Fawn on the Moon

Chapter 3-1

Chapter 3

October 1994

Gerry opened his eyes and had to blink several times to clear the haze out of them. It took him a few seconds to understand why an oddly attractive, though seemingly mute gargoyle was staring at him. He reached for the remote control, fumbled with the buttons once he found it, and realized that when he’d fallen asleep, he’d only managed to mute the television set, not turn it off. No wonder his dreams had been full of chaos.

He flung his arm over his head and buried his face in the muscle. He breathed in the scent of his own skin, of day-old sweat, and willed the process to wipe the remaining dream fragments out of his mind. So many years forgotten; did it really only take one moving image and a couple of moments of the man’s voice to bring everything back? It wasn’t fair. It shouldn’t be so hard to forget, and yet so easy to fall back into remembering.

You had everything. Everything you’d ever wanted and more than anyone could need. But that was the problem, wasn’t it, Mark? You could never make yourself understand there was a difference between those things. That want wasn’t need by any means, and need could never be want.

It seemed to take almost too much effort to get himself upright. It was a damn good thing it was Saturday. But even though Gerry didn’t have to get up and go to work, he still had to get up and get to work. There were always things to do. Laundry. Cleaning. Groceries. That was his plan, too. It had been circling his mind, an imaginary to-do list floating in the atmosphere above his head: get up, get dressed, make coffee, and get s**t done. So, he headed for his bedroom with the best of intentions. He even remembered to gather up the dirty glass, the vodka bottle, and the towel. All three items got abandoned on the side table in the hallway instead of making it to either the kitchen sink or the laundry basket, though. And even though his legs and feet wanted to refuse, Gerry found himself walking up the narrow staircase to the loft.

The house didn’t have a second level, per se. At one point the loft had been nothing more than an attic. Even now, the loft only had a three-foot-wide strip of head room down the middle of it. From there, the roof sloped down, making the sides of the room useless for anything but storage or low furniture. There were only two windows, and they were just small squares of glass on either end. One looked over the front of the house, the other over the back, and Gerry had said on more than one occasion that even with a full-blown tornado roaring outside, the windows would be hard-pressed to let in a breeze. The space was eerily quiet, however. Whatever insulated the ceiling or covered the roof did a beautiful job of keeping out sound. When the kids outside got too noisy to stand, or on the days when even a feather’s drop would be too much stimuli to take, Gerry would flop into one of the three ancient, worn, but oh-so-damn-comfortable chairs that he’d dragged up there, and he’d read. He’d lower the curtains, uneven lengths of black fabric that he hadn’t even bothered to get hemmed before he tacked them over the windows, then he’d turn on the lamp, and get lost for hours. In between the cubby space of that sloping roofline and the floor, stretching down one side of the loft, were stacks and stacks and stacks of books that Gerry had read, and books he planned to read one day.

It wasn’t the retreat Gerry was going for, however. It wasn’t the comfy furniture or the books. He could feel it in his still-naked bones before he dared to admit the plan to himself. No, it was the other side of the room—the side where the previous owners had installed sliding panel doors and fashioned a storage area out of a portion of the space. And Gerry hated himself for it.

The carpet felt good under his feet as Gerry walked the path of the loft. It had been cheap, just a remnant, and a deep blood-red that nobody seemed interested in having anymore. Up there, though, in the dim light, the color had been perfect. The shag was deep, long enough for Gerry to dig his toes in, or spend hours distractedly twiddling when he was stretched out on top of it, but it tended to catch on the unfinished bottoms of the sliding doors something terrible. Most times, it made for a good deterrent when a mind started offering up ideas about digging into the past. That day, however, the door slid aside with surprising ease.

Gerry looked down at the carpeting and shook his head. f*****g figured.

In the storage area rested a Bankers box. It was nothing fancy, in the least. The plain brown corrugated board with its olive-green stenciled letters, its beat-up edges, and worn handle holes gave no suggestion to the circus it held inside it: magazine articles, photos, both personal and professional, notes, hand-written lyrics and scraps with random phrases, printed press releases and programs. Somewhere in the depths of the paperwork rested a gold straw, and a single earring that looked like a disco ball, each facet a true-to-life diamond, set in gold. He’d only had the earring out twice, and both times had been to gaze at the costly trinket and consider its worth. The first time he’d been freezing, with no money to put oil in the furnace. The second time was when his car had died the week after getting his new job. But the earring had always made it back into the box. He’d never been able to gather the nerve to sell it.

The day wasn’t about clinging to tangible valuables, though. It was about seeking out the intangible ones—the thrills, the emotions, and the memories—and trying to make sense of the dreams that had haunted him through the night. Why now? To what end?

Gerry stared at the box, sighed heavily, and then, as if directing the question to the closet, “You really want to do this, Ger?”

The box did not reply. Instead, his mind offered up a beautiful face and a not-altogether-endearing smirk. That image flopped into one of Gerry’s chairs, and waved a long-fingered hand in the air at the dust that rose. The light of the room highlighted a gold taffeta jacket and the dark red velvet pants matched the color of Gerry’s carpeting perfectly. The imagined dust dissipated, the figment’s expression shifted into a mask of innocent patience, and it spoke. “Well, of course you’re going to do it, Fawn. You never could stay away.”

Gerry lifted his chin and clamped his teeth together. Even in imagination, a prick was a prick. “I don’t know about that, space queen. I’ve been gone for a hell of a long time.”

He almost felt the brush of the hand that he visualized, as the ghost of the former Maxx Starlight was suddenly behind him. It whispered in Gerry’s ear in a voice so soft it could have been a breeze. “What makes you think I would ever believe you to be gone?”

Gerry spun so fast he almost lost his footing. “I don’t give a flying f**k what you think, Maxx Starlight!” He took a deep breath and glared at the empty room. “Stupid Goddamn Mark f*****g Devon. Prince of Suck My d**k. Queen of Sell Outs. Loser Extraordinaire!” He caught himself, reined back his voice, and laid both palms against his belly in what he hoped would prove to be a soothing gesture.

“Losing it,” he mumbled. He was standing naked in his loft and yelling at empty spaces. He was probably scaring every dust bunny in the place. He snorted at his thought and shook his head. “Yep. Definitely losing it.”

He didn’t bother to look back at the closet. He merely reached behind him, shoved the sliding door closed with far more force than necessary, and left the loft.