Mending the Moon Read online

  “Thank you,” says Rosemary Watkins. “I’ll go make sure the consult room’s unlocked.” The ER’s family consult room has comfortable furniture in soothing colors, but very strange lighting. There’s no wall switch, and to turn on the floor lamp, you have to step on a button that invariably gets shoved underneath a chair. On top of that, the bulb keeps burning out.

  The room’s intended as a place where families can absorb bad news in privacy and something resembling comfort; making them sit in the dark is a little too grimly fitting. And it’s hard to keep the room stocked with tissues.

  The consult room’s outside the ER proper, in an adjoining hallway. Ordinarily, Rosemary would grab a tissue box from an empty room on her way out of the ER, but there aren’t any empty rooms tonight. She can make out the voices of at least three howling children, two male drunks engaged in a shouting contest—a pair of security guards speeds past, power-walking toward that room—and a female patient yelling for someone to bring her pain meds now goddammit now I need a shot now where are you fuckers?

  Her friends wonder why she volunteers in such a noisy, dirty, chaotic place. “I’m not saying you have OCD,” Melinda told her once, “but you do tend to have meltdowns if your outfits aren’t perfectly coordinated.”

  And Veronique, acerbic as always, added, “You can’t walk into Melinda’s house without trying to dust all her books and geodes, and you can’t walk into mine without offering to sweep up stray bits of cat food in the kitchen, but you spend four hours a week in an ER?”

  But that’s why she does it. If she can bring even a little bit of order to this place, offer even a temporary oasis, maybe one or two patients will feel better. And, anyway, the upheaval here comforts her; her own life seems serene by contrast. Most of the time, she feels competent at the hospital.

  She’s not clergy, of course. The hospital trains laypeople to minister to patients, with the most difficult cases reserved for the staff chaplains. But she’s been doing this for seven years now, and at least some of the ER staff routinely ask her to visit patients, or to talk to distraught relatives, or to bless their own hands.

  Heading for the hallway, Rosemary dodges left around a portable X-ray machine and right around a gangly teenaged boy on crutches hobbling toward the restroom. The crowd of medical staff around the code room, closest to the ER entrance, has dispersed; there’s nothing more to do there. Rosemary glances into the room, but sees only a drawn curtain. Beyond the curtain, she knows, is the body of a thirty-five-year-old woman, brain-dead from an aneurysm, being kept alive on a ventilator. When the family arrives, the doctor will ask what they want to do next and gently bring up the subject of organ donation. And then Rosemary will do whatever she can to help.

  She skirts a family—mother and father, each carrying a screaming twin infant—being escorted into the ER by a registration clerk, and finally manages to escape into the hallway. Fifteen feet to her left, she sees the open door of the consult room, a dim glow spilling out into the corridor. She won’t have to call security to have the room opened, then. Good. She walks down the hallway and glances inside. Not one but two boxes of tissues, one on each table. Thank God for small favors.

  Rosemary stands there, debating her next move. It’s seven o’clock. She’s been here for two hours, on her feet the entire time. Ordinarily she’d take a break now, but she knows that if she sits down, if she allows herself to be alone, she’ll think about her first visit of the evening. She spent forty minutes with an eighty-year-old woman with a broken hip, who clung to Rosemary’s arm and keened, “There’s no one here! I’ll die alone. No one cares about me! I used to have people. They’re all gone! No one’s here.”

  “I’m here, Lisa. You’re not alone. My name’s Rosemary, and I’m here with you.” But Lisa kept howling. She howled while Rosemary sang a lullaby. She howled while Rosemary, in desperation, recited the Our Father. Chaplains aren’t supposed to pray with patients who haven’t requested it, but many elderly dementia patients respond to the familiar words of the Lord’s Prayer.

  Lisa didn’t. Rosemary couldn’t even sit down: Lisa had one hand clamped around Rosemary’s fingers and the other around her wrist, and between the bedrail and the angles of their respective arms, standing was the only option.

  At last a surgical nurse in blue gown, cap, and booties came to take Lisa to surgery, and gently pried her fingers from Rosemary’s arm. “Okay, Lisa, time to let go now, all right? I’m going to take you upstairs. We’re going to fix your hip. You have to let go of this nice lady’s arm, sweetheart.”

