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.

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.

Chapter 10, Moonwalker

“Where’s your helmet?” Zoe asked when I rolled up to the back door of Chaos.

“Some gulls stole it.” I tucked my bike behind the dumpster hoping the anarchists didn’t think it was up for grabs and shuffled through my backpack for my keys. “Come on, we’ve got a lot of organic Ethiopian Estate Guatemalan Shade Grown Kona Mocha Java to brew. And you look super cute today, by the way,” I said, swiping her glasses off her face and putting them on my nose. “Can I wear these?”

“No,” she said, swiping them back. Not unless you want me get lost when I have to venture out into the jungle to fill the creamers.”

And that’s how we passed the day after I’d received my mission to save the man on the moon and saved a crazy, homeless-red-haired kid’s life with starlight that had streamed through my hands like the dollar bills we put in and took out of the register all day. I didn’t say a word to Zoe, but I could tell she wanted to ask me why I was in such a good mood, but didn’t want to jinx it in case I was manic instead of my usual depressed.

“You want to come over and watch a movie with Cally and me tonight?

“You mean leave my apartment two nights in a row? I don’t know about that. That seems pretty risky.”

“We’re going to make popcorn with Bragg’s and nutritional yeast.”

“Wow, you’re trying to lure me with the taste of fake cheese.”

“Would you prefer partially hydrogenated oil that stays in your body for the rest of your life?"

“Well, if you put it that way—sure, I’ll come over. But only if you give me any leftovers to feed the seagulls.”

“I thought they stole your helmet. What are you feeding them for?"

“They did me a favor. I should have ditched that thing a long time ago.”

“Hey, check this out,” Zoe said. She had a print-out in her hand someone had left on one of our tables. We had a few particularly zealous ones who casually “forgot” their propaganda in the coffeehouse. People left all sorts of crazy “information”--everything from pamphlets promoting the latest jungle superfood berry drink to articles about aliens who looked like lizards that were actually running the world. Supposedly George Bush was one—an alien. This guy saw his real lizard face one time when he smoked DMT. I would have left it around for someone else to read, but later he started claiming Obama was a lizard, too, and I just wasn’t ready to let go of that little ray of hope for the world he’d brought into my dark existence. Obama was not a lizard. There had to be something sacrosanct.

“It says here there’s a solar eclipse today,” Zoe said, pulling herself away from the article to look at the clock on the back wall that drove us crazy because it ticked off the minutes and neither of us could stand the sound of each second of our lives passing by in Chaos, even if it was just a café. Of course, when it was busy, we couldn’t hear it. We weren’t sure if that was a better or worse way to go through the day, which was a bigger waste.

“And it’s happening right now!” She ran to the door, peering out through the pane. “I’m too scared to go outside,” she whispered. “What if something gets me!”

“I don’t see anything,” I mumbled, pretending I had no idea what she was talking about. I wasn’t ready to decide if I was in denial about the morning’s events or just wanted to keep them as a secret to hold tight.

“That’s because you can only see it in Asia where they’re a lot more superstitious than we are.”

“You’re Asian,” I reminded her.

“No, I’m Chinese. We’re a continent to ourselves.”

“Well you have a rabbit foot key chain and cross yourself when a black cat crosses your path.”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t let anyone tell me I had to stay indoors all day so my baby wouldn’t get birth defects like they make women do in India. If I was pregnant, that is.”

“You’re talking about a country that burns brides.”

“Look who’s superstitious now.”

“Or prejudiced.”

“Wow, you really don’t have any pride left.”

“I’m too old to be pc. Let me see that.” I grabbed the paper out of her hands and scanned it, looking for some confirmation that I wasn’t crazy, that it was the eclipse’s fault, that the morning’s fantastical scene could be reduced to a scientific phenomenon and I didn’t have to worry about werewolves on top of the whole Michael Jackson thing.

Everyone knew how the brain responded to light. They’d done all sorts of experiments with rats and there was that sick Werner Herzog film based on a true story about a guy that grew up in a basement and had no memory of anything until one day he found himself stumbling down a street. Supposedly the actor that played him wasn’t acting. Herzog had cast a real lunatic in the part and didn’t even care that people condemned him for taking advantage of the poor guy. I’d just read an article about him in The New York Times “catching up” with where he was today. God, these ironic quotations make me sick. I make myself sick for using them in the first place, but how else can I express my disgust at the human race? He played the accordion on the street in Berlin. People stopped to gawk at him because he’d been in a movie. Nobody told him he played badly. You really just couldn’t trust anyone. Especially the sane.

I wasn’t going crazy. I was just feeling the effects of the eclipse on a biochemical level because I was extremely sensitive to variations in light. Of course this implied I was also sensitive to the dark, but I didn’t want to go there. Not today. Not when I ran the risk of giving birth to a deformed baby if I ventured out on the street.

“Did you get to the part where the astrologers predict a rise in communal and regional violence in the days after and a devastating natural disaster?” Zoe asked me.

“Skipped it. I like this part. ‘There’s no need to get too alarmed about the eclipse,’ I read aloud. ‘They are a natural phenomenon,’ the astrologer told the Associated Foreign Press.”

“Who said that?”

“Siva Prasad Tata from the Astro Jyoti website. He straddles the two worlds, you know. Or at least that’s what this article says. I don’t trust the internet. How do you know it’s a reliable source? It’s not like Deep Throat in Watergate. He had a real voice. He wasn’t some disembodied robot of a machine anyone can program to say anything.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

“Sometimes you treat me like such a baby! I can’t help it if I wasn’t born in the 60s. By the way, it’s also the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. Were you at that, too?”

“I’m not that old!”

“Not even in utero? Maybe you were conceived there?”

“I told you my parents weren’t hippies. They were in the army and a general caught me when my mother squeezed me out of her. That’s why I’m such a strict boss.”

“Talk about straddling dimensions. How many worlds does that guy in India straddle? I bet you’ve got him beat.”

“No shit. Just two.”

“I think both of us are straddling a few more than that. Wanna name some?”

“I’m having a hard enough time with this one.”

“There’s no cream left,” whined one of the customers.

“Back to work, peon,” I commanded Zoe.

“Yes, boss. Very good, boss,” she said in a bad Indian accent, bowing all the way to the ground to kiss my feet. The cream-deprived customer didn’t think it was funny when she got back up and informed him, “You know in India where cows are sacred you wouldn’t be allowed to put cream in your coffee. You could only have soy milk.”

“I should fire you for that,” I reprimanded her, holding in my laughter for the customer’s benefit for about three seconds. “Sorry, sir,” I choked. “We’re all a little crazy today because of an eclipse on the other side of the world. Your coffee’s on the house. Make that free for everyone!” I announced. The customers clamored toward the counter, tossing dollar bills in our tip jar. If I got fired it would be worth it at least, in other dimensions besides this one.

Zoe beamed at me. “You’ll be a dumpster diver yet.”

“What time is dinner again?”

“Dinner? I thought I invited you over for popcorn and a movie.”

“Since I’m not going to fire you and will probably be the one who gets fired myself, you two better feed me more than popcorn.”

“I’ll go see what’s out back in the dumpster.”

Moonwalker, Chapter 9

Almost as if to spite me, the morning always showed up when it was supposed to. Sometimes the birds sang, sometimes they didn’t. When they stopped I knew the sun was over the horizon and it was safe to roll my bike downstairs and head off to work. It was downhill from Fox Point to Wickenden, and even though there was hardly ever anyone on the street I’d taken to wearing a helmet since I’d moved to the city, something I’d sworn I’d never do, but I figured if I really wanted to change my life I had to start somewhere, and maybe that somewhere had to involve not looking at all cool. As my mom said, “you’re not getting older. I mean younger.” And as my father had been saying since I left home more than twenty years ago, “You know, you really need to get health insurance.” If I got in an accident I’d be screwed. Now that I was officially middle-aged maybe it was time to be prudent, although Zoe said I looked cute when I pulled up at the shop where she was sometimes waiting for me to unlock the door. She was usually late because she knew I’d never tell on her.

“You’re such a nerd,” were her exact words. “I love nerds. They’re so enthusiastic.” She gave me a “We Are Traffic” sticker for my helmet the Critical Mass bikers wore. “You can ride with us, you know,” she said, as if riding a bike was something radical and not something I’d been doing my whole life because I’d never been able to afford a car.

As I said, usually I was the first to arrive at Chaos, but that morning after The Annunciation I had another odd—I won’t say disturbing just yet—encounter.

Providence didn’t have that many homeless people, at least not obvious ones. There weren’t a lot of panhandlers on the street with their legs stretched out covering half the sidewalk, people huddled in ATM foyers who pushed all their possessions around in shopping carts, or who slept over grates to keep warm when it was well below freezing like they did back in the 80s when Reagan was in charge. There were plenty of poor people, but they all seemed to have a place to sleep at night as far as I could tell, which didn’t mean they actually had a home come to think of it. Come to think of it, one of the things that freaked me out about Providence is how few people there were on the streets. People didn’t walk a whole lot in this city. Everybody drove even the shortest distances in their cars.

