One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy Read online

  one hundred

  percent

  lunar boy

  A NOVEL BY STEPHEN TUNNEY

  e-book ISBN 978-1-59692-809-1

  M P Publishing Limited

  12 Strathallan Crescent

  Douglas

  Isle of Man

  British Isles

  Tel: 44 (0) 1624 618672

  e-mail: [email protected]

  MacAdam/Cage

  155 Sansome Street, Suite 550

  San Francisco, California 94104

  www.MacAdamCage.com

  Copyright © 2010 by Stephen Tunney

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tunney, Stephen, 1959 –

  One hundred percent lunar boy / by Stephen Tunney.

  Seventeen chapters + Epilogue.

  ISBN 978-1-59692-368-3

  1. Teenage boys—Fiction. 2. Moon—Fiction. I. Title.

  Book and cover design by Dorothy Carico Smith.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For Anne, Julien, and Sophie

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  chapter one

  The only birds that live on the Moon are hummingbirds. They are lunar white and the size of dogs and they travel across the lunar landscape in vast clouds. Their wings vibrate something inside the inner ear that makes one feel euphoric, as if they are floating. During those fleeting moments when they kissed, he wondered, am I inside a cloud of hummingbirds?

  The fact that he kissed her had made the train ride bearable. And that was saying a lot, as the Sea of Tranquility line was easily the worst subway on the Moon, especially late at night. It must have been close to one AM when the ancient plastic and aluminum monstrosity stopped in the middle of nowhere, forcing Hieronymus to sit for hours in the hot and crowded subway car. The bright forescent lights flickered on and off. Periodic announcements from a cackling speaker explained the reasons for the delay, but no one listened as nearly every person squeezed in with him was drunk. Everyone in that loud, sweaty mob must have been returning from parties or concerts or other nocturnal events. Some were loud, some were sleeping, a couple were sick. Two or three fights broke out, and there was even singing. Still, he hardly noticed them. Earlier that evening, at an amusement park, under the luminous Earth, he kissed a girl, and this delightful memory blocked out the debauchery all around him. She was beautiful in a way he had never known before. She was a foreigner. A tourist. She was from Earth.

  He arrived home at five in the morning, had a terrible shouting fight with his father, stumbled into his room, and passed out. He slept for seven hours and then woke completely disoriented.

  Through his grogginess, Heironymus tried to remember the previous night. Not that there was much diference between night and day. The sky was always the same reddish tone of the artificial atmosphere. Dusky dawn color is what the Earth-born called it. She called it that. She. And what was her name? What kind of a young man was he to kiss a girl, and the next morning struggle to remember her name? It’s not like he was drunk — he wasn’t. He peered out from under his covers at the clock on his messy desk. It said twelve. His forgetfulness must have been from other places than lack of sleep.

  There was a strong smell of motor oil coming from somewhere. He tossed his covers aside, shocked to find himself not only still dressed, but covered in a strange industrial filth. Greenish gunk, dirt, grime. His white plastic jacket lay on the floor, stained in motor oil, with a huge rip in its side.

  He had also fallen asleep with his goggles on. Usually he’d have to wear them all day long and then toss the Pixiedamned things of to the side before going to bed each night. He hated them. They were ugly and utilitarian with black rubber straps. The lenses were slightly purple. At least when he was alone in his room he could be free of them, but everywhere else, he had to wear them. It was the law.

  But it was because of the goggles that he had met the Earth girl. Slowly, the memories floated in. The evening reassembled itself.

  She had an Earth name. The kind of name you never heard on the Moon because it was so trendy on Earth and Lunarites were always a little behind the curve when it came to fads like that. It was a sentence for a name. When she first told him, he pretended not to let on how awkward it was, but after a few minutes with her it seemed completely normal, and now he lay there in his bed, fully clothed and furious with himself for not remembering.

  He was about to take his goggles off and go back to sleep with wondrous dreams of the kiss they had shared when it suddenly came back to him. Not the girl’s name, but that other, terrifying thing they did together. The illegal thing.

  He covered his face with his hands.

  He was only sixteen and already his life was over. Was he mad? Was he completely out of his mind? What he did with that girl was so far beyond forbidden. If the authorities found out, he would be sent to a prison on the far side of the Moon with an automatic life sentence. He would disappear. Those rotten goggles — the same goggles that attracted the Earth girl also attract the police. They set him apart. They inform all of Lunar society that he is one of them. A One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy.

  Hieronymus took several deep breaths.

  His first line of thought was that he was in trouble with his father but not with the police. Not yet. He looked at the clock again and reasoned it was over twelve hours ago that he last saw her. He dropped her off at her hotel and caught the last subway out of LEM Zone One, far away on the other side of the Sea of Tranquility. The police were extremely fast in cases like this, and he was counting on her parents believing her totally false alibi, which he found unlikely. The girl was covered in dirt. A lump of automotive grease meshed into her hair, she was completely spaced out after what they had done. What kind of parents would not call the police?