  The whole time, Lisa continued her keening. “There’s no one here! No one cares! No one loves me! Why won’t anyone come help me? Why isn’t anyone here?”

  Rosemary should have taken a break after that visit, gotten a cup of coffee or escaped into the chapel for a while. Instead, she washed her hands at the sink in Lisa’s room, trying to scrub the feel of those frantic fingers from her skin, and moved on to the next patient, and then the next, and the next. Those were brief, pleasant visits: a few prayers for healing, a few casual conversations about pets and gardening. None were what she needed. She kept looking for someone who knew she was there. And then the charge nurse waved her over and told her about the aneurysm.

  She needs to eat; she’s already slightly shaky, and dealing with the family will require energy and concentration. She has to be present to them. She can’t do this one on autopilot. During a quieter shift, she could ask the charge nurse to page her in the cafeteria when the family showed up, but right now, things are too hectic. It’s not a good time for a volunteer to try to ask anybody for anything.

  Rosemary stands paralyzed in the corridor. She knows this is a ridiculous stalemate. She wouldn’t have any trouble deciding what to do if she weren’t so tired, and being so tired is a major red flag that she needs to take a break and refuel.

  But if she takes a break, she’ll think about Lisa again. No: she has to keep busy. So she stops for a long slurp at a water fountain and goes back into the ER, bracing herself against the barrage of noise and activity. She hears the static of the department’s PA system clicking on, and then, improbably, her own name being announced from the nursing station.

  “Rosemary, call on 57. Chaplain Rosemary, pick up line 57.”

  She squints, thinking she’s misheard—who could be calling her here, and why?—and then feels a sudden surge of panic. Walter. Something’s happened to Walter.

  This makes no sense, since no one at Walter’s nursing home would call the ER to find her. They’d call her cell, which she keeps on silent at the hospital and checks regularly. But she’s reaching for the nearest hall phone even as she works this out. “Hello, this is Rosemary. May I help you?”

  * * *

  Seven hundred and fifty miles away, Anna Clark settles down in front of the evening news with a glass of white wine and her knitting. It’s raining, typical Seattle weather, but she doesn’t mind. She likes being surrounded by water; it’s one reason she and William bought the house on Mercer Island. Living on the island makes her feel calm, self-contained, protected by moats.

  She is, of necessity, a highly social person. She organizes openings at her husband’s art gallery: ordering food and flowers, schmoozing with artists and patrons. She’s on the board of the private school where their son attended K–12, and she’s in a knitting group run by one of the other Blake School board members. But she also finds too much social contact exhausting and treasures her time alone.

  She’s knitting an ornate lace shawl with outrageously high-end yarn—a qiviut-cashmere blend she ordered from a musk-ox farm in Canada—and she has to concentrate on the minute stitches. The tray table on her lap holds Barbara Walker’s Treasury of Knitting Patterns, open to page 204, Frost Flowers, a twenty-four-row repeat in a multiple of thirty-four stitches plus two. Walker assures her readers that this is actually a simple lace, quickly learned after the knitter has gone once through the pattern, but Anna’s only on row fourteen. If sh
e decides she likes the pattern, she’ll photocopy it and return the book to its shelf. If she doesn’t, she’ll rip what she’s done and start again with another pattern.

  William isn’t home; he’s working late, getting ready for a show at the gallery. He took the dog with him into the city. Percy’s not home, either. He doesn’t like being surrounded by water unless it comes with a lot of sunshine, and he’s fled to Mexico for two weeks to escape the onset of autumn. William’s parents had extra timeshare points. The resort’s American-owned: by a Seattle company, in fact, one that’s made a big deal about how good their security is, since so many Americans have been killed down there. Percy went down by himself, which seems a little odd for a kid his age, but Anna knows he’ll meet people. Most of his friends are working or in school, and can’t take the time. He decided to take a year off between college and starting his MBA, to give himself more time to study for the GMAT, so of course he wound up back home, in his old room with its garish comic posters and high school lacrosse trophies. Anna had hoped he’d redecorate—the colors in that room give her a headache—but he’s kept it the way it is. Well, of course. It’s only for a year.