Which made the guy camped out on the sidewalk who I passed every morning even more noticeable. Usually he was sitting upright, back against the chain-link fence, legs stretched out, sometimes with his hands behind his head as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He seemed to be going to sleep as the sun came up, which meant he stayed up all night too, unless he just slept all the time like I did first semester of my sophomore year at Yale.

I wanted to stop and ask him how he managed to do it. How did he survive the mocking laughter of the moon and the werewolves howling around every corner, but the one time I did engage him in conversation, he kind of scared me. I told you about him before. He was the guy who’d told me that the Asians wandering the streets of Fox Point at dawn carrying five-gallon buckets with fishing poles on their shoulders were Hmong immigrants. “Do you know about the Hmong?” he asked that one time I slowed in front of him. He had a thick, red-blonde beard, so I wasn’t sure the voice I heard actually came from him, even though there was nobody else around because it was hard to see his lips. Besides, he just didn’t look animated enough to put more than two words together. “They’re fighting a Secret War,” he informed me. “They’re with the CIA. Watch out.” I was grateful I had just reached a hill so my bike could accelerate without it seeming like I was trying to ignore him. Now, I just went ahead and ignored him, but I always glided past with a good excuse playing through my mind, like Zoe didn’t have a key and I didn’t want her to break in and get fired because then our tips would suck in case he spoke again.

He always wore a wool hat, which was crazy since it was well over 80 degrees every day that summer, but then again, maybe he really was crazy and took it off in the winter. I didn’t know because I hadn’t lived through a winter in the city yet.

Supposedly most homeless people were mentally ill, so this wouldn’t surprise me. Sometimes he took his shirt off, which was a startling sight since with his clothes off I could see he wasn’t old and decrepit. In fact, he was totally hot. He had the shoulders of a surfer and defined abs that looked liked he’d spent hours paddling on his stomach.

I used to surf. I wondered if I’d ever caught a wave with him out on Block Island and considered stopping, or even turning around, but the momentum was always downhill. Besides, he probably smelled.

I was in no rush the morning after Michael Jackson’s revelation. In fact, I was going to be early for work since I’d been so restless I left the house well before the ten minutes it took me to bike down the hill to the coffeehouse. I’d actually left my apartment while the moon was still in the sky, waiting at the top of the hill to watch it set in the ocean I could barely see past I-95. Narragansett Bay was beyond that, and beyond that the Atlantic Ocean where Block Island waited for the butterflies to anoint it with secrets and lost gold. I missed that place, though I swore I’d never go back there. Not at least until I got a real job.

I was in no rush. I didn’t want to get to work too early. The morning, when the sky was shared by sun and moon, if I could stop from shaking, was actually beautiful. Only melodic birds were singing—no crows or cackling blue jays. I decided to get off my bike and walk a little instead of riding as fast as I could to the safety of Chaos.

First I saw what looked like a rattlesnake’s tail. Then a few stars starting small and growing larger as I followed them down the sidewalk. A weed growing up through the cracks was outlined with a big heart, another with a multicolored rose that looked like a cathedral window; yet another with a smiley face that made me smile as well, which rarely happened before my first latte.

The stars seemed to form some sort of wondrous pattern, but I couldn’t figure it out, and they weren’t white, but every blazing color you could imagine, including the ones on the spectrum we can’t see like infrared and ultraviolet.

Did you know black is the combination of every color and white is no color at all? A moth shot toward my face like someone had thrown it, white wings fluttering toward my nose. I batted it away, but could feel it caught in my hair. Its wings beating against my skull sounded like the whirr of a helicopter’s blades coming in for a landing to rescue wounded in a war zone.

The light exploded. I dropped to my knees and shielded my eyes from the shrapnel I knew must be flying around, but nothing hit me but the air from the blades, whirring quietly now, like wings resting on flowers. I opened my eyes to blackness and there they were in every color, a flock of butterflies sprayed across the sidewalk singing look down, look down.

Embarrassment usually would have kicked in at this point. I’ll admit it wasn’t the first time I’d found myself in a compromising position on a sidewalk. It happened more than once back in the days I was a drunk. I’d probably been mistaken for a homeless person myself. I even had some actual physical scars to prove it as well as the stories I’d told at AA before I’d dropped out, but I wasn’t embarrassed. I didn’t have time to be, because there on the concrete in front of me, outlined in fuchsia chalk, was a human body, except it had wings, which I supposed made it some kind of hybrid, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal if there wasn’t an actual body inside the chalk outline, hands folded over its chest like broken wings, the way they do for people in coffins.
It was the hot homeless guy, laid out like a corpse, body taking up the whole sidewalk, feet dangling in the gutter. The water beneath us rushed by without a sound.

One shoe was off. When I got close I could see it was hanging from the laces on the sewer grate. I picked it up before it could fall and put it on the pavement next to him, hoping he’d notice when he woke up.

No such luck. He was either drunk or dead, and from the angle of his neck I would guess dead. No one could sleep like that, although I had seen some drunks pass out in some pretty crazy positions over the years that you’d swear weren’t humanly possible. Damn, I was going to have to do something, I thought, just when I was almost starting to enjoy being apathetic.

Maybe he just passed out because it was really hot. Maybe if I took his hat off he’d snap out of it, which is what I did, grimacing as I touched the greasy wool, plucking it off his head and tossing it over my shoulder where it landed on the grate with his shoe. A couple of seagulls swooped over toward us from the direction of the Bay as if they thought there might be something worth scavenging besides the usual pizza boxes and bottles of malt liquor that nobody cared enough to recycle, even though it wasn’t a trash day and the bins weren’t out on the street. They perched on the chain-link fence and looked down at us.

“What should I do?” I asked them, glad it was so early and there was nobody around. People were going to think I was crazy too if I didn’t watch out. I half expected them to answer, but they didn’t, so I did the most obvious thing and looked down at the poor dead kid (I could see he was really young up close) who looked so vulnerable with his hat off I started to cry. How was I going to tell his mother? Maybe the police would, though I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. The police showing up at your door with that look on their faces you know from TV but can’t believe because it couldn’t really be happening to you because things like this don’t happen in real life, they only happen on television. I was going to have to tell her. I couldn’t do that to her, even though I didn’t know her yet and didn’t want to.

I took another look just to make sure I’d be able to positively identify him in the morgue. I had to be absolutely sure it was him before I told his mother the heartbreaking news. Maybe he was from Florida and I’d have to go back there after all.

He had strawberry blonde hair like Willie Nelson. Strawberry stubble on his cheeks, which was strange because it meant he shaved and I didn’t see when a guy who spent all day and night laying on the sidewalk would shave. Come to think of it, how did he eat? There weren’t any restaurants or stores on this block. People must bring him food, I guessed, and as far as going to the bathroom maybe he jumped over the chain-link fence and went in the abandoned lot. Probably thought he was fertilizing the weeds like a responsible anarchist.

I was aware that all these thoughts were rampaging through my head so I wouldn’t have to touch him. The closer I got, the less it looked like he was still breathing. Maybe he had the ability to hibernate like a bear or a frog at the bottom of a pond, or maybe he was waiting inside an invisible egg like a turtle, or a chrysalis like one of the butterflies he’d sketched in chalk on the sidewalk. I assumed it was him since the trail of stars and butterflies ended with the outline chalked around his body. I didn’t stop to ask how he could have drawn it around himself. When I got really close I saw how it glowed as if etched in stardust or something as precious and rare as the luminescent filaments on butterfly wings. Supposedly if you brushed them even the slightest the butterfly couldn’t fly anymore and died of grief and broken flowers.

I was afraid to cross over it, afraid to even reach over with my hand to put my hand up to his mouth to see if he was still breathing, but what if he was just bound by some magic spell that would break if I did?

After awhile you can only make so many excuses. At some point you’re going to get in trouble for not calling 911, even when it looks like there’s nobody else witnessing the scene. That’s why they always catch so many hit-and-runs. There’s always somebody watching from behind a drawn shade or hunched down in a parked car. I was pretty sure he was dead. I was going to have to be the one who declared an end to this poor kid’s fate. I reached my hand over the glowing line around his body and cupped my palm to his mouth.

Neither warmth or cold came from his lips, which were slack like a dead person’s, or like someone really relaxed like we did in corpse pose at the end of yoga class, though that had never really happened to me, but I knew about it because I was so not relaxed I never lost myself in the bliss of prana and heard every word the instructor said, judging myself of course for not being relaxed enough to get lost in it.

Without thinking about it, I moved my hand down to his heart. I didn’t touch it. I just let my hand hover in the air, drawing the glow of the stars and butterflies and smiley faces and hearts surrounding us into my own heart that I could hear now beating inside my own exhausted body.
I know it’s hard to believe, but the street started to drum.

Inside all of the shuttered houses there were drummers calling and answering each other back and forth across the pavement with ancient rhythms from Africa that told the story of how the world was born and how it would die.

It was a story about the emptiness in the center of the earth, a story of the black hole in the center of our galaxy. It was the story of the black hole inside each one of us, the vacuum where no sound exists that we dance toward, summoned by our beating hearts and the stamp of our feet on the red earth.

