Moonwalker, Chapter 11

Zoe hadn’t been joking. For dinner we ate salvaged bear claws and monkey bread washed down with the end of the day’s coffee we usually dumped.


“I love monkey bread,” she said, feeding Cally a ball of sweet and sticky dough, then licking her fingers. Cally licked her lips and said “Kiss me.” I gagged and tried to look like I wasn’t jealous.

The movie was The Butterfly Effect. It was horrible. I mean any movie starring Ashton Kutcher was horrible, but this one was especially bad because it wasn’t supposed to be funny and the three of us couldn’t stop laughing whenever Ashton got the most agitated. Cally kept Zoe’s promise and made an extra bag of popcorn with Bragg’s and nutritional yeast for the gulls.

“Tell them it’s good for them,” she instructed me.

“Yes, Professor Weiner.” We laughed so hard we spilled popcorn all over the floor where the three of us laid on our stomachs like little kids to watch the TV.

“You know Ashton is kind of cool,” Zoe said. “You can tell he really does love Demi and she’s fifteen years older than him. Maybe you should go for a younger guy, Minnie.” I knew she was trying to butter me up by not calling me Minerva, or nutritionally yeast me I guess I should say, but I wasn’t going for it.

“Been there, done that. Plus I told you I’m not going for anyone, especially someone barely out of diapers.” Especially not crazy-homeless artists, even if they did have surfer shoulders. It was bad enough I was straight without having them know I was generally attracted to derelicts that sucked me dry mentally, emotionally, and financially.

“That movie wasn’t so bad,” Cally mused. “I mean they really did a good job of demonstrating a sophisticated scientific concept. I wonder if Ashton knew the source of all his troubles?”

“I don’t think sophisticated and scientific are even in his vocabulary,” I said, “and what concept are you talking about?”

“Smarty pants,” Zoe kidded me.

“The Butterfly Effect,” Cally told us in her best professorial tone. “I was just talking to my undergrads about it this morning. That’s why I picked this movie out.”

“I was worried you were going to tell me you were going to dump me for a boy,” said Zoe.

“As if. You know I’d do anything for you.”

“Even take my name?”

“Maybe we could talk about that some other night when I haven’t eaten so much popcorn and might not puke?”

“What’s the Butterfly Effect?” I asked before the conversation veered too far into the surreal.

“It’s a famous phrase that demonstrates the primary principle of Chaos Theory. You know who James Gleick is right?”

“Hello? I went to art school?”

“Is he the guy that came up with the Gaia Hypothesis?”

“No, that’s Lovelock, but I bet they’re friends because they’re definitely on the same wavelength as far as the earth being a living entity with consciousness just like you and me.”

“And what about me? Can somebody fill me in or am I just too unconscious to have a clue what you’re talking about?”

“Jealous, baby?”

“No,” she said, sticking out her lower lip.

“Are you pouting? I can’t believe you’re pouting. I probably shouldn’t tell you how cute you look right now.”

“I don’t get it.” Zoe whined.

“Ok. Well, the Gaia Hypothesis is probably obvious to you since you’re a mystical free-spirited pixie artist. It just says that the earth is as conscious and alive as we are. The implications of this are that since we humans who live on the earth have become parasites capable of destroying our host it will most likely rise up and kick us off soon.”

“How’s it going to do that?”

“Oh, you know, Hurricane Katrina, the Asian Tsunami, global warming, all those tornadoes that keep slamming down on Kansas like the Wizard of Oz on continual replay.”

“The lunatic is in the grass……The lunatic is in the grass,” Zoe sang in a cockney accent. She had it down pat, as my mother would say. It was part of her twee act. “Have you ever seen the Wizard of Oz matched up with Dark Side of the Moon? It’s mind-blowing. I actually cried which I never did in the regular Wizard of Oz. I always feel so bad for the witch. Nobody understood what she went through.”

“What did she go through again?” I asked.

“Can’t remember, but I figure it must have been horrible to turn her into such a bitch.”

“Well we’re not in Kansas anymore. These days there’s no excuse. She should get some therapy.”

“Look who’s talking,” Zoe dared to say.

I stuck out my tongue. “Monkey bread is cheaper.”

“Sorry, I ate the last piece.”

“Hey, do you want to hear about the Butterfly Effect or not?” Cally reined us in, pushing back her long blond hair that crackled with static when she took her hand away.

“I guess so,” said Zoe.

“Gleick’s famous statement was that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings could cause a typhoon halfway around the world.” Her voice was dull and dry, blasé, as if to test our attention. Were we really listening? Were we so jaded we couldn’t take in the enormity of what she was saying? Well, I couldn’t. I was lost with the butterflies flapping their wings in the waning sunlight. Zoe, however, still had human ears and a mouth that could speak.

