Woman Who Loved the Moon (11 page)

He nodded. “Me, too. Thirteen years, and I still have nightmares. The gods like irony, Christy. When I came home, all I wanted to do was to get the smell of death from my nostrils. I
asked
for daytime TV, to work on soap operas and childrens’ shows and giveaways. And here I am working for Jordan Granelli. Mr. Death.”

“You too?”

“I sound like Zenan. I know why he drinks. We are the modern equivalent of a Roman circus. Under the poetry and Granelli’s decorum, the audience can smell the blood—and they love it. It titillates them, being so close to it, and safe. Death is something that happens to other people. And when it happens—call an ambulance! Call a hospital! Tell the family, gently. And be sure to bring the camera close, so we can watch. And don’t, don’t even try to help. You’ll spoil the scene—and we all have to go.” He mimicked Jordan Granelli with a bitter smile.

“I have Paul,” Christy said. “What do you do, Leo?”

“I take long walks,” Leo said. “I read a lot of history. I try to figure out how long it will take for us to run ourselves into the ground—like Babylon, and Tyre, and Nineveh, and Rome.”

“Are we close?”

He shrugged. “I own a very unreliable crystal ball.”

They had reached the subway line; Christy could feel beneath her feet the secret march of trains. “I’ll take the subway here, Leo,” she said. “See you Monday.”

“I shall take a long walk and contemplate the city. See you Monday.”

As she went down the stairs to the subway, Christy looked with curiosity at the people around her. Was there really such a thing as a mass mind? The faces bobbing by her—some were content, some discontent, thin, fat, calm or harried, bored or excited—what would they do, each of them, if she were to collapse at their feet? Observe, in an interested circle? Ignore it? Call the police or an ambulance, maybe—the professionals who know how to deal with death. Death is something that happens to other people. All we, the survivors, need to do is to mourn.

Damn it, I don’t want to think about it! She interposed Paul between her mind and the faces, and it quickened her breathing—two days! Two days with Paul. Fool woman! Grown woman of thirty-four, no adolescent, so suffused with plain physical passion that people waiting near you are staring at you! She raised her chin to meet their eyes. Under her shirt her nipples were stiff. I wonder if Paul ever thinks of me, and gets a hard-on riding home from work. The thought delighted her.

She quivered like an antenna to the presence of the people around her, and to the city. She was riding on the city’s main subway line. It ran from south to north under the city, passing beneath its vital parts—city hall, business district, the towering apartment complexes of the rich, the university—like a notochord, East of it lay Lake Michigan, with its algae and seaweed beds, like green islands, set in a blue sea. West of it the bulk of the city sprawled, primitive and indolent in the summer heat, a lolling dinosaur.

And Paul was out there, high in the smoggy sky, a mite on the dinosaur’s back. She had first seen them through a camera’s eye. She’d been shooting a documentary on new city buildings, six years back. He had been walking the beams of a building sixty stories up, dark against the sun, his hair blazing gold, his hooks swinging on his belt. She had asked one of the soundmen, “What are those hooks they carry?”

“Those are the skyhooks. They’re protection. See the network of cables on the frame?” Through the camera she could see it, like a spiderweb in the sun. “If a worker up there falls, he can use those hooks to catch the cables and save himself. Experienced workers use the cables to get around. They swing on them, like monkeys, hand over hand. The hooks don’t slip, and the cables are rough, so they fit together like two gears, meshing.” He made a gear with the interlocking fingers of his two hands.

“But I thought the name for the
people
was skyhooks,” she said.

“It is.”

Human beings, she thought, with hooks to hold down the sky...

* * *

She opened the door to the apartment. Paul was sitting in a chair, waiting for her.

He jumped up and came to her across the room, fitting his hands against her backbone and his lips to hers with the precision of anticipation. His lips were salt-rimmed from a morning’s sweating in the sun. She leaned into him. At last she tugged on his ears to free her mouth. “Nice that you’re home. How come?”

