Meet Me in the Moon Room (3 page)

Maybe Durkovich would die before she had to pick around in his nose with her scissors.

“Little off the top and sides, Mr. Durkovich?”

“Why ask?”

Cosmetology! What a stupid word. Opportunities limited only by your imagination. Brenda supposed her imagination had hotfooted it to Kenya with Lyle, the poet, the bastard, when he left her with both halves of the rent to pay. I’m leaving you for purely philosophical reasons, he’d said. What could that possibly mean? She didn’t know, and she still owed over a thousand dollars on her beauty school tuition. Brenda couldn’t afford to lose this lousy job at Harvey’s Barbershop.

Something jumped out of Durkovich’s hair as she combed and clipped along the back of his neck. Brenda gasped and leaped back, shaking her hand. The man had bugs!

“What is it?” Harvey moved up close to her. Durkovich twisted his head around to stare at her.

“Nothing,” she said and moved back in on Durkovich. Time to bite the bullet. Bugs or not, Harvey would can her in a minute if she made Durkovich mad. Another old guy came into the shop, and Harvey put good cheer and baseball on his mean face and moved back to stand over his own chair.

Brenda gingerly lifted the hair at the back of Durkovich’s neck with her comb. Something moved down there, lots of somethings. Brenda bit her lip and moved her head in a little closer. She swooped down like a hawk to hover at treetop level over a tangled, charred jungle. She didn’t see the twisting white lice she’d expected. Instead, little brown monkeys swung from black and white branches and vines, and she could hear them chittering as they jumped from the trees she felled with her scissors. A bright swarm of tiny blue birds rose screeching and veered away from her face. The ground she’d cleared looked like old leather. Dead rivers and deep gullies ran this way and that, around puckered termite hills and ragged bomb craters. Would she find Lyle playing Jungle Jim down there? Her hand shook. He’d always treated her like she didn’t know any big words. She didn’t think she could stand to see that sad, superior look of his.

Brenda clipped quickly up through the forest, leaving the monkeys behind, and as she moved, the air cooled. The trees were not so thick up here. She heard a tiny roar, and when she’d created a clearing, she saw a crowd of students all waving angry fists and signs at buildings shaped like onions. Fires flickered in alleys. She saw the angry flash of gunfire, and the crowd surged screaming into the trees followed by shouting, shooting uniformed men on horseback. Brenda quickly followed with her scissors, north. She had to get out of town fast.

She left Moscow to its rioting and moved toward the top of the world. Up here the ground was dead white; it was, in fact snow, Brenda realized. The wasteland. Where they send you if you don’t know just the right things to say.

Her song, her theme, her favorite music from her all time favorite movie drifted in the frigid air. She snipped down trees across the top of the world in a frantic search for its source. She cut a swath sideways across the world. She cleared paths right down to the snow, some straight as interstate highways, others meandering paths.

Gray wolves followed and watched as two horses dragged a sleigh across a vast empty field of snow. Brenda could see Lara bundled in her white furs, her dark hair blowing around the bottom of her Russian hat. Lara. Brenda. They’d always been one, really. Brenda rubbed her cheek against the thick fur of her coat and looked from where she sat in the sleigh at the smoke rising from the chimney of a lonely cabin in the snow. A man stood in the doorway with his hand raised. She squinted through the blowing snow, her lips trembling and blue with cold.

“Yurii,” she whispered.

Siberia and Yurii. Yes. She’d come so far through the snow, endured so much to find him.

He ran through the deep drifts, his ragged coat flapping, his gray leg wrappings dragging at his feet.

“Lara!”

She leaped from the sleigh and rushed toward him. Her theme swelled, filling the air as they met, and he crushed her to his chest. She felt weak and would have fallen in the snow had not his strong arms held her. He pushed her back to look into her face.

He could use a good stylist, she noticed. His hair was a butchered mess. Of course, he had been sick. Long white trenches ran over the top of his head from front to back, from right to left. Sadly, his nose had gotten old. His mustache sprouted from his huge nostrils like evil black weeds.

He put his hands on her shoulders and shook her.

“What’s the matter with you!” he shouted in her face.

