a day in their classroom. Pete, on the other hand, had never seen anything remotely like this in his entire life.

“Wow!” He cheered, applauding with his big hands. “I like your song!”

She jumped up in the air and landed on his lap, where she immediately placed her open mouth on his, giving him an unbelievably long, wet, tongue-thrusting kiss.

“My gosh!” Pete exclaimed, his face flush with excitement. “I am so joining the Loopie class!” he yelled so loud half the entire transport could hear.

Moments later, the transport arrived at LEM Zone One. Hieronymus noted to himself that he alone among the four knew what the LEM actually was — the others simply didn’t care. Pete stayed with the Loopies, chiefly because Clellen kissed him a few more times, and as they walked to the site of the ancient broken spaceship, he went out of his way to introduce Hieronymus to some of the other kids, saying things like,
this is Hieronymus The Phantom. I got him to join the track team!

A hundred students arrived at once. They disobeyed all the rules regarding the old metal ruin from Earth. They climbed on it, they jumped off, they wrestled, and they all threw things at each other. The teachers yelled and when the kids got themselves in order, the teachers explained what had happened on this very spot two thousand years earlier. The students quickly got bored and some of them began to goof around again — this was a story they had all heard hundreds of times before, and they were more attracted to the glittering casino lights in every direction and all the strange adults crowded around than a pile of broken-down metal vaguely resembling a giant spider sculpture. One boy found a rusted can of beer that had been tossed under the LEM and shouted out loud,
hey, do you think they left this here too?
and everyone laughed. Hieronymus climbed up and jumped off the contraption a few more times, running around with Bruegel and Clellen and Pete.

He was standing on top of the thing when he saw her. She was looking directly at him, walking in his direction.

The girl from Earth.

He froze. The way she walked. Her face. He had never seen anything like her.

It is not a disease. It is inexplicable.
There is nothing wrong with me. They gave it a name that sounds like a disease, but it is nothing of the sort. I don’t know what it is. But I am certain that there is nothing wrong with me.

What do you see when you take your goggles off?

I’m not allowed to talk about it.

But you do take your goggles off.

Sometimes. At night when I sleep. When I wash my face.

So you sometimes can go to the window, like in the middle of the night maybe, and look out.

Yes.

What do you see?

I see everything that normal people can see. And then some.

And then some. What does that mean?

I am not allowed to talk about it. If I am caught, I will be sent away.

I’ve come all the way from Earth.

Then you will go back to your normal life on Earth and forget you ever had this conversation with me. You will forget you ever met me.

Do you know that only One Hundred Percent Lunar People can pilot Mega Cruisers?

What are you talking about?

It’s true. If you want to pilot a Mega Cruiser, you have to be able to see whatever it is that you see. I heard they pilot all the ships in the entire solar system and they don’t wear goggles when they do it.

I don’t believe it.

It’s just a rumor. But I think you would know right away if this idea makes any sense. Certainly, at some time in your life, you have looked up into the sky, into the forever that is the same outer space that we see on Earth. You just told me that you sometimes looked out your window at night. How could you not have looked into the sky? What do you see?

What do you see?

Here she was. Beautiful was too cheap a word. She was an image. A revelation. Fragile. Invincible. An orchid. A silver antenna. She was electricity. She was a fairy. She was a firefly, a silkworm, an imp, a demon, a goddess. A black-eyed, black-haired girl from another planet, from the sphere just above their heads. He felt himself unable to breathe as soon as he came upon her approaching form. He was standing on the lopsided contraption of junk that had at one time carried the first human beings to the Moon. There was a crowd of people, students and tourists, and from them, she emerged, an apparition, her eyes already on his, making him feel childish, her other-worldliness inherent in her awkward walk, her gaze belonging only to him.

She climbed up the ladder the ancients had once climbed down. She did it with the ease of someone from a world where the gravity is harsh, and thus, here on the Moon, can practically float.

He could not move. He was paralyzed with such pleasure as she approached him. Surrounded by the buzzing neon lights of the casinos, standing on a junk pile, an archaeological contraption, broken,
so hard to believe that humanity had once tossed this thing here — a symbol, an endeavor of such high expectations,
it rests crumbled and surrounded by tourists, half of whom do not even know what it is, she walks upon it as if it is her alter, constructed eons ago to mark her arrival on this spot, at this particular time.

She walked right up to him and his world slowed to a halt. Silence enveloped the atmosphere. Huge hummingbirds hovered in the air as she approached.

Humanity took a breathless pause.

Her lips moved.

“Hello. I’m from Earth. I saw you from over there. Are you a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy?”

“Yes, I am.”

Her smile widened. A volcano split the Moon in two, but all he saw were her wonderful black eyes. Her accent when she spoke…

“I would love to speak to you. Do you have some time?”

“Yes. Yes I do.”