“Monday’s Labor Day. Dale gave us the afternoon off. Said to get an early start on drinking, so we’d all get to work Tuesday sober.”

“That was smart of her.” Dale was the crew boss on the building.

“So we have three and a half days.”

“No,” she said sadly, “only two and a half.”

“Why?” he demanded sharply, pulling away from her as if it were her fault.

“The show doesn’t stop for Labor Day. Think of all those lucky folks who could be home to watch it! Makes more money. Christmas, New Year’s, yes. Labor Day, no.”

He grunted and came back to her arms abruptly. “Then let’s go to bed now.”

They went to bed, diving for the big double bed and turning to each other with the hunger of new lovers. They rode each other’s bodies until they lost even each other’s names, calling in whispers and groans and laughter, and ending half-asleep in each other’s arms, soaked and surfeited with loving.

Christy woke from the drowse first. Paul’s head lay against her breasts. She tongued his forehead gently. He stirred. The camera eye in her came alive: she saw him curled like a great baby against her, looking even younger than his twenty-seven years, chunky and strong and satiated, his skin dark red-bronze where the sun had darkened it, fairer elsewhere, his hair red- gold... How brown I am against him, she thought. A thin beard rose rough on his cheeks and chin, his chest was hairless and well-muscled, his hands work-callused... He opened his eyes. He has blue eyes, she completed, and bent to kiss his eyelids.

“What do you see?” he asked her.

“I see my love,” she answered. “What do
you
see?”

“I see
my
love.”

“Thin brown woman.”

“Beautiful woman.”

It was an old dialogue between them, six years old. It amazed Christy that, in their transient world, they had survived six years together. I love you, she thought at him.

Suddenly, as if someone had spliced it into her mind, she heard Zenan, drunk and sardonic. “If Jordan Granelli had a lover,” he said, “and that lover collapsed in front of him, dying, he’d first call the ambulance, and then call the cameras.”

What the hell? Angry, she thrust Zenan, the show, Granelli, from her mind, and like a shadow on a wall they crept back at her. “What is it?” Paul said.

“Ah. Come with me to work Monday,” she said suddenly.

“Why?”

“So that I can see you sooner.” So I can hold you in front of the shadows, she thought, like a bright and burnished shield. “Please.”

* * *

Sunday night, the shadows turned to nightmare black.

She was in Dacca, standing in front of a wretched yellow brick tenement. It was falling apart; there were even gaping holes in the shoddy walls, and it stank. The dust stung Christy’s eyes. She looked around for a landmark, but all she could see clearly was this one building; the dust clouds obscured the rest. I want to go back to the hotel, she thought, but, impelled, she went towards it. I don’t want to go in.

Close to the entrance something moved. Dog pack? She looked around in haste for a brick or a stone to pitch. But the dust drew aside for a moment and she saw: it was a woman, bending or crouching, close to the open door.

Her thin flowing robes were mud-stained, and she hunched like a flightless withered bird on the ground, holding something protectively to her breasts. The whites of her eyes were as yellow as the building. Jaundice. She stared at Christy and then “turned her head away, making a crooning wail. A fold of cloth fell away from her, and Christy saw that she was holding a baby. With terrible feeble movements of its lips it tried to suck, and then it cried, a whimper of sound. The woman’s breast was a dun-colored rag. She has no milk, Christy thought. The mother wailed again, and looked at Christy with huge imploring eyes.

I must have something. Christy reached for the little pack she carried at her hip. She pulled out a small can of goat’s milk with triumph, and pried it open with her knife. Hunkering down beside the woman, she held out the can. “Here.”

The woman sniffed at the milk. Then she took the can from Christy’s hand and tipped it towards the child’s mouth. The infant coughed, and the milk ran out, down its cheek and neck. The woman tried again. Again the baby coughed, a minute weak sound like a hiccough, and gave a gasp, and was still. The woman peered at it and let out a moan. “What is it?” Christy said, and then she saw that the child was dead. It had died as they tried to feed it. She touched its forehead with one finger and pulled her hand away quickly from the ferocious heat.

