One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (16 page)

The last person who looked at my eyes died.

I won’t die.

No, but you won’t be the same ever again.

They had to keep walking in order to maintain this conversation. He had known many people from Earth before, but they were all adults. She was a teenager. Someone his own age. He was amazed at the graceful way she walked beside him — as if she were a dancer, almost floating, the peculiar way her arms swayed at her side. He was enthralled with her delightful accent. She told him exactly where on Earth she came from, but he had never heard of it, and it hardly mattered to him because the experience of listening to her speak was in itself a musical treat.

They passed a gigantic casino experiencing a catastrophic emergency — hordes of gamblers were leaving in large groups and a fire truck swerved almost onto the sidewalk, the firefighters rushing out and charging into the casino lobby. As they passed, deep inside, way beyond the lobby, orange tongues of fire sizzled out of control. From inside this cauldron, excited, panicked voices could be heard, and as they tried to pass, a crowd gathered.

The spectators prevented some of the firemen from getting their equipment from out of the fire truck, and three men who appeared to be together got into an argument with the fire chief — they were offended he had dragged a huge filthy coil of hoses from the truck and deposited it just in front of them. As they argued, there was an explosion from inside the casino, and the fames suddenly grew with a bright intensity.

One of the three men, dressed in a flashy bright blue blazer and a hat of brushed aluminum, flustered with indignation at the sloppiness of the firefighter.

“You have a tremendous amount of nerve!” he complained. “Those hoses are filthy! You almost got them on our shoes!”

The fire chief shouted orders into a tiny, old-fashioned wristmounted radio and ignored them. He was joined by another fireman as they grabbed more bulky pieces of equipment and dumped them just next to the hoses. This caused another self-righteous outburst from the same spectator.

“Excuse me!” the fellow with the aluminum hat shouted. “Our shoes were almost stained by your carelessness!”

The chief had no time for this. There was another explosion, and the other fireman addressed the concerns of the spectator.

“Sir, kindly move away. You are preventing us from dealing with this emergency.”

“No. You move away. You move these hoses out of the way. I am not walking into that filthy street with these new shoes, which your careless fire chief almost stained with those disgusting hoses.”

As he said that last sentence, three new firefighters rushed past him from another truck that had just careened onto the scene. In doing so, they brushed against one of the other three complaining men — this being a fellow who wore a wonderfully exquisite wrinkled paper suit of bright white. The three of them moaned at the large black greasy soot mark this left behind across the gentleman’s shoulder.

“Look at that! Look at that!” shouted the man in the aluminum hat. “What are you going to do about the stain on my friend’s suit?”

The firemen were too occupied with their immediate worries of preventing the entire casino from going up in fames to pay any attention to this rude dandy. Three or four silver figures showed up — rescue robots — mannequin-like, faceless machines designed to walk through fire and locate trapped people. They reported to the chief, who told them to run up to the tenth floor, the fourteenth floor, and the twenty-ninth floor. As he said that, there was a shattering of glass, and looking up, three hysterical faces began shouting and screaming from the twentieth floor. “Track those voices!” the chief yelled to the last robot who ran into the spreading fames, "I think they might be on twenty…”