  Indeed, they broke the law. Actually, he broke the law. He was responsible, not her. He didn’t want to do it, but she convinced him otherwise. He tried to explain it was a crime, but she was sure they would get away with it. He told her she would get hurt, but she disagreed — she was a strong and daring young woman from Earth who could take anything the Moon tossed at her. She was wrong, not about being daring, but about everything else.

  At least they kissed before they did it.

  In his bed, terrified of even moving, expecting to hear police sirens from the highway outside growing in volume before twenty officers burst in through his door to drag him away, he wondered how many times a day this happened. To others just like him. Other One Hundred Percent Lunar People.

  His special status was not completely rare, but unusual enough to be a curiosity, one generating stares and questions and rumors. Borderline abnormal. A shameful thing to be. There were many others just as shameful as himself — One Hundred Percent Lunar Boys, and Girls, and Men, and Women. Thousands. They all wore goggles. They had to wear goggles. They were forced to wear the goggles, every last freakish one of them. It was that, or exile to the far side of the Moon. Hieronymus cursed his life and the li
mitations that had always defined it.

  He sat up. He lifted the goggles up of his face to rub his weary eyes. He glanced over at his window. Something happened just outside the glass. Actually, something was about to happen, and he quickly put his goggles back on. He was right, a hummingbird, this one very large, came by the window and tapped its long beak on the window pane, begging for food as these annoying creatures often did. He tossed a small pillow at it, and the bird flew away. None of this was a surprise. With his goggles off, during those few seconds, Hieronymus saw the entire thing played out in shadow-like forms before it happened. The goggles filtered out his natural visual ability to see physical actions and movement before they occurred. This was true of all One Hundred Percent Lunar People, and why the Lunar authorities created laws to keep their vision suppressed. Normalized. As if they were normal people, which they were not.

  One of those laws was very clear. Never look at another human being without the goggles. That was the law he broke last night. He looked at her. And if he were to be discovered, the consequences would be severe.

  The girl from Earth with the sentence for a name. He’d never met a teenager from the Motherworld before. She was vivacious and demanding and intelligent and she knew about the phenomenon. Had she been from the Moon, he would have easily brushed her off, but her accent and the way she walked and her naïve Earthling’s enthusiasm captivated him. He was weak. He could not resist. She wanted him to look at her with the goggles off.

  Which he did.

  And as a result, he knew he would never see her again.

  He broke the law. When the goggles came off, he knew exactly what was going to happen to anyone he looked at. He knew what was going to happen to her. And it made him terribly sad.

  Two more hummingbirds slammed into his window. They futtered away disoriented, and Hieronymus suddenly remembered her name. Windows Falling On Sparrows. Her name was Windows Falling On Sparrows. He whispered it to himself. The breath of her rediscovered name passed through his lips, solidifying, for a moment, the last image he had had of her: her hand on a staircase banister as she looked at him one last time before disappearing up the stairs of the filthy, badly lit hotel lobby.

  Windows Falling On Sparrows.

  He sat up and gazed out through the window. A horizon of neoncovered towers under a red sky. The Sea of Tranquility was full of tower blocks, and from where he was, he was part of the same massive skyline of repeating skyscraper clusters. Endless housing projects. He lived on the eighty-eighth floor of a tower just like them with his family. It was rare that his father ever yelled at him, but when he’d finally gotten home at the insane hour he did, his old man really blew his top. Ringo Rexaphin was aware that the subway often broke down, and had it not, his son would have arrived at a decent hour, but that was not exactly the point of his baritone, high-volume yelling. Why, why, why put yourself in that position? Why subject yourself to the whims of others? That subway is over three hundred years old! His father had lectured him through his own half-closed sleepy eyelids, furious he had to wait up all night. And he was right. The Lunar subway was notorious for its late-night breakdowns or accidents, and sometimes, and seemingly for the Hell of it, the trains would be pulled for maintenance. Randomly. On a whim. One that could leave anyone stranded for hours. And the crummy old subway system was not just known for its mechanical failures — it was also a place of violence. Robberies, rapes, brutal stabbings. His father was particularly on edge because just the night before, a couple from Plagston Heights had been murdered on the exact same line Hieronymus had traveled on. Their train broke down between two suburban stations in the middle of the Sea of Tranquility. Three cruel men with stockings on their faces climbed aboard and attacked the couple, who, unfortunately for them, were the only passengers in the subway car. They chopped the poor woman’s head off. And the man: his eyes were gouged out. A gruesome discovery for the next morning’s commuters…

  Hieronymus had paid special attention to this story, and to the others like it. He was aware of the details during his grueling ride. It made him a little bit paranoid. The man with the plucked-out eyes? He was a One Hundred Percent Lunar Man. What really interested the detectives — and the press — was the fact that the man’s eyes were nowhere to be found. The murderers had stolen them. They did not take any money or valuables, but they took his eyes. They even left behind the fellow’s goggles.

