Moonwalker, Chap. 7 (a short one)

“Sooooo,” Zoe and Cally said as one.

We were back in my apartment in Fox Point. I was stretched out on my beloved sofa, they were snuggled together in the love seat my mother had given me, probably in the hopes I’d finally settle down and “find somebody” now that I had actually signed a lease.

I didn’t answer. It was so quiet in the apartment the hum of the refrigerator sounded like a freight train and the ceiling fan like a hive of swarming bees. These weren’t very interesting metaphors, but I was tired and past the point of trying to come up with something clever or useful. I was too shocked at what had just happened, although I think I’d blathered on about what had happened in the Accord on the way home, so by now they must both think I was a lunatic, which would be quite an accomplishment considering their standards.

“So?” Zoe finally asked again in one syllable, letting me know she was really worried.

“Minnie?” I knew she was sincere since she didn’t call me Minerva. “What’s with all the owls around here?”

“Non-sequitur. Stick to the point,” Cally reprimanded her.

“Like you ever do, Miss Mad Scientist. No, I’m really curious. How can you stand being around something you’ve told me you don’t like? Why don’t you just get rid of them?”

“It was my mom’s idea. House-warming party. My head is killing me. Did I do something I’m going to regret?

“You don’t remember?” Zoe said with a little too much eagerness in her voice.

“Remember what?”

“Falling into the moon like William Blake,” Cally informed me. “Or at least that’s what you said when you came to. It just looked like you passed out in the confetti to me.”

“Falling into the moon…” I remembered. I was just hoping they’d forgotten. “What else do you want to know about me and my owls?” I asked, hoping to lead them away from the gathering evidence of my insanity. “The housewarming party was really for my mom. She was so excited I finally got my own apartment she convinced me to have one. It was supposed to be kind of like a wedding shower where you get everything you’ll need for the rest of your life, only all of her friends couldn’t figure out what I needed. I think they’d all grown so used to thinking me of as impractical they couldn’t imagine I’d need a blender and a toaster. I ended up with a bunch of figurines.”

“Well here’s a potholder at least,” Cally said, holding up one my mom’s friend Mrs. Finkelstein crocheted herself.

Cally was really pretty, I thought, watching her put my dishes away from across the room. She’d make a good wife. Except she was a physicist. She knew way more than me about the nature of the universe. I’d have to ask her some questions when I woke up from this dream. Zoe was sleeping with a genius. I wondered if they were better or worse in bed than the dodos I’d been in love with.

She and Zoe always debated which last name they were going to take when they got married. Zoe wanted it to be hers because then Cally would have to go by Cally McCallister, which she thought was really funny. I know McCallister is a strange name for a Chinese family, but they’d adopted it when they moved to the States. It had been the name of their foster family assigned to them by the Catholic Church. To this day, St. Patrick’s Day was Zoe’s favorite holiday, she insisted. “Chinese New Year’s too loud. The fireworks burst my eardrums once.” Cally didn’t think it sounded very professional. “What happens when I win the Nobel Prize? It’s going to sound so ridiculous everyone will think it’s a joke and I’ll show up at the awards ceremony and they won’t let me in because nobody named Cally McCallister could possibly be a genius.”

“Well our other choice isn’t so great either,” Zoe sighed.

“You mean you don’t like Weiner?”

“We’re lesbians! We can’t be named after the tool of the oppressor!”

“But you like dildos.”

“That’s because they’re not attached to a male body.”

“Marriage is so bourgeois,” I sneered from the luxury of my couch.

“You must be feeling better,” Cally joked.

“Except for the bruises on my throat,” I said, touching the hollow where Michael’s fingers had choked me.

“Bruises? Let me see. You didn’t tell the cop that. Zoe, come look at this. She’s not making it up. Those are finger marks on her throat. Unbelievable.”

“So you didn’t believe me?”

“Well, Zoe told me you’ve been kind of depressed lately.”

“So I staged my own abduction and passed out in Kennedy Plaza in the confetti snowdrifts? You’ve got a high opinion of me. I didn’t know.”

“Sometimes depressed people act out. You know, do things to get attention.”

“Funny, I thought we just lay around on our couches.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You ever been to Madagascar, Cally?”

“What does that have to do with all of this?”

“That’s where the dodo bird was from.”

“Aren’t those the birds that were so tame they walked right up to the sailors who beat them over the heads with clubs?” said Zoe. Sometimes she surprised me.

“Tame or stupid?” I asked them both.

“What do you think?” They sort of answered.

“All I’m gonna say, is the dodo is extinct.” I walked them to the door and we hugged—a group hug, all three of us shoulder to shoulder, foreheads touching. They didn’t ruin it by saying “This is how the Maori kiss.”

Zoe turned back halfway down the stairs. I was still standing there, behind the closed door, but I didn’t answer when she asked, “How are you going to do it?” I wanted to tell her about the blue butterfly I’d seen traveling across the moon when I’d looked up and met his hollow, drugged-out eyes, but I knew if I did she might get sucked in too. All I had to do was follow it. I didn’t want her to follow me. It would be extinct soon.

“It was forty years ago today,” Michael Jackson’s falsetto blew through my burned out skull. “Forty years ago they first walked on the moon.” They were gone. Once again, I was talking to myself.

Forty years ago today, probably right about now, my mother was running down the hall toward me, her breasts leaking a trail of milk across my universe I was still following.

I fell asleep crying, wondering where the tin soldier wearing one sequined glove had ridden off to, where I would ever find enough flowers to satisfy the butterflies now that they were all gone.