“How could that be possible? Butterflies weigh practically nothing,” she asked her girlfriend, trying not to look mesmerized by the sight of her exposed neck, sinuous as a swan, one long arm draped across the back of the futon, the other crooked to support her head as she leaned back to watch our reactions, eyes half-closed.

“It has nothing to do with size,” Cally said, sitting back up and reaching for her computer. “Here, let me show you.” She typed into Google and pressed enter.

“Here. Let’s see...Butterfly Effect. Whoops, better type in Chaos Theory, too. The first entry that came up is that dumb-ass movie.”

“We live in a truly degraded culture,” I had to comment. Cally smiled and kept on typing. “You know you love it,” she said, giving me a look that caused me to swallow my words of protest. “Here we go. According to Wikipedia, ‘The Butterfly effect encapsulates the more technical notion of sensitive dependencies on initial conditions in chaos theory.”

Zoe and I looked at each other. We could tell she was really excited and didn’t want to tell her we still didn’t have a clue, but one of us was going to have to do it because it might be important some day if we ever needed to know how to get out of Kansas.

She wasn’t my girlfriend, so I volunteered to be the one to burst her tornado.

“Ground Control to Major Tom,” I interrupted. “Ground Control to Major Tom.” Zoe laughed, but Cally kept going. I was going to have to sing to get her to pay attention. “Come on Zoe, help me out. Don’t do this to me.”

“It’s all yours. You’re the star of this show,” she said, reaching for the popcorn.

“Here are we sitting in our tin can,” I sang. “Like my grimace?” I said for Zoe’s benefit, Cally still wasn’t paying attention to us.

“I love when you caterwaul,” she drawled like Scarlett O’Hara.

“Far above the world. Planet earth is blue and there’s nothing we can do.” I stopped, surprised at how my voice sounded. It was much stronger than I remembered. It was almost like someone hiding in my vocal chords had decided it was safe to come out. I wondered what he’d been hiding from? Soldiers? Martians? Godzilla? I also wondered how I knew it was a he who’d been hiding when my voice was a clear soprano that rang true as a tuning fork, vibrating around the three of us until we got off our bellies and sat up straight. The cheap Oriental rug felt like a genuine magic carpet.

“Can you hear me Major Tom? Can you hear me Major Tom?” Zoe finally joined me. “About time,” I said as we fell silent, or rather silent with laughter. We were rolling on the floor at this point, laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe.

Cally closed her laptop by now and stood, sweeping her arms wide as if to embrace the cosmos. We sang the climax together, all three of us. I couldn’t believe I’d grown up to be such a dork.



Here are we floating round our tin can!

Far above the moon!

Planet earth is blue!

And there’s nothing we can do!

Dun dadun dadun dadundun! Dun dadun dadun dadundun!



And then the synthesizers took over and we were floating above the earth looking back at all we’d left behind….headed toward the moon with nothing to do and no desire to get there.

On the ride home, for the first time ever I laughed at my fear of the moon. Of course I kept my headlamp until I safe on my sofa, but I didn’t miss my helmet.

Moonwalker, Chapter 1, second time around

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always searched for the meaning behind the meaning. I’ve always wondered where the drop of rain goes when it breaks the still water’s surface, and I’ve always reached in, searching for something to hold onto. I was born this way. I slipped into this world on a moonbeam, aware from the very beginning that everything we thought was solid—from the crisp, red apple, sweet against Eve’s lips before she took that first bite, to the bile she choked on when God punished her by making childbirth so painful it became a curse instead of a blessing—everything—was a reflection of something we couldn’t touch or taste or smell, something that would burn our eyes if we looked at it. There was a chance we could hear it, but it came by grace only, and with a price. We had to give up our voice so we’d never be able to tell anyone what we knew.

The meaning behind the meaning. The raindrop in the ocean. I was born knowing. I was born with a bitter longing to find just one thing to hold onto, yearning for a story where something—anything—a mother’s love, a diamond trapped in coal—shone all on its own.

All of this changed the year the butterflies found me, raining down on me like bright, amazed jewels--amazed at the light, amazed to be flying after knowing nothing but the darkness of the cocoon, amazed at their own beauty that had blossomed in that darkness without knowing it would one day dance across the sky with all the radiance of a rainbow! All of this changed—I’m rich, I sang as they landed on me!—all of this changed when I remembered.