My hand was a calabash, a hollowed gourd. I turned it over and it was filled with water whose phosphorescent glow called me to look through its surface to discover what happened on the other side of the black hole. The drums gripped the back of my neck and pushed me facedown until my nose was beneath the surface. I closed my eyes until I heard a voice say open, and when I did I saw the lines on the palm of my hand were some kind of map I could follow if I wanted to really know the earth, but I also saw that if I followed them I would have to leave it too, or at least the safety of the earth I knew where it was only possible to live with death because we ignored it.

The drums wanted me to dance with death. The street was shaking and the rattle of the chain link fences dividing the paved yards shot through my legs like a jolt from an electric chair.
I had to get to work. Zoe had to be there by now and she’d be really dismayed if I did something as stupid as drowning in my own palm. With that thought I actually did inhale a nose-full. My head jerked up, spraying water all over the kid’s red beard. I noticed the seagulls were still perched on the fence above us, looking down with their yellow eyes and red-tipped beaks. They were silent as owls, unusual for such talkative birds.

“Give that back!” A ghost yelled.

His eyes exploded open. He leaped to his feet and slipped around me, running down the street after one of the gulls who was flying away with his hat I’d thrown over my shoulder.

“Ladrón! Get back here! You know that doesn’t belong to you!”

To my amazement, the gull turned around and dropped the hat in the middle of the street, the way they dropped clams on the blacktop on Block Island to crack them open. He picked it up and put it back on his head, reached into his pocket and threw the gull a packet of unopened oyster crackers which it caught and flew away with toward the Bay, the other gulls taking off after it to see if they could steal its score.

“Phew,” he said, “this is my hat from Peru,” jamming it back down on his head until it nearly covered his eyebrows. “They can digest plastic, you know.” He said to me without turning around to face me.

“I know.” I knew a lot about seagulls. I hadn’t lived on Block Island all those years and not learned a trick or two.

“You really should take off that helmet. It doesn’t suit you.” I wanted to say “turn around,” but decided to play it cool--if that’s what he wanted. The “Aren’t you hot with that thing on?” I managed to drop seemed blasé enough to convince him I hadn’t been scared to death when I thought he was dead on the street.

“Do I look hot?” he said, turning around, and because he turned I knew he was aware of the double entendre. A lesser boy would have ruined it by pushing the hat out of his eyes with a line like that, but he didn’t. Did he know I’d checked him out those times I’d passed by on my bike and he’d had his shirt off?

“I have to go to work now.”

“That’s all you can say after you just saved my life?”

“Uh-huh.” It appeared my eloquence and rapier wit had deserted me.

“Thank you.”

“It was nothing.” Disarmed by a seagull. “Just what were you doing passed out like that?” I asked.

“Did I scare you? I’m sorry. I had a rough night keeping the werewolves out of the neighborhood. For some reason they want to get in Fox Point more than anywhere else. I finally got rid of them by telling them there was a big frat party at Providence College, but some didn’t believe me and snuck back. Took a bite out of my leg—look.”

He rolled up his pants and sure enough there were teeth marks on his calf.

“Werewolves? You expect me to believe that?”

“No. I expect you to believe I’m a junky who shot up and passed out on the sidewalk.”

“Did you draw all this?” I pointed to the flowers and stars beginning to glow pink as the sun rose around us.

“That depends on who’s asking.”

“Like the cops?”

“Like girls who have wings but don’t know it.”

He looked at me and for a couple of seconds I swear I saw myself reflected on his black pupils. I was a white star in the center. I didn’t look like the self I knew. I can’t say what I looked like, only that I was present at the birth of something beautiful. Something unequivocally true--something that could never be taken away from me if I could only remember to remember it.
“The werewolves love this block. It’s where Fox Point ends and Wickenden starts. It’s always easier to cross over on the borders.”

“Border of what? It doesn’t look any different to me.”

“That’s because you haven’t learned how to be invisible yet. You could though. You noticed me when nobody else did.”

“That’s because everybody was asleep! This is a weird city, anyway. Nobody’s ever on the street it freaks me out."

“Wow. You really can’t see them, can you? Just me. Incredible.”

“Whatever. I gotta go now.” I turned to mount my bike. “What do you eat?” I couldn’t help asking. He pulled a goldfish net out of his pants and waved it in the air around his head. “Moths. Moonlight. Want some?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“No. You just don’t want to remember.”

“How I lost my soul?” I joked.

“No, how to find it.”

Of course I forgot all of this as soon as the first door opened on the street and a woman wearing gold earrings so big her Chihuahua could have jumped through them hollered out at us. “Hey, I thought I told you to beat it, kid! Go find some other block to stink up!”He laughed and waved at her. “Good morning! I could tell he really meant it. “You think those are real gold?” He asked me. “I hope so.”

“Me too.” The Chihuahua barked as if to say “me three,” but its owner must not have understood we were rooting for her to show us the way to lift us out of this leaden city where the sky was so heavy it was going to collapse soon.

“I mean you!” She barked. The little dog jumped out of her arms and cowered under her robe. “Beat it or I’m calling the police!”

“I guess protecting people from werewolves doesn’t mean anything anymore?” The kid sighed. “What’s a Dragonfly to do, but fly away?” He spread his arms out like wings and rolled his eyes in circles. The pupils fractured like a kaleidoscope into every color of the rainbow and then some. When he stopped they were blue once more and I could breathe again.

“Dragonfly?” I managed to say, dumbstruck by his multifaceted eyes.

“That’s my name. And by the way, you’ve got to change your name as well as get rid of that helmet.”

“’I’ve been told that before. Hey, you don’t think nerds are cool because they’re so enthusiastic do you?”


“Sure. I love nerds.”

“But you’re a surfer!”

“So are you. I’ve seen you out there.” So we had met before. “You really should get going,” he said. “Nerds are never late cuz they’re so enthusiastic to get to work.” I swung my leg over my bike seat and straddled the bar. “Flexible,” he commented. He put his hand on my seat. “Where did we surf together? Narragansett Beach?”

“No.”

“Watch Hill?”

“Definitely not. Too many rich people. I get arrested every time I roll into that town.”

“Black Rock?"

“Never heard of it.” But somehow I knew that that’s where I’d seen him. Offshore
the far side of Block Island, looking back at the faces of the old men etched in the bluffs by wind and rain, wondering if we’d ever go back to land, waiting for the first butterfly to float on the current of air sweeping down from Canada aromatic with the resin of pine trees high in the mountains of Mexico where the fractured light could be made whole again. He waved his net in the air in front of my face. “That wasn’t me. That was my brother.”

“He surfs too?”

“Yeah, but only when it’s sunny.”

“I gave my board away.”

“We can go back there and get it. It’s only a 45 minute drive to the ferry.”

“Not until I get a real job. I promised myself.”

“Well, then you best be on your way. Don’t want to get fired from the one you already have. Won’t look good on your resume.” I slid up on to the seat. He slowly took his hand away. “Careful,” he said, “You don’t want your pant leg to get stuck in your chain and make you crash.” He stooped down and rolled it up. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“We do?” I leaned over as he began to stand back up. He didn’t smell bad at all. In fact he smelled like Sex-Wax, the coconut-scented balm I rubbed on my surfboard so I didn’t slip off. Or used to. I had given my board away when I left the island.

“You don’t think you didn’t save my life for a reason now, do you? Somebody else might have just left me for dead.”

“It could have been anybody.”

“But it wasn’t. It was you, whatever your name is going to be….It’ll come to me soon. Next time I see you.”

“When will that be?” I asked, even though all my danger signs were flashing. I had a feeling he could make me forget the man in the mirror who’d cursed me when he saw the broken glass all over his bar. “What the fuck!” he’d yelled. “Fucking crazy bitch!” Of course I’d just thrown a bottle at his face, covering us both with broken glass.

“Don’t worry, it’s almost over,” he said, his voice smooth as river water streaming over moss-covered stones.

“I’m not so sure about that," I answered, wondering how he knew, because he did know. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t erase those memories.

“The eclipse that’s about to start in a couple of hours. It’s one of the biggest in years. The moon’s going to block the sun for over six minutes.”

“It’s going to be dark in the day?” That was the last thing I needed.

“Only in Asia. Here we’re just going to act crazy without knowing why.”

“Isn’t that how it usually is around here?”

“Whadda you know. I think I’ve figured it out,” he laughed, waving his net around my head like a magic wand.

“What’s that?”

“Your name.”

“Tell me.”

“Can’t. You’ve got to give me something first.” He dropped the net over my head, leaned in close. There was only a thin veil of mesh between our lips that fluttered as our breath drew it back and forth between us. I wanted to kiss him but I knew if I did there’d be no saving me from the werewolves.

“Don’t worry. I’ll still protect you,” he said before pulling away. His eyes sparked and shot across the dawn to join the seagulls gathering to greet the sun at the edge of the Bay. “Catch you later!” he cried, releasing me with a push on my seat that sent me rolling down the street.

“My name!” I yelled over my shoulder.

“What are you going to give me!”

I unstrapped my helmet and threw it over my shoulder. He must have caught it, because I didn’t hear anything crash on the ground.

Moonwalker, Chapter 8

About Providence. As in:

1. looking to, or preparation for the future, provision; as in
2. skill or wisdom in management, prudence; as in
3. a. the care or benevolent guidance of God or nature
b. an instance of this; as in
4. God as the guiding power of the universe.

