Moonwalker, Chapter 12

The next day was my day off, but I was on my bike heading for the Brown Library before the first birds started singing. I couldn’t believe how loud they were on my block considering there were no trees or bushes for them to hang out in. There weren’t even any weeds besides that one the strawberry-blonde boy had drawn the heart around, and someone must have pulled it up because it wasn’t there anymore when I biked by.

Neither was he. Where did the birds hide out? I looked up hoping to see one cross the sky, but it was empty of wings. Maybe they lived in holes in the eaves of the dingy houses. They looked ramshackle enough.

Of course the library didn’t open for another four hours. I passed the time with the giant trees in the quad that was usually filled with students crisscrossing back and forth on their way to being rich, famous, or socially responsible, but since it was summer they were all off traveling the world volunteering or on Martha’s Vineyard. The trees were so spectacular they erased my bitter and cynical thoughts as soon as they appeared.

They were glorious, reaching up to touch the clear, blue sky untainted today by smog from all the cars that nobody in Providence really needed. The city was small enough to walk or bike, but everyone was in such a hurry. That’s what the trees advised. Keep riding that bike. My job at Chaos wasn’t going to buy me a car anytime soon, so it was easy to say all right.

A single gull drifted so far above I thought it was an eagle until it swooped down for the popcorn I had sprinkled on the grass around me.

When the library opened I headed for the science stacks. I could have looked it up on a computer, but something in me, probably the same instinct that made me buy records instead of CDs, made me want to discover the truth from an actual solid object like a book. Something that smelled organic like leather, that had once been a tree whose rings sang in a forest to roots and stars stretching themselves in all directions while staying true to the fire in their bellies.

By the time I finished, the sun was almost down. I hadn’t noticed it was close to getting dark. I didn’t care. Something had caught me up in its beak and was about to give me wings if I was brave enough to jump off the roof.

Here’s what I learned about Chaos Theory.

Chaos Theory describes the behavior of certain systems that may exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. (When I was a very little girl someone touched me. Down there. You know where. We didn’t have a name for it because nobody told us one. I had never felt anything so delicious in my life.)

As a result of this sensitivity, which manifests itself as an exponential growth of perturbations in the initial conditions (When I was a little older I lay in my canopy bed and fantasized about being raped.), the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random.

(I was a wild thing in high school. I’d do anything, anything, anything for you, but no one could make my heart sing.)

This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future dynamics are fully defined by their initial conditions with no random elements involved.

( ) So there was no use trying to fill in the blank.

Also observed in weather, the paragraph concluded. I had a feeling the end was only beginning.



I started to dream again that night, which would imply I slept, but I’m not sure that’s what actually happened.
In the first dream Block Island became the new Atlantis after being wiped out by a tsunami. Everyone I knew drowned. I watched from my vantage point above the surface where I hovered on my tiger-striped wings before they got too waterlogged and I plummeted down, down, down into the heaving ocean where I bobbed with the rest of the survivors. I knew every single one of them because that’s the way it was on Block Island. Everybody knew everybody. We were usually good at coming together in a crisis, but there was nothing we could do for each other this time since none of us had the power to grant each other fins and gills.

It was a different natural disaster every night. Typhoons, tornadoes, hurricanes, heat waves, but there was one thing in common. Right before my eyes closed, or was it right before they opened--I saw it--the blue butterfly that had crossed the sky the moment Michael Jackson had told me I had to save The Man in the Moon.

It held perfectly still in the spell of its own silence, calling me to come closer. I did, wondering if it was dead and if it would be ok for me to collect its body and mount it under glass, the proper thing to do with the rare and precious things of the world that were in danger of extinction.

The silent song held me so close to its heart my own stopped beating. Wings I hadn’t known I’d had wrinkled and folded up, falling off my shoulder blades.

I was glad. This meant the world would be safe, even if I could never fly away from it.

Then it happened. The Man in the Moon started laughing. The sound of his laughter was the breath that became a wind that swept down toward the earth and lifted the dead butterfly’s wings. They flapped—just once--but I felt the reverberation in my own maimed body, crushed by memories, my bruised innocence bleeding across the Milky Way.

My last thought before I went under: my mother was right.