Back on the island nothing had changed, but I was starving. Gunther drove. Rain pelted the street outside the train station. We turned left onto a connector road, and rode the line between the docks and the old industrial complex. His land cruiser roared as we picked up speed, ear protection on, headsets built-in, like they wear in war helicopters.
No traffic on a Sunday. Only place with no traffic on a Sunday.
Gunther had a little place behind Tamara’s, squeezed in a back-alley beside a bare face of rock. Tamara’s house sat on top of the rockface.
He backed into the garage. We got out as the overhead door closed on the tired, sun beaten streets, steaming with rain.
“I can’t believe you live here.”
He shrugged. “It comes with the job. But I don’t live here anymore. You live here, and I keep watch.”
“This was Tamara’s idea.”
He shook his head no.
“You don’t have to put me up. Not like this. What about Tamara’s place?” I followed him in. He showed me to the den, with chairs around a dark coffee-table by the bay window, which looked out over the alleyway. Sun hit the panels at an extreme angle, and rain lashed against the panes.
“I considered putting you up in Tamara’s house.”
“If I stayed there, you could watch both of us.”
“Tamara has asked me to keep a close watch on you.”
I sat heavily on the couch. The leather welcomed my tired limbs, and I heaved a sigh. Turns out I ached all over, but the worst was my head.
“Don’t fall asleep there,” Gunther said. Pots and pans clattered in the kitchen.
The phone rang. Gunther picked it up. Nobody there. Then it rang three times and stopped. There was a pause. Gunther still held the phone. One hand held an oven mitt by his side. Then it rang again, and Gunther picked it up, listened for a moment, and handed it to me.
“About Tamara,” he said.
Tamara’s voice was tinny and quiet.
“Liza.”
“Yeah,” I sat up stiffly. A moment’s panic washed over me. Gunther frowned; watched it pass from me.
“I have to be brief. Before entering the desert, we discussed the possibility of an abrupt ending. Gunther and I prepared for such an outcome. Do you remember what I’m talking about? I mean, am I making myself clear?”
When I said nothing, she went on.
“Listen carefully. We discussed various outcomes. I knew it was possible that after the events of the desert, it might become necessary for one of us to leave, cut off all—or nearly all—contact, and go into hiding. My chief concern was you, and we discussed how Gunther might transfer you to a safe house if it became necessary, but things have not panned out that way. The Shoemaker estate is dissolving. I cannot say more in this regard except that you will not have to worry about the kind of fallout I predicted. Nonetheless, I am grateful for these preparations because I have decided myself to make an abrupt departure, leaving Gunther behind.”
She had spoken too fast for me to follow. I mean I had heard what she said, but I was taken aback.
“I have been searching for my brother since before you and I met. Now I’ve found him. We’re together. In hiding. What I’m trying to say is, all the work you did paid off. All this stuff with the mossmen, and their awful miracle… My brother’s was always my only real concern.”
“You’re leaving.”
“Yes.” Then a heavy silence followed. “I’m going away,” she said at last. “I may not see you again. But your help is what brought my brother to me. He is old, just not as old as me. But in some ways he is still a happy boy, and I’m a happy girl. I think we can play together, before the end. But he must never be found again. The people who hurt him are still out there.”
Tamara seemed to know that I finally understood.
“Thank you for bringing us together. He is my brother. He…”
A moment of quiet passed. Gunther still watched me.
“I think I have to go,” she said at last. I could almost hear her nodding to herself, blonde curls bobbing up and down. Then she did go.
Gunther took the phone. When he sat down across from me, I looked—anywhere else. He was lost in thought.
Outside the bay window, stars peeped over the opposite building. Stars over the pacific ocean, over LA. Over the blue desert. Over Death Valley. The faintest stars, and a barrier of the red mist at the horizon halo, where light pollution hung in a wide arc. I thought about the energetic little man, who had groveled at the feet of Tombstone in the desert.
I looked back at Gunther. Whatever he felt about Tamara going off, on her own, it was done. She was out of his reach. He grappled with that alone, I guess. Stretched across his face was—The expression—The anguished unmaking of his relationship, his guardianship—He was prepared to lose Tamara, but not for her to leave. But he never told me. After a few weeks, he seemed back to normal, but—I don’t know. Maybe he never got over it.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I was not back to normal. I stayed with Gunther for four weeks. Every evening, I watched the sky, looking for the moon, but the stormclouds lingered, and held their place over the whole west coast. Rain fell for days in a row onto the black streets. I saw nothing of the moon, but the Shoemaker estate called me incessantly. I knew their numbers from my research: numbers copied off the yellowpages weeks ago, which I had written in a long list. I ignored them all.
Sometimes they left messages. I listened to these with my phone in my hand. I would never call them back.
As the moon gradually waned, I began to feel peace in my mind, as if my own personal storm were clearing, but that only gave me time to think deeply and clearly about what happened in the desert.
I realized that on top of everything else, the moon had been pulling at my heart, just like how it pulls on the tides, and it dislodged something that was buried deep inside of me. Like the odor of flowers in thin mountain air, this long-buried thing overwhelmed me. I did not know what that thing was, or how the moon had gripped my heart, but the pull was undeniable.
