Bones of The Moon Read online

  I bustled around the apartment getting ready and had us out on the glistening street in no time. Mae wore a peach-colored suit and appeared very pleased by the change of surroundings.

  «Hi, Mrs. James. Strange weather, huh?»

  Alvin Williams came out of the door behind me and started talking before I'd even turned round. His voice sounded friendly enough, but when I turned to look at him there was no expression on his face. He might just as well have been looking at a door.

  «Hi, Alvin! Where's Loopy?»

  «He's a pain sometimes. I wanted to go out by myself and look at these clouds. Will you look at those colors! It's like they're having a fistfight or something up there, huh?»

  I liked that image and smiled at him without looking at the sky. I knew what he was talking about, but Alvin Williams with his dirty glasses and Buddy Holly haircut didn't seem the kind of fellow who would come up with images like that.

  «Well, Alvin, this is an historic day for us. This is the first time Mae lames here has ever gone for a walk.»

  He smiled and looked into the carriage. «Is that right? Well, congratulations. You and Mr. James should have champagne or something tonight to celebrate.»

  We chatted for a few more minutes, but then he became sort of nervous and said he had to go. That was okay with me, because I wanted to get moving.

  «So now! Welcome to 90th Street, Mae. There's the market where I shop for us. Over there is the bookstore your Daddy likes. . . .»

  I gave her the quick guided tour of our neighborhood and besides Alvin, everybody _did_ smell of good cologne.

  It still hurt me to walk much, so I stopped after fifteen minutes in front of Marinucci's Ice Cream Emporium – a favorite watering hole of the James family. I went in and ordered coffee and checked to see if Mae was still tucked up tight in the right places.

  A waitress I had never seen before brought the coffee to my table and didn't even peek at the baby.

  «Cretin.» I picked up the cup and made a face at her retreating back. The cup wasn't hot and the coffee was barely warm when I sipped it.

  I clunked it back down on the table and looked out of the window. I hate lukewarm coffee. It has to be hot, _hot_; almost enough to burn your tongue. The waitress was reading a magazine at the counter and I was about to call her over and complain when I looked at the mug. Steam swirled up from it and carried the good smell of fresh ground coffee in it.

  Huh? I touched it to be sure. _Hot_. Hormones? It must have been hormones, or my body, or something inside readjusting or calibrating after the shock of the birth. Or else I had become so stoned looking out of the window at gray and blue rain that I'd grown dull or wobbly or even just _off_ about certain things; things like heat and time and memory.

  Shrugging it off, I picked up the cup and blew over it to cool it. It was _so_ hot I could barely keep my finger crooked through the ceramic hole. Hey Danny, guess what happened to me today? I shook my head, knowing I wouldn't tell him about this because it would make me look very silly.

  So I had my coffee, paid and left. Passing the window on the way home again, I glanced in at the table where I'd sat, but the cup was gone. Funny.

  As we approached across the plains of Randua, the sound of the forgotten machines became gigantic, oiled and precise. I began to make out their separate parts: pistons and levers moving in a glistening storm of chrome, brass and tight compression. They no longer _made_ anything, but continued to function. The ground they sat on was theirs, inviolable to others.

  When we were within a few hundred feet of the first one, it slowed suddenly like an old steam locomotive coming into a station. On its side was a large red and gold plaque that said «Lieslseiler: Prague.» Its separate pieces slackened down to half-speed, although it hissed and clanked even more than before. I was sure it had somehow sensed our presence. Its message and then its pace was quickly – frighteningly – picked up by the other machines. As one, they worked down to the same rhythm, despite each being entirely different from the other.

  I felt the wolf's body tremble beside me and I knew it was my place to speak.

  «Let us through. You know who we are. We're not your enemies. We have to cross the plains and then the mountains.»

  The machines mocked me by clacking their levers up and down in perfect time to my last words. When I stopped, they went back to their own mysterious rhythms.

  «Leave us alone.»

  Clack-Clack-Clack-Clack.

