One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (34 page)

Hieronymus fell into a pile of glass that must have shattered over a century ago. Luckily, he did not cut himself as the cracked edges of the broken shards had been dulled by time and the elements. Slue grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him up, and within seconds they were blindly running from building to building in Joytown 8. Hummingbirds flew next to them and crisscrossed just before them like strange, silent phantoms. The complicated dead cityscape unfolded before their terrified eyes. It was an endless jungle of concrete and wires and broken and bashed electrical parts. And junk—machinery that made no sense to them. Rubber objects tossed about. The farther they ran, the more they felt trapped and suffocated. They were trying to find Bruegel, but they were not sure which direction they had charged into as they left the horrible domed building.

They passed through one caved-in structure. They guessed it must have been a guardhouse of some sort, because there appeared to be old and crude weapons on the concrete floor, along with a strange metal bowl that Hieronymus deducted must have been an ancient helmet. They were not anxious to stay and examine anything. The entire complex was unbearably sinister. There was nothing written. No letters, no typography. If there had at one time been words printed in ink on the walls, they had long since vanished. If the people from those days used paper to write information on, that was gone as well. The only thing remaining was that circular wall of fourth primary color—preserved, and now an illegal and forgotten attraction for a very special group of thrillseekers—or addicts.

“Bruegel!” Hieronymus shouted, suddenly panicking. ”Bruegel! Where are you?”

All he heard was the echo of his own voice.

He shouted his friend’s name again, and from another concrete ruin of a building a line of gigantic hummingbirds swarmed from one of the collapsed windows. They avoided the strange swarm of futtering creatures, and ducked into an alley where they viewed, on an avenue, a herd of white-furred moose all heading in the same direction on the boulevard. The beasts were moving below a gigantic radar dish that hung suspended between two brick towers—long ago it must have fallen into this position when its own structure began to crumble.

In the alley, they found an open doorway and ducked inside. The herd of moose continued to pass on the outside avenue, all of them making strange, deep bellows with their open mouths. Exhausted and frightened, Slue and Hieronymus sat on the concrete floor against a metallic wall. In the center of the floor was a drain. There were endless lines of old pipe running across and hanging from the ceiling, all of it covered in a strange copper-and-tan crystallized silt. Some formations were so old stalactites formed out of it and hung down among the ancient plumbing.

They were cold, and Slue began to shiver under her velvet poncho. Hieronymus put his arm around her. He was cold as well.

“This place…” she said, staring at the drain. ”You know what this place is…”

He nodded.

He had an idea when they first passed that dilapidated gate with the ancient eyeball. This was never a town. This was, at one time, a true horror.

How long could humanity live on the Moon and remain human? There was no percentage below One Hundred. Either you were human or you were something else entirely. The Moon was a stone in space. The air they breathed was artificial. The water they drank came from melted comets.

She dyed her hair blue
.

The endless clacking of a thousand moose hooves continued just outside. Then two or three of the gigantic animals sauntered into the alleyway from where they entered, one poking his head into the room where the two teenagers sat huddled on the floor. It casually walked inside, wandered over to the drain in the middle of the floor, bent down, and with an incredibly long snakelike tongue, began to lick the interior of the drain.

“What the Hell is it doing?” Hieronymus asked in an urgent half-whisper.

“Shut up!” hissed Slue.

The beast looked up and stared at the two directly in the eye. Its eyes were a bland pink. Its teeth were crooked, and its lips were coated in a strange green material. A large black beetle crawled on its side, disappearing into its fur, reappearing, disappearing again.

The staring contest did not last very long—after a few seconds, the creature went back to licking whatever moist horrors it could find in the drain. Its tongue was wet. Awful. Its hooves were huge, caked with unknown matter accumulated from a lifetime of wandering around the far side of the Moon.

The teenagers held each other tight, and somewhere under the poncho, one of his hands met one of her hands and their fingers intertwined in a way that only frightened lovers’ could.

The moose looked up again as seven or eight huge hummingbirds entered the chamber, flying in circles. The white-furred beast let out a strange howl, jumped up on its hind legs, and tried to bite the fast birds. They flew through the doorway and the mammal followed in confused, shadowy pursuit, barking and howling.

Their hands stayed together.

There was a loud and hollow echo of metal on metal that rang throughout the avenue. Outside, the fallen radar dish must have shifted.

More hummingbirds entered, and some perched up on the pipes that ran across the ceiling, while others just hovered, staring at the lost teenagers. Three or four landed on the floor, then disappeared down the same drain where the moose had just stuck his long tongue.

Do you remember the last time we worked together in school?

The rotunda? We were working on The Random Treewolf.

You started to tell me something.

What did I tell you
?

About something that happened on the Moon ninety-four years ago.

I wanted to speak about the Regime of Blindness. But you didn’t want to listen
…

Do you think that this is one of those camps?

Yes
.

I thought so, too. The remains of the gate. The big eyeball…

Anyone like us, they would round up. They would do unspeakable things to us. That wall…you know what that wall was made of
…

That time, you began to tell me something else.

What else did I begin to tell you
?

The reason I am called a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy. The reason why you are called a One Hundred Percent Lunar Girl.

It’s an old expression from former times. Back then, a person was labeled as being either One Hundred Percent Lunar, or One Hundred Percent Human. There was no in-between
.

A strange silence had descended. The moose had all left the area, but the hummingbirds remained. Only the sounds of the creaking ancient antennas and broken radar dishes in the wind could be heard over the refined buzzing of the floating birds’ swifting wings.

