Ambient 06 - Going, Going, Gone

I’d have seen her back home. »You have moon cities there?«
    »Last man who walked on the moon died twenty years ago.« She looked at me, not the moon. »Walter,« she said, »Do you want to go back, or stay here?«
    I smiled. »What’d the first man on the moon say, once he got there?«
    She looked blank for a moment; then giggled, trying to remember and realizing she couldn’t. Then it came to her. I guessed it was something she’d been told back in second grade.
    »›One step for man,‹« she said. »›Two for mankind.‹«
    Then, she kissed me. We held each other so tight that I think each of us was trying to blend into the other one, that we could somehow jump into each other’s worlds and stay there. When at last I came up for air I looked at her, and she looked happier than I’d ever seen her; and I knew where I was going to be sleeping that night at least.
    »I want to stay here,« I said. »I’m getting used to it quicker than I thought I would.«
    At that moment I think I was about as happy as I’d ever been. But then before I could kiss her again I saw her expression change; her eyes widened, as if she were seeing something that she’d always known she’d have to see one day, however much she didn’t want to see it – the minister coming up the walk, the doctor with the chart, the angel at the gate. I stepped away from her, still holding onto her waist, just moving off far enough to turn around and see what she saw. In the western part of the sky (for all I knew, here, it might have been in the east) there was what appeared to be the thin white tail of a comet, stretching across the bowl of the sky, reaching unbroken from one side to the other. When I first saw it, the line seemed to be fixed, and steady; but as I kept my eyes on its narrow course, I saw it slowly beginning to widen.
    »Walter,« she said, »we may not have a choice.«
     

NINE
    Throughout most of the rest of the night, while Eulie shook those little black boxes of hers out of her bag, diddled their absence of knobs, and made phone calls, I lay on her couch and found myself making my acquaintance with the dream world as I found it on her side of the aisle. Truth be told, and I’m truthing now, I’ve never been much ridden by nightmares, at least not of the sort that come during sleep, but that night I suffered a series that grew progressively worse. First I saw figures standing, covered in white sheets, no holes cut out for eyes; they were talking to me, but I didn’t cop the plea they wanted to hear and they started piling on like blankets, suffocating me underneath. Then, nothing; then my father, sitting at the kitchen table back in our house on Queen Anne Hill, reading the newspaper. The headlines were large, but I couldn’t read them. On the floor, near his feet, was our dog, a small mixed breed, like us; although it was disembowelled it was still alive, and tried to lick itself. Another pause; then I imagined that I lay on her couch, and tried to rise as a black form took shape inside my chest – first it was a square, then it became a circle, then a square again, increasing in size every time until I could see the points sticking out between my ribs. Relief; and then came the worst. I dreamed I was an island, my friends, an island at night, surrounded by ocean. Tiny Arabian pirates were trying to land on my shores, jabbing tiny iron hooks into my skin, jabbering and hollering and poking away. That was more than I could bear, and I shocked myself awake, drenched in cold sweat.
    »Twelve nine seven four,« I heard Eulie saying. »Five seven three three one –«
    Reading aloud some list of numbers, I inferred, blinking myself into fuller consciousness; wondered why she was standing in the middle of the front room talking to herself until I remembered what she’d shown me last night, that this was how she made telephone calls. I supposed she was yammering on to superiors or inferiors somewhere else about the silver thread on high, seeing if they understood what it might signify. Every so often she’d pause and walk down the hall, or into the kitchen – she’d explained to me that there was so much titanium in the walls of her house that she had to shift around regularly, or else she’d lose the connection. Her phone apparatus was in her head, somehow; and all she had to do to get on the party line was to say the number and she’d be hooked up immediately. This seemed no more peculiar than anything else