One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (19 page)

He ran down the concrete steps of the Lunar subway. He paid with cash, which was highly frustrating because he only had a couple of crumpled-up dollars, and the machine kept on rejecting them while other rushing late-night commuters and tourists passed with such ease through the fingerprint machines. He heard the train arrive in the station. The clumsy toll machine finally accepted his last dollar. He charged down the steel steps, and he almost slipped. He made it to the train just as the rickety doors were closing. The crappy slug made of ancient plastic lurched forward in its claustrophobic tunnel. He was a long way from home, but if the train maintained its schedule, he’d be home in an hour and a half, and thus, only a little past his curfew hour. He sat. He looked around. Nearly everyone was sleeping. They were all drunk, or they were junkies who were nodding, face forward, eyes half closed. The train smelled. The lights blinked. The walls were festooned with advertisements that changed every ten seconds on worn-out screens. The screen directly opposite him, hanging over the half-sleeping form of a drunken college student, had a huge gash across its middle, and a sticky material ebbed out in gelatinous bulbs.

When she entered the tiny hotel room, her parents were aghast at her condition. Their daughter looked as though she had been through a mudslide and ended up trapped under a truck. Her mother became hysterical. Windows Falling On Sparrows had planned a long monologue about having been chased by a group of thugs, but in the bright lights of the hotel room, which her parents had kept on, staying up, worried about where their daughter was, she became confused. She wandered over to the bed and lay down. She was about to speak when a flashback of the color, one that lasted only a millionth of a second, sailed quietly through her mind, and she widened her eyes. Her lungs raced with air. No! she thought. She was suddenly afraid the color would return and stay in her field of vision, and that would be the end of herself as a sane person. She vaguely heard her mother’s hysterical screaming and her father’s calm yet determined voice, at that moment unusually precise, asking her. “What happened? Did somebody do something to you? What happened? What happened?”

Her black eyes strayed from light to light. She could not look at them. She found their faces to be alien and frightening. Her mother rushed to her side with a damp cloth and wiped the side of her face with it, the cloth instantly filthy. Her father kept repeating himself, and when her mother bellowed with another nervous exclamation, it was as if she were speaking a completely foreign language. Windows Falling On Sparrows attempted to speak, but only a few words came out. Her mouth was dry. All she could think about was that spot in front of the Ferris wheel. She was going to meet him there again, tomorrow night at eight o’clock.

Her father was convinced she had been assaulted. Her knees and the palms of her hands were badly scratched. Who could have done this to her? What was that stuff in her hair? What kind of horrible ordeal did they put her through!
I am going to kill them with my bare hands! I am going to kill them!

She squinted and heard the loud cannon-like sound of her mother’s voice berating her father. She could not decide if she wanted to see or hide from any more flashbacks of that color that nearly drove her completely mad.

Her parents quickly understood that they had made a terrible mistake by calling the police. Two of them arrived wearing their characteristic stovetop hats and unfashionable capes. One of them had long hair and extremely large, feminine eyes. The other officer was a short burly man who needed a shave. Exonarella noticed his extremely tiny hands. The burly one spoke in a very rude and direct manner.

“We received a report that your daughter has been assaulted. Where is she?” Before Sedenker could even answer, the officers brushed past him and stopped in their tracks. They saw Window Falling On Sparrows sitting up on the edge of her bed, blinking into the overhead light, completely unaware the police had arrived.

The officers knew immediately. One of them activated a small device on his wrist and spoke into it.

“Lieutenant Schmet, this is Officer Krone. I’m upstairs at the Venice. I think we found our Juliet, but there is no sign of Romeo. I repeat, Romeo is not anywhere in sight. You want to come up here and ask her a few questions?”

Exonarella’s blood pressure charged through her body, her infuriated brain about to explode like a hand grenade at this presumptuous officer.

“How dare you call my daughter Juliet! That is not her name!”

“I understand that, Madam, but that is only police lingo between ourselves. Not to be taken personally. Lieutenant Schmet is on his way—he’s a police specialist in these manners, and he will have some questions for your daughter.”

“What do you mean, ‘these matters’?”

The two officers looked at each other, and then the effeminate one with the big eyes spoke up.

“We are not certain, but we believe your daughter may have been the victim of a very particular type of assault that is specific to the Moon.”

“What?!” Exonarella screeched. She turned around and smacked Sedenker in the face. “You let her go! I wanted her to stay here, and you let her go and see that damn LEM thing!”

“Don’t you ever hit me again, you insane shrew!”

“I hold you responsible! You! You allowed our daughter out into that den of prostitutes and gangsters and all sorts of heathen scum! And now here she is, out of her mind because she has been attacked! Attacked, and it’s your fault!”

Sedenker walked over to Windows Falling On Sparrows.

“Who did this to you? WHO DID THIS TO YOU?” he shouted.

She looked up and began a sentence, but forgot the first few words of it before she reached the middle. She turned away, not because she intended to be rude to her father, but because for a split second, she thought she saw the fourth primary color. This time, she wanted her mind to accept it, to become one with it, to see him again.

Detective Dogumanhed Schmet was indeed a type of expert in this. More than an expert, actually. He had a keen personal enthusiasm for the law enforcement side of lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis. He didn’t care about its scientifc or its social issues. His own mission was extremely clear—if one of
them
is caught showing their abnormal and dangerous eyes to any normal person, they will be arrested. That’s that. He was delighted to spend endless hours on and of duty guided by his obsession with the LOS population. What happened to them after he took them off the streets was of no concern to him—he just knew that his life’s mission was that of a sentinel, a lonely floating angel who had set out to protect the Moon from these abominations, even if it meant legally catching them one by one. And he had a very good record in this respect. Fifty-eight confirmed arrests of various sorts, all of them within the same parameter—a citizen with lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis showing his or her eyes, on purpose, to a citizen without lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis. That was their weakness. They had to show their eyes—they could not resist. And he was always there to reel them in.