His comrades from school quickly became insignificant. They were transformed into shadows, gray and brown and fading into the neon lit cityscape. There was only her. She was from Earth, the forbidden place. She was the most astonishing thing he had ever seen and she came from the tumultuous world of his ancestors.

“What would you like to talk about?”

You can not comprehend what it is that I can see. It can not be explained in words.

Everything can be explained in words.

Not this.

As they walked away from the ruin of the LEM, only Bruegel and Clellen and Pete noticed. Pete, being the by-the-book kind of guy he was, immediately expressed concern that his new friend Hieronymus could get into trouble by cutting. Bruegel, who by now had warmed up to the tellball player, explained that in this case, leaving was not really cutting, but it was more or less deciding independently when to pursue academic pursuits, or, in Bruegel’s pseudo way of making up words to sound more educated, it was a fuxitation of the romular behavioral mode ingrained in the Lunar constitutional triad that allowed for immersions and slegisonic sidemorgraphic thinking in a carpikular sense. Pete thought this explanation sounded logical, especially when Clellen interrupted again and gave him yet one more extraordinary, spine tingling, outrageous kiss on his open mouth with her wondrous yet bad, very bad and beautiful lips. Pete felt his heart palpitate. Where did you learn to kiss like that?! he exclaimed between breaths. As the rest of the class made their way to a nearby museum, Bruegel and Pete and Clellen snuck away to a bar — Bruegel had a fake ID and Pete had a few extra dollars and so they ordered several rounds of beers and the three of them got quite drunk before making their way back to the transport three hours later for the ride home. Hieronymus was nowhere to be found. None of the teacher chaperones made any effort to locate him because he was, in that circumstance, just one of the Loopies, and who really gave a damn about those criminals, that’s all they do is cut class anyway. The bus ride home was uneventful except that Pete and Clellen got a little out of control in their making out. Bruegel fell asleep, and luckily for him, when he finally got back to the apartment he shared with his mother, she did not notice the smell of alcohol on his breath because she herself was pretty smashed as it was, passed out on the living room floor. Clellen was dreading what her father might think if he caught her again with the stink of beer on her lipstick-smeared mouth, so she bought a pack of mints and ate them all — luckily, at the moment she arrived in her own fat, her father was busy in his bedroom with one of his girlfriends, so Clellen did not have to test her mint-favored scheme of covering drunkenness. She sneaked into her room and locked the door by shoving a chair under the doorknob. Pete had never been drunk before in his entire life and he was physically unprepared for his body’s own adverse rejection of it — not to mention his parents’ horrified reaction to the spectacle of their son puking up the unmistakable bile of stinking excess in the living room.

That night, Ringo Rexaphin was beside himself with worry when his son never came home. He called the school, but no one even knew Hieronymus was missing. He dreaded the idea of calling the police. He did not trust them, and they were notorious for singling out One Hundred Percent Lunar People and charging them with the crime of Ocular Assault when, in fact, nothing of the sort happened. Still there was this terrible thing that had happened on the subway just the night before, and he was worried beyond all reason. He spent the night pacing the apartment. Several times he got so worried he almost hyperventilated. He had never known such anxiety. He drank three glasses of whiskey. It changed nothing, and he didn’t even feel it.

Finally, at five in the morning, Hieronymus walked in. His father yelled a lot and almost smacked the sixteen-year-old in the face — but his relief that his son was finally safe at home quickly pushed the possibility of this far away. It was Saturday morning. Hieronymus slept until noon.

Have you ever imagined what a fourth primary color might look like?

I have tried to imagine, but I can’t.

There are three primary colors. Red, yellow, and blue.

I know.

Try to imagine what a fourth one might be like.

Green comes to mind.

Green is just a mix between yellow and blue. Try again.

Purple? Is purple the fourth primary color?

Wrong again.

Is it a brownish mix?

It is not a mix at all. You don’t mix any colors to get it. It’s primary.

What you are saying is impossible. Logically, there is no fourth primary color.

There is a fourth primary color. I know. I see it. There is probably a fifth and sixth one too. There may be an infinite number of primary colors. We don’t see them. You only see three. I can only see four.

Does it hurt to see this color? Does it give you a headache?

These goggles give me a headache.

Why must you wear them? It seems to me to be a very excessive measure.

I am required by law to wear them.

That seems like a very unfair law. What would happen if you all decided to refuse?

There would be a mass hysteria like you wouldn’t believe.

Why would anyone get hysterical over people taking their goggles off?

You would get hysterical if I took my goggles off.

How could you say that? You don’t even know me.

It doesn’t matter. You will become totally hysterical if I take my goggles off.

Prove it. Take your goggles off.

No. I will go to jail if I do that.

None of what you say makes any sense.

But it does. My eyes are the color of the fourth primary color. Your brain will short-circuit if you even look at it.

Show me.

I can’t. I have already broken the law by talking about it.

Show me your eyes.