  Together, they sounded like the largest typewriter in the world. I looked at Martio, but his round camel's face gave no hint as to what to do.

  «Please, just _stop_.»

  Clack-Clack-Clack.

  Minutes passed. Their movements and pace stayed the same so long as no one spoke, while their steam whistled savagely up into the dry air.

  «They want the word, Cullen.»

  I looked at Mr. Tracy, shocked that he had even mentioned it here in front of the others, in front of the machines! But they had remained silent after he spoke.

  Pepsi had his arms wrapped around the wolfs front leg and his face was scared. He looked at me as if _I_ knew what to do.

  «But why, Mr. Tracy?»

  «Because it's the only proof of who you are. It proves why you're here.»

  «But won't we need it later?»

  The machines' tempo quickened; they were offended by my hesitation.

  «You need it now. Use it!» Mr. Tracy's voice was quiet but firm. I had no choice.

  «Koukounaries!»

  They stopped.

  An hour later, the wolf came up alongside and Pepsi broke the sullen silence which had been with us since we passed so quickly and anxiously across the rest of the Plain of Machines.

  «Mom, what does it mean? Koucarry?»

  I looked at Mr. Tracy; he was a few feet ahead of us but he had turned when he heard the boy's question. He nodded for me to answer. It was the first magic I ever gave my son.

  «Koukounaries, Pepsi. It means _pine cones_ in Greek.»

  The doctor's name was Rottensteiner and his office was decorated with cheerful photographs of his family and their Golden Retriever dogs.

  I sat in a chair across the desk from him and told him the whole story of my Rondua dreams. It made me nervous to be spilling these same beans again for the second time in a year, once on each side of the ocean, but the Koukounaries dream had scared me. I wanted to get this whole thing out of my system, or at least find an angle on it that I could accept and live with.

  When I had finished, he steepled his fingers and shrugged. «I honestly don't think anything is wrong, Mrs. James. I've never heard of this happening before, but that's nothing new in this field. Your doctor in Italy was right, so far as I can tell. Dreams do what they want. You can't put a leash on them and tell them where to walk.

  «People usually have repetitious or sequential dreams after some kind of traumatic experience – they've been in a bad car accident, or someone they loved recently died – something bad that the system just can't let go of. Now, the fact that you seem to be both happy and well-adjusted tells me that you're dreaming of Rondua because a part of you enjoys it. Nothing more or less. To tell you the God's-honest truth, I don't _know_ why it has gone on for so long, or why it's so clearly episodic. But as a doctor, that doesn't make me concerned. Obviously the most recognizable thing is that you're incorporating parts of your conscious world into Rondua. The Greek pine cones is the best example. Why? I don't know. For some reason, your subconscious has decided to use that particular bit because it likes it. It _is_ a strange word, but there's no rhyme or reason for how that part of the mind works. It's both a stubborn and a mysterious thing and it really does end up doing or thinking exactly what it pleases.»

  «And I shouldn't worry?»

  «Of course you could come and talk to me once a week about your life and what may be on your mind that day. But I would be cheating you. You sound fine, from what you've told me. You like your husband, you're enjoying
your child. . . . To me, your life sounds like its moving along in high gear. If anything bad does come of the dream eventually, then by all means come back here and we'll talk. But I don't think that will happen. If I were you, I'd let Rondua do what it wants. Maybe if you really dislike it, the less you resist it, the more apt it will be to go away.»

  I was a greenhorn in the land of psychiatry and psychology, so having heard the same judgment from two doctors, I slid the «Am-I-mad?» worries to the back burner of my overactive mind.

  Danny knew nothing of my visit to Rottensteiner, or the fact that the Rondua dreams had been continuing. But some weeks after I had returned from the hospital, he did ask how Yasmuda and the gang were doing.

  I handed him a wet child and refused to look at him. He took Mae, but stood there waiting for my answer. He was concerned and that concern invariably made me want to hug him. I told him I still dreamed about Rondua once in a while, but nothing like before. He asked if that made me _sad_, which I thought was a queer question, coming from him.

