The Moondust Sonatas Read online

  “Beaver,” he suddenly said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Um, would you prefer Wally?”

  Oh yeah. I kept forgetting I’d given him a fake name. “Whatever dude. Continue.”

  “Wally, we need to talk. I need to meet your friends. How can I make that happen?”

  “I thought we discussed this,” I said.

  “We did. We’re discussing it again.”

  “Did you ever hear that quote about insanity being expecting different results from the same old shit?”

  He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees. He pressed his fingers into a power triangle. I didn’t know people actually did that outside of 1980s movies about stock-brokers. Then, he said, “I’ll level with you. I can turn this into something huge for me. But, only if I have your full cooperation. That includes letting me meet your people and letting me observe people using moondust in their natural setting.”

  As if we were fucking rhinos or something.

  He continued, “I need to make that happen. I’ve heard you say you’re not willing to help me. But, what I’m doing now is entering into a negotiation. Would you like to negotiate with me? You name your terms, we start talking.”

  Both reporter Max and I let silence linger, tense, like tectonic plates pushing together.

  Then I lit up a cigarette. To me lighting it was like throwing a stack of chips onto the poker table, raising the stakes. He visibly tightened. I think I saw a neck tendon pop out.

  “Did I tell you about the guys outside of my apartment?” I said.

  He answered like he spoke through a clenched jaw. “No. Do I need to get my recorder?”

  “Nah. Long story short, some dudes are staking me out. Not cops, someone else. I don’t know who. I need a place to stay for a while—until it blows over or I can figure out who they are.”

  If we weren’t in such a serious moment, the expression of horror he failed to hide might have made me laugh. “For how long?”

  “If—and it’s a big if—I take you to my people, I’d have to start our negotiations at three days on your couch. But, it won’t be enough.”

  Silence.

  I said, “Maxwell, old boy, try to understand what you’re asking of me.”

  “What am I asking of you?”

  “You’re asking me for everything. I have people, friends, I work with on this, and it’s been great for us because we’ve kept our operation low-key. If we have one rule, it is do not bring random people into each other’s space and do moondust with them.”

  He scoffed, said, “Whoa. I’m a reporter, I don’t plan on—”

  “Oh. But, you will do moondust with us, if you’re there with us. That’s how these things work. Do you think I’m going to show up at my friends’ place and say, ‘Hey, this guy is going to stand around watching and taking notes while we do our thing?’ Get real.”

  “Surely there must be another way.”

  I spread my hands, took a drag, and blew it out slow. “I’m all ears.”

  Silence.

  Max said, “I can’t do moondust.”

  “Your call. But, I can’t take you with me if you don’t. If you want into the inner world, then you have to pay admission. Didn’t you ever read, Among the Thugs?”

  Shock registered on his face; he must have figured I didn’t read. “Yeah. But, Bryson didn’t throw bricks through any windows.”

  “I’m not asking you to. The point is, he respected the rules of the people he observed. Right?”

  “Listen—”

  “No, you listen. You’re trying to write about something you don’t understand. And you’re trying to leech off of me to do it. You want to meet my friends, you want to watch us do our thing, and you want to turn us into caricatures in order to make your journalistic bones and get rich. You expect me not to notice that everything I tell you, you get to twist however you like?”

  I paused to glare at him.

  Then I continued, “You expect me to believe I’ll get fair treatment? I never bought that. But, it’s one thing exposing myself. Now you want me to bring my best friends in this world in, so you can shit all over their good names? Make us out to be junkies? So I’ll get to turn on the news one day and hear you telling the world that I’m dealing and using the worst drug since crack?”

  Again, I paused so my words could sink in.

  Then I continued, “Because that’s what you’re trying to do, isn’t it? That’ll get you a premium position as one of Rupert’s principle ball washers, right? Asking me if it’s addictive. Trying to get me to say stuff about how dangerous moondust is. Fuck that. You don’t get it, and while you don’t get it, you’re going to be the one introducing it to the world. And when you do that, who’s face is going to be on it? Whose name is going to be in that article?”

  I took a puff of tobacco. He didn’t say anything.

  I could tell Max was trying to think up something, so I kept going. “What’s worse is you don’t even want to get it. You want to know what you are? You’re not a journalist. Milton Bradley was a journalist. You’re a vulture. You’re not after the truth, you’re after a reputation.”

  “Milton Burrows,” he said. “Milton Bradley made board games. If you’re going to insult me, get the facts straight.”

  It was a pretty weak attempt at a rebuttal, especially because I didn’t give a damn. In fact, his correction made me laugh.

  “Here are the facts. Something I’ve learned is—if you want the truth of something, you have to live it. Truth isn’t a concept, it isn’t words on a page, and it isn’t a blurb in the evening post about what the experts believe. Truth is an experience lived. Moondust taught me that, and if you want to tell the world about it, you’re going to know what I mean. Or, we’re going to part ways, and you get to run with what you have now. So what’ll it be, old boy?”

  48. MAXWELL

  It was out of the question. He sat there, smugly sneering at me, thinking he had me checkmated. If I did it—despite the fact that I would have become a thing I admittedly hated—I’d be giving in. My journalistic integrity—and my impartiality—would be shot.