Although I thought it was a cliché used by authors who couldn’t think of anything better, I wasn’t tired of it. I was fascinated by all the definitions one word can contain, so I looked up Providence in The Merriam-Webster, who, if Providence was meant to be truly
relevant to this narrative of my life, must be leaving some definitions out because:

1. I didn’t believe in planning for the future
2. thus my poor skills and wisdom in management which could be said to contribute to my imprudent lifestyle.
3. While I might agree that nature with all its bounty (all those coconuts in Florida) could be benevolent, there was still the issue of hurricanes, and of course, in the northeast, winter, so these instances weren’t infallible.
4. a. Needless to say I had serious doubts in God as the guiding power of my universe.
b. Even more needless to say was my serious doubt in the existence of God.
c. After a few drinks I had serious doubts about the universe, which hadn’t changed since I’d gotten sober.

So it was kind of a mystery how I ended up living here after all these years pretending I was a gypsy. Real gypsies don’t ever give up the road. They die on the backs of their ponies, their untamed souls straining to be free from their bodies like the sound of the devil’s violin solo. I tried telling myself I was following in the footsteps of Roger Williams, who’d bailed on The Massachusetts Bay Colony on a horse strapped down with books in the name of religious tolerance, but if I couldn’t fool myself with this excuse, I knew I wouldn’t be successful with anyone else.

Providence was really just the easiest place to go that was close to Block Island where I figured I could get a job and create some kind of more stable life for myself. I didn’t want to end up working in a coffeehouse, but I didn’t get one call back for a job interview based on the resumés I sent to Brown and RISD, various non-profits and private schools, an importer of exotic foods, a travel agent, a company that prepped rich kids for the SATS (I know I didn’t graduate from college, but my scores were stellar. I had a lot of promise in the beginning), a film production company (everyone kept saying the film industry in Providence was going to blow up soon), and an underwater salvage rescue crew. I figured they were my best shot because I was really good at snorkeling, even though they were looking for someone who was certified in SCUBA. They were the only ones who actually did call me in for an interview, but when I told them I thought SCUBA gave divers an unfair advantage over the fish they looked at me strangely and suggested maybe I apply for a job at Butler. I looked it up later and discovered it was the local mental hospital. When I sent in my resumé I got a phone call from admissions asking if I needed help.
When not even my last hope, Wholefoods, would take me (I had been told everyone who worked there was an artist, plus they had health insurance, which would have made my parents so, so happy), I knew I was in trouble and contemplated jumping back on that Greyhound that had taken me to Florida all those years ago.

Wholefoods was honest at least. They told me they didn’t think I’d stick around long enough to make it worth training me, which was probably right, but I was disappointed because everyone there did seem like they were having a good time even though all they were doing was stocking shelves and ringing people up on a register. And I had kind of wanted those health benefits. I hadn’t been to a dentist in 15 years and my mom told me I really should get a mammogram now that I was-one more time, probably not the last--40 years old, even though the thought of having my breasts squeezed by some metal machine terrified me more than the thought of getting cancer. Call me twisted, I'm aware my priorities are skewed.

Providence, Oh, Providence. I wanted the bounty of God or nature to help me plan for my future, but it just wasn’t working out until one day I wandered down from Fox Point to Wickenden Street, thinking to get a coffee at Café Chaos and there it was, the sign I’d been looking for: HELP WANTED.

I’d tried to promise myself I wouldn’t end up working in a coffeehouse, but I must not have really meant it. In any case, I was good at the job and was soon promoted to shift supervisor, which meant I got to boss Zoe around and take the fall if the creamers weren’t full.

I also tried to like the city (I knew love was beyond me), but despite Buddy’s efforts to make it more glamorous, Providence was dingy and drab as a dockside whore, not that there were any in the city. Oh, there were plenty of hookers, but they weren’t anything romantic like that. They were just plain old hookers who smoked crack, shot heroin, and generally went about leading as dismal a life as possible in this dismal city.

The East Side had some nice buildings if you were into brick. That’s where the Brown and RISD campuses were, but I wasn’t. Bricks made me think of ballast stones, of people moaning in the holds of cramped ships, of slaves chained to each other, dying in misery before being tossed by the feet to the sharks. Also, objects to throw through windows. If the revolution the anarchists said was coming soon ever made it to Providence there’d be plenty of ammunition for the overthrow.

“Actually, that’s not what we’re about,” said one I met out back of Chaos when I was hefting a bag of coffee grounds into the dumpster. “We don’t believe in no rules, we just want to make our own. Most of us are actually quite peaceful,” she said while grabbing the bag out of my hands. “Hey, don’t throw those away. We’ll use them for compost.” She was gone before I had a chance to ask her if I could be one too.

After that I just left the bags out back to disappear, feeling virtuous and with a little more hope about humanity, although the last time we came across each other in the alley she promised me she’d bring me some vegetables from their community garden which I have yet to see.

Also, I have a thing about trees. I hate to see them cut down. I mean, I really feel their pain. I don’t know what else we should build our houses with, but it shouldn’t be trees, which is a problem in Providence, because besides bricks, there’s a lot of fine, old Colonial wooden houses and churches being written up as treasures in guidebooks. When you look at them you can see how much older the trees were back then before they were harvested because the clapboards are so wide. I took a tour of the John Brown House once and had to leave, I got so sad from counting the rings on the floor. According to my count, some of those trees had been a thousand years old before they’d been chopped down so we didn’t have to step on the ground anymore.
Providence used to be one big forest. Impossible to believe now, especially on my block which barely had a weed growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk.

If I could stage a revolution it would be an uprising of trees. They’d push their way up with their roots through all the pavement of the world until we all fell to our knees and apologized for the ugliness we’d created, which you could really see when you left the East Side and ventured out into the rest of the city. Ugly lime green or beige aluminum siding and chain link fences seemed to be the preferred décor, although preferred would be pushing it as most people didn’t notice how anything looked because they didn’t care enough about anything. Poverty does that. And I’m not talking about the genteel kind that I lived in where I had the option to compare myself to starving artists like Van Gogh and Picasso because I knew who they were in the first place.

I don’t know where I got the idea that beauty is a virtue. Maybe it was Providence itself. I loved how the early settlers of New England were named after abstract virtues, as if being named Chastity or Prudence could summon those qualities to one’s self. Despite trying to convince myself otherwise by years of dedicated debauchery, I had deep Puritanical roots. I knew there was something severe about me that stopped me from fitting in completely with the truly debauched barflies I surrounded myself with in my heyday--some of them quite sophisticated—for those twenty years I chased the sun up and down the east coast.

I used to debate this with one of my bosses (in a coffeehouse, of course). He was the tannest person I knew without wrinkles. “I rub coconut oil into my skin every night,” he said when I commented on his youthful appearance. He never even bothered going north anymore and seemed genuinely happy. I tried rubbing coconut oil all over myself for a week to see if it would work its magic on me but just ended up with greasy hair and acne, and oil-stained sheets I had to throw out because they started to smell rancid.

“Don’t you think sybaritic is a better word to describe our lives than debauched?” asked that well-lubricated former boss of mine. And if you’re wondering what sybaritic means, you’d be amazed at how many really smart people sling coffee.

I knew. Sybaritic means pleasure—anointing yourself with oil and lolling luxuriously on a tropical beach. I knew all about this way of life, but I’d never truly enjoyed it. In the back of my mind I was always thinking about what I had to do, not to survive, but to make my mark on the world.
I knew I wasn’t truly sybaritic because I even drank with ambition. Almost every night I got drunk to get drunk, not because I enjoyed the taste of alcohol--and I was a connoisseur of drink specials, not of fine wines or exotic tequilas. I only drank top shelf if someone else was buying, otherwise it was whatever cheep vodka was in the well. At least I’d graduated from the Piels Light and Fuzzy Navels from my high school days is what I told myself whenever I started to feel bad about myself.

“Life’s too short to feel bad about yourself,” said my wise, Confucian boss. This was in the stage where he grew a Fu Manchu beard, pinned his long hair up with chopsticks like a geisha and served coffee in a kimono. We were living in Key West, so this mélange of genders didn’t seem weird at all. It was part of the daily pleasure of living in a place where you could do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted to. If there were no limits, wouldn’t you create the most fantastical, fun-filled life for yourself?

I tried to apply his sage advice to my flailing life for awhile, but I couldn’t talk myself out of the idea that I was wasting my time on earth. Twenty years of serving coffee, scraping paint, pulling weeds, and cleaning houses while analyzing my employers from a Marxist feminist perspective and wondering when I was ever going to get to reading Daniel Deronda had worn me down.
One day I looked in the mirror and saw, I was a shabby boat in need of a good detailing. My teak was chipped and peeling, my surfaces no longer smooth to the touch and shining in the tropical sun. I was working in a boatyard restoring trim at the time in exchange for a place to sleep, if you’re wondering where this metaphor came from.