  «Sad? Weren't you the one who was so worried when I was having them before?»

  «Yeah, I was, Cul. But it's just that you seemed . . . really happy when you dreamed of them. I even liked hearing what was happening in the next exciting adventure: Felina the Wolf; Mr. Tracy, the dog with the hat on . . .»

  «You remember them?»

  «How could I forget?»

  The real winter days came and things grew cold and blue and very still.

  Being a mother was much harder and more monotonous than I had originally imagined. In my pre-Mae musings, I had envisioned days pleasantly full of pragmatic duties that led to a smiling, happy baby and my feeling worthy for a series of small jobs well done. But there was always so much _to_ do, and it had to be done over and over again. Things were only complete for a moment. As soon as you turned your back or closed your eyes for a second, the bottles were all dirty again and the nappy needed changing, and what about that load of laundry you put in an hour ago? Mae was a very good kid and fussed only when she had reason to, but there were a lot of reasons and sometimes her fussing made me short-tempered and frustrated as hell.

  And then I always tried to have our small world all shipshape and spic and span by the time Danny came home from work in the evening. It was important to me that he shouldn't walk into the kind of mess some friends of ours allowed because of their kids. I recoiled at the idea of toys everywhere, chocolaty faces, that repugnant smell of cooped-up child I knew from visits to other houses.

  Maybe down-deep I wanted Danny to think I was Wonderwoman in every conceivable way. Attractive, bright, sexy as the devil, but most of all – competent. We want to be loved for what we are, but also for what we want others to _think_ we are.

  Weekends were best, because Danny was around to pitch in and help out with the washing and the shopping. Sometimes we'd arrange for a baby-sitter and go out to dinner and a movie. It was a big help and what was nicest about those breaks was that we'd both come home renewed and excited to see the baby again.

  It snowed all the time. It was too cold to go out most days and too warm in the apartment. One particularly gloomy afternoon, I sat with Mae on my lap and felt suddenly that if I didn't find something to do fast the walls were going to eat me. I had not dreamed of Rondua for a while, which was too bad because it would have given me something to think about during the endless feedings. As an exercise while sitting there. I tried to remember the finer details of what I had seen and experienced: the mysterious color combinations, the way amber light fell across the Ronduan mountains at daybreak and sunset.

  Remembering daily life is difficult enough, God knows. Remembering dreams days or even months later is a wee bit more difficult.

  When Mae had had her fill and dozed off, I put her in her crib. Rummaging around in a desk drawer, I dug up the notebook I had kept when the first dreams started. I hadn't put anything in the book since our return to America months before, but this time I set to work putting down these newest Ronduan scenes before they slipped away from me completely. The more I wrote, the more I remembered: the color of the camel's eyes, the sound of Felina's leathery feet padding across sandy ground.

  My mind, which since Mae's birth had fallen into a kind of sleepy stupor, stretched and began shaking other parts of itself awake. It was like «Reveille» played in an Army barracks; one guy got up, then another, and soon the whole place was clattery noise and blankets thrown aside, feet hitting the floor everywhere.

  I filled a few sides without worrying whether it was sequential or chronological or logical. It was a diary and diaries are conversations with yourself. _I_ understood what I was trying to say, so it didn't matter whether the entries made perfect sense or not.

  The hours didn't «fly by,» but I did spend a long afternoon at it, working myself into a kind of tiredness I hadn't known for a long time – the kind of tiredness that comes at the end of good hard work which means something to you.

  When Danny came home I was very animated and glad to see him. I didn't say anything about the notes, because I wanted to think about why I was really writing them. Were they catharsis, or just a way of passing time? Perhaps I was even laying the groundwork for the children's book I had thought about writing earlier. I didn't know what was at the heart of this and until I did, I decided to keep it all quiet.

