by F P Adriani
I lowered my voice and moved my head a bit closer to him. “Did you tell RG?”
“Haven’t talked with him since the day before.”
“You should tell him right away. He can move you out.”
When his eyes looked at me this time, they had flattened. “Thought maybe that was what you’d be for.”
Someone suddenly squeezed between his left side and the person beside there, and then Dylan just as suddenly clammed up.
I used the silent moment between us to examine him more…and realized he not only looked tired, but dirty too; his stained-with-brown-spots green moon-suit had certainly seen better days. So had his knotted hair….
The new person beside him had ordered something and now left with it. And then the person in that other seat also got up and left.
Now I said to Dylan, “You’ve just come off the end of a lunar night. When was the last time you had a light-bath?”
He turned his head away as he said, “It’s been a while.”
“That’s no good—you’ve gotta go at least twice a week even during the day. Your mind can easily get fucked up here in the shadows. And I get the feeling you’ve been here for years.”
Very suddenly, he changed the subject. “I’d like to go soon, back to my shack. Don’t suppose I could convince you to join me….”
“No,” I said.
He pulled an I-figured-that flat mouth and nodded slowly. “I saw you and your big hat come in with someone, but then you separated. So I just thought….”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“So what am I supposed to do about that maybe-tail….”
“Look, I’ll follow you back tonight.”
“Under my glass,” he said now, “the little paper-piece there—my address and number are inside. Call me when you get outside my place.”
I slid my now-empty glass toward his now-empty glass; then I quickly moved his until I’d yanked the piece of paper away.
I slipped it into one of my jacket pockets, rose and turned around, and as I began stepping away from the bar, I heard the snap-crack of the tape being ripped from the metal bartop.
*
I walked nearer to the band again, once again feigning enjoyment there; then I looked for Tan. I found him—and immediately saw that the woman now occupied his chair with him. Her hip was dangling against his body and the chair, and her breasts were almost at his mouth level.
I began shoving people aside a little too harshly as I moved in Tan’s direction, my head turning toward Dylan a couple of times. He was still seated at the bar; he still looked tired and lonely and not the way he should look for safety reasons….
When I reached Tan, I asked him if he could walk me to my motel.
“Oh,” the woman pouted, at him. “Leaving so early again? Will you be back?”
“Yeah,” he said to her through a shaky smile. And then she moved even closer, seeming about to plant a kiss on his mouth.
I saw stars and my hands smacking her face…in my mind. In reality I quickly grabbed one of Tan’s arms and began yanking him up from the chair till the woman had slipped away and he was standing.
“What the fuck was that?” I shouted at the yellow air as we walked away from the table. “She was on your lap!”—I said that when we’d walked to near a side door. But unfortunately I didn’t have the time to let Tan respond because just then I spotted Dylan walking out the bar’s front door.
*
Outside now in the alley between Nightlights and the restaurant next door, Tan asked me what the hell was going on.
I glanced at Dylan’s address on the paper. “I’ve got to follow him back to his place. He thinks someone’s been tailing him.”
We were moving along the alley, but Tan seemed to still all the same. “Who?”
“I don’t know, and it seems neither does he. Whatever. We’ve got to keep moving.”
The street was still fairly crowded, but not so crowded that I couldn’t make out individual people, especially Dylan, with his knotted, matted hair….
He kept moving and so did Tan and I, though I made sure we paused and looked in some store windows, where I kept a close eye on any reflections there. Laughing at one point, I smacked Tan on the arm; he flashed me confused eyes, but with mine I only told him to keep the cover.
Eventually Dylan moved down a side street that ran toward another edge of the dome. I looked at the street sign and said, “This is his block.”
I remained on the corner, standing in front of a café-type stand. The place was just closing up for the night, but I asked the attendant there if Tan and I could each have one last hot drink.
While the guy poured out our order, I kept glancing down the block.
Our cups finally in hand, we moved in the opposite direction to Dylan’s place. Then we went around another side street to finally stop between the cover of the houses right across from Dylan’s place.
As he had indicated, his house really was a shack, a vacation shack. People sometimes kept them in this colony when they permanently worked in the mining colonies. But I wondered how Dylan could afford a second place; he hadn’t exactly looked rich.
The shack was square and gray and set in its own little alcove beside an old property-division wall. There was a brown door on that side of the house, which seemed to be the house’s only door.
My eyes peered further down that side; then I motioned for Tan to move with me to where we could see the opposite side of the house. But I still spotted no one anywhere near it.
We walked down to another space between two more houses; then we moved back in Dylan’s direction. This time I saw people on the street near Dylan’s place: they looked like a family, two adults and a little kid. The kid held a balloon in her hand, and the three of them were laughing loudly over something. If they were a tail on Dylan, they were a really inexperienced tail, considering the way they were drawing so much attention to themselves. Or maybe they were really clever….
They finally moved off down the street.