Ferociously sweaty, I looked at the dull trim I’d been scraping for hours and saw the truth: my allure was gone. Even more surprising was the revelation that came with it: so was the allure of the sun. My bloodshot eyes longed for the balm of clouds, low and gray, blocking the horizon.
There’s something I kind of need to admit at this point--a confession that betrays those Puritan roots I hinted at earlier. Despite what I told Zoe and Cally, I did actually go to college. I didn’t like to talk about it because it’s one of the few things in my life I can’t spin as ironic.

I dropped out before I graduated--but it was Yale I went to. I’d dreamed of going there since I was a kid, and I got a full scholarship to study English Literature with a focus on Critical Theory, which was all the rage in the late 80s.

I was ok for the first year. I went to all my classes religiously, had a 4.0 GPA and was the darling of all my professors who all assured me I was going to have a brilliant career following in their footsteps. But something happened my sophomore year that was beyond anything I’d read about in books, aside from fairy tales, which I only knew how to analyze for what they said about the culture they came from. I had no clue what to do when I actually started living one.

In my case I guess it was Sleeping Beauty, except for the beauty part, although I did have raven colored hair, ruby-red lips, and skin white as snow like the princesses always did in fairy tales.
Anyway, right after daylight savings time in late October, as the days grew shorter, I stopped getting out of bed, meaning I slept all day as well as all night, meaning I also stopped reading books and writing papers, meaning I failed all my classes and would have been kicked out of Yale if I hadn’t quit. The last paper I wrote was on Daniel Deronda and was a total failure since I hadn’t read the book.

Deep in the winter of my discontent, it came to me—what I had to do to wake up. On an afternoon where I cracked my eyes open to find myself in a dark-paneled, Gothic dorm room drowning in musty light I heard the words that saved me: “This life doesn’t belong to you,” wafted into the delicate spirals of my ears by the wings of a butterfly who had slipped through the heating ducts, radiant with the promise of secrets revealed if I was brave enough to follow it.
I closed my eyes once, then again, to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, but it was there every time I opened them, my eyelids fluttering like its jewel-toned wings, kaleidoscopic with color that lured me away with the ultimate fool’s gold—the promise that I could really be rescued.

Of course at the time I didn’t really realize this. I just wanted to escape somewhere besides sleep. I managed to get out of bed to go home for Christmas break, but when it was time to go back to classes I got on a Greyhound instead and rode it all the way to Key West, where I started my new classes in debauchery and bacchanalia, sometimes drunk enough to try to excuse my behavior by declaring I was a devotee to Dionysus to people who saw triple on a regular basis.

When summer rolled around I headed back North, to Block Island, this tiny seven mile island off the coast of Rhode Island that most Rhode Islanders hadn’t even been to. It was also full of professional drinkers, though they were less sybaritic than their Key West counterparts since this was New England we’re talking about, but I didn’t mind because the money was good, the beaches glorious, and nobody judged me for not doing something with my life because none of them were either. Well, some of the people we served did, but we just made fun of them for selling their souls for money when we, who cleaned their houses and bussed their tables littered with lobster shells, were free, our souls untainted by corruption, though we started the day with a Bloody Mary so our hands wouldn’t shake in front of the customers.

Back and forth I went, year after year, listening to my parents say “you’re not getting any younger, you know,” but I didn’t believe them because I knew exactly when it was time to go. I left when the butterflies came.

They arrived on the first cool breeze from the north that drifted toward the island from Canada sometime around the end of September when the goldenrod was in full bloom. If you stood at the edge of the clay bluffs on the south side of the island and looked out over the open ocean toward Portugal you might be the first to see one. After that, you couldn’t miss them. They were everywhere—drafting on the breeze kicked up by the ferry, fluttering around the heads of the last holdouts drinking frozen drinks on porch bars; clinging to screen doors and windshield wipers; and of course, they had all the flowers covered, especially the goldenrod, which if you looked closely was where they slept, napping on the stems in the sunlight, wings tucked close to camouflage their flame color.

Monarch butterflies--flocks of them drifting on the arctic air to a legendary pine forest high in the mountains of Mexico. Well, a legend to me at least. One of these days I was going to make it there myself.

It was my favorite time of the year—that time between staying and going. That time was like the moment before you catch what you know is going to be a wave that will bring you all the way to shore. You see it out beyond a couple of waves you know could give you a decent ride and wait, turning into it and paddling head down in complete trust that it will take you. When it comes, you know it’s what you’ve been waiting for your whole life. You hear a voice that says, “Look up! Look up!” and you are no longer lonely, for there right next to you is one unbelievably, delicate butterfly, catching the wave on gilded wings that flash against the sea spume.

Some of them do drown. The wrack is littered with their waterlogged bodies, tangled up in dried rockweed, picked over by seagulls, jumping with sand fleas.

I tried not to think about that sight, but that night, after Zoe and Cally left, I couldn’t get the image of all those crumpled antennae and waterlogged wings out of my mind.

I hadn’t told them, but as well as being the anniversary of the Moonwalk, it was also exactly one year ago tonight that I quit drinking, except for that one little slip up with the bartender and his worm, which I couldn’t forget, try as I might. My palms were still scarred from the broken glass I’d gripped when the mirror had cracked underneath my fingers.

Getting “sober” they called it. I should have been at an AA receiving my one year
chip, but I’d dropped out after six months. I just couldn’t say “Hi, I’m Minerva and I’m an alcoholic,” without feeling like a liar. I’ll admit, I was a drunk, but I had too much faith in the power of words to keep labeling myself something I didn’t want to be for the rest of my life. Besides, I hadn’t been tempted at all by that shot of zambucca Zoe had wanted to buy me.

It was going to be a long rest of the night, I was thinking, when out of the blue the phone rang. It was my mother, calling to see if I was all right, which she never did, especially at two in the morning. Usually we just chatted about whatever had gone on at our respective jobs or what our friends were doing at our scheduled time every other week, so I was surprised she would ask me a direct question about my life.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked again before hanging up.

“I’m fine, Mom. Really. I just can’t sleep.”

“Must be genetic. I can’t either. It gets worse when you get older.”

“Doesn’t everything?”

After we hung up I was left with the ceiling fan and the refrigerator who didn’t seem possessed by magical bees or demons or whatever I’d convinced myself was out to get me. They were just regular electrical appliances draining the life out of the planet.

Did you know there’s no sound on the moon? It’s a vacuum. No sound, no wind, no erosion. Ghosts could speak and throw bricks around and you wouldn’t even know they were there unless you saw where they landed. They could terrify people by howling like banshees, warning them of their impending deaths.

The astronauts said they found no signs of life when they’d landed there forty years ago, but they could have been lying. They could have fallen under its spell. Or it could mean they just couldn’t see the life that was there because there senses were too dull. I know this is sounding pretty out there for a self-proclaimed, jaded cynic, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something just beyond the edge of my eyes the astronauts had missed, something silent that was trying to speak but couldn’t because it was trapped in a vacuum. Something that was trying to suck me into its hungry mouth, growing fat on my suppressed sadness, while I grew brittle and sharp as a sickle.

I walked over to the stack of milk crates where I kept my record collection to see if there was anything that would snap me out of this mood. I must really be freaking people out if my mom is calling me in the middle of the night. Zoe’s whole Sylvia Plath thing had me kind of freaked out about myself.

When I was a kid I loved collecting things—shells, stamps, feathers, stones. I threw them all away the summer I was sixteen, except the stamps which I stuck on postcards and envelopes for the next ten years in odd combinations that must have either puzzled or delighted whoever received them. I didn’t know. I sent them to people I found in the phone book. I felt kind of bad when I thought about them now. I hoped the shells, with the sound of the sea inside them, were still sighing wherever they’d ended up, that the stones hadn’t been crushed into gravel, and that the feathers had managed to drift out of the landfill and fly back to the clouds. Part of the reason behind my new collection was to make up for what I’d done to the first. I figured if I forced myself to collect what I was most scared of those things I’d thrown away might find a little rest and leave me alone.

I was hoping that listening to songs about my greatest fear would help me exorcise it, or at least understand the hold it had on me. I was also convinced this could only happen if I heard the songs on vinyl. There was something about the scratch of the needle when I dropped it in its groove, something about that moment before the song started where I came so close to understanding my fear I could feel it shiver through my bones that could never be replaced by a cold, slick laser that was also used to slice into eyes and other delicate organs.

It was a decent way to pass the night. I might even have done it now and then if I was normal and not an insomniac who had to find ways to pass the time besides agonizing about her own personal apocalypse and the state of the world. I learned so much about the moon from those records you might have said I was an expert on her moods. Sometimes she was benevolent like Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” sometimes cruel like “The Killing Moon” of Echo & The Bunnymen. I learned about moon shadows from Cat Stevens and how to moondance from Van Morrison, and how to walk on the moon from The Police. I learned what a little moonlight can do from Billie Holiday and how moonlight in Vermont looked shining on the sycamores, and how sad it was when your love proved untrue and left you blue under a blue moon of Kentucky.
I saw you standing alone there under a blue moon, too. You were even sadder than me, though not as frightened of being alone; though Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s was the saddest of all, drowning in that melancholy moonriver.