She started to cry, and with tears on her face, she stood up and stumbled away from the mother and the dead baby. She turned away from the building, and not three feet away from her, directly in her path, stood Jordan Granelli. He was carrying a tripod and a camera, and his face was the face of a skull. It grinned at her, and his hand patted the camera. “Thank you, Ms. Holland,” he said.

When Paul woke her, she was making small crying sounds in her sleep. He rocked her and stroked her. “A Dacca dream?”

“Yes—no. Come with me tomorrow, Paul, please!”

“I’ll come,” he promised.

“Love me. I need you to love me.” In the dark morning they made love, like two armies battling for a hilltop, intent on the same desire; sighted, grasped for, won.

* * *

They woke late that morning. It was hard to dress: they kept running into one another in the way to the bathroom. Paul shaved, standing naked in front of the mirror. When he pulled on his pants, he stuck his skyhook sheaths on his belt, like a badge of office, and thrust the hooks into them.

Christy glared at him. “You’re coming with me.”

“I said so. But I want to make damn sure that nobody asks me to do anything. I won’t look like a cameraman in these.”

That’s for sure, Christy thought. He looked like an extra from a set. She suspected, with envy, that he was going to visit his building, later, just for the fun of swinging around it. I wish I could love my job like that.

They arrived late to the studio. The equipment van, which carried the cameras and the lights, the cable wheels and the trailing sound booms, was parked outside on the roadway, its red lights flashing. The trailer sat behind it. Christy and Paul stepped up into it. “Sorry we’re late,” she said to Leo.

“Hello, Paul.”

“Hello.”

“Okay, Gus. Let’s go.”

Gus played race car driver all the way to the South Side, flinging them happily against the sides of the crew van like peas in a can. “Christ,” muttered Zenan, “it’s a good thing I didn’t eat my breakfast.”

“Why don’t you let Gus drive the equipment van tomorrow?” Christy asked Leo plaintively.

“Because he’d break all the lenses doing it,” Leo said.

Zenan added, “Us he can break.”

They stopped at last. Jordan Granelli’s limousine was parked up the street. He was standing outside it, with his three guards around him, waiting for them. “Next time,” Leo suggested gently, “maybe you could go a little slower? Even if we are late. Tom doesn’t seem to know Chicago as well as you do, even though he’s forty-seven and has lived here all his life.”

Gus mumbled and bent over his steering wheel as if it were a prayer wheel. Jake walked across the street to them. “Mr. Granelli’s getting impatient,” he said. Leo shrugged. Jake looked at them uncertainly. He eyed Paul.

Christy said, “Jake, this is Paul; he’s a friend of mine,” Christy said. “Paul, this is Jake. He’s one of Jordan Granelli’s bodyguards.”

They nodded at each other. “Skyhook,” Jake said. “So was I.”

Paul was interested. “Were you? Where’d you work?”

“Lot of buildings. I worked on the Daley Towers.”

“Did you! I didn’t,” Paul said with regret. That massive building, Chicago’s monument to its most famous mayor, was still the tallest in the city, though it was six years old.

“Last year I was working on the new City Trust building when a swinging beam hit me—so.” He made a horizontal cut with the edge of his hand against his right side. “Knocked me off. I hooked the cable—but it cracked some ribs, and my back’s been bad ever since. I had to quit.”

“Tough luck,” said Paul sympathetically.

They waited. “Which house is it?” Christy asked. Leo pointed to a white frame house across the street. Christy saw the flutter of curtains in the house next door. A woman with a baby on her hip was standing at her window, staring out at the black van, and at the white car with its black device.

She shivered suddenly. Paul put an arm around her shoulders. “Cold?”

“No—I don’t know,” she answered, irritated.

“Goose walking on your grave,” commented Jake.