His enthusiasm was legendary in the world of Lunar Law Enforcement. That is not to say he was liked. Most policemen he came into contact with secretly detested him. They did not like his strange, manipulative manners toward his fellow officers and toward members of the public. They also did not like the way he smelled, which was inexplicable, but probably related to his unusual, fake-looking skin. And his eyes. One was false, one was real, and they were different colors. It was terribly disconcerting. But still, he was a legend.

He let himself into the hotel room without knocking. He did not say hello to the hysterical mother nor the flustered and shouting father. He simply nodded to the other two police officers before walking to the girl. He paused for a second as soon as he saw her. There was something so familiar about her. Impossible. She was a teenager from Earth. He had never been there.

“Hello. My name is Detective Schmet of the Sea of Tranquility Police Department. Your parents called because they believe you have been roughed up by some thugs or a gang, but officers Rondo and Krone over there suspect that something else entirely, a different kind of assault, one that can only happen on the Moon. Just by looking at you, I am inclined to believe them. So tell me, where is he? Do you know his name?”

“Who?” she asked, looking up at the newcomer.

“Come on. The boy with the goggles who showed you his eyes.”

“I don’t know any boy like that.”

Detective Schmet sighed. The girl was truly intimidated. His pasty white skin was moist and wrinkled as an olive upon his artificial-looking face. She thought he was made of warm rubbery wax. The heavy odor of lanolin lingered around him. His hair was bright yellow, and there was that one blue eye and one brown eye. He wore a suit of plush turquoise velvet. On one of his hands, there was a tattoo of a cat’s face, screeching, a mouse’s tail protruding from its fangs.

“Maybe you do not know any boys like that. How could you know any boys at all on the Moon? You just arrived here a few hours ago, and according to your passport information, which I took the liberty of checking just after the officers here alerted me to your presence, and indeed they alerted me and me specifcally because I keep close tabs on a certain phenomenon that exists here on the Moon…What was I saying— oh, yes—according to your passport information, you have never been to the Moon before. Of course. So it is indeed an accurate answer if you do say that
you don’t know any boys like that
, because you don’t. But that brings me to my next question. A general question. Answer truthfully. Do you know what a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy is?”

She hesitated.

He moved forward. He could smell guilt. Withholding information was a noisy endeavor, and he could see it in her shaking left index finger, in her eyelashes, and in the edge of her earlobe that twitched, her earring shifting.

“As in One Hundred Percent Lunar Person?”

“Yes.”

“Those are the people on the Moon who wear those goggles with the purple lenses in them.”

“Right. Congratulations. You know something that most kids on Earth don’t. Now, answer this next question. Why do they wear those goggles? The purple-lensed goggles. Why?”

“Because their eyes are very sensitive?” she answered, knowing full well that he saw through her lame, unimaginative answer.

He smiled.

“You are a very smart and intelligent young woman. I knew before I entered this room that I was going to meet a very special, inquisitive teenager. Now, how did I know that? Because there was something that was fagged on your passport information. The type of thing that gets sent right away to my office. Just in case. What I saw on your passport information was a report by a security guard on the Mega Cruiser you and your family flew in on. The
Ragmagothic Chrysanthemum
. Beautiful name for a ship, by the way. According to the security guard, you, Windows Falling On Sparrows, demanded to know if the pilots of Mega Cruisers were One Hundred Percent Lunar People. You appeared convinced of the outlandish notion that only One Hundred Percent people could pilot Mega Cruisers, and then you went on to declare some purely phantasmal concepts over why. You used the expression lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis, which proves that you indeed have a very keen interest, and knowledge, in this subject. Best of all, you took it upon yourself to confront a pilot crew who just happened to be passing in a corridor—I believe they were on their dinner break. You asked one of the pilots if he was a One Hundred Percent Lunar Man. You even asked him if he was wearing Schmilliazano goggles under his helmet. Now, there is nothing wrong with being interested in any particular subject, and you are certainly allowed to maintain your spectacular views, however, this short, documented history of your confrontation with the crew only reveals to me, an officer of the law, that you are also withholding information as it regards to a dangerous criminal who has assaulted you and will most likely assault others before we finally catch him. So please, when I ask you a question, don’t play dumb. I know that you know that I know that you know that you have a keen interest in the subject of One Hundred Percent Lunar People. Well, I have a keen interest in that very subject as well, and I understand how it makes complete sense, that once here on the Moon, you may indeed sneak away from you sweet parents here, your calm and reassuring family unit that makes you feel like a wonderfully secure human being, and wander the streets of LEM Zone One, where if you happened to meet one of those One Hundred Percent Lunar People, you might get some answers to the questions you were denied on the Mega Cruiser. Yes? Is that not right?”

“The report in my passport is in error,” she lied.

“News travels very fast on the Moon. You met a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy. We know that there was one in the immediate area tonight. You became friendly. You already, as evidenced by your actions on the Mega Cruiser, had a deep interest in the mythology of their eyes—you know, the so-called ‘fourth primary color,’ and you wanted to see for yourself. He showed you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Officer.”

“Everyone wants to see the fourth primary color. Admit it. He took his goggles off…”

She could not believe how ugly this man was. But he was very perceptive, and she had to concentrate not to give herself or her lunar boy away. He spoke more, and as a defense, she silently indulged the vacant feeling that had overcome her.