When I got to this song I always broke down, feeling the weight of my unlived life—you’re off to see the world, there’s such a lot of world to see, Holly strummed on her guitar on the fire escape, still fooling us she believed she could have it all. But we knew. We knew there was a Bad Moon Rising and we’d never see her again. Not unless we surrendered to The Dark Side of the Moon. I still had a couple I hadn’t even played yet. “Sister Moon” by Sting and REM’s “Man on the Moon,” but I was done fooling myself and there was no one to convince otherwise. I couldn’t even make it back to the sofa. I lay down on the hard, painted floor. A weight settled on my chest, pressing all the air from my lungs. My ribs cracked, bells splintered the humid night, ice-cold. My blood would stop flowing soon.

The lunatic is on the grass. The lunatic is on the grass. Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs. Got to keep the loonies on the path. The lunatic is in the hall. The lunatics are in my hall. The paper holds their folded faces to the floor And every day the paper boy brings more. And if the dam breaks open many years too soon And if there is no room upon the hill And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too I'll see you on the dark side of the moon. The lunatic is in my head. The lunatic is in my head You raise the blade, you make the change You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane. You lock the door And throw away the key There's someone in my head but it's not me. And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear You shout and no one seems to hear. And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.

You know what seemed really strange to me now, but which seemed normal when it was happening, was that I knew who Michael Jackson was talking about without him actually saying the name out loud. When he asked me if I knew who he was, he wasn’t asking me if I knew who Michael Jackson was. And when he asked me to save him he wasn’t pleading with me to save him from the overdose that had killed him, like maybe a ghost would have. I knew who he was talking about because I’d been waiting for him for forty years to finally catch up with me.
The Man in the Moon. The thunder in my ear. The someone in my head that wasn’t me.

He’d let me off the hook that first time--why, I didn’t know. He could have crept back in through the slats of the shades when my mom finally pulled me from her breast and left me squirming in my cradle. Now I saw I’d been spared for a reason. Now it was time for me to pay back the boon granted me forty years ago. The only thing I couldn’t remember was what would happen if I didn’t, but I had a feeling I didn’t want to find out.

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.

Moonwalker, Chapter 6

Waterfire is supposed to be a spectacle in the grand sense of the word, Providence’s own version of Carnevale in Venice, when masked revelers roamed the streets in thrall to the Lord of Misrule who encouraged them to trade their morals for licentious encounters in torch-lit, slippery alleys lining the murky canals. It didn’t quite translate. Even though Providence was a mob city, it was still New England. Not even the goombahs who supposedly kissed the “Pope’s” ring in secret, back-room ceremonies on The Hill (that’s Federal Hill, the epicenter of Italian epicurean delight which welcomed visitors with a neon golden pineapple at the beginning of Atwell’s Avenue), could maintain the illusion for too long. Eventually it became obvious that the mysterious masked courtesans were really strippers at The Foxy Lady pulling in a little cash before their next shift at the “Legs and Eggs” brunch. A couple of guys I’d known from my past life as a barfly clued me in, only because I promised not to tell anyone about what went on in the back of that limo they shared with a prominent city official who shall remain unnamed. I may scoff at the urban legends of what went on in those backrooms on Federal Hill, but even I had a healthy respect for the Pope.

Everybody at Chaos was always going on about how “magical” it was, but I knew it wasn’t really magic. The fires were gas and came out of metal burners that ran through the river like a giant stove.

Supposedly there were musicians and acrobats and all sorts of performers to entertain the masses, but I didn’t really know since I’d never gone, which means I just made all of the above up. I have a fertile imagination, don’t I? Zoe tells me I’m not a liar, I just spend too much time alone. “You have a special gift for storytelling.”

As I’ve mentioned a bunch of times already, I rarely venture out of my apartment once the sun’s gone down. I guess that would make me the opposite of a vampire, except I don’t sleep all night in a coffin. I lie awake on my sofa wondering if the bunny in the moon is going to nibble off my ears and toes.

The whole thing was the brainchild of the city’s disgraced mayor Buddy Cianci, who’d gone to jail twice (so far.) The first time for paying someone to burn the man who’d cuckolded him (isn’t that the greatest word?), as in put the horns on (where did that come from?) with cigarettes, the second for some kind of racketeering, which was pretty crazy because everybody knew that it was pretty much socially acceptable in Rhode Island to be financially corrupt.

Anyway, the city loved Buddy and Buddy loved the city so he came up with ideas like converting the old, abandoned mills from when the textile industry had been huge here into lofts for artists so the RISD students would stick around after graduation and make Providence into an “arts destination,” which had kind of worked. Zoe was here, and there were lots of students who stayed now instead of moving to poseur-filled, expensive New York City, although I had the sneaking suspicion that the reason was because they couldn’t make it there. You know how that song goes so I won’t inflict the grotesqueness of Frank Sinatra on you. Talk about the male gaze. The Rat Pack blows.

“I’d rather stay here where I can be the only one with Japanese kites painted all over my Accord.” Zoe had decided to turn her car into a moveable art project.

There were also lots of punks and anarchists burrowed into warehouses all over the city. They came and dumpster-dived behind the coffeehouse. I liked them and decided I wanted to be just like them when I grew up. My parents were going to be thrilled.

As I was saying, Buddy loved a good party. They say he didn’t stay home one night the entire time he was mayor. If he wasn’t invited to a party, he made one happen, and Waterfire was the crowning jewel on his tiramisu.

I’ll admit, it was better than something really lame like the Superbowl. I was glad Buddy hadn’t pushed for a major sports franchise in the city. Providence didn’t even have one team of its own. The closest thing we had was the Pawsox, the farm team for the Boston Red Sox in Pawtucket, the next dump over. And to give him credit--it wasn’t so easy to set the river on fire since almost everybody had forgotten about it in the first place.

Some progressive soul had gotten the idea at some point in the recent past before people cared about view sheds and quality of life, let alone the health of our planet’s water, to pave it over. Actually, I think it was when they built I-95 right through the city, forever destroying the downtown skyline and dooming its citizens to face a fire-breathing dragon who choked their dreams with exhaust fumes.

Buddy ripped the pavement off and freed the river. Too bad the “Free Buddy” campaign to have him released from jail early didn’t work, too. He served out his jail time in New Jersey somewhere, but was back now hosting a radio talk show. The Free Buddy t-shirts were collectors’ items with both hipsters and regular folks. I even had one myself.

There were also lots of Portuguese in Providence. I guess I should be embarrassed to admit that I couldn’t really tell the difference between Portuguese and Italians, but that’s what happens when you grow up in Connecticut. Supposedly my neighborhood Fox Point was settled by Portuguese and Cape Verdean fishermen, but I hadn’t seen anyone but a couple of forlorn looking Hmong wandering down toward Narragansett Bay with fishing poles, carrying a bucket between them. Now, they were easy to identify since they were Asian.

I knew they were Hmong because this crazy guy who sleeps on the street told me, but I’ll get to him a little bit later. I still have no clue what a Cape Verdean looks like. If it wasn’t for him I’d probably think they were Thai because there were a couple of really good Thai restaurants in the city I loved to go to for a cheap lunch.

Despite my best intentions, I’ll have to admit that my first reaction to the whole scene when Zoe and I finally found a parking space and joined the throngs on the sidewalk was that it was kind of romantic.

Well-groomed couples strolled with their arms around each others’ waists, some trailing delighted children behind them slurping Del’s Lemonade, the Rhode Island version of a smoothie that rotted your teeth and gave you brain freeze, but you didn’t care because it tasted so good. Clam cakes were like that, too. They sunk in your gut like lead tied to a fishing pole, but you didn’t care because you knew all the grease they were fried in would give you the runs.

Girls with big hair and high heels from Warwick who clearly hadn’t realized the 80s went out of style, well--in the 80s, promenaded to impress the boys with gel-slicked hair and collared shirts, no sneakers. That was the dress code in the hottest club downtown where they had go-go girls dancing in stage in giant birdcages. At least that’s what Zoe had told me. “I went down and filmed them one night with my friend for an installation he was working on. They did it for free. They all said they loved the gold body paint. ‘Gilded Cage,’ was the name of the installation.”

“How original.”

“He got an A. The professor loved it.

“Man?"

“Yup. Talk about the male gaze, right?”

As we strolled down the sidewalk I wondered if everyone thought we were lesbians. I kind of hoped so, as long as we didn’t get harassed or beat up or that some friend of my parents would see me and phone my mother, who was convinced I was one anyway. Just last week she’d asked me again if I had something to tell her, and I knew she wasn’t asking if I was pregnant, which was the big worry way back in high school. Now that it looked like she’d never get grandchildren out of me, I bet she wished I had gotten knocked up in 11th grade.

“Want a coffee milk?” I asked my adorable date. I needed a distraction from mulling over my failed life and coffee milk was one of my favorites. I shepherded Zoe into the corner diner we were just passing, famous for its Rhode Island culinary delicacies.

Coffee milk, also known as a cabinet, was something you either loved like mother’s milk or loathed. I have no idea why it’s also known as a cabinet, so don’t ask me. Sometimes it’s best just to surrender to the mystery, also applicable to clam cakes. It was best not to wonder just where the clams were in all that dough, especially best not to contemplate when they’d last changed the fryalator grease.

