Shoot the Moon

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

Full moon lifting, rising up slow, slow, like a massive stony sphere of glass and zinc and silver gray crystal and soft ivory. Selene: her light flows creamy into the cool sky, butyraceous. Carefully, she watches the moon ballooning, this weighty pearl of stardust rays and kohl ridges and crater rims, startling for their perfect circularity, and the smooth, flat marias, seas of fine black dust, as it floats up through amber golden honey in velvety velvet rosy mountain violet twilight, the mountains so close by, chummy. So near to her, these hulking friendly, familiar bodies in soft repose, endlessly mutating in quality of changing light but not in form. Both changing and firm, the mountains, fickle and resolute, aspects she sees reflected in herself. But she is a woman, while the mountains are unambiguously masculine, and now she feels them pressed up close to her like a lover's hungry body, not clamoring or demanding, but insistent. Carved sculpture in alabaster, she thinks, imagining: seated nudes curving round, his one hand delicately brushing her hip, the other under the edge of her chin, lightly elevating it, fingers spread, palm turned outward, thumb outstretched. Mouth close to mouth, noses turned askew, slight angle. Outside in the cold on the patio rocker, lightly rocking, she sits alone. One bare foot she has folded under her long skirt, curled toes of the other against the bricks below. Half a glass of wine. Quiet temporary escape, so brief this time, this invaluable treasure! The mountains there, close by, and she could easily reach out and touch them. Their remote details, muzzy in the failing night, are reduced by accordioning distance and cooling atmosphere optics to tiny blemishes, like pigmentation marks on a face that she might caress. Stigmata of birth into such an imperfect world where flaws are rendered endearing. Cold world, yes: hard. Where one welcomes blemishes as familiar, comforting, human signs. Cherish. And she, here, alone, slowly sips from the glass. Quiet. In the quiet. Blessed alone.

Caught suspended between the points of the moon.

Over many months that has become a mantra rebounding between the parallel mirrors of her consciousness. She isn't certain what it means, but it feels right. Storm-tossed words, maybe; an embryonic idea gathering itself together through a long, cumulative process, laboring to take on some solid form. Clarity will come eventually. Now, as ever, when these submersed words well up from the back of her mind, a singular associated image forms as well: the moon as a thin crescent, not the pregnant, tumescent orb now bobbing about above the uneven silhouette ridgeline of the darkening mountains, but a steely-thin, semilunar curve lying on its back and stained rusty red at the piercing points.

Between the points of the moon.

That morning, weeks ago, they had to wait such an unreasonably long time in the emergency room lobby. He was concerned, in his way, but he was already angry before they arrived, angry for having to go there, for missing work. The stabbing pain was a dominating, dazzling vision for her, scintillating and bright, so that even now she could scarcely recall anything that had been happening around them. Over the first few hours his concern (like a rancher's for an injured horse he'd rather not have put down if it could be helped, she thought) had inevitably given way to inconsiderate irritation and, later, to his typical hostility and rage, which he took out on the staff behind the desk. It was impossible to go anywhere with him. Always creating mortifying scenes, leaving a shambles for others to clean up. Even through the pain she could feel the other patients and family members in the lobby watching them and pitying her. She hated it, and she loathed them all. She kept her eyes lowered, reflexively returning to that buried place where she was not with him, where she was not in the same room with these watchful strangers. Away. Away.

"Let's go," he raged. "They're not going to take care of you here. They're completely incompetent idiots."

"Go where," she said.

"Anywhere. Another hospital. Home. They must not think you're seriously sick if they won't help you. We'll just go home, and you can go to bed."

An inconvenience for him, so I must not really be sick.

"Let's wait for a little while," she half-whispered.

Then, of course, his hostility was turned against her, its accustomed easy target. Back she retreated into her head, deeper, a hermit crab pulling back farther. Back, back, escape from those penetrating, disapproving spectator eyes that he never even noticed. Blind and stupid. Oblivious like a stunned fish, glassy eyed on a plate. Center of the universe.

Man.