I remembered, one summer day while filling the empty creamer at Café Chaos, the coffeehouse I had unwittingly ended up managing when all I wanted to do was follow orders, in Providence, Rhode Island, where I was attempting to plant myself to see if I could grow some roots after twenty years of chasing the sun. I hated the dark, cold winters that wanted to drag me under ground and freeze me with no promise that spring would come. I had what’s known as a mortal terror of them. The last one I’d endured I almost hadn’t made it. I told my mother I was in hibernation mode when I finally answered her call after a month of frantic messages, but it was really a bottle(s) of Irish Whisky and a bong that had gotten me through it. I had a prescription for Prozac I kept under my pillow in case things got really desperate, but I never came to that since I never sobered up enough to remember it was there. In those days, I was good at forgetting. I had a lot of practice at pushing things I didn’t want to remember out of my mind so that it was almost like they’d never occurred, or even existed. That’s why it was such a surprise when, lost in the motion of pouring cream from a cardboard quart into the insulated steel carafe that sat on the counter at Chaos in service to the light and dark preferences of our valued customers, I remembered the moon streaming through the blinds of my bedroom window, pinning my arms down so that I couldn’t roll away from it into the shadows where I could go back to sleep, sucking my thumb until my mother showed up when it was time for my 2AM bottle.

I screeched like a rabbit cornered by hounds. I slashed the impenetrable night to the bone. I pierced the dreams of the neighbors in our cul-de-sac in the Connecticut woods, tore a layer of skin off their illusions, left them bleeding in the open ocean as the sharks moved in to pick them off one by one, but no one came to help me. I lay there, flayed by the eye of the moon, my cries feeding the pocked holes on its blank face, mocking my cries, indifferent. The moon sucked the breath from my body. I began to collapse in on myself like a fish ripped from the ocean by a steel hook. I remember it all. I remembered, that day in Chaos when the customers assumed I was either drunk or having a nervous breakdown when cream flowed all over the floor because I didn’t realize the carafe was full. “Minerva, what’s wrong with you?” my co-worker Zoe said, walking out from behind the counter to see what all the fuss was about. “I’ll get a mop,” was all she said when she saw my face, escorting me into the storeroom where I collapsed on a coffee sack and started to sob.

My mother came running. Down the long hall to my room where I squirmed on my back, where I choked on my tears, where I struggled to breathe, almost swallowing my tongue. She came. She flowed toward me on a river of milky light that came from behind the moon, enveloping it as she lifted me out of my crib, cradling my head to her breast, soothing my downy head. I latched on.

The taste of her milk was sour and sweet, sticky with murmurs. She had white wings like a swan. She enfolded me in her feathers. In place of the moon—her breast, full and white. I remember the moment it became the entire world.

Why, I want to know now? I was already weaned. Already used to a bottle. How? Her milk should have dried up weeks ago. The meaning behind the meaning. The raindrop in the ocean and where it goes. Everybody’s got their stories to make sense of their world. Like most people, I got a bunch from my family and a bunch more from a therapist when I decided my family was the reason I was so miserable. That’s why the voice I heard as I poured cream all over the floor made no sense—forget it all—the voice said. I should have asked why, but by the time I thought to ask I was slumped on a coffee sack in the storeroom of Café Chaos looking for something which I could use to blow my nose. I’d cried so much I couldn’t breathe, which snapped me out of it like a good working girl. There weren’t any tissues in sight, so I settled for a dish towel, wiping my hands on my apron and walking back out into the café where Zoe was waiting, reading a book whose title made me cringe, The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon.” I almost lost it all over again, “Put it away,” I gasped.

“Hey, do you need an inhaler or something? Do you have asthma?” She said, mercifully tucking the book into her backpack. “This book’s totally radical. It’s a bisexual, biracial revisionist retelling of the founding of the American West with these crazy Mormons who try to keep everybody done, but of course they fail because of course the sex is just too good. Oh, by the way, I closed for the day,” she informed me. “Can’t run the place on my own and you seemed like you really needed that meltdown.”

“We’re going to get fired one of these days.”

“Let’s hope so, Minerva. Let’s hope so.”

“Bye, Zoe. Thanks.”

“No problem,” she said as she got in her car. “I’d offer you a ride but…”

“Sure, I understand. I have my bike here anywhere. I didn’t blame her for not wanting to deal with her hysterical puddle of a boss anymore. Besides, I knew. It was time to go back to the beginning on my own. To face the hungry moon and see if I still knew how to breathe underwater. Beneath me, I could see the vague peaks of mountains as I drifted in opalescent tendrils, utterly seduced by just the word glow.

I can’t say when it was I started to follow butterflies—if there was an actual moment when I was entranced by the promises of broken flowers and fractured light. I can’t pinpoint when I was seduced by pollen and mirrors, or when I became hungry for the golden promises I glimpsed in still water to be fulfilled. I do know one thing for sure. From the very beginning, I was afraid of the moon.