Whenever I drank that first sickly sweet sip I felt complete. After that I felt sick and usually threw the rest away, trying not to think about what my mother would say. She was a big one for making sure I finished everything on my plate. Not because it was a waste, but because it was good discipline, a remnant of her time in the army. After awhile, punishment and reward felt the same, which meant I had some pretty major food issues as well as being an alcoholic. See, I said it. Just don’t tell the doomsayers at AA. “Once an addict, always an addict,” was not going to apply to me. Future tense noted.

“Yuck,” was her gracious answer. “I can’t believe you drink that swill. It probably has high fructose corn syrup in it.” Zoe was a coffee snob and health freak, which kind of seemed like an oxymoron to me. I guess, working in a coffee shop, I was supposed to be one too, but there were some things in life I couldn’t give up or get over, whatever the case may be.

“Wouldn’t you rather stop somewhere with a little atmosphere and have an espresso with a shot of zambucca?”

“I don’t drink. Remember?”

“Oh--right.” She got that worried look on her face that said I forget sometimes how crazy you are. I knew she was thinking about that one time I had got drunk with her. I’d never told her what happened when I’d told her to go. I would make my own way home. “Well, you could just have the espresso and we could pretend we’re in Italy.”

I had to admit, if you squinted, or didn’t wear your glasses if you wore them in the first place, that the river at that moment did look a little like a Venetian canal. There were even gondolas plying its glowing surface, ferrying “lovers” up and down. I think some of them might have been actors, but some might have been real people out on a first date or having a special anniversary. There was even an old couple who looked especially romantic. They must have been actors, because nobody that had been married that long could possibly sit through a boat ride down the whole river without getting in a fight. The wife obligingly proved us right by whacking her mate over the head with her fan. “Hands off!” she shrieked.

“She’s only a bird in a gilded cage,” Zoe sang. Sometimes her whole “life is a cabaret” routine was pretty amusing.

For a moment I wished I had someone to go for a boat ride with besides Zoe, who wasn’t even single. Her girlfriend Cally was supposed to meet us at the Moonwalk exhibition. She was some kind of grad student at Brown. I wasn’t sure what she studied because I felt so pathetic listening to her career plans that I never asked, or just tuned her out whenever she started talking about whatever she studied, or developed, or whatever fabulous thing she was doing to make the world a better place for all humanity, which wasn’t to say I didn’t like her. As one of my two friends, I thought she was great.

“We are the World. We are the children,” hummed Zoe. “Hey, remember when his hair caught fire?”

“Who?”

“Michael Jackson! I mean honestly, Minerva.”

“Minnie.”

“I’ll only call you that if you trade clothes with me.”

“Not happening.”

“I wouldn’t want to walk around in that uniform you wear anyway.”

She was right. I kind of did wear the same thing everyday, depending on the season. Right now in summer it was a black tank top and dark gray “yogini” pants with a pair of Reefs. I may have moved to the city, but I still couldn’t give up the flip-flops I’d worn for the past twenty years on the beach, and I doubted if any real yoginis wore sustainable fiber drawstring capri-length pants, I think they practiced in saris, which I wanted to tell the pushy clerk in pursuit of a commission, but sometimes even I got tired of questioning every little thing. I justified the seventy-five bucks I’d shelled out for them by wearing them everyday, but I didn’t namaste her back on my way out. She came in the coffeehouse. She was a bad tipper.

“And we really should do something about your hair, too--maybe some layers or something.”

All of a sudden my long, black, one-length hair I’d flipped and let fall over my eyes, that boys had gripped and sniffed and run their fingers through, felt like the heaviest burden in the world. I must look like a crow, or maybe even worse, a vulture. No wonder I couldn’t get a date, although the idea of dating horrified me. I’d always been the kind to fall in love at first sight and move in with the guy the next day.

“Hey! Watch out!” Zoe exclaimed, grabbing me by the elbow and pulling me off the curb into the street. “What a jackass! He almost set your hair on fire!”

I had been trying to get a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the windows of the bar we’d been strolling past to see if I really did look as bad as I felt and had almost stumbled right into a fire dancer.

“It’s not his fault,” I said, stepping back up onto the sidewalk.

“Yeah, it was. He came right at you. It looked like on purpose to me.” Both of us walked to the corner and looked in both directions, but the fire dancer was gone.

“You almost caught on fire, just like M.J.!” Now that I actually hadn’t gone up in flames, Zoe couldn’t have sounded more delighted at what had almost happened.

“When did that happen again?”

“Back in the 80s. You don’t remember? You were in your prime then, girl.”

“I beg your pardon.” I said. Not that I didn’t think she was right. Well, maybe 1991 was the year I peaked.

“Do I remind you of a crow? I had to ask.

“Where did that come from? I thought you were into owls?”

“How many times do I have to tell you I can’t stand them?”

“Not enough, I guess. I’ll have to return the salt & pepper shakers I got you for your birthday.”

“My birthday’s not until December.”

“I like to plan ahead.”

“Yeah, right. Me too. And someday we’ll both have 401ks and health insurance.” We both laughed at that and kept on walking with the crowd down toward Kennedy Plaza where the Moonwalkers were supposed to converge for the big dance-athon.

“Ok, so I know I was the one who was in my prime in the 80s, but could you fill me in on this whole Michael Jackson thing?”

“I can’t believe you weren’t into Michael. Didn’t you even like The Jackson Five? Remember “ABC, Easy as 1,2,3?” How could any kid resist. We used to dance to it in gym class to help us learn our alphabet.”

“You went to a city school. In the suburbs we did the Hustle. There weren’t a whole lot of words. Anyway, I was more into The Partridge Family. I wanted to be a hippie. I refused to feather my hair like Farrah Fawcett and everybody made fun of me.”

“Wow, she’s dead, too, sounds like we’ve got some synchronicity flowing here.”

“Dream on. It’s all coincidence. Nothing means anything. And I promise I’ll cut my hair but you have to come to the salon with me and make sure I don’t end up with bangs above my eyebrows. None of that hipster shit for me.”

“Oh, yeah—so Michael was filming this commercial for Pepsi. It was the first time a celebrity endorsed a product like that on TV,” she continued like a newscaster back from a commercial break, “when his hair just exploded in flames. He was so into his dancing that he didn’t even notice until some other dancers or crewmembers, I don’t know, came running and started beating it out.”

“Is that where he came up with the idea for ‘Beat It’?”

“Omigod. That is so sick, besides being totally ignorant. Michael didn’t become The King of Pop until after Thriller and everybody knows “Beat It” is on Thriller. You really don’t know anything, do you!

“I know you secretly suspect me of not missing an episode of Entertaiment Tonight for the past twenty years, but I’ve actually been really busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Reading People Magazine.”

“That’s awesome.”

“So you believe me when I say I don’t have a clue about Michael Jackson?”

“No, but that’s ok because I like telling this story.”

“How many times have you told it this week?”

“Well Cally’s getting a little sick of it, so I guess that would probably mean about thirty.”

“She must have a high tolerance for pain.”

“You don’t even know.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Are you sure about that?” She and Cally were convinced all my troubles would fade away if I would only become a lesbian. They liked to freak me out with tales of lesbian escapades like fisting. They were probably right. It must be nice not to have to worry that some guy wasn’t going to tell you the reason he couldn’t keep it up was because your pussy was too loose. Sorry, sometimes I just couldn’t help the flashbacks from my life in a bottle.

“Well, a long time ago this beautiful black boy was born who could sing like an angel. He was proud of his heritage and grew his hair into an afro. His name was Michael Jackson and the world loved him so much they would do whatever he wanted, so these evil corporate demons who wanted to rule the world paid him a lot of money so he could build a place called Neverland where he could live and never grow up if he would dance and sing like Mr. Bojangles and convince the world that they didn’t really like Coke better, they liked Pepsi!”

“Amazing,” was all I could say. She was really getting into it now. She’d stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and people had to step around us. “Keep going.”

“Well he secretly blamed his afro for catching fire and burning his scalp and causing him so much pain. If it had been shorter and silkier instead of as wiry as a brillo pad that could scrape catfish skin of a grill maybe it wouldn’t have burned so crazy and he might have noticed it sooner before he had to get beaten on the head by a bunch of backup dancers. As he lay in the hospital drugged on painkillers, he decided he didn’t want to be black anymore so he started wearing silky wigs and weaves, he bleached his skin ever whiter year after year, and had cosmetic surgery on his nose and lips so he could look just like his soulmate Diana Ross.”

“I thought Elizabeth Taylor was his soulmate.”

“Aha! I knew you really did read People!”

“Well, maybe I’ve glanced at it a few times. Was it Elizabeth Taylor or not?”

“No, everybody thinks that but it was really that chimpanzee that he brought to the Academy Awards. What was its name?”

“Bubbles.”

“No comment. Or maybe Emmanuelle Lewis. That little guy who used to sit on Michael’s lap when he was like fourteen.”

“You mean Webster?”

“We’re gonna get in trouble!” Zoe laughed. “I think we better stop going there before someone overhears us and beats us down. Come on. I want to see the Moonwalkers. I bet they started already.”

I linked my arm in hers and we flowed back into the crowd flooding into Kennedy Plaza.