  She’ll be glad when he’s in school again. Miranda Tobin, another parent on the Blake School board, always asks about him. “And how’s dear Percy? Still back with you and Bill?” Miranda’s son Tobias—Toby Tobin, what a terrible name to give your child!—was one of Percy’s lacrosse teammates at Blake. Percy thought Toby was an ass; Anna thinks the same of Miranda. It must be a dominant gene. Toby’s in his first year at Harvard Medical School, a fact Miranda trots out at every opportunity. “He can’t decide between neurosurgery and urology,” she told everyone last week. “They both pay well, but the hours are better in urology.”

  After interactions like that, an evening alone in the house is healing balm. The house feels very peaceful like this, the drone of the TV and the steady pattering of raindrops the only sounds. Anna focuses on her knitting pattern: yo, p2 tog, p2, yo, p2 tog, k2, p1, yo, p4, p2 tog, p4, p2 tog-b, p4, yo, p1, k2, p2, yo, p2 tog, p2, repeat. The length of the repeat is dizzying, and it’s easy to get lost. Lace knitting is a precision sport. She can’t fudge if she makes a mistake, and ripping the fine, fuzzy qiviut is a challenge in itself.

  She works her way through the pattern, paying absent attention to the television—weather, sports, traffic, the usual state budget woes—and looks up only when she hears the front door open. William calls out a muffled “hello”; Anna hears Bartholomew’s toenails clicking across the floor before he nuzzles her arm in greeting and lies down next to her chair, 120 pounds of Irish Wolfhound hitting the carpet with a thump. He yawns, hugely, essence of dog breath and wet dog wafting over her. Her nose wrinkles.

  “You’re home early.”

  William comes into the living room, rubbing his hands together for warmth, and bends to kiss the top of her head. “The setup was easier than I thought. Three of Kip’s friends helped.”

  “Do you think the show will go well?”

  William shrugs. “We’ll see. The work’s not to my taste, but a lot of people like it. Have you eaten?”

  “Soup and salad. I can heat up that leftover quiche if you’re hungry.”

  “I’ll do it. Don’t get up.” He goes into the kitchen, Bart raising a head to sniff in his direction before flopping down again, and Anna hears the dull thud of the fridge door closing, the soft hum of the microwave.

  “On second thought,” she calls, “I’ll have a piece too.”

  “Okay.”

  She’s folded up her knitting and is about to turn off the TV when something catches her attention. “Mexico,” the announcer says, and Anna looks up to see a somber anchorwoman. “An American tourist has been found brutally murdered in the Castillo del Sol resort in Cabo San Lucas. The resort owners, Seattle hospitality magnates David and Delores Strucking, have issued a statement—”

  Percy. Anna’s chest constricts, and for a moment the TV’s drowned out by the white noise in her head. She forces herself to focus, hears, “The woman’s body”—a woman, good, no, not good, of course not good, but at least it’s not Percy, and Anna breathes more easily again—“was discovered by housekeeping staff. Her name is being withheld pending notification of the family. We’ll be sure to keep you updated on this story as it develops.”

  Panic pricks Anna’s throat. “Will? William! Come here! Something horrible has happened. We have to fly Percy home.”

  2

  Comrade Cosmos was born during the humid summer of 2002 in Princeton, New Jersey, when a group of Information Systems majors, sharing a rented house and bored with the usual rules of beer pong, invented a new challenge. The winners of each match would have to invent a superhero; the losers would have to create that superhero’s nemesis. Later, the boyfriend of one of the participants said, “It was kind of like their version of the Villa Diodati.” The boyfriend was an English major, and while his professors might not have ranked Comrade Cosmos and the Emperor of Entropy with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the comparison was apt in at least one way. Just as several stories came from that famous summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva, so a number of hero-and-villain pairs were born of the 2002 beer-pong rules. In both cases, however, only one narrative went on to capture the imagination of the wider culture.

  Desi Santamaria and her friend Peter Phillips were the winners who came up with Comrade Cosmos, Champion of Order. CC lore has it that the hero was largely a response to the fact that this particular round of beer pong had knocked eight full cups of beer to the floor. However improbable that number may be, we know for a fact that the losers, Jacob Morganthau and Honoree McKenzie, responded by creating the Emperor of Entropy, Curator of Chaos.