I was sighing as I laid down my drink and pulled out my moon-phone and the paper Dylan had given me. I punched in his number, and when he picked up, I said, “I’m out here, have been for fifteen minutes. I haven’t seen anyone interested in you.”
A soft sigh from his end. “Then maybe I was imagining it….”
“Listen,” I said now, “I’ve got to talk to you about something. I’ve learned that you learned about something a while ago—about something that started up again. I need to know what you know about all that.”
“Huh?” he said. But then I could hear the wheels of his thinking traveling over the line. “Oh…wait. I know what you mean. RG mentioned it last time we spoke.”
“What did he say?” I asked fast.
“Nothing. Just that it was of interest and to keep my eyes open again.”
“What opened them in the first place?”
Now I thought I heard a shrug…behind a yawn from him. “…Just someone making an offhand comment.”
“Who—who?”
“Dunno. A traveler. Never saw the person again. And, anyway, it wasn’t my direct concern, so I passed it off to the others….” Another yawn.
My voice sounded like a heavy blanket of pressure even to my own ears. “Is that it, for chrissake? That’s all you’ve got?”
“Yeah, really. It was a weird off-hand comment and nothing more…. Well,” he finally said, “I’m fallin’ asleep here. Gonna get one of those light-baths first thing in the morning.”
“All right. That’s good. And I’ll tell you what: I’ll check on you again tomorrow. I’ll call you right before I come in the afternoon.” And before I leave for the next colony, I thought, but I didn’t say that.
I also didn’t say that I wanted another opportunity to question him.
*
Because Tan and I both still felt kind of achy and didn’t want to feel even achier tomorrow, we decided to sleep in the separate bubble beds. T
hat we weren’t exactly happy with each other didn’t help matters—or at least I wasn’t happy with him.
I was pulling the bedsheet on top of me when I said for the third time that night, “I just don’t understand what the fuck she was doing on your lap.”
“I told you,” Tan said from his bed, “when she got up to go to the bathroom, someone took her seat. And then she came back to mine and fell on my lap—”
“IIII was on your lap yesterday, and you know what happened then!”
I heard his groan, his angry-seeming groan, coming out of the darkness. “Number One, I was keeping a lookout on you and the contact. Number Two, I wasn’t attracted to her—how many times must I say that? She wasn’t my type.”
“Yeah, with her tits in your face.”
“That’s just it: she’s too obvious. I don’t like women with no self-esteem.”
“How do you know she has none? Maybe she just liked you and was giving her go her all. You’re too fucking good-looking. Sometimes I can’t stand it.”
“Yeah, right,” he said, his very ironic voice slicing through the darkness.
“I mean it,” I said.
“You don’t seem to mind the way I look when we’re humping.”
“You’re right. I love it then, I love it when we’re alone. I love it just about every time…except when other women notice you. I wish they didn’t.”
“You can’t have me all to yourself. No one can with anyone. So don’t even wish it.”
“Goddamn you,” I said, because he was right…. Then, in a slower voice: “I wonder if she’ll be disappointed when she doesn’t see you again.”
“Who cares,” said Tan, and he sounded like he really didn’t care.
“In these situations with women, I get annoyed by them. …At the same time, I know what really wanting a man you can’t have is like.”
“Oh really?” I saw his gray silhouette in the darkness as he rose to a sitting position. “How many times has that happened to you? I mean, how many men have you really wanted?”
My face felt red, though I knew he couldn’t see that. “You’re right. Not that many.”
He lay back down again. “Of course, there is James….”
“Argh…not again.”
*
The sleeping-in-separate-bubble-beds bit wound up not mattering: I still woke up feeling too achy. And I also realized that my throat now seemed too dry for comfort.
I got out of bed and went right to the small room-fridge for a bottle of the motel’s complimentary, flavored vitamin-water; the cold, tingly-with-vitamins liquid slid down my throat and instantly made it feel better.
“It’s so dry in here,” I said, and I thought I’d said it to myself, that Tan was still asleep.
But then I heard his soft morning-voice say, “It’s weird: in the buildings it’s dry, but on the streets it’s damp. Why can’t the engineers here balance that out?”
My right arm vaguely motioned toward the window. “It’s all the trees out there. I guess maybe they need more plants in the buildings.” I sighed. “T—Frank, we should get packing, and then get moving. The train leaves at four-thirty later.”
“Shit,” he said on a hard sigh, and I could tell by that sigh that he wasn’t at all looking forward to my plans for this day.
Join the club, I wanted to tell him.
But, instead, I went into the bathroom to pull down my pajama pants and plop my bare ass onto the toilet.
*
Later, as we were leaving the motel to go get some lunch at a restaurant, I punched Dylan’s number into my phone again. But, this time, there was no answer from his end.
I glanced at the clock above the concierge’s desk and realized that I’d probably called too early. I would try again after lunch.
Unfortunately, when I finally did that, once again I got no answer.
Could he have still been at the light-bath? He might have been. Or he might have been taking a lengthy shit, for all I knew.
