One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (3 page)

He watched the clouds of hummingbirds in the distance. There was only one kind of bird on the Moon: hummingbirds. They thrived in the artifcial environment where so many others had failed. They were huge. An adult hummingbird was as large as a dog. They traveled across the landscapes of cities and wilderness in gigantic clouds. They lived everywhere, sometimes even under the ground. They were all, without exception, bone white. Lunar white. Colorless, hovering creatures. Half bird, half dream. They were often scavangers, and their long beaks were perfectly suited to retrieving trash from garbage bins. They were known to silently enter apartments and steal the dinner right of of plates the minute you had your back turned.

From afar, a traveling cloud of hummingbirds resemble a swirling white dragon as large as any Mega Cruiser, shifting, changing shape, dispersing, then re-forming again.

They were as numerous on the far side of the Moon as they were here.

There was a prison there. On the far side of the Moon. A special, secret place just for the One Hundred Percent Lunar Boys and Girls and Men and Women who broke the law — and not just any law, but specifcally the law against deliberately showing their eye color to a normal person.

Nobody liked the far side of the Moon. It was nearly deserted. There were no apartment towers there, no cities, no trains, nothing. A handful of research stations with a few scientists. A single highway called Highway Zero crossed the entire thing. Grazing fields for wild animals. Strange farms run by robots because no one could stand to live there. The Moon was a place of extremes: the side that faced Earth was overpopulated and highly urbanized and illuminated with neon, and the side facing away from Earth was bleak and dead and full of shadows and fear. And a prison.

If she had betrayed him, he would be there by now.

He decided to begin his belated day. He went about gathering the clothes he thought he should wear. What a pity his favorite white plastic jacket was destroyed. He had left it on the floor, as he did with all his things. He found a shirt — wrinkly, but not stained and not smelly. From under his bed he retrieved a pair of crumpled pants he had only worn once. It then took him twenty minutes to find a matching pair of socks.

He tiptoed into the hall, heading for the bathroom. It was going to take an extremely long shower to get all that automotive gunk of of him.

He silently passed his parents’ bedroom. His father was still sleeping. His mother was awake, but still in bed, crying. He was used to that. It was all she ever did.

Her name was Barbie. She too was from Earth. Because she spent every minute of her life crying, Hieronymus had never enjoyed a single conversation with her. Whenever he tried, she looked away, her face crunched up, tears spilling from her eyes, a miserable portrait of a never-ending state of misery. For years, Hieronymus thought it was because of their life on the Moon and that dreadful law — Quarantine Directive Number Sixty-Seven, the one preventing all parents of One Hundred Percent Lunar Children under the age of eighteen from ever leaving the lunar surface — that she was a woman so filled with tears.

His fault, in other words.

Ringo never wanted Hieronymus to think that.

“There is a reason why your mother is like that, Hieronymus. It has nothing to do with you. It has nothing to do with our living on the Moon. She was like that on Earth. For a long time.”

“If that were the case, Da,” Hieronymus once asked his father, “don’t you think that after all this time you might consider sending her to a psychiatrist? She seems pretty miserable.”

Ringo shrugged his shoulders as he always did when avoiding responsibility, which was something he was pretty good at.

“No,” he replied. “She’s not that bad off — she’s just going through a rough patch.”

Hieronymus did not believe him and concluded, naturally, that this rough patch had begun the day he was born.

The doctor held him upside down.

The doctor, even before spanking the goo-covered infant on the behind, knew something was off, something was slightly unusual about this baby.

The doctor held the newborn higher and glanced directly into its newborn face, only to suddenly squint his own eyes shut and turn away with a slight dizziness — like someone fearful of heights confronted with a thousand-meter drop.

Looking away, his face collapsed in sadness. His loud, resigned sigh was enough to warn everyone in the room of the inevitable an nouncement.

“Madam,” he said. “Your son is a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy.”

Barbie had already been crying, so there was not a noticeable change in her. But the nurse who stood just next to the doctor was overcome by her own curiosity.

“How can that be?” she exclaimed loudly as she took the upsidedown Hieronymus from the doctor. “Let me see…”

It happened so quickly. Everyone reacts differently. This nurse, Oxcelendra Marlin, was completely unprepared, and the doctor blamed himself entirely for not warning and training his staff in case this should happen — in case they should happen to deliver one of them.

She looked into the two tiny open eyes. She saw it. The color with no name. Not a simple mix of other colors — a new one. Primary.

She went into a sudden and extreme panic, and she felt as if the inside of her chest had collapsed, as if her body cavity was no more than a bag of crumpled-up paper. Someone took the baby from her. She knelt and placed her hands on the tiled floor. She remembered a prayer from her childhood. She chanted it out loud.

Jesus and Pixie, how your hour is bright.

Oh Pixie, Fairy of the Lord, I tunnel in my tracks through fire,

and food and smashed automobile

He sees the colors of salt and blood through his eyes,

the demon portholes

witness him and his eyes that slay the normal light…

This nurse, suddenly mad, stopped reciting her unusual prayer. She knelt straight up and held her head between her hands. She tried to control the horrifc fear that brought her groveling on her knees in front of the staff she normally had complete authority over. But they had not seen those eyes. The simple placement of his two irises, their positioning so completely normal. A color at once bright and from the void. She thought to herself, is this what it is like for a blind person, sightless from birth, to suddenly see colors for the very first time? No. A blind person would understand. This was more like being a dog. A beast who lives in a black and white world who suddenly gets a glimpse of color — and is unable to articulate what it means.
Nothing like yellow! Nothing like blue! Nothing like red! Nothing like green or orange or purple! New! New!
Her headache became intolerable. The doctor, her colleagues, they became intolerable as well. That baby — beyond intolerable. A bearer of light, but a light from the void. All else was dimmed, the collection of horrible people around that horrible infant became shadows, and the ceiling above reminded her of a bucket of combustible fuel. As a young girl, she once had her eyelashes and eyebrows burnt of while staring into a bucket of fuel that suddenly ignited, and her face received a sunburn, and she wondered as she looked up into the ceiling,
how long will it be before the combustion happens again?
Alas, it already had, for she actually saw the color that everyone secretly spoke about, and she had no idea exactly what it meant, as no one did. No one, nobody on the Moon or the Earth, understood what this meant. All they could do was hide from it. Pretend it did not exist. Never give it a name.