“You know, nothing’s ever hopeless,” Zoe mused as we strolled along. “As long as our imaginations are free we can create whatever we want. I think that’s what Michael was always trying to say.”

“He was?” Maybe I should have paid more attention to him. I’d kind of tuned out after “Beat It” and the misogynistic “Billie Jean,” but come to think of it, Paul McCartney had been friends with him and I loved The Beatles. They’d done that song together—“Ebony and Ivory.” Oh wait--that was Steview Wonder. Screw that theory. Anyway, I liked that song. I wanted to live in perfect harmony, side by side on my piano keyboard. Who didn’t, besides skinheads and Republicans. Oh Lord, why can’t we? I thought, suddenly looking forward to seeing the Moonwalkers. Maybe there was some magic afoot tonight.

Well, Zoe and I were feeling it at least, arm in arm as we walked down the first level of stairs into the plaza. Even though we were there to celebrate a dead guy, the mood of the crowd was upbeat. Cally stepped out of the ring of people and skipped over to us. She may have been a grad student at Brown, but not even she could resist being twee. She was tall and blonde, but somehow it worked for her, too. Both my new friends knew that being cute would get them much farther in life than being gloomy like me.

“Look at all The Michaels!” Callie crowed in delight. How come when she crowed it sounded cute instead of the croak that came out of me?

She and Zoe were always so happy to see each other, even when they’d only been apart a few hours. They had this annoyingly endearing habit of standing forehead to forehead and rubbing noses. “This is how the Maori kiss!” They’d say in unison. People just melted when they saw them, even homophobic ones I bet. They were very non-threatening lesbians. Of course, if I crossed over to their side I would end up with a bull-leather-dyke as a girlfriend who would terrify everyone so even less people would talk to me. I’m not even going to go into the boys that I’ve dated over the years. Notice, though I’m 40, I don’t say men, because I’m pretty sure I’ve never dated anyone in that category.

“Come on. They’re just about to start.”

Zoe and Cally and all their cuteness weaseled a way right up to the front of the crowd. I tried to follow, but ended up stuck in the middle where I couldn’t see anything. Annoyed with myself, I decided to assert my right to see the Moonwalk and began to elbow my way toward the front.

“Excuse me,” I pushed, glaring at anyone who tried to protest. “Hey, Lady!” said one guy with a trophy girlfriend dangling off his arm.


“Hey what?” I challenged him back like I was saying something really threatening. To my surprise he let me pass. It hurt when he called me lady, but I told myself the sting was going to be worth it when I got to the front and had the best view in the crowd when he couldn’t even see past his girlfriend’s fake boobs. I don’t know why women wear high heels. They’re ruined your feet and you end up towering over your shrimp of a boyfriend. Then again, maybe I should reconsider, but if my feet were ruined, I wouldn’t be able to run away.

I’ll have to admit, like those few moments when I’d watched the gondoliers on the river and thought I was in Venice, that the whole scene we’d just entered was a little wondrous. There were big white globes on all the street lights with cutouts of the moon’s face and they’d passed out sparkly silver confetti that everyone was tossing in the air. There was so much it looked like it was snowing and already the ground was covered in swirls of silver. Some kids and even a few grown-ups had lain down and were making snow angels.

In the center of the circle we’d formed, were all varieties of Michael Jacksons. Male, female, short, tall, young, old. A guy in a wheelchair. A fat lady with an afro. Hipsters in leisure suits from Savers who knew that Off The Wall was by far the best of his records. Little kid Michaels (black and white, another good M.J. tune), even a girl dressed up like The Scarecrow from The Wiz. Her boyfriend was Diana Ross as Dorothy. She even had a fluffy little dog under her arm playing the part of Toto. I laughed when I recognized one of my customers from Chaos under a wig, face painted kabuki-white, eyes lined in black, lips in scarlet, with that five-o’clock shadow Michael sometimes had that was so confusing. He was wearing one of those military jackets with the gold epaulets Michael wore at his peak, and of course the one glove. Lots of people with one glove. I kind of wished I had one. Of course, being America, there was a guy selling them, but I wasn’t going to spend my hard earned money on something as frivolous as sequins, even if I was feeling a little dizzy with delight.

As I watched them all start to dance--some of them pretty decent, most of them not-- it came over me, remembering those videos in high school—yes, despite what I told Zoe, I did watch MTV— Michael Jackson could really groove. I mean, he was an amazing dancer, almost right up there with Fred Astaire, though I don’t think Michael could dance on the ceiling like Fred in “Royal Wedding.” Neither could Lionel Richie, who was the favorite entertainer of that high school boyfriend I mentioned earlier who got me to do whatever he wanted by bribing me with fuzzy navels. Not to say that I could dance on the ceiling, but I did hang from a fan the night he serenaded me with “Stuck on You.” He wanted to see just how stuck he could get to a certain part of my anatomy. It might have worked better if he hadn’t been standing on a waterbed that remarkably didn’t pop when we both went flying. Besides, videos were all special effects. Fred had real magic, we had bong hits, booze, and sometimes cocaine we snorted from mirrors in the locked room at parties which nobody mentioned, but everyone wanted to get into.

It was almost like Michael wasn’t really here on earth--like he was just floating over the surface--and I saw suddenly, that that was what the Moonwalk was all about. He was showing us his soul when he did that dance, just a few backwards sliding steps that showed the world that even though he was stuck in a body like us, he could escape whenever he wanted.

Well, maybe not quite. Or maybe he just forgot when he left the stage.

He wouldn’t have needed all those painkillers if he’d remembered. I thought about that zambucca with espresso Zoe wanted me to drink with her earlier and wondered if it would have kept me up all night or put me to sleep, if it really would have been Ok to have just one shot.
I also saw, watching the little kids dance around, that there was no way he was a child molester. Peter Pan would never have allowed that to happen in Neverland. He and Wendy would have vanquished any molesters before they messed with Tinkerbelle just like the way they threw Captain Hook to the crocodiles. It was ok not to want to grow up. The earth made no sense at all, while everything in Neverland did. In Neverland the butterflies had an infinite supply of flowers to eat and Peter and Wendy never looked at each other with the longing I had seen on my own face for so many years now I closed my eyes when I looked in the mirror. I was never going to fall in love again--at least until I learned how to Moonwalk and could truly escape.

As the crowd grooved along with the Moonwalkers, I found I couldn’t hold still myself. I actually forgot where I was for a few moments until I looked up and there was this guy trying to dance with me. He seemed really familiar, but I couldn’t place him. It was hard to get a look at his face because his hat was pulled down over his eyes. He’d cut out two holes for his eyes which sparked at me before shooting away across the plaza. Before I could figure out who he was he was gone and I was trying to scream, but nothing came out of my mouth but dried moth wing’s and moondust.

Someone was dragging me down the stone stairs that led toward the bus stop that took people to the airport. Elbows pinned to my back, wrists held in one hand, the other on the back of my neck. I stumbled, head down. “Minerva,” a voice said. My name fluttered in the air between us then dropped to the ground where it disintegrated.

“You know who I am, right?”

I nodded.

“You know it’s your job to save me?”

I nodded.

“You know what will happen if you don’t?”

I nodded.

“One small step for man, one giant step for mankind. They never think about who they’re stepping on, do they?”

And then I dropped, too. Falling into the mouth of the moon like William Blake.

BLAKE: Pray, Mr Taylor, did you ever find yourself, as it were, standing close beside
the vast and luminous moon?

TAYLOR: Not that I remember. Mr Blake: did you ever?

BLAKE: Yes, frequently; and I have felt an almost irresistible desire to throw myself
into it headlong.

TAYLOR: I think, Mr Blake, you had better not: for if you were to do so, you most
probably would never come out of it again.

When I woke up Zoe and Cally were explaining to the police that I hadn’t had anything to drink. “I did try to get her to have an espresso with zambucca, but she’s not a boozer.” Zoe was rambling on, charming the cop with the old-fashioned word for drunk, “All she wanted was coffee milk.”

“A cabinet,” Cally added as if to assure the officer of her credibility.

“Where did you say you work again?” the cop asked, checking their IDs. I couldn’t blame him because it seemed hard to believe one of them worked at Brown, though who knows what he made of Zoe. Most of the locals thought RISD students were rich, spoiled brats, but she was pretty hard to resist, especially when she talked in her squeaky voice. “Brown University, physics department,” Cally answered, which answered my question as to what she studied, which I remember thinking I needed to remember because I really liked her and it wasn’t pc to be jealous of intelligent blondes as I drifted back to sleep in the confetti that had now formed deep drifts in Kennedy Plaza.

“Well, you girls just take her home now and let her sleep it off,” the cop said, releasing us. I’m sure we were entertaining, but there must have been real criminals out there for him to catch, like the man who had almost scared me to death. The man who sat side by side at the piano keyboard with Paul McCartney, who must have been wearing a wig because his hair had burned, who lined his eyes and wore lipstick that highlighted his five-o’clock shadow. The man with epaulets on his shoulders, who had pinned my arms with one hand, demanding I save him with his other on my windpipe, crushing the air from my throat until I passed out. He left behind one sequin-studded glove to remind me: Don’t try to escape. I’ll be looking down.