They were alone on the far side of the Moon. They were alone. Alone. Far away from everyone. Not a trace of neon light. No authorities. Just them, hiding in shadows.

“We won’t die,” she said to him, both of their hearts beating so uncontrollably.

“And even if we do…” He smiled.

With only inches separating their faces, they took of their goggles and looked at each other.

An outstanding thing happened. The hummingbirds all launched into the air with an excited vigor and suddenly, as if by clarion call, hundreds more swarmed into the room with an inexplicable urgency, empowered. They came in through the open windows where the glass had long vanished. They crawled out of the drain on the floor. They emerged from pipes. They squeezed in through cracks on the walls, filling the room with the futtering of thousands of feathers, no longer white, as these birds were suddenly triumphant in their natural lunar color, the fourth primary color. They swarmed around the boy and the girl, astonished, on the concrete floor, eyes to eyes, a cloud of hummingbirds, a cloud of hummingbirds enveloping them. Filling the void, these hovering beasts matched their eye color, birds of the fourth primary color electrically shifting the cavernous room from empty ruin to palace of bright splendid forbidden hue. They transformed and they arrived by the thousands, all at once, from all corners, to create a sphere around the two, a moving sphere of fast moving birds glowing and pulsating as the fourth primary color. Huge birds, pointed beaks, hovering, forming an orb that breaks free of the obscure, the resplendent glowing announcement to all eyes that this fourth primary color cannot be hidden nor diluted nor outlawed, that it exists loudly as the Moon’s color of all things lunar. Where blank white once lay as a non-pigment, it arises on the wings of magnificent hummingbirds answering the call of the lovers’ long suppressed eyes.

Surrounded by thousands of swarming birds, bathed in their nameless color, everything felt truly normal for the boy and the girl. For the first time in their lives, they were each able to look at another person, directly, no goggles, no consequence, no drama. It was normal.
Your eyes are beautiful
he told her, and she laughed, the blue-haired girl.
You know what
? she replied
your eyes are beautiful too
and she reached forward and touched the side of his face, and he did the same, his fingertips tracing the surface of her cheek.
I have never looked another person in the eyes like this before
. It was true. It was remarkable. They could have looked away, they could have seen the future and past projections of their own selves, objects, the bending of time with space, they could have looked up into the wondrous void of the infinity, but they wanted only to look at each other. The normal wonderfulness of a young man and a young woman looking at each other. The light of the purple sky, the cold murky concrete floor, the dark sinister walls, all comprised of blue, yellow, red, all obscured now by the true lunar color, vivid in the feathers of a thousand hummingbirds and their own eyes before them, meshed together to make their world normal. Normal.
You look so different
, he said, smiling at her.
You look like a girl from the countryside. I don’t even notice that you have blue hair. She laughed. You look different too, for the first time, you don’t look uptight. I can’t believe how not-uptight you are
!

They continued with these revelations until they had nothing left to say. Then at last they kissed, and that too was a completely normal and wonderful thing to do.

They heard the sound of a car. The hummingbirds around them pointed their beaks in the direction of the mechanical hum. Then they dispersed as quickly as they came. They returned to their blank-white, colorless selves as soon as the teenagers stopped looking at each other. The birds all fled, like bats from a cave. And they feared the reverberation of the human industrial machine. It got louder. A deep, purring engine, humming along with the crackle of glass and pebbles getting crushed under a large tire.

Hieronymus and Slue got up from the concrete floor and ran over to the square hole in the wall that at one time had held a window.

Pete’s Prokong-90 was cautiously moving up the boulevard.

They saw Pete in the driver’s seat, Clellen right next to him, and Bruegel in the back. And as they did not wear their goggles, they also saw the projection of the car continuing farther, themselves entering the car, then the vehicle driving in a straight line under the collapsed radar and out of sight.

“It appears that it is our fate that we should run out and meet them…” Hieronymus said, putting his goggles back on.

“Wait,” Slue said, a genuine sadness in her voice. ”Let me look at you one last time before you do that.”

Pete and Clellen could not figure out just what kind of a place they had driven into, and to them, Bruegel’s explanation made no sense at all. When they finally discovered Slue and Hieronymus running out from the building they were hiding in, they were, of course, relieved, and for a few moments, Pete was utterly embarrassed, till he saw that they were holding hands. Clellen was overjoyed to see her friend Hieronymus, and she giggled and turned to Pete, exclaiming, "See! I told you! They are together!”

Pete was a little confused about all of this. For weeks he was dating Slue. Then he met Clellen and decided to cheat on Slue for some action with this…more adventurous…young lady. He did not exactly intend for Clellen to automatically become his girlfriend, but, in the space of a few hours, he managed to get light-years with her as opposed to the admittedly boring time he spent with Slue. Clellen was up for going to a motel right away! With Slue, such a fun subject like that never even came up. Slue was, despite being really good looking, a snob. She was not a good kisser either, and the goggles thing got tiresome after a while. Clellen, on the other hand—hot, good looking, hilariously funny, liked sports (or at least she claimed she did), and best of all,
she did it
—well, he had never known anyone who
did it
like her before.

Bruegel remained quiet as he sat in the back. He too saw Hieronymus and Slue approach the car holding hands. All he could do was quietly sulk. He liked Clellen, but she chose Pete. He liked Slue, but alas, she chose Hieronymus. He knew for a fact that Clellen had made out with Hieronymus, and that Pete had dated, and thus probably kissed, Slue. Another night where the other guys get all the girls.
The girls I like don’t like me
. He pondered at the injustice of it all.
And the girls I don’t like, they like me
.