Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (78 page)

(I try to keep my life at arm's length and just look at it, Luke once said. I haven't done a lot of things I wanted to do or should have done, but I don't pretend I have.)

Remembering when he and Luke were young and went hiking in the mountains together, he lay down, chewing more pain pills; the bottle was nearly empty. After that he might have been dreaming. Opening the middle drawer of his father's desk, he saw the dead moon in the black sky. He loved the sight. How often, if ever, did Luna duplicate herself? Wearily he crept to the window and found another moon there. Then he was sick to his stomach. Once that ended, he lay down on top of his unmade bed and closed his eyes. He saw the moon again. This time it appeared to be falling up toward the blue earth.

When he met Mr. Murmuracki again, he realized that he had lately been perceiving everyone else as if through glass, distant and muted. Only this old man did he see true.

He knew enough not to inquire about moonflowers. He said: I'd like to go to the moon.

Well, said Mr. Murmuracki, for that you don't need me. You need—

Excuse me, but I can't seem to find anyone else.

Ah. How much time did you say you had left?

I'd guess three months. But how can I know? My stomach hurts—

And why is it exactly that you thought I might be able to help you?

I bought my moonflowers from you.

Yes, I remember, but how does that signify?

I'd like to go to the moon because—

Yes. Why exactly would you wish to travel to the moon, especially in your condition?

If I could just see what's going on up there right now—

That's different. We do have a channel, to communicate with our suppliers. You'd be satisfied to observe it from the viewing room?

Have you been to the moon?

Oh, I've never missed a day of work. I'm much like your late father in that respect . . .

You knew him?

A fine man. One of the best.

Could I see him?

He's gone.

Where did he go?

Where you're going.

Will I see him then?

He's considerably farther away than the moon.

Oh.

Now, as I mentioned, we do have a viewing room. Whom would you like to see?

Victoria.

Of course. A pretty name, isn't it?

Yes—

You have very good taste, if I may say so, to feel as you do toward that lovely young woman. In her life she was, how shall I say, unappreciated—

But she—

Yes, yes, that's right. This way. Now, when you open the door, it will seem quite dark. Close the door behind you and wait for your eyes to adjust. Remember also that from here to the moon is a good light-second or two, as we both know from our college days. Just take your time. I'll be in my office up front.

Thank you, Mr. Murmuracki.

Within seconds he had become one of the elect who comprehend that the moonglare is caused by a certain pearlescent cloud-lid pressed tight over the Mountains of the Moon, whose fragile purple teeth and angles become black by contrast with this painful cloud and with the steep white bow of snow beneath; something about these entities makes for an awful and dangerous dazzlement.

Isaac was sitting alone and moody by the shore of a high cold lunar lake whose surface happened to be, in horrible contrast to Isaac himself, alive with earth-tides; he was picking moonflowers and dissecting them into nothing, ignoring Victoria, who hovered seductively at his shoulder, festively clad in her flesh; the breeze kept whipping her long blonde hair in Isaac's face; sometimes a strand of it flicked into his eyesocket, and then without looking up he brushed it away with his wristbone, meanwhile ruining more and more moonflowers, whose petals flew up like fireflies toward the lunar mountains. The roar of the lake-waves against the dun and cinder-dark moon rocks was so loud that whatever those two might have been saying to each other, if anything, could not be overheard; but presently Victoria began to ascend away, and as she cast one look over her shoulder, my neighbor who watched discovered her face sparkling with tears. Isaac never looked up. Pitying her, this sad watcher, whom both of them had rejected, leaped up to call to her; he thought merely to console her;
he
wasn't selfishly desirous! At this, Isaac gangled himself upright, a tall skeleton no longer in possession of all his metacarpii (no doubt he rambled hard here on the moon), turned round, waved and grinned at his former friend, who waved back neutrally, neither disliking nor blaming him but disinclined to be won over and re-abandoned
(when he was young, he, like Isaac, had tried his best to make everyone love him, until failures taught him how to strengthen himself with the magic spell called
no
); whereas Victoria, flitting and hesitating, finally alit upon the water, at arm's length from the shore, wiped her eyes upon her fairskinned arm, and said: Hi.

Hello, he said. I was just—

I don't want to talk about it.

All right, he replied, mildly sorry that he could not help her. A moon-bird with a pearlescent beak rushed silently between them. He turned away as she began to strip, and Isaac swung the telescopic barrels of his eyesockets toward her. He left them then, approving of them both, wondering whether Victoria would succeed, in which case Isaac would certainly break her much-broken heart: all in a day's work.