I wondered if, when the Garden moon waned into nothing, it would pull that something growing in my heart far away. And left nothing to replace it, nothing but a space in her heart. But for now it lingered, dislodged and uprooted, and I decided to enjoy it before it passed away.
Gunther often left for hours at a time. I called Gunther one night, when he was out and got no answer. So I put down my phone on the counter and wandered to the bay window.
Cars passed the alley’s mouth, mostly I detected the sound of cars, their sound boiling up over the buildings, drifting to my ears like steam, a hot sound far away, sometimes near. The sound of people going somewhere fast, each person going somewhere different, sometimes closeby, watching one another just to avoid a crash, or sometimes curiosity.
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One night I took a taxi back to my apartment. I felt somehow that the danger had passed. The mossmen, the Shoemakers, and Tombstone. I paid the tab in cash, and slipped onto the familiar sidewalk.
No different than any other sidewalk, I thought to myself. But it felt right, beneath my feet. I was pounding the pavement before long, racing to the front doors, but when I rounded the corner it was destroyed. A part of the complex had simply crumbled. Rubble piles lay among the sand, as if the cement walls had given up, and let themselves dissolve in the wind and rain.
A warm breeze buffeted my face. The headlights of passing cars slashed across the broken building, like searchlights. With nothing to find, the words flashed through my mind. I kept on walking. I tried to act natural, as if I had nothing to do with that place. I thought about my neighbor.
The moon isn’t out… It’s been raining for weeks. How can I know if the mossmen succeeded or failed to carry out their miracle? Will I see a difference in the Garden Moon, or would the change be too faint to notice, even after days, weeks? I wondered many things as I stood on the balcony. I dreamed that night of the moon, dark with moss.
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We agreed I should leave. Or at least get on the road to avoid being found by the estate… or the mossmen. But each of us packed alone. Now that Tamara was gone, her absence might draw unwanted attention to the house. Gunther could not explain away her absence indefinitely. We had to vanish too, at least for awhile.
The next few days and late into the night, I packed my bags until Gunther’s house appeared as it was when I had arrived. I left no trace of my coming of going.
I went to the park, with the two rows of trees and sat on the swingset, waiting for the moon to come out. Should have been almost full again. The sun set over a bay full of white yachts. Now the moon rose. I waited. I wanted to make sure about the moon. It rose, plain and luminous. A moon older than humanity, its surface riven by meteoric impacts, littered with satellite garbage of a once great human endeavor for space exploration. It was the moon I had known before the Garden Moon.
I went back to Gunther’s house, stood by the bay window, and thought. The shifting tides of fate had brought us together like sea creatures drawn into the same current, myself and Tamara, and Gunther. But now the great motion had ceased, and I thought maybe I could turn my attention to other things, without fear of being swept away.
Whatever strange lives had brushed up against me, carried by the same currents of fate, they had now washed away. In the wake of the Garden Moon, I felt a familiar thing. I remembered my old life, the way I had been a writer and nothing more. Faraway gulls wheeled in the rain. Their shrill voices came to me on the wind. Bright clouds let a mist fall around their white shapes in the pale sky. I thought I could write about those clouds.
I sat alone on the couch, staring out at the rain and began to think about my neighbor. I wanted to meet her more than ever then, just to say hi. But she could not understand the weight of this simple act, or what it meant that I was no longer swept up in the strange fates of my friends and enemies. But somehow, after the Garden Moon, she would go too. It occurred to me as I sat back and watched the sky. We would not meet again. Each of us would persist on our own quiet islands of life. The Garden Moon was over, and its grasp on all of us had loosened, and then dissolved entirely. My old neighbor was gone and I would have no way to find her, no business finding her.
Then I remembered Gunther’s words. When the world changes, it is important to look into things you have given up, things that were no longer possible. Their stories had come to an end. When the world changes, consider carefully which of these might be possible again. Consider, he had said. I have considered them.
With a sigh, I let them go.
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One day while Gunther was out, went to the train station. The foamy lip of the sea heaped against the pilings; splayed along the shore.
A woman stood by the water in the wind. I stopped when I recognized her. The phone booth was just up ahead. Maybe she’d been using it.
She smiled when she recognized me, but no words passed between us, and she turned and walked away. But in walking away she passed close by me, and I sensed a vast expenditure of energy between us. I passed by her in a heart-warping flux of emotion and unexpressed desires that I did not understand. I wanted to ask about Argo, ask her why she helped me, but I clamped my mouth shut, and when we had passed, and she was removed from my field of view, I arrived at the edge of the docks, and turned around to look over the island from below. Far away were the apartments under the train tracks. A ways downhill were the coastal villas, Gunther’s tiny place, Tamara’s old place, the small clump of skyscrapers like a cluster of gemstones, thrust into the radiant sky. The moon hung above them, dusty gray, barely visible in the full light of day. There remained no hint of green.
I turned away, to the bay full of yachts. The foamy lip of the sea heaped against the pilings; splayed along the shore. In the end it was up to me.
At that very moment, two trains passed across the island, rocked by one other in a roaring exchange of wind and electric lights. A thousand passengers met and departed. A thousand impressions blurred into a press of staggering emotion, that if only they had slowed for a moment, then the two would exchange, and they could see each other clearly, and the dizzy spell of everlasting motion would have ended with a hiss, and sigh. Doors open. They would step off the train, and into one another’s lives.