The shadows are deepening and spreading quickly through the familiar mountains. The dancing marriage between stasis and flux, she thinks, and through some mysterious chain of subconscious association her thoughts turn to her weight; or rather, to her continually changing weight. Her weight is a different kind of blemish, she thinks, for this one is a moving target, now increasing, now diminishing. It seems to her as though her weight is interlocked cog to cog with cosmic cycles; more specifically, with lunar periodicity, waxing and waning, now crescentic, now gibbous. Bad behavior observes a kindred cyclic pattern, perhaps even more so among men than women. Is that right? she thinks, frowning. It's a counterintuitive impression, but wait. Could it. . . ? Puzzling it over. Like how hospital emergency rooms are always busiest when the moon is full. Police and paramedics and firemen, too. That's when the knife-and-gun clubs are gathering. Stake out territory. Pissy fights. Make your mark. Turf wars. Male hormones, too? Howling at the moon? Lunar tides and women, of course. Bodies. Even the pitch of the voice changing. Vocal cords tightening in accord with estrogen levels. Embarrassing, high-pitched voices, some women. Hers a soft contralto, thankfully. Swelling breasts. Signals, and men blind to them. Puppets on strings. Fertility. How a man hears a woman's voice subconsciously alters his perception of her. The mechanisms of sexual attraction. Bonding, and so forth.

I don't like talking about work, he wrote. It's not real or important. More of a charade. All coals to Newcastle stuff, or a dung beetle backing into life, knees locking unnaturally and ankles swelling, walking backwards you see, laterally discerning could-have-beens only too late in retrospect having regressed past them while dithering on about office politics and diets and can you believe she did what with whom and insurance policies and pictures of the kids and the petty crime blotter and what the third house from the corner went for ‑‑ a scandal! ‑‑ and pushing that great big ball of so much accrued camel mire up, up, up, up the long hill. Treadmill hill, and siphoning off a small, trickling stream of indemnification. No matter that's what all these others seem to find endlessly compelling in this impossibly short interval we spend in life. None of that vast, overwhelming social flux exerts any slimmest magnetic sway on the point of my compass, which bends predictably, steadfastly, and ineluctably toward only one single pole.

When he was a boy ‑‑ way back when, way back before life ruined him, before dozens and dozens of disappointments settled out down on top of dozens and dozens of their antecedents, the glories of high school football fading with time with no subsequent illustrious triumphs to celebrate, boozing turning from a juvenile vice into a filthy crutch, liver rotting, growing meaner and meaner like a beat dog, graying beard, graying hair, too many sleazy girls in topless bars, too many unfriendly friends in lowest places ‑‑ when he was a boy he used to raise chickens to show at the county fair, strangely enough. One year he won a purple ribbon for best cock in show, a story he never tired of sharing, even four decades later, with anyone who would listen or who could not escape. A claim to fame. She could not even fake a smile anymore when she heard him telling the tale. But she always thought of the afterword to the story, which he always neglected to mention: how at the end of the fair his golden cock was auctioned off to the highest bidder and taken away to be slaughtered for someone's stewpot.

He says he wants. But he doesn't. He thinks he does, but no man wants what he says, no matter that he believes it. We are our bodies and there's no escaping it. Men can live in their heads. Can afford to. Don't have to have the same physical connection to the real world. Personally squeezing the next generation out of your body, expelling it though birth canal (vagina going in, birth canal coming out), pelvis widening, erasing hips, like having swallowed the full globe of the lustrously polished, blazing moon and ramming that long, protracted plop! through a small, endless, clinched up tunnel. Labor they call it. Counterfeit understatement so you won't eat crushed glass before you. Curse of Eve. Breeding rituals (bleeding rituals) men never grasp because they are not men but dangerously strong and intimidating boys. Too physically strong for anyone's good. Thick biceps. Never have to grow up, do they? That's why war, for example. Murder. Car crash movies. Ticking time bombs. Topless bimbos. Playing man games. Dirty minds. Men are just farmers with heavy bags slung over their shoulders, broadcasting seed by hand out across open fields. Seed by hand: right. A hen is an engine for making eggs. A cock is an engine for making hens. While hips spread and waist evaporates and volcanic pinnacle breasts weather to gentle hills and ravenous big bad wolf eyes turn, seeking younger prey. But he's sensitive. Slow to anger. Must admit that, whatever else. How different it would be. But it's only a fantasy. Easier said. Oh, but if only.

A breeze comes. It is cold on her cheek, but the wine makes her feel warm. It comes with the night when the mountains are cooling, the air flowing down their flanks and gulleys as night sets in.

The blemishes that make us human.

She considers this, lightly moving the porch swing back and forth.