Brenda slipped from his chest and crumpled at his feet in the hair around her chair.

Yurii Andreievich ran his hands over his head. He looked bewildered. For a moment, she saw the young medical student who still hid inside that ravaged shell.

“Look what you’ve done to me, Brenda,” he said. “Just look what you’ve done.”

Harvey’s face rose like a bad moon behind Yurii’s shoulder, and Brenda scooted away from the two men and got to her feet.

She spoke to them with her eyes, said, I have slapped you awake, Yurii, set you free. Take the hand of your new friend, and the two of you run free, laugh and play in the snow. Be happy children.

She slipped off her white barber’s smock and handed it to Harvey.

“Hey!”

“Hey!”

Let them spit and sputter. She grabbed her purse and headed for the sunshine.

Beatniks With Banjos

K
enneth was seized by invisible forces while he, Rebecca, and the cat they called Lord Byron were sorting socks and drinking eggnog and feeling blue on Christmas Eve. Kenneth had been turning a festive green and red plaid sock rightside out when the tremors hit. He lost all feeling in his hand, but the sock moved anyway, as if his hand were opening and closing and twisting on his wrist like the head of goose. Kenneth could see a quivering yellow tongue and the slick black void of a throat as the creature zoomed in to stop just inches from his face. Red eyes like blood blisters rose from what he supposed were still, at some level, his first and third knuckles, giving the thing an oddly unaesthetic asymmetry.

“I am,” said the goose sock, “the Ghost of Christmas Shifted Sideways in Time.”

“And I,” Rebecca said, “am the Ghost of Maybe We Should Have Gone To My Mother’s For Christmas!”

Kenneth looked over at her and saw that she had the mate to his red and green goose creature on her own hand, but on her the sock was just a puppet and the voice was coming from her own mouth. Couldn’t she see what was happening to him?

Rebecca grabbed Lord Byron and put a sock over his head. The cat staggered around pawing and singing like a Christmas drunk. “And this is the Ghost of Christmas With A Bad Attitude,” she said. Lord Byron hunkered down in the great pile of socks and made a deep and dangerous sound, and Rebecca relented and snatched the sock off his head. He reached out and swatted at the air a couple of times, but then he seemed to forgive and forget and rolled over on his back in the socks.

Kenneth believed that cats were mechanical devices, but he knew better than to voice that opinion aloud. This was probably his most dangerous secret.

“Can we get back to the business at hand,” said the Ghost of Christmas Shifted Sideways in Time, and Kenneth dared another look at its terrible face.

“What do you want?” Kenneth asked.

“Disclosure,” Rebecca said.

“I’ve come to warn you of the Curse of Internal Consistency,” the ghost said.

“But internal is good,” Kenneth said.

“But not when you keep it to yourself,” Rebecca said.

“Consistency is good, too,” Kenneth said.

“So you’re saying I don’t make sense?” He recognized that tone. She was gearing up for round two.

“Yes,” the ghost said, “internal is good and consistency is good, but they don’t go together.”

“You mean they are not consistent with one another?” Kenneth asked.

“Exactly,” the ghost said. “At some fundamental level, internal consistency is not consistent.”

“So, if you’ve come to warn me off internal consistency and internal consistency is not consistent, what then is the problem?”

“The problem,” Rebecca said, “is that you’re talking to a sock on your hand and ignoring Lord B and me altogether.”

“The problem,” the ghost said, “is that even now you’re frantically trying to tie all of this together into a system of experience that is consistent with what you foolishly believe the universe is like. You’re trying to make sense of it all.”

“But that’s how we work,” Kenneth said. “We find the patterns in chaos. I mean isn’t the world full of portent? Isn’t every single thing connected and concerned with every other thing? Isn’t it true there are no coincidences? Doesn’t every little breeze seem to whisper . . .”

“Oh, please!” Rebecca said.

“Doesn’t everything mean something?” Kenneth asked.

“Certainly not,” the ghost said. “Internal consistency is not good for you. It is a system for rejecting possibilities. It is a straitjacket for the mind. What you’re forgetting is that sometimes a cigar really is just a banana.”

