I bought two croissants and, with them in a paper bag, returned to Irene’s place, still hearing deep down that sweet tolling of bells.
For Manuel de los Reyes
Moon Madness
by Tom Tolnay
© 2007 by Tom Tolnay
Tom Tolnay is the author of two suspense novels (Celluloid Gangs and The Big House, from Walker & Company), two collections of short stories, and dozens of stories in magazines ranging from The Saturday Evening Post to Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. His fifth book, The Forest Primeval, is a novel of psychological suspense, scheduled for summer 2007 release from Silk Label Books.
It began at precisely 1:09 A.M. Edgar Snipe knew this because a harsh voice on the street below had yanked him out from under layers of dreams, back into this world, and the lighted slot of his digital clock stared at him like the rectangular eye of a Cyclopean robot.
“I’m gonna kick your ass all the way to the moon, Irma!”
With a precinct house half-way down the block, Edgar figured that, before long, the drunk would be prodded away into another neighborhood at the end of a nightstick. Cops working the gallows shift, after all, needed their sleep, too. But no. The loudmouth continued to rant directly outside his tenement: “You hear me, Irma? From Ninth Street all the way to the freakin’ moon!”
At 1:22 Edgar heard the scuff of slippers on the wooden floor in the apartment above his. The window groaned open, and the booming voice of the matronly black woman who lived up there broke upon the moon-bleached streets. “Take that noise someplace else!” Then quieter: “We got kids sleeping up here.”
The drunk roared: “Mind your own business, fatso!”
“If you don’t shut your trap,” the woman bellowed, “I’m calling the cops.”
“Call the cops! Call the army! Call the President!”
The upstairs window slammed shut, and Edgar heard her feet, sounding heavier, thump across the floor. Silence took hold upstairs, making him think the mother of three might be dialing the police. He was glad. If that hollering kept up much longer, he might feel obliged to get out of bed and do something, and he was too tired to be arguing with a drunk at 1:26 A.M. He’d worked overtime that night and hadn’t gotten home until nearly eleven. In a few hours he’d have to crawl out of bed, slap a cheese sandwich together, fill his thermos with coffee, and catch the Second Avenue bus uptown.
A bony-armed, wispy-haired man of fifty-four, he had elevated the skill of avoiding involvement to a minor art form. Mostly his connection with others consisted of untangling the data that defined his customers’ lives, adding and subtracting and multiplying and dividing until a picture of the circumstances of the small shop owners began to emerge — all of this accomplished behind the frosted-glass door of a one-desk office in a building left over from the Industrial Revolution. After work each evening he would ride the bus back downtown, triple-lock his apartment door, shove a TV dinner into the microwave, and, before retiring for the night, light up a cigarette and read a few chapters of a science-fantasy novel. Next morning the routine would start all over again.
In the guts of the alley between the stained brick tenements, a slinky, elongated gray cat picked up the lament of the man on the sidewalk, and the two of them wailed mournfully in unison. Far off, possibly above Fourteenth Street, Edgar heard the charged swoon of a siren, followed by another and another — a three-alarm blaze had broken out somewhere downtown. More distantly there was a muffled boom — a gas-pipe explosion, he speculated, or maybe a husband had shot his wife in the act of sharing their bed with his best friend. Edgar sneered knowingly.
He turned onto his left side, facing away from the window. But the drunk had launched into a string of profanities that Edgar’s ears couldn’t escape, each four-, five-, six-letter word shouted without a pause in between. All the while the moon kept advancing, slicing the room with sharp bands of whiteness between the blinds.
Beyond sleep, Edgar climbed gravely out of bed and, wearing loose pajamas that made him look like an urban scarecrow, moved to the window and lifted one plastic slat in the blinds: A man with a blast of silvery hair, wearing a ribbed undershirt and dark work pants, was now hollering not at the tenement but at the moon, stopping only to take a swallow from the bottle he was clutching by its neck.
“Aw, shut up,” Edgar protested quietly.
He gazed at the cutout of icy light. Though he’d followed news accounts of the flights to the moon in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, and had seen the fuzzy images of astronauts beamed back to Earth on television, he still found it difficult to accept wholeheartedly that human beings had set foot on its distant, reflective surface; that one of them had jabbed a pole bearing an American flag into its gray silt, kicking over stones that had lain undisturbed for millennia. To him space travel still seemed to have a closer connection to science fiction than to reality.
Governments, if not scientists, had largely lost interest in the study of lunar terrain in the decades after the last Apollo flight. But Edgar had read in the Sunday papers that this was changing. Not only the United States but several other nations were developing plans to launch lunar flights. According to the article, an unmanned Japanese flight would soon be hurling missile-like instruments onto the moon to penetrate deep inside its surface to study the composition of the moon’s innermost interior.
The novel he’d been reading that evening seemed to echo these developments. A team of multinational scientists had launched a manned rocket to the moon and the astronauts proceeded to drill far below its gray surface. Presenting their discoveries to an international quorum of astrophysicists in Stockholm, Sweden, the team leader made an astonishing claim: “Following extensive analysis of samples taken, we’ve found that the moon’s core is composed of living tissue, containing cells that resemble neurons.”
That was where Edgar had put the book down — hours ago, though he had a pretty good idea of where the plot was going. The scientists would claim that through telepathy, or perhaps through its rays of reflected light, the moon was projecting thoughts into the minds of the inhabitants of Earth, affecting how human beings behaved.
Such fictional imaginings were too far removed from reality to interest Edgar in any very meaningful way; they simply helped pass the lengthy evening hours of an accountant who had lived alone with his numbers for many years. But tonight those hours had been stretched almost beyond endurance by the noisy intruder on the street.
The drunk wailed: “I’m gonna boot your mother’s ass off the planet, too, Irma — just like a football.” Appreciating his own simile, he repeated it again and again, finally breaking into a burst of grating laughter. Whenever the drunk paused in his shouting, Edgar knew it was only to take a swallow from his bottle.
Next-door, through the wall, Edgar heard something heavy drop onto the floor, and suddenly his next-door neighbors, a young couple to whom he’d nodded once or twice, began arguing, though he couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. The couple had always seemed to get along well, but Edgar understood the strange things that being awakened abruptly in the middle of the night could do to people.
He considered opening his window and telling the drunk to get lost, but he knew that would only encourage him to continue barking at the moon. His bare feet chilled, he returned to his bed and wriggled his bony body onto the limp mattress. Immediately he drew the blanket over his head, but it didn’t help.