Far away across the milky moon-lake, which widened and narrowed like a woman's body, there was a rolling rise of moon-alders and laval outcroppings, and beyond this grew many blackish-purple mountains of fantastic height, sharpness and fragility, like broken glass upended on narrow points, flaring out into double-bladed wings, and then terminating (where the clouds revealed it) in needles; and because he was on the moon, and therefore already partially of this place, he found himself able to speed as rapidly as a water-bird, if not as gracefully as his Victoria, over the waves and then up that lava-pored tree-swale and up a very steep yet rounded canyon to a glacier amphitheater amidst the highest peaks; and there, as he had suspected and hoped, walked Luke, quite steadily and still undecomposed; while at his shoulder now flew that naughty, never satisfied Victoria, so good at making herself and others unhappy, whispering, giggling, touching herself; just then she was a skeleton and did not seem to know it—or perhaps she had tried everything else and hoped to tempt Luke through this more advanced state of undress. Luke trudged on. Why didn't he fly like her? Well, he hated to cut corners. When she swirled down before him, seeking to clasp him in her bony arms, he pushed her away. She fell to the ground, perhaps on purpose, then leaped into the sky and streaked upward, leaving behind her a glowing trail of anger which condensed and fell to the snow as reddish-brown crystals which in turn sublimed into nothing.

Giving Luke awhile to recover from the irritation which Victoria must
have caused, he presently overtook him, and called out. Luke uttered his name with cheerful surprise, and so he flew down to visit his friend.

How are you getting on?

Oh, not bad, said Luke. There's a million-year hike I plan to take, if I last that long, which I probably won't. What's going on?

Happily and excitedly he began to tell Luke all about himself. So often in their lives he had talked and talked, and Luke had patiently listened. At intervals Luke had called upon him in distress; but mostly it had gone the other way, and it was still like that. He requested advice, and Luke said: Well. I can tell you what I'd try not to do, not that I'm very good at doing what I'm supposed to. You've collected a lot of stuff in your life. Why not get rid of it?

I'm trying to phase it out in stages, he replied.

I'd say that's very sane.

How are you feeling? he asked again.

I have good days and bad days. Being dead isn't all that great, but it's not terrible. I try to appreciate what I can, like the earthlight on the snow over there. Where I'm heading there should be much more snow.

Then the wind began to hiss, whistle and shriek. Luke lowered his head, walking steadily into it.

The watcher hovered behind, as he had in life, perceiving now how steep and shadowed was that place between the rock-teeth. Here was he and there was Luke, with death snow-shadowed between them. There was Luke, going up into the blue sky of space. When the dying man departed the viewing room, he felt slightly ashamed that on his face Mr. Murmuracki could probably discern that loneliness, as if he had sat too long by the shore of that writhing lunar lake, while everyone else went about the business of living or being dead; he thought: Oh, no, to be lonely
forever
! and a high cold wind rushed down from the Mountains of the Moon.

When he found the little red book in which he had written his morbid poems, he felt revulsion and resistance. It was this object which caused Victoria to leave him. His final lover's letter to her was enclosed, carefully and viciously marked up by her. Setting it aside, he took the red
book back into his hand. Pulling open the cover with his thumb was more unpleasant than it would have been to lever the slab off Victoria's grave. But he did it. The poems, of course, were very badly written, in an unhappy seventeen-year-old's unaware imitation of the Decadent manner. But it was worse than that—what had he been
thinking
? They described someone who looked like her, yet was dead and rotten. It was bad enough that he had written them; but why had he sent them to her? What had he supposed would happen? Now for a moment he excavated the grave of that pallid, skinny seventeen-year-old boy who had understood neither Victoria nor himself. The boy stared up at him. A beetle crawled across his spectacles. His desire to ask the boy anything fell away, for the boy knew nothing. He replaced the slab. Asking himself how he would feel if some woman wrote him poems like these, he answered: I would think her very sick. I would fear she meant me harm. I would get away from her—far away, forever.

There is a desert in your blonde-white hair

With lions sleeping in the sun.

Your eyes are wide and deadly pools

That draw me under blue.

Pretty bone-teeth glisten savagely

Veiled by the currents of salt-red blood, your lips.

You watch me always, hungry;

Your smile is a tomb-sweet lure,

and on and on, more gruesomely. He felt ashamed; he longed to destroy the book; it was horrible to him. But he had kept it so long, even if without looking at it.

It made him sick.

Now through the night-whipped trees I passed with silent tread, creeping through lakes of moldering leaves, filling myself with unspeakable etheric fires,
whatever those might have been.
The grave awaited me,
just as it now truly did, when he went to visit the true Victoria, who was truly dead but not hungry for him and whose smile was no lure to anything horrid, or was it?
The grave awaited me. The sweet-smelling soil about it was repulsively soft, and I tunneled through it with loathsome ease,
no
doubt because that summer he had been reading the stories of H. P. Lovecraft.
Through the soil, a green-white hand, blotched and cold, came groping in search of me.