She heard voices. New people had entered the chamber, and one was a tall fellow she used to know when she worked in the operating room on the fortieth floor. But in her state, she could only ascertain the familiarity of his voice, and with it a certain degree of trust she felt as his form approached her. With his shape were several others. His voice was deep.
Oxcelendra, oh Oxcelendra, keep still, breathe deep, Oxcelendra, this will pass. It happens to everyone, the first time and every time. In a few moments you will back to your old self, just breathe deep, your mind cannot keep it. Already the color is fading — your mind cannot process a color it cannot accept, Oxcelendra. Would you like to hear a story, my dear Oxcelendra, of the first time I saw this color? There you go; lie down on the floor. I was twelve and my older sister had a cruel friend who was one of them, and as a joke he took of his goggles and forced me to look at his eyes and I saw that color and I ran and hid under a table in a public restaurant. But eventually I was okay, and I reported him to the police and the cruel friend was sent away…

Oxcelendra Marlin lay curled into a fetal position under a nearby window. No one bothered her once she fell asleep.

The doctor was already gone. Barbie was still crying, and a nurse stroked her head, which was protected by a paper hood and completely soaked in tears. Through her moist and squinting eyes, she saw another nurse walk away with her baby, who was already fitted with an infantsized pair of goggles.

Endless stripes of neon covered the walls of the corridor. Ringo had to stop every twenty meters or so — neon was nothing new to him, but sometimes he got a little sick of its overuse on the Moon. It occasionally made him dizzy. He was angry at himself for not being present for his son’s birth. If he were present, somehow, perhaps Hieronymus would have been born with normal brown or blue eyes and there would not be the massive unknown he was now wandering into. If he had been there, this would not have happened. But instead, he was at his cursed job overseeing the hydrodynamical particle converter just at the moment the zoning sequence began to blow of a few red lights. Even if Barbie had called him (and she did not, as she long ago had stopped communicating) to let him know she had suddenly gone into labor, it would have been impossible to leave at that exact moment.

He was one of only thirty-seven Ulzatallizine Hydro physicists on the Moon who knew how to transfer particle reactions into Hydro-Extraction salvage points — were he to leave at that exact moment, just as the acceleration modules were setting of alarms, it would have meant immediate termination, and correctly so, as such a move would have proved how terribly selfish and irresponsible he truly was.

Four years prior, another fellow of the exact same position left his post during an identical crisis and the resulting catastrophe ended the lives of four hundred and fifty-eight workers, thirty engineers, two dozen administrators, and six thousand inhabitants of a housing complex located just above the Ulzatallizine Extraction and Processing pump. It was a catastrophe caused by one man’s stupid and selfish negligence — he had rushed home to see a goddamned tellball game between A.C. Tycho and Fecunditatis. He lost his job — and then he killed himself. Ringo took this event to heart. But still, he could not help but feel his absence in the birthing chamber added to the factors that tipped his son into the population of lunar inhabitants who were obliged by law to wear those dreadful, unattractive goggles.

He entered her room. Like the hallway, this place too was lit with neon. Barbie lay in her bed, on her side. Weeping. Her eyes were closed. Two rivers of tears, one from each eye, soaked the pillow behind her head. The only consolation he could muster was the bland normalcy of this. Her crying. Even if Hieronymus had been completely normal, she would still be crying.

She cried every day.

She hated living on the Moon, but she had not been particularly happy on Earth, either.

Ringo looked down at her.

Earth.

Suddenly, a forbidden place.

Not that he was in much of a hurry to go back. Since he and Barbie had taken up residence on the Moon, he had only been back once — one quick visit in the three years they’d lived here.

But now.

Quarantine Directive Number Sixty-Seven.

Eighteen years. They could not leave the Moon for eighteen years. Their life on Earth, their memories, instantly became a fleeting, half-remembered dream. Suddenly that was eons ago. Strange discolored images from a world now thrust into the far-away. Students at the university. She sat a few desks away from him in one of his classes. Her hair was bright red. Her accent. She took forever to tell him where she was from. He pursued her. The first time they kissed, a tree collapsed in the wind just three meters away, and they ran back to the party they’d escaped from, convinced it was their fate to be lovers.

Barbie is such a silly name, he told her. Oh, and yours, what kind of a name is Ringo?

The stove worked on and off. They had a cat who died — he buried it in a muddy field outside the small house they lived in when he was in graduate school. She wrote a novel; it was published. She earned her degree in Chlorination Reversal and worked for a time at a geological institute where a man named Filby tried to seduce her but instead got himself beaten up by Ringo, who used to be very jealous. They all became excellent friends — Filby married Ringo’s sister. Ringo had very black hair. And his eyes were copper brown. Or velvet brown, as Barbie used to say, as they reminded her of the velvet couch her grandmother slept on. He once got drunk and wrote some embarrassing poetry he destroyed before Barbie could find it. A yellow kite — the wind forced it into a nosedive. Thieves stole their bikes. They were married at a shopping mall, before and after a pair of robberies. Ringo’s father died in a mudslide. How many lovers did you have before we met? Several. How many is several? Several is a number I cannot remember because these past loves just don’t compare to you.