The fire was spreading fast, and the chief grumbled to another firefighter about the cheap and hazardous materials used in constructing these skyscrapers. An orange ball of light exploded on the sixth floor, and a fire marshal said to the chief,
what the hell were they keeping up there?
And the chief said,
this looks a little like arson, don’t you think so?
Three firemen were carried out, suffering from smoke inhalation — a collapsing beam had fallen on them, ripped away their breathing equipment, and forced them to inhale the insanely hot, soot-filled air. As they were transported on their emergency gurneys, the back of one fireman’s coat brushed against the checkerboard trousers of the complaining fellow with the aluminum hat who had refused to budge from his spot. He looked down and saw the soot stain across his pant leg and fell into a screaming fit about his pants and his shoes that were almost marked and his friend’s paper suit, which was ruined. The firefighters ignored him as more human screams filled the air. That only encouraged the man, who persisted, despite the mortal danger in every direction, to create an enormous distraction with his ridiculous ranting. Finally, the fire marshal told him,
you know, you are really in our way. I am sorry that your clothes got stained, but I think you should have known better as you are standing right in the middle of a fire zone and you are just preventing us from carrying out our responsibilities, so won’t you please move over there across the street? I am warning you, not only will you get arrested as soon as the police arrive, but you will only get more soot marks on your clothes if you don’t leave.
This was a fruitless plea. The three furious men stood in their spot without moving and declared they would stay glued to the sidewalk until someone from the Sea of Tranquility Fire Department wrote them a check to cover the cost of dry cleaning their unfairly soiled clothes, and just as the gentleman in the aluminum hat made this loud and vocal demand, his face round and red with the most extreme anger, his moment of standing his ground proved to be a fatal one for him and his friends. Thirty floors above their heads, there was another loud crash followed by a massive object falling, falling and screaming — it was a man, a four-hundred-pound man, who had leapt from his apartment to escape the fames. He landed directly upon the three complainers and crushed them all on impact, in particular their vertebrae columns and their skulls. The crunching sound was louder than the fire-alarm-and-screaming cacophony, and despite the instant deaths of the three stubborn gentlemen, the four-hundred-pound window leaper emerged from this freakish accident completely intact. He had no problem whatsoever with the fire marshal’s request to stand across the street.

The girl from Earth began to cry, and Hieronymus put his arm around her, a genuine protective gesture — he was taller than her, and he had already seen death happen right before his own unshielded eyes. This horror scene had reminded him of the way he killed Lester two years earlier. He felt the girl trembling, and he wished they had not wandered down this particular street. The day was ruined. Her shoulders were shaking, and her eyes were full of tears.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Those poor men, those poor men. I’ve never seen dead people before. I can’t believe what happened. One second they were alive, then one second later, they were crushed under that falling man! If only they had listened to the fire marshal, they would still be alive!”

“Yes, but then that big fellow who had fallen upon them would be dead. They gave their lives to him.”

“Horrible,” she cried. “Death is horrible!” Then she held him tight as they walked through the crowd, fighting it like fish swimming upstream, through all the currents of the gawking population heading towards the spectacle of the fire, which was getting out of control under the red sky. More fire trucks came roaring up the avenue, passing them and then heading toward the unfortunate, burning catastrophe.

She was truly scared. He was also scared, but for different reasons.

“I watched those men crumble,” she moaned. “Three men, crushed like insects — I can’t believe how their backbones snapped like that, their skulls…”

Tears streamed down her face. Sirens wailed. A man walked past wearing a black derby. He turned to smile at her, but she nearly fainted as he had only one eye — the other was just a long-ago healed eye socket with bland skin coating its cavern interior. The fellow had a handlebar mustache. When he opened his mouth, a miniature baby hummingbird on a leash of dental foss flew out and hovered next to his ear, never able to fly away as the other end of its line was tied to the man’s front tooth.

She covered her face with her hands. “This place is awful,” she moaned.

“What hotel are you and your parents staying in?” Hieronymus asked.

“It’s called the Hotel Venice. It’s on Ratugenbar Avenue.”

“I’ll take you there.”

A vehicle with three drunken tourists veered of the street and smacked into an iron footbridge. The three human beings inside were not wearing seat belts, and at the moment of impact, they flew forward like three ragdolls and smacked themselves upon the interior windshield, bloodying their faces with broken jaws and cracking the glass. Hieronymus was about to run over and help, but the Earth girl grabbed his arm and said, “Enough. I have seen too many terrible things for one night.” And so he walked away with her.

The girl from Earth was so upset by all these random accidents. She felt as if the Moon had toppled of its orbit and was causing all of these terrible coincidences to occur just to chase her away.

Your eyes are the color of the fourth primary color?

Yes.