  A few days later I bought a very sharp leather notebook at a stationery store and started transferring everything into it. I knew I was getting serious when I forked out twenty-seven dollars for a notebook: I hadn't kept a real one since college. I was both stirred and intimidated by the vast number of unfriendly white pages in there. I don't have very nice handwriting, so I wrote slowly and very carefully, enjoying the act in itself and understanding for the first time why monks had once devoted so much time to illuminating manuscripts.

  The first thing I tried to do in that pretty book was pull all my Yasmuda dreams together and somehow shape them up. I began with the first dream and my first words to Pepsi when we were in the plane, descending on Rondua.

  «I remember when the sea was full offish with mysterious names; Mudrake, Cornsweat, Yasmuda, and there wasn't much to do in a day.»

  While Mae slept or lay in her bassinet, eyeing her pink owl mobile, I wrote.

  4

  My mother took Mae and me out for lunch to «Amy and Joe's»: one of those presumptuous «really American» restaurants where they served us okay chili for seven dollars a bowl.

  Walking home through breezy cold, Mom insisted on pushing the baby carriage the whole way. She talked about how one day all three of us girls would be having lunch together. Her face was one big smile after she said that.

  The thought intrigued me. What would Mae James be like when she was old enough to sit at a restaurant table, legs long enough for her feet to touch the floor, her face interesting enough to draw the looks of men?

  «What are you thinking about, dear?»

  «About how kids get gypped by their parents. Their birth is _our_ second beginning, but then our death is the beginning of their end.»

  «That's very poetic, but don't be morbid, dear: it's bad for the complexion. Isn't that your building? What's going on down there?»

  Alarmingly, five police cars stood at strange angles to the curb in front of our apartment house. The drivers had been in too great a hurry to worry about proper parking.

  Thank God in heaven I knew Danny was safe at work. I had called ten minutes before to warn him that dinner would be late due to «lunch-with-Mom.»

  «Cullen, it looks like something bad has happened. Should you come over to our apartment? We'll get a cab and call Danny from there.»

  «No, Mom, I want to see what's happened. It could have something to do with our apartment. Maybe I didn't turn the gas off. . . .»

  We came to the barriers the police had put up to keep people back.

  «Officer, I live here. What's happening?»

  «Had a couple of murders, lady. So
me nut killed his mother and sister. Somethin' real bad.»

  People like to say that immediately after they heard the news they knew who did it. but I'd be lying if I said that. At the moment, I didn't even remember Alvin Williams _lived_ in the building. He wasn't the most memorable guy you'll ever meet, apart from his crimes.

  «Holy shit, look at that damned guy!»

  We had been chatting with the policeman, who knew nothing more about what had happened. He was the first to see that they were bringing Alvin out of the house. It was the middle of the day, but he wore a plaid pajama top over what I _think_ was a skirt. I couldn't tell because I was too shocked, then too drawn by the expression on his familiar face. Calm: absolute and total calm. His hands were handcuffed in front of him and he kept stumbling as he walked out of the building to the first police car.

  «Look at the fuckin' blood, man!»

  Two black teenagers in identical windbreakers and green watch caps stood next to us, taking everything in.

  «He musta fuckin' cut the shit out of evvabody _in_ there.»

  «Mother _fucker_, man! Where's his knife at?»

  «Cullen, come on. Let's go to our house.»

  We had started back from the barriers when Alvin shouted, «Mrs. James! Hey!»

  His excited hoot grabbed me like a lasso and I froze where I was, but couldn't get up the nerve to turn and look at him.

  «How're you, Mrs. James! How's the baby!»

  A man in a ski jacket came up to me and showed his police badge. He was a nice-looking man. I heard doors close behind me, a siren start its wail.

  «Do you mind if I talk to you for a minute, lady?»

  «Want to know something strange? One of the last times I ever talked to Alvin, I came in here afterward for a cup of coffee.»

  We were sitting in Marinucci's Ice Cream Emporium. The police detective's name was Gabe Flossmann and he had a soft voice wrapped around a thick New York accent.

  «How well did you know him, Mrs. James? Did you ever have him over or anything, or go to his place?»