Living in the same body our whole life. Inhabit. Habitation within, like a visitor come to call, or a passerby. Stuck in one dingy motel room, condemned for life. Check it every day. Inspect it. Scrutinize. Conceal the blemishes of time as best we can. Changing hair and skin. How can we stand to watch the same face every day? Men with rugged features are attractive. Even ugly men. How is that possible? Because they are not us? Vive la différence! Ah, yes. Biological imperative. We're not driving this car around, as he says. Living that way in his head because he can. They can. Boys. We're helpless passengers, locked in, looking through the glass, screaming inside as the horrors rush toward us. Hormones at the wheel. Wild whipping emotions. All valuing individuality so much, but the truth is we're more similar than different. Man after man after man, woman after woman after woman. Especially women. And all worshipping at the altar of rational thought but. Unwitting hypocrites. Can one be an unwitting hypocrite? A fool at least.

God, I am so lonely.

The big tabby cat she calls Chintzy hops up to the patio from the yard and rubs against her bare foot.

"Hello old fellow. Been out hunting mice?"

Chintzy is not a purrer, but at her voice he arches his back and drags his tail along her ankle. He turns, comes back, repeats the process. She drinks from the glass and looks down at him.

"Are you my best friend, Chintz? Are you true to me? You haven't got any other peoples out there, have you?"

He turns, comes back, rubs by again. He does this a few more times before walking to the edge of the patio and sitting down. He turns his head and licks his shoulder many times in rapid succession.

"Ignoring me, huh? Playing hard to get?"

He's not hard to get. Not even playing. He said to her: Your children are gone. My children are gone. Relationships mean something different at this point in our lives. We don't have to be crazy the way that families make people crazy. We can do whatever we want to do. There's no longer any reason for you to remain in a situation that makes you so miserable.

They came for her finally, sending out a tall nurse in cranberry-colored scrubs, heavy-set and alligator-skinned but smelling of some fresh herbal soap or shampoo, feigning cheerfulness but transparently bored with the usual monotony of weathering the onslaught of the sick and injured, indignant public, understandably upset and unfamiliar with the hospital games whirling all around them, seen and unseen. "We'll take you back now, honey." He said something disrespectful that the nurse affected not to hear.

Out of the lobby and into the ER-proper, where they filed her away in a tiny room for a few minutes and took her vitals and gave her the ritualistic paper gown. He: complaining the whole time, whining, insulting. Missing work. Losing money. These people who didn't know what they were doing, who don't care about people's lives. Wasting his valuable time.

The nurse returned in less than five minutes.

"I'm sorry, but we're extremely busy today, and we need this room, honey. Full moon last night, you see. Every month it bumps up the census. We're going to move you out to the hall for a little while until the doctor can see you."

Then he, going berserk, demanding to see someone in charge, while she shared a small smile with the nurse and then kept her eyes away from her, from anyone, retreating even further into herself. The nurse skillfully guiding them out into the bright hall as his accustomed, insipid tantrum inevitably unfolded, his shouting, his swearing, his threatening, the hall crowded with rushing people, nurses, doctors, phlebotomists with their trays of tubes and gauze and needles, sniffling, contagious patients, lost and bewildered family members scurrying about; she, slowly lying down on the gurney in the hall where several other patients already were warehoused. Feeling the stabbing pain in her abdomen. It was the bait-and-switch, she saw: keep them in the lobby until they threaten to leave, then move them into the hall for a while, create an illusory impression of progress being made. He, holding her bag of clothing carelessly, raving like the out of control maniac he was; she, lying practically naked under a cold sheet in a flimsy paper gown deep inside her pain, sheltering in place.

The stars are emerging, first one by one and then in amiable little crops as the night deepens, but the sky remains a washed out, pale yellow-blue in the vicinity of the bloated moon. The stars make her think of tiny diamonds scattered on a fresh-swept beach at the edge of the ocean, for they are extraordinarily brilliant and hard and multicolored. She wants to think of diamonds and the sea and no more about the hours-long wait in the hall of the emergency room before the cranberry nurse finally came to take her to see the doctor: Sorry for the crush, honey. Sometimes the wait in ER is so long we have to do two pregnancy tests on every woman, because (winking) sometimes the first one is negative, but the second one comes back positive. She smiled but didn't laugh. She doesn't want to think about how he abandoned her there so he could go to work, or about his diabolical, pathological jealousy, always checking the odometer in her car, calculating distance and time, watching clocks, accusing her of infidelity, searching her purse for evidence or any incriminating clues. Checking the timestamps on grocery receipts. Terminally suspicious of her. Her jailer. She is his captive. A kept woman, but not in the usual sense. A reluctant mistress to her own husband? A prisoner. He said he was Sisyphus and she was Persephone. . . .no, Andromeda he said, only her chains were really made of smoke, and some day when she could see that, then they would blow away and she would be free.