  So it was something to be avoided, to say the least. I also needed to refrain from slapping this jerk around like a piñata full of bearer bonds for even suggesting it. The nerve.

  I started with a deep breath. And, I stalled by dealing with other problems first.

  “Okay,” I said. “Those are your demands. Now we’ll negotiate. For example: You want to stay here because you can’t go home. But, what if I take care of the people staking out your house?”

  I had an idea. It was far short of brilliant. But, after the mistake happened, pressing on was the only thing.

  His body language suggested he was as skeptical too. “How are you going to do that, Mandrake?”

  “That’s my problem. But, I think it would go a long way toward showing good faith. No?”

  “I don’t think showing up in an ascot bearing martinis is going to do any good. And if they go away, it only does me good if they don’t come back.”

  “If I can deliver, I don’t do moondust, and I get in with your friends. If I fail, then I shoot, or ride, or whatever you call taking the stuff. Deal?”

  “If you can convince me the situation is handled, I’ll ask my friends. I’m not the boss of them. If they don’t want anything to do with you, then that’s not my problem.”

  “Not good enough. You give me an introduction. We ask them together.”

  “Deal,” he said.

  “Great. It’s a deal. I’ll have them gone soon. We’ll start with you telling me what you know about these guys and anything you suspect. Next, I’ll need more moondust for study by the scientific community.”

  He showed me the picture his friend took and gave me what information he could about the people chasing him. Which was almost nothing. He said he couldn’t remember much about when the breach of security, so to speak, happened.

  This problem define
d working with druggies: If, best case scenario, they were present enough to understand the world around them, then their recall sucked.

  So I had more problems than solutions, and all I had to lose was my mind, health, and, if things went far enough sideways, my life. In a perfect world, I’d have come up with a better alternative than dealing with a crew of anonymous thugs. But, not here. Still, international fame and fortune trended tough to come by, so danger was par for the course. Didn’t reporters in warzones deal with death every day? Mine is not a profession for the faint of heart.

  After a good hour or two of heavy brainstorming, a workable idea finally came to me. Trouble was, someone would need to put himself in harm’s way, and no way could I convince someone else to jump on this particular sword.

  As long as they didn’t see through the ruse, everything would be fine. They get what they wanted, we get what we wanted. Easy-peasy. At least, that’s what I told myself.

  As much as I wasn’t happy about having to confront Beaver’s thugs, I dreaded one task more—Justine.

  The clock read 1:38 a.m. I needed sleep. So much to do tomorrow.

  I brushed my teeth, washed my face, undressed, jumped in bed. As I waited to fall asleep, I tried not to think. Thinking wasn’t doing any good. She was not my girlfriend now, and if there was doubt, there wouldn’t be tomorrow.

  Try not to think about pink elephants. Fill your brain with other things. Sublimate.

  Sunday, October 1, 2006

  49. PETER

  Nothing had been right.

  I was a chemist, my life built on the foundation of science.

  This guy Max, a reporter I know, brought me a substance to analyze. A drug. But, it refused to be categorized by any means available to me.

  I tried to get access to specialized equipment. But, all the people in control of or using the equipment weren’t giving out favors. I was urged to “file grants.”

  Fuck grants. The bag of substance Max lent me burned a hole in my desk.

  I just kept staring at it, and it just kept sitting there violating everything I knew to be true. And I lacked access to the tools needed to understand.

  Could anything be worse for a scientist? I devoted my whole life to understanding. Now moondust sat staring at me, violating my understanding utterly.

  I devoted every test I could to this stuff given the limited resources at my disposal. My findings remained consistently inconsistent. Variable weight. Variable conductive properties. It varied in everything, impossibly. Every test was like a calculator telling you one plus one equaled one or a million or seven or nineteen. But, never two.

  I’ve heard that in lucid dreaming, you know you are asleep because words or numbers are not static, they change as you look at them. The brain-function on which reading depends is not accessible because you’re asleep and in the dream-world. Moondust felt exactly like that. Was I in the dream-world then as well? A nightmare?

  My watch read 10:32 a.m., Sunday morning, I sat in a coffee shop drinking a particularly bitter cup of the house brew. The coffee really stank. But the shop was close to me and cheap. I usually brought the coffee back to the office. But, it was Sunday, and besides, I couldn’t stand to be in there right now. Maybe later, I would check to see if Maxwell got me a new sample.

  So instead, I drank it there, splitting my time between reading and staring out the window at the city. I read a copy of The New York Globe, Sunday edition. The headline was usually New York’s latest sports catastrophe and today a hockey brawl splayed across the headlines that, atypically, was bad enough the hockey players all got suspended. Inside, the paper held the usual junk-food news stories. It was just what I needed on a day like today, not to think.

  As dedicated as I was to non-thought, it didn’t work. The same things kept running through my head.

  If all the basic meat-and-potato tests came back with impossible results, wasn’t it foolish to expect more cutting edge technology to show any different? Take for example quantum sequencing. While quantum sequencing was a fancier kind of testing, I had no reason to believe, given the relationship between moondust and scientific inquiry, there would be any difference in the result. The best I had any right to expect was further verification, which scared me.

