Maybe the Moon

under.”
    “Well, I’m an adult.”
    I told her they might want proof.
    “I have an ID,” she said, missing the joke.
    “Why do you think they say that?” I said, beginning to worry for real.
    “I’m sure it’s nothing,” said Renee.
    “It won’t be nothing if my ass is flung into Kingdom Come.”
    Renee must have suspected a last-minute change of heart, because she frowned and poked out her lower lip. “It’s not that fast, Cady. Nancy Reagan’s hair wasn’t even messed up.”
    The woman in front of us, a plump, white-haired lady in pink sweats, turned around and smiled down at me. “It’s really mild,” she said. I wondered how long she’d been waiting to leap into the conversation. “I was the same as you, but it’s a piece o’ cake.”
    “Thank God.”
    The woman nodded. “I was exactly the same as you.”
    “You’ve done this before, then?”
    “Brought my sister’s kids last week.”
    Renee jumped in: “Is it fun?”
    “Well…if you love Mr. Woods as much as I do.”
    “Oh, I do!”
    The woman laughed.
    “I mean, I probably do.” Renee tittered, then cast a guilty glance in my direction. I could tell how much she was dying to blab, so I admonished her with a stony look. The pink-sweats lady seemed nice enough, but I was tired and cranky, and too preoccupied with ideas for the new video. I just didn’t have the stamina, or the time, for the draining little ritual of explaining myself.

    The ride turned out to be a sort of glorified fun house: a chilly, dark space the size of an airplane hangar, through which we lurched and glided in “bark”-covered trains. The scene of our Adventure, according to Philip in the preride video, was not the suburban forest we knew from the movie but the “faraway, mystical realm of Mr. Woods’ origin.” Translation: I may be cheesy enough to exploit this character, but I’m not going to fuck around with a classic.
    What this change of locale afforded, of course, was the perfect setup for cloning Mr. Woods, for creating a whole race of lovable robots in his image. That familiar wizened face, once so charmingly singular, popped up behind every bush and tree stump as we sailed along, as a teenage girl, say, or a romping baby, or a campful of lumberjacks marching home from work. There were Mr. Woods farmers and their wives, Mr. Woods soldiers going off to war. There was even a wedding ceremony in which everyone in church looked like Him. In the pyrotechnical finale, at least a hundred of the little fuckers (evil ones, I presume; the plot was too much for me) were hurled through the forest by a giant catapult.
    I was profoundly unmoved. When we lurched out into the day-light again, Renee and the pink-sweats lady swapped notes. Renee was pleased, but thought Mr. Woods looked weird as a bride. I bitmy tongue and said something vague about the old-fashioned thrill of being led by the hand through a darkened room. Renee looked at me funny, unconvinced, then resumed gabbing with the lady.
    When we were alone again, Renee announced stiffly that she had to pee.
    “Then pee.”
    “Look,” she said. “I didn’t tell her.”
    I told her I knew that.
    “Why are you mad, then?”
    I told her I wasn’t, that I was just tired, that I thought she was mad.
    “You wanna go with me?” She meant to the ladies’ room.
    I shook my head, gave her a weak smile, and asked her to help me find a place away from the traffic.
    This turned out to be a small but highly groomed patch of grass around the corner from Fleet Parker’s Dressing Room. I was sprawled there amid the birds of paradise, like some live-action garden gnome, when I heard a youthful male voice call my name.
    “Cady?”
    The guy knelt on the lawn to address me, completely natural about it. He was cute and in his early twenties, snub-nosed and sandy-haired. He wore a blue checked shirt with chinos and bore a marked resemblance to half the cutie-pies in West Hollywood, but I honestly couldn’t place the face.
    “Yeah?”
    “It’s Callum.”
    All I can tell you is that the name just stayed there in the air for a while, everywhere at once, like the hum after a bell has been tolled.
    “You’re shitting me,” I said.
    Without showing teeth, he gave me the prettiest smile. “No.”
    I hit the ground with my hand. “What in the world are you doing here?”
    “Same thing you’re doing, I guess.”
    My thoughts were galloping way ahead of me, of course, so itwas a real chore just to function