  These characters might have been as fully forgotten as the others invented that summer, save for a fortuitous combination of talents. Desi had a flair for graphic art and had been devouring DC and Marvel comics since she could read. Jacob, who’d almost majored in English himself, wasn’t half bad with a storyline. Peter was a canny marketer, and Honoree, even more than the others, excelled at Web design and publishing.

  Thus an empire was born.

  It started small, of course, with a modest Web-comic. Comrade Cosmos—muscles bulging beneath skintight blue and gold spandex, teeth and hair perfectly straight and aligned—answered the summons of a small-town mayor whose tiny community of Oblivion, Nebraska, had been destroyed by a windstorm. The panels showed wreckage everywhere: car parts strewn across the high school football field, pet goldfish and small mammals impaled on the branches of trees, bras and jock straps hanging from the steeple of the First Presbyterian Church of Oblivion, and a black, yawning pit where the local fire station had once stood. Sobbing citizens wandered the streets, searching for their fenders, their hamsters, their underwear.

  “This was no ordinary storm,” the mayor told Comrade Cosmos.

  “Like unto a tornado it was, and yet not so, for it was one wild wind everywhere with no focus or funnel.” These words were gummed, spat, and sputtered by an old man whose dentures had been blown clean out of his mouth, and whose pigtailed granddaughter had to translate for him.

  “Our fire station was brick and metal and had stood against many fierce winds,” the fire chief told CC, “and yet this one demolished it.”

  “No,” proclaimed Comrade Cosmos, “it was clearly no ordinary storm! It is most evidently the work of that dastardly coward, that vilest villain, the Emperor of Entropy!”

  At these words, the Emperor himself appeared: a swirling darkness in human shape, his eyes glowing red coals, exploded galaxies flowing through the emptiness he occupied. One of the distinctive features of the CCverse, from the beginning, was that invoking EE—naming him, speaking of him, sometimes even just thinking of him—summoned him instantly, for this most dangerous of genii is inherently everywhere, omnipresent, lurking in the very fabric of creation. Comrade Cosmos, in contrast, has always been merely a frail human, although initially o
ne with bulging muscles clad in spandex.

  “You have perceived aright,” boasted the Emperor, flinging his arms of shadow wide to encompass the devastation of Oblivion. “This is my work, the play of an instant, a mere eyeblink and flick of my finger. How shall you withstand me, puny superhero? It would take you years to undo even a microfraction of the chaos I have caused. Admit your frailty, and despair!”

  “Never,” said Comrade Cosmos, and turned to bow to the assembled townspeople, who had gathered to gape at this confrontation. “Good folk, our enemy is only one, but we are many. He can wreck entire towns with the flick of a finger, but he has only ten fingers, and we have thousands, if we summon friends and family and even strangers to help us. No repair is wasted, here or anywhere. Whenever you hammer a nail or sew on a button or feed a hungry child, whenever you chop wood or carry water, whenever you plant a garden or pave a road, you work to defeat our enemy. Together, we can repair the world. Let us begin!”

  The townspeople responded to this stirring speech with tears of joy and cheers of assent, and promptly started the work of rebuilding the town. No one shirked. All helped with happy hearts: bricklayers, grandmothers, doctors, schoolchildren, the mayor himself pouring concrete. Comrade Cosmos dug and hauled and hammered and painted with the rest of them, and in due course—as EE stood in the background, shooting off the tiny stars that meant he was fuming—Cosmos gestured expansively over a neat, sparkling town square and announced, “Oblivion is restored!”

  Wordplay has always been a feature of the CCverse. The cultural critics who study Comrade Cosmos, noting that its language and images are a derivative stew drawn from Tolkien, the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer—to name only the most prominent sources—observe that it survived, and then thrived, by keying into cultural anxieties. CC was born of the fear and grief following September 11, 2001; the yawning pit where the Oblivion fire station once stood clearly recalls Ground Zero, and the destruction of Oblivion echoes the scale and senselessness of the terrorist attacks.