Is that why you keep them covered?

I don’t keep them covered. The law keeps them covered.

If this law did not exist, would you still keep them covered?

I don’t know.

I would like to see this color. Won’t you show me?

I can’t. It will make you completely hysterical.

After everything that’s happened tonight, I’m already hysterical.

It’s against the law. And there are police everywhere. I’m always hassled by the police because I’m a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy. If I look at you with my goggles off, I will be charged with assault.

I want to see this color.

Find someone else.

No, I want to see your eyes specifically.

It’s not going to happen.

Don’t you want to see what I look like with the fourth primary color?

They got lost. Hieronymus was not completely certain where her hotel was. It was somewhere in their vicinity, among the hundreds of hotels they kept passing. It was easy to take a wrong turn and simply end up wandering in circles. Tourists blocked their every step, and these were not just visitors from Earth, but tourists from all over the Moon, clogging the streets looking for casinos and bars and nightclubs and restaurants and prostitutes and drugs. LEM Zone One was only a name. No one knew nor cared what its historical significance may have been — it existed at this point in time as a quasi-lawless free-for-all, a gambling hole, an adult playpen, a place where losers went to fulfill loser dreams.

They walked through an alleyway leading to an illuminated area. The Earth girl looked through an open door that led into a dark hallway. A man with a rubber snake in his teeth was on all fours, chasing a small white mouse with a hammer. He caught her from the corner of his eye. “What’s wrong, you never saw a chaincarresser before?” he said.

She nervously walked away and with Hieronymus, exited the alleyway into a sea of bright blue lights. An amusement park…a Ferris wheel…twirling rides…a roller coaster…a lake with small boats shaped like mechanical dogs.

What is your name?

You won’t believe what my name is.

That’s not true. I am ready to believe whatever you tell me.

My name is Window Falling On Sparrows.

Excuse me? Did you just tell me that your name was…an incredibly silly sentence?

Yes. Windows Falling On Sparrows.

Is that just your first name? Or is it your entire name?

It is only my first name. And you? I have just spent hours walking around with you, asking all sorts of personal questions, and I don’t even know your name.

Hieronymus.

That name is also unusual. I have never heard it before.

My father named me that. He never told me where he got the name from.

And your mother?

I have no idea what her opinion of my name is.

Determined to rid themselves of the evening’s horrible surprises, the two teenagers entered the amusement park — a festival of light bulbs and giant moving insects. The first thing they saw was a crude rink surrounded by a fence. The rink was only fifty meters in diameter, and inside, two large moon moose were viciously fighting. Moon moose were very similar to their relatives on Earth, except their fur was a highly unnatural, bluish white. They were also much bigger than their Earthling counterparts and far more aggressive. Their ancestors were brought to the Moon almost a thousand years ago, and they thrived mostly in vast herds on the far side. Another factor that differentiated them from their cousins on Earth was that they were omnivorous — and sometimes cannibalistic when the food supply ran out. Windows Falling On Sparrows ran to the barrier and stood among the jeering crowds, some with dollars in their hands. Big, crude men and women, all with fleshy faces, excitedly watching these two massive beasts ram each other with their magnificent antlers. The animals themselves were frightening, almost prehistoric creatures. Never in her life had she ever witnessed such a display of illiterate vulgarity. They yelled bizarre idiomatic expressions. Every face, either stupid looking or ugly. That crowd, even worse than all the cretins she met by the casinos. She stayed close to Hieronymus. The two moose rammed each other, circled each other, charged, and then rammed each other again. Deafening cheers and boos. The man next to her waved his fist full of paper Lunar dollars. He smelled awful. He was filthy and his clothes were of the worst sort — shiny blue running pants, fannel shirt. Drunk, he gave her a threatening look with his wet, bloodshot eyes. Just behind him, a skinny woman with translucent gray hair and a face full of lines took a sip from a flask-shaped bottle, threw it into the rink, then inexplicably, with her tongue, licked the rust covered fence post.