Still, standing outside the restaurant, for some reason, I just wasn’t getting a good feeling. Now that the unconsciousness of sleep had put a distance between me and the night before, suddenly, I didn’t like what he’d said about the tail; suddenly, I didn’t like the way he’d looked. Something now felt…off to me. Really off.
“We’re going back to Dylan’s place,” I said fast to Tan.
His only response to me: a heavy frown.
It seemed he’d given up trying to convince me with words that I was nuts.
*
On the way to Dylan’s, I remembered something and asked Tan, “Did you run the camera at all last night?”
“Yeah,” he said, “just for a little bit.”
“Well, did you see anything?”
“A whole lot of partying bodies.”
I glared at him.
And he sighed in impatience. “What did you expect me to see? I turned it on for a few minutes and panned it around, especially at you. We can look at it after.”
When we finally got to that same street-café near Dylan’s place, I told Tan to wait there.
His black brow quickly lowered at me. “Why?”
“Just do it, please. We’ve got our phones, we’ve got our locators. You don’t need to be with me,” I said.
And before he could respond, I walked away.
*
My pulse pounding a bit too fast, I approached Dylan’s place, walking along the empty-looking street. I didn’t bother being so covert this time: I simply went around to the brown side door and knocked on it.
I waited for a moment on the stoop, glancing at the window beside there, then back at the door.
I got no response to my knock, I heard no movement inside. Not that I’d normally be able to: the door and window looked shut up tight…or maybe not.
When my eyes now moved back to the window, I noticed scratches on the bottom corner of the frame nearest to the stoop. The gray frame was made of processed regolith, so something really hard must have scratched it, or someone using something really hard….
I pulled on my blue suit gloves, then pressed my fingers around the window frame—the corner suddenly gave, as if someone had closed the piece quick so no one would notice it had been broken.
My fingers pushed the corner of the window open, and then the corner of the inside white curtain aside…and that was when I saw him, lying on his belly on the floor, in the same green suit as the night before, only now, the back of his head no longer existed, and his face was the ultimate dull state: the state of death.
*
My hands—my whole damn body snapped back from the window.
I probably should have gone inside and checked around to see if something had been taken—namely, whatever I’d passed to him in the bar.
But, by this point, my growing-frantic thoughts were only about myself, about the self that had been on the Moon before and had done something she shouldn’t have, that if the police found me here and didn’t think I’d killed Dylan, they could still possibly find out about the killing I did do….
I bolted away from the stoop, and this time I ran behind the shack, under the cover of the row of houses that led down toward the street’s corner.
I finally saw Tan again: he was casually standing at the café there, drinking from a bottle of something.
However, when he saw me running for not only my life, but for his too, he dropped the bottle onto the sidewalk. “What is it?” he demanded in a loud voice.
I grabbed his arm and yanked him from the stand. “We’ve gotta go.”
He shook off my hand, but he kept moving fast with me. “What did he say—something that upset you?”
“Naaa. His dead body is what really upset me.”
Tan came to an instant hard stop. “What?!?!”
“He’s dead, goddammit!” I said, nervous spit shooting out my mouth as my feet began moving again.
“But how can you be sure he’s dead!”
“Be
cause. Half the back of his head is now a goddamn crater.”
“Shit!” he said in a breathless voice as our feet plowed on. “Where the fuck are we going?”
“I’ve gotta contact goddamn James,” I spat now. “Goddamn him—every time I’m around him, I get into a mess! Maybe he doesn’t mean to drag me into shit, but he’s always been too fucking goal-oriented for my own good.”
“Then what about after you talk to him—where will we go?”
I glanced at him. “I’m sticking to my original plan—that’s why I came here: for me! I need to get something from this. Should have gone there from the get-go—instead I’ve been sidetracked, and into a new disaster to boot! I’ve gotta start addressing my personal shit more directly….”
Now his hard hand on my arm pulled me to a stand-still position. He was panting badly, and, for that matter, so was I, not only because of the trot. I just realized that someone I’d spoken with only hours before had now been snuffed out. The poor guy. Shit, crap. I hadn’t wanted this to happen….
“Have you ever stopped to think,” said Tan, “that maybe that’s all played out? Maybe those few fucking threatening letters are it, the extent of it all? We’ve been on Earth and here for days, and you’ve found nobody, and nobody’s found you. And I’m totally glad about that. Maybe it’s blown over. So let’s just go HOME.”
I snapped my arm from his grasp. “I can’t. I’ve got to make sure. How the fuck do I know this guy isn’t dead because he just met me?”
There was a pause. And then Tan pointed out, “But he said someone was tailing him before then.”
“Yeah, but I was already here that day—”
“Stop blaming yourself for every goddamn thing—”
“We’ve gotta go,” I said fast, and now I began speed-walking again. “You just don’t seem to get it: if there is someone who’s still got it in for me, I’d rather the person bother me here than there. I’ve got others to think about back home.