Then who is he? King Minos?

Oh, she can't keep it straight in her head.

Always mixing up Romeo and Juliet with Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. It's too hard and anyway, what's the point? There's too much hurt. Too much wine. Too much pain. Too many migraines. Too much pressure. Too much Paxil. Expectations and hostility pressing in. It's life. Too much history piled up, pointing nowhere to any future. There is no future, only more of the past, and present. No way out. No escaping.

She looks at the stars wondering whether he's looking at them. Always these little connections possible that can't be guessed. Coincidence in time. Tenuous, invisible links holding the world together. Their diamonds, the stars. Priceless gift. Eternal. Remote and beyond theft. Where they could go. The sea, he talked about. Tides. Pull of the moon. Cyclic. The points of the moon. . . .

Walk along the sandy diamond beach. Strolling along, the sand crunches, water spilling in to fill our prints behind us. In the night. Dark. Quiet. Escape. Free. Freedom, like butterflies flittering wherever the moment takes them. It's better to indulge these fantasies than to think about the horns of the uterus, for example. Fallopian. Muscles and fat, ligaments and nerve bundles. Dense networks of blood vessels. The displacement of the pelvic organs. Round ligaments, cardinal ligaments, broad ligaments, uterosacral ligaments. The bones themselves shift unnaturally when the ligaments are severed. Spinal compression follows. Physical pain. Joint pain. All desire pruned out. Snip, snip! Sensation lost or severely diminished. Labia, clitoris, nipples. Vagina. But not just saying farewell to sexual presence, identity. Psychological mayhem. Fatigue and personality changes. One's soul being cut up and a new one, a foreigner, moving in, taking up residence. A new person. Death of the old one, the lifelong companion-self. Invaded by intruder. Taken over. Superseded. Body snatching.

Replaced.

To rise, she considers. To float up high, high. Higher. Higher. Like the moon, far above the rooftops of the mountains. High above the world, soaring far above the world, looking down where it is blue and green in the day and at the city lights like networks of jewels on the night side. High where they cannot reach me. Where it's cold and quiet, always quiet. No demanding voices. No shouting. No turmoil. Only peace.

The screen door creaks open and then bangs shut. His footfalls are heavy, distinctive. The little drunken half-stumble and the swearing, and she knows he's sloshed beer out of the can. He stops then, freezing in place. She can picture it perfectly without turning, but she tries not to.

He clears his throat. "What are you doing out here?"

"Nothing. Watching the moon."

He grunts.

"Want to join me?"

Momentarily he says, slurring: "Why would I want to do that? You know that we have nothing."

She looks up at the moon, now higher, whiter, the yellow and delicately stippled shades of gray color washed away. It seems so much smaller than it did earlier. Effect of. . . .parallax? She can't remember. An illusion.

She imagines that she is alone on a spaceship, sterile-clean, spic-and-span, that is coming in low over the horizon preparatory to landing. Out the wide window she sees the beautiful, unmolested landscape passing smoothly below, curving away in perfect silence: stark white and black and gray, cushiony soft dust, perfectly settled, perfectly neat as a sea of soft, inviting pillows, stretching away every way below, dimpled with tiny pockmark craters; in the distance, a few low silvery-gray ridges and rills making a horizon against star-spattered night. No Earth in the sky, no sun, only the moon, the spaceship, and she, alone. Perfect night.

He mutters something unintelligible and turns, going back inside. The screen bangs closed again.

Outside she can feel the cold. Even with the full moon shining it is dark on the little patio. She lifts the glass to her mouth but finds it is empty.

She doesn't want to, but there's no excuse now.

Squeezing down her feelings into a tiny core, she gets up from the rocker. Quiet time is over.

"Chintz, you coming?"

The cat is staring out into the yard, ignoring her, sitting on his great big, rolling haunches.

"Okay. Be that way. But I know you are faithful, in your own tomcat way. Just you watch out for those owls. And coyotes."

She looks up one last time at the moon for a long moment, feeling like a butterfly whose wings have been carefully cut away with surgical precision, just a long, wounded, twig-like body that can never take flight.

She sighs and then, tightly taking hold of herself, she goes back inside the house.

The End.