Now he remembered that for years he had suffered from nightmares of this sort, nearly every night. He must have been very ill.— Why hadn't he killed himself?— Women had saved him, one after the other.— Hadn't he hoped that Victoria would do the same?— She could have said: I'm waiting for you, and here's my hand; my hand's alive, and my smile's alive and I love you.— But who could have loved something like him?
Eagerly I scraped the earth aside . . .

Flushing, he closed up the hateful book again and reinterred it in the envelope. He could bear no more of it today.

He chewed his pain pills. Then he lay down and waited for the syrupy narcosis to comfort him. He dreaded to meet Victoria's eyes.

He felt better. There was the envelope, lying on his father's desk. He longed to put it away in the drawer. Rising, he picked it up—and the red book broke through the brittle yellow edge.— Shame, shame, as pitiless as sunlit revelations of grime in spiderwebs!

Coasting over the lunar surface at a very low altitude seemed to improve his spirits, so he now did that nearly every afternoon, especially when it was too hot and bright to visit the cemetery: browsing across the moon map as if he were peering through leaf-holes into the light, loving the white shinings on the black and silver moon, searching for a certain unknown thing in craters on the night side of the terminator, while weary old Earth arose as jewel-green as a new oak gall. Whatever else was written in that red book of poems might if he were sufficiently fortunate be equally valuable. Consider the eighteen-year-old patient of Jung's who, having been preyed upon by her brother and a schoolmate, discovered that sorrow is a labyrinth of translucent glass, whose passageways gain in weariness and bewilderment by half-showing the adjacent ones, which may be their own turnings, and which continue even deeper into that green dimness of sea-glass; until she began to believe herself to live upon the moon, where all women and children had to be sequestered
underground, in icy fissures in the grey moon-bone, in order to protect them from a certain vampire. Volunteering to kill this monster, she caused herself to be placed on a high tower in the middle of Lacus Mortis (45˚ N 27˚ E); and they gave her a knife before departing with protestations of admiring grief. Thus far in this tale, although it has been wisely called
the
last receiver,
being the entity which communicates all rays and causes from the superiors to the inferiors, the moon seems no very pleasant place. But even before the dark predator came winging over the half-lit lunar canyons, she must have been lubricated by what prudes call curiosity; for she kept begging herself: Let me just find out what he looks like beneath his lush-feathered wings.
Afterward
I'll stab him.— Muffling his face in his black shoulders, contracting into his own long spine, like a folding umbrella, the vampire now settled silently onto the parapet, close enough for her to touch his elbow had she wished to. With extreme caution and delicacy, like a fisherman setting up his lures, he reopened his wings. His features attracted her far more than she could have imagined. Drinking in the sight of his beautiful eyes, she hesitated a trifle too long, so that he seized her and bore her off, through the dark grooves and into a pretense of brightness: green and orange swales, the roar of water dulling down the piping screams of death. What happened between them next Jung never reports, but I think it fair to suppose that there was kissing, sucking and tickling involved, for she soon considered the moon so lovely a place that she struggled against being cured and was thereby condemned to dwell on earth. What if the skinny, shy seventeen-year-old boy who loved Victoria had been of the moon-woman's type? In other words, what if he could have dug down through the cemetery loam and liked it? In his spirit he dreamed over his moon map. It also soothed him to sit at his father's desk and gaze at Victoria's letters, even without reading them; today he wasn't well enough for that. From the middle of the heap he withdrew a new one and placed it in an old pouch that he had, in the expectation of carrying it with him around his neck for several weeks, his joy in it slowly swelling—not at all the desperate joy which had inflamed him like longing when he was seventeen and she calmly slipped another note into his hand in the high school corridor, then rushed off to her chemistry class, or when a new letter lay in a slim white envelope in his family's mailbox,
bearing a thirteen-cent Liberty Bell stamp or that butterfly or an American eagle gripping sheaves and arrows in its claws—and always her sweet name or initials greeted him on the return address, which she very occasionally typed but mostly wrote in her very slightly forward-slanting script: a new treasure to add to his hoard; ever so carefully he slit open the lefthand edge of the envelope. How his heart used to pound at seventeen! The pleasure he felt nowadays was a fiery, peaty spirit which had aged in an oak cask until its sting had grown capable of clothing itself with knowing discretion within sweet smoothness. Who could say which was better? Good boy, he drank whichever was available. Sometimes his loving pleasure in Victoria brought water to his tired old eyes.