“Hey, Mr. Moon — I’m sendin’ you a coupla earthlings to bury in your craters!”
Now Edgar remembered the dream he’d been immersed in when the drunk had jolted him out of sleep: The moon had grown angry over the intrusion of astronauts probing beneath its surface, with the likelihood of more to come now that China, India, Japan, and Europe had announced plans for lunar explorations. And so, with its powerful icy rays, it had frozen all feelings of love in every human heart on Earth. The accountant smiled coldly at the thought that maybe the moon had frozen his own heart already, many years ago.
Finally, at 1:53 A.M., Edgar heard another voice outside, and it sounded authoritative. “It’s about time,” Edgar said gratefully, getting up and scuffling across to the window.
Raising two slats of the blind, he saw a tall, square-shouldered policeman, arms crossed, standing over the much shorter drunk. The bottle, lying in the gutter, glistened in the moonlight. “You’ve had a little too much to drink, old-timer, and the neighborhood’s had a little too much of you. Why don’t you and I take a walk.”
“I’m stayin’ right where I am,” the old man declared. “Not one inch am I gonna move!”
“Where do you live?” said the cop in a tolerant yet insistent tone.
“Nowhere — as of tonight, I don’t live nowhere.”
“In that case you’d better come along with me to the station and sleep it off.”
“You can’t make me leave — this sidewalk’s public property.”
In the apartment above Edgar’s, the mother yanked open the window and screamed, “Throw the bum in jail!”
From a window below his apartment came a chesty voice: “He’s keeping the whole damn neighborhood awake, Officer. Get him outta here. I gotta work in the morning.”
“Gonna chop all of you up into pieces like chunks o’ cheese!” the drunk roared at the building. Enjoying his latest simile, he repeated it a couple of times. “Like chunks o’ cheese!”
“Pipe down, Pop,” the policeman said, his voice growing agitated.
Deep in the alley, the cat made a trio out of this duet of distress, releasing that nerve-shriveling meowwwwwww again. A block or two away the huge tire of a delivery truck blew out, and an auto-theft alarm went off somewhere. On the ground floor in Edgar’s tenement an infant began wailing, coughing, choking to catch its breath. On a nearby street, a dog barked hoarsely, triggering a howl from another backyard dog.
The turmoil caused Edgar to recall something he’d read about mental patients ascending to the heights of their madness under the gravitational pull and marble glare of a full moon.
As the voice of the drunk began to fade down the street, followed by the policeman’s voice goading him along, Edgar heard the young couple moving around, bumping and thumping, in the next apartment. Aroused from their sleep by the unrest of the night, he figured, they’d begun to take it out on each other, and their voices quickly grew loud and bitter.
“You didn’t seem to mind Greg putting his hands all over you.”
“Look who’s talking! Don’t think for one second I didn’t see you hanging on to Dahlia all night.”
Suddenly they broke loose, screaming wildly at each other — one of them throwing something made of glass, maybe a lamp, against the wall with a great crash.
“You’re nothing but a slut!” roared the young man.
“I hate your guts!”
Edgar Snipe gave up on sleep. Staring at the scratches of moonlight clawing their way across the tangled sheets on his bed, he began piecing together the events of the night, passages from the novel he’d been reading, details of that news item, and fragments of his dream — and in the wooziness of a thick fatigue began to wonder whether some sort of vengeful force might truly be at work in the moonlight.
At 2:16, lying in bed against the wall that separated their apartments, Edgar heard the slap of what sounded like a fist meeting a wad of flesh. The young woman began shrieking hysterically. Edgar stiffened.
“If you ever touch me again,” she sobbed, “I’ll cut off your fingers,” her voice fading as she escaped into another room.
After a few moments of silence, Edgar heard the young man yell, “Put that down, Susan — have you gone nuts?”
“What’s the matter, Jack? Not such a big man anymore?”
Good Lord! thought Edgar, sitting up, wondering if he should do something. Now he heard them struggling, apparently falling onto the floor with a clatter, as if they’d knocked over a night table on the way down. Edgar kneeled on his mattress and pressed his ear against the wall. The young woman sounded very much like that cat in the alley, letting out a piercing screech.
“Give it back — it’s mine, give it back!”
“Who’s afraid now?” he demanded. “Come on, tell me — who’s afraid of the big bad knife now?”
Alarmed, Edgar jumped out of bed and dashed to the window, opened it wide, and leaned out: He could not see the policeman or the drunk anywhere on the street. And he heard someone running across the floor next-door. Without a notion of what he ought to do, he felt himself moving toward his front door, his pajamas striped by horizontal slices of moonlight.
The doors of the two apartments opened at the same moment: The young woman, dark-haired, wild-eyed, wearing a pink nightshirt that didn’t quite reach her knees, sprang against Edgar, startling him as well as herself. In the dull light the young man, a head taller than both, suddenly loomed over them, his taut body covered only by a black T-shirt and white undershorts.
Though Edgar saw the descent of the steel blade all the way — as if it were approaching in slow motion — he was powerless to stop it from plunging into his shoulder. Backwards into his apartment he staggered, the pain seeming to come on slowly, and then making him dizzy. He collapsed, his limbs sprawling awkwardly across the floor. He could taste a salty thickness, hear the rasp of shrill voices, sense the suddenness of movement around him. But when he tried to see what was going on, he was too weak to raise his head.
With his mind lolling near the craters of unconsciousness, he focused on the only image that came to him, clinging to it as if it would help prevent him from falling off the edge of the Earth: A figure in a silvery, puffy, one-piece suit, with a transparent globe for a head, was jabbing the sharp point of an aluminum flagpole into a spongy gray surface.
Stripes of sheer whiteness continued to spread over the linoleum in his apartment, until they touched Edgar’s nicotine-stained fingertips, and the sound of the ambulance grew louder.
Ideas in My Head
by Janice Law
© 2007 by Janice Law
Janice Law is a prolific short story writer and also an accomplished novelist, who created one of the earliest modern female detectives, Anna Peters. The Edgar-nominated author’s most recent novel, Voices (Forge, 2003) was a finalist for the Connecticut Center for Book Fiction Award. The Hartford Courant praised the book’s “depth and grace.” Booklist called it “quietly compelling.”
You know that old saying, Don’t try to put ideas in my head? I’ve had an interesting example of that, and I can tell you that once certain ideas get into your mind, they lodge there like grit. You can’t get them out and you can’t leave them alone; pretty soon, you can’t think of anything else.