  The cornerstone of my world was that scientific inquiry was the best and only way to approach any equation, question, or mystery and that cornerstone was gone. Blown to smithereens.

  My phone buzzed; it was Max. “Hey there, superstar,” he said, “How’s my favorite scientist doing? Have you earned that Nobel, yet?”

  I had a choice between laughing or taking the spoon in front of me and jabbing the handle into my eye socket. “If I can pose a counter question: What’s the likelihood that the Vatican would reward a priest who proved that God did not exist?”

  “Um, slim to none?”

  “So we agree: I’m not likely to get the Nobel Prize any time soon. Glad to hear it.”

  There was a moment’s silence on the other line. “Where’s the sunny optimism I know and love?”

  “I lost it when you ruined my fucking life.”

  “Okay, I’m sensing some hostility. Care to tell me what’s going on?”

  I sighed. “I can’t tell you what’s going on. That’s entirely the problem. You’ve handed me an unsolvable riddle. The only thing that can be proven about moondust is that there can be no proof. You son of a bitch.”

  He cleared his throat. “Peter, I’d say I’ve handed you the scientific riddle of the twenty-first century. And you get a crack at it before anyone else. So you haven’t solved it in a weekend. Boo-hoo. Now, are you going to suck it up, or should I terminate our working relationship?”

  “Okay,” I said, after a few deep breaths. “But I got to tell you, I don’t think this has an answer. I think our names will live in infamy.”

  “Then, you have to decide, do you want it to be your name or someone else’s name? It’s your call. Make it now, because I have a lot to do. I need you with me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Than tell me what you need.”

  I have become Yama, destroyer of science. “I need… more sample. And I need to know how it’s made. Maybe that will tell me something about it.”

  “Sample I can do. I had my source give me some more last night. The second thing might be tough. But, I’ll work on it. Keep your head up, Peter. This is where careers are made.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll come by the lab by tomorrow afternoon, latest. In the meantime, call me if you have a breakthrough. Bye now.” And then he hung up.

  Science failed. But, there was still one avenue open to me.

  I kept thinking back to how the guy who discovered LSD didn’t know what he had until he put it on his tongue. He even submitted his experience-based journal to the reviews. Was it scientific? Absolutely not. But, perhaps there was a part of knowing that existed beyond tests and theories.

  What if we had gravity wrong?

  What if electromagnetism was something else entirely?

  Proof vanished before my eyes…

  It opened a fissure in me that just kept spreading.

  A dead end, an unpardonable sin, an unanswerable question.

  It started to rain.

  50. CHESTER

  Office hours had to be one of the cruelest, most searing indignities of the academic world. Which was telling because this world never wanted for indignities. Waiting for some student to come to your office any day, let alone Sunday, sniveling and angling for special treatment—better grades, a leg up on the upcoming exam or paper, extra credit to boost a limp GPA—made me wonder how dentists had the highest suicide rate of any profession.

  This thought brought the echo of Betsy’s latest dig into my brain: Ches, get over yourself. You’re the most melodramatic jerk I ever met.

  But she didn’t have office hours. No surer proof existed that the educational system failed western society than spending five minutes alone with a college f
reshman.

  Betsy was going to leave me, I just knew it. I’d never been good with women. I never had the secret decoder ring necessary to figure out what they really meant, or what to say. My only real skill with the fairer sex was the uncanny ability to recognize the slow slide into irreconcilable differences, which ended of all my relationships. The swirling vortex, my paper love-boat going down another drain. Davey Jones shouting: Release the Kraken.

  I buried my head in my hands. I felt like being drunk. I wondered if any of my students would even notice if I were terribly soused while they gave me their bullshit excuses. As long as I gave them what they wanted? They’d probably think me cool for once.

  The problem with being tenure-track at this particular university, however, was no matter how much I didn’t actually want the job, somehow I couldn’t do anything to jeopardize it. The promise of tenure: a prison without walls or guards.

  God, I am a melodramatic bastard. She was right.

  But she was cruel, always on her high horse—a figment of her imagination. A fucking optometrist at fucking U.S.A. Lens Makers. “Get your eye exam and new glasses in one hour or your money back!” What a joke. The daughter of closet alcoholics, to boot. What gave her the right to criticize me all the time?

  It didn’t matter, though. Realistically, I couldn’t do better. Didn’t have money. No one would ever confuse me with George Clooney. No one ever called me suave, and 95 percent of my attempts to make strangers laugh—whenever the nerve or insanity to do so caught me—ended in silence, which to call it awkward would be flattering. Time made me neither younger, thinner, nor more capable with the fairer sex.

  The idea of being single again terrified me. I’d rather be Luke facing the Rancor without use of his light-saber. I’d rather be Nicolas Cage.

  I was saved from this line of thought and corresponding queasy feeling by my first student visit of the day, a young man named Thad, about as intelligent as his name made him sound. In order to get that which he wanted, he carried the pretext of actually caring about chemistry and needing help to understand it. He neither cared nor had the capacity to understand, it seemed, because he asked nonsensical questions and my answers may as well have been in Mandarin.