  The police knew what it was all about, and it was not too difficult to figure out. The color of those eyes were the exact same as all the eyes covered by all the goggles that all the One Hundred Percent Lunar People were forced to wear. The color was highly unusual — the only place one could find it was in those eyes. It was not just any color or any mix of colors — it was something altogether new. It was the fourth primary color. And because of the extreme and hysterical reactions exhibited by anyone who actually saw this eye color, the color itself was illegal.

  Hieronymus Rexaphin’s eyes needed to be covered up because they were the fourth primary color. And simply looking at the fourth primary color caused profound temporary disruptions in the cerebral cortex. And so many people wanted to experience that…

  I’ll pay you fifty dollars if you let me have a peek at those eyes beneath your goggles.

  Go away.

  Listen, Hieronymus, I won’t tell anyone if you just allow your goggles to slip off. I just can’t imagine what a fourth primary color looks like. You have to let me see…

  No way.

  I’ll kick your ass, goggle-freak, if you don’t let us see what’s behind those goggles!

  Leave me alone!

  That girl from Earth had also turned out to be a bit too curious for her own good.

  He lay back in his bed. Certainly, if the police had found out, they’d be here by now.

  He had kissed her. Why couldn’t it have just stayed at that? Like normal people who just kissed each other and then maybe a bit more, but certainly not something as extreme and as unlawful as what then transpired?

  They kissed. It was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to him.

  And then it was ruined.

  She kept insisting. She was not just beautiful, she was everything beautiful should be, and she was from another world, and she seemed to be so intellectually together, and the sound of her voice drove shooting stars through his heart, and there was a quality to her that made him think she would be strong enough to see the color of his eyes with no consequence, but he was dreadfully wrong. He wanted to be a normal young man just this once. He was not, and life had seen fit to remind him of it. He allowed her to lift his goggles off, and then it happened, and it took hours for her to return to normal. It nearly destroyed them both. He thought about that part. How she went completely insane and it was his fault. And while it was happening he felt so horribly helpless.

  Windows Falling On Sparrows.

  He buried his head in his hands.

  What had happened to her? She was a mess. Had her parents believed her? Was he a coward not to explain to them himself? Yes. He was a coward. He’d endangered her life, he should have turned himself in to the police, but, what the Hell, he had to catch his train, so he walked her safely back to her hotel, and then ran as fast as possible to the subway station. He was a very fast runner. He was so fast that, unknown to him until yesterday, some students called him The Phantom because he would always sprint to his classes at a remarkable speed. And last night, he ran from her hotel as if his life depended on it. He was convinced the police knew all about the evening’s illegal transgressions — and that they were hunting him. All he needed was to get to the train. As fast as he could. He did not even have the time to call his father, who would be furious by this time anyway for not knowing where the Hell Hieronymus was. He had to get on that train! He sprinted past the drunk-filled casinos and prostitute-infested bars, past the shambled buzz houses and junkie dens, past the decrepit remains of the first LEM to ever land on the Moon — it was over two
thousand years old — past partying crowds, past beautiful models out on the town with rich boyfriends, limousines, intersections of crowded traffic, flashing cinemas, clubs where loud bands inside played rhythmic and insanely noisy music, he almost stopped when he saw the taxi stand but he remembered that he had almost no money left so he had no choice, it would be the Lunar Subway System, Sea of Tranquility Branch, the most notorious of them all, a dreadful train his father always told him to avoid, but he had to take it and he had to run if he was going to catch the last train back to Sun King towers, where he lived.

  He succeeded. But the ride back was a slow-moving disaster. A hot and suffocating disgraceful wreck of worn-out plastic and cracked aluminum. He arrived home at five o’clock in the morning.

  * * *

  Windows Falling On Sparrows lay in the strange bed. The police had been both rude and kind to her, especially that strange detective with the face that looked like a plastic doll with mismatched eyes. Of course they were rude because she did not cooperate, and the doll-policeman knew she was lying before she had even opened her mouth. She stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep. She would begin to doze of, then…that color…would nudge her from the place where her dreams began, and she would sit up in her bed breathing heavily, trying desperately to see it again. She was in a state of both terror and bliss. Then she would remember him and start to cry.

  Her parents had been outraged when she showed up late and looking like she’d been hit by a leaking oil truck. Her behavior was erratic — she could not finish sentences, and she refused to answer her parents when they asked her what in Pixie Hades had happened to her. Her mother began to scream at her father for allowing her to wander out by herself on this dreadful, horrible Moon. Her father called the police because he was certain she had been attacked or some sinister gang-types had forced her to take drugs. When the police arrived, they spotted the signs immediately — she had been exposed to the fourth primary color. She refused to admit it, and the evening for this poor family from Earth went from awful to extremely terrible as the police became vicious and highly disrespectful. They had heard there was a One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy at the amusement park with a girl who fit her description. The police always kept tabs on One Hundred Percenters — just in case something like this happened.