“What is all this talk of cigars and bananas?” Rebecca, still wearing the mate of the Ghost of Christmas Shifted Sideways in Time, crawled over to Kenneth. “Can’t you just say what you mean?”

She snuggled up to his side, but as soon as she touched him, she stiffened like she’d grabbed an electric wire. The sock on her hand jerked her arm up into the air, and Kenneth realized that sometimes a sock wasn’t just a sock. The Ghost of Christmas Shifted Sideways In Time and the Ghost of Maybe We Should Have Gone To My Mother’s For Christmas twisted together like snakes and rose up and up and around in a kiss high above Kenneth and Rebecca, forcing them together in a face to face confrontation.

They stared into one another’s eyes.

“I’m sorry I called your mother an old poop,” he said, the close-up of her brown eyes convincing him that he had been in the wrong all along.

“Now that you mention it,” she said, “it occurs to me that your remark was the inspiration for me calling you an anal cartoon. I’m sorry, too.”

“I’d blocked that part out,” he said.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it again.”

“No, I’m glad you did,” he said. “I deserved it.”

Her eyes invited and he accepted the invitation and leaned in and kissed her.

“Er, excuse me, kids.”

They broke the kiss. The ghosts above them leaned over to look down at the new voice. Kenneth and Rebecca turned to look down too, resulting in them being cheek to cheek. They saw that another sock had gotten onto Lord Byron’s head and now the sock was talking. The conglomerate creature looked like a cat with the long neck and head of a cobra.

“I am the Ghost of This Particular Christmas,” said the cobra cat, “and boy was I feeling insubstantial there for a while! Now it looks like we can dine on impossible things for breakfast after all.”

“How do you dine at breakfast?” Rebecca whispered. “And my god, whose arm do you suppose is in that sock?”

“You use a spoon,” said the Ghost of This Particular Christmas. “What we need now is a holy contradiction, something to jump you out of the grooves you have so doggedly dug for yourselves. The two of you must become Beatniks with Banjos, or Compassionate Conservatives, or no wait, I’ve got it—Christian Atheists. That’s the ticket. The best of both worlds. Take what you like and leave the rest. Close your eyes and imagine it. Get down in the trenches. Come on, no more fooling around!”

“But doesn’t this fast and loose philosophy of yours mean that we can be absolute scoundrels?” Kenneth asked.

“Yes,” said the Ghost of This Particular Christmas, “but if you were scoundrels, being internally consistent would just make you more narrow-minded and dangerous.”

“But doesn’t this mean we can believe whatever we want?” Rebecca asked.

“Yes,” said the Ghost of This Particular Christmas, “it means you can believe whatever you want. Who’s to stop you?”

Who indeed.

The sudden realization that his mind was his absolutely and that no one was listening in, that no one was clicking a censoring tongue at him from some astral plane washed over Kenneth in waves of freedom, of joy, and he gasped and pulled away from Rebecca and looked into her sparkling eyes and saw that she had made the same glorious realization. You could believe totally in both sides of an argument at the same time!

Green plants sprouted from the carpet like celery and stars filled the windows like flood lights. No, wait! Those were giants, maybe gods, yikes! maybe even aliens grinning and shining flashlights in at them. Heavenly voices sang heavenly songs, and the smell of cinnamon and oregano filled the air.

“Hey,” Rebecca said. “Didn’t this Epiphany of ours sort of, well, come right out of the blue?”

“I’d say that’s where it came from all right,” Kenneth said.

The Ghost of This Particular Christmas crawled onto Kenneth’s lap, and the three of them, Rebecca and Kenneth and the baby Byron, not to mention the Ghost of Christmas Shifted Sideways In Time and the Ghost of Maybe We Should Have Gone To My Mother’s For Christmas, were sufficient for a midnight mass celebrated with celery and flashlights, some soft humming, and unfolded socks.

Later Kenneth leaned down and kissed Rebecca on the cheek and said, “Go call your Mom, before it gets too late, and give her my love.”

“I will!” Rebecca said and got up and rushed out of the room. “Then I’ll make cookies!” she called.

Kenneth looked at Lord Byron lazily licking himself. “Meanwhile,” he shouted back to her, “I’ll wind the cat.”