Chasing the Moon

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Diana found West on a ladder, changing smoke detector batteries in the hall.

“Hi,” she said.

He grunted.

“You’re not busy, are you?” she asked.

“Just taking care of a few things, Number Five.”

He descended, and she helpfully held the ladder.

“I’m not distracting you? Because if this is important…”

He grabbed the ladder, moved it a few feet down the hall, and climbed it again. There were a surprising number of detectors. So many that West had a paper bag full of batteries in his right hand to replace them all.

“These aren’t like cosmic smoke detectors or anything?” she asked. “It’s not like if the batteries die in them the universe blows up, right?”

“Nope. Just being safe. Can never be too safe.”

“Oh, good.” She laughed to herself. It was silly to think everything West did had grand importance. It was ridiculous to assume that everything in the apartment building was connected by invisible strings to something vital to the universe outside.

He climbed down and repeated the short journey down the hall to another detector. She tried to be helpful and pointed out he’d missed one.

West stopped and wheeled upon her with unexpected energy. “We leave that one alone, Number Five. We don’t ever change the batteries in that one. No matter how often it chirps for them.”

The detector beeped.

He glared at it. “Shut up.”

It chirped louder.

“Just ignore it,” said West.

Diana pondered the small white disk affixed over her head. What great and terrible effect would it have if she slipped in while West wasn’t looking and popped in fresh batteries?

She wanted to know. She blamed Zap’s transferred curiosity, but it was deeper than that. The mind detested mysteries. It liked things to make sense or at least be predictable. It was human nature. It was why some people became scientists, theologians, philosophers, dedicating themselves to exploring those mysteries, and why most others took the easy way out and resolutely pretended those mysteries didn’t exist. But her species hadn’t crawled its way to civilization by not thinking about things, analyzing them, tearing them apart, putting them back together in fanciful, experimental combinations just to see what happened. Zap’s influence had only amplified her natural inquisitiveness.

It wasn’t all her and Zap, though. The smoke detector itself whispered temptations to her. She’d gotten used to those types of whispers and pushed them aside, along with her questions.

She made herself useful by holding West’s ladder as he crept down the hall.

“I need your help. I don’t know who else to talk to this about, and I thought you might have a useful perspective.”

He grunted.

“You help people, right? You keep the universe running and all that, right?”

“Not exactly.”

“But I’ve seen you do it. I’ve helped you.”

He nodded. “I keep a few things in check. Nothing terribly important, though.”

“Not important? If not for you the world would be crawling with giant bugs from the future or we’d all be floating around in space.”

“Those things would take care of themselves regardless. Or not. It’s not as if it matters much in the long run.”

The conversation paused as they moved to the next detector.

“Doesn’t matter? How can you say that? People would be dead without you. Heck, they might not have ever existed if not for you.”

He leaned against the ladder. “And if they never had, who would notice?”

“You can’t be that indifferent. Otherwise why would you do this job?”

“That’s a strange question. Why does anyone do anything? Why does anyone take a bath when they know they’re just going to get dirty again? Why does anyone eat when they know they’re just going to be hungry again? Over and over again until eventually they die. And they will die. So why go to the doctor when you’re sick? It’s only postponing the inevitable. But at least it’s something to do while waiting for the inevitable to happen.”

“But that just makes it all sound so meaningless.”

West replied, “And who says it isn’t? Humans. You’re always so obsessed with finding meaning in things. But not really. Because when you say meaning you really mean specialness. You want a nice warm hug from a cold, indifferent universe. You want everything you do to be important and everything you think to be catalogued and recorded.”

“It’s not like that,” she said, “but it would be nice if it meant something.”

“Yes, I agree. It would be nice.”

He climbed down the ladder and knocked on the door of Apartment Three. Peter-thing answered.

“Here to replace the batteries,” said West.

Peter-thing absorbed the information, smiled. “Safety first.” He checked on a batch of baking cookies while West did his task.

“Why are there so many smoke detectors in this building?” asked Diana. “I don’t remember seeing so many before.”

“Do you really want to know?”

West sighed, and while he was normally a flat, unreadable soul, she sensed some annoyance on his part.

“I’m sorry, Number Five. I’m trying to see your point. I am. But I’m not exactly sure what it is.”

She sat on Peter-thing’s couch and blew a raspberry.

“Neither am I.”

It was no wonder people went crazy. She was adrift. She couldn’t think of a good reason why she should be concerned about any of this. It was like politics. Getting involved seemed like a good idea sometimes, but ultimately it only served to disillusion and disappoint. West was right about the search for meaning. Nobody really wanted meaning. They just didn’t want meaninglessness. Except for maybe anarchists, but even most of them tried to shoehorn some kind of sense into it.

West’s annoyance changed to something stranger. Sympathy.

“Okay, let’s go then. I have something to show you.”

“No.”

“What?”

“No, I don’t want to go on another of your bizarre, otherworldly sightseeing tours where I fight dinosaurs or destroy planets with my sneezes. Those don’t make anything clearer. They only leave me more confused than when I started. I just want to figure out what I’m supposed to do. Can we just skip the weirdness this time?”

“I suppose. If that’s what you really want.”

“It is.”

“Are you certain? Because the Isthmus of Skrunb is beautiful this time of year. As long as you ignore the shrieking butterflies.”

“Oh, I’m certain.”

Peter-thing lumbered over with a plateful of gingersnaps and snickerdoodles. He offered one to each, which they graciously accepted, even though Diana didn’t care for either type of cookie.

“Meaning of life is cookies.”

She nodded politely, took a nibble of her gingersnap.

“Cookies are good. Cookies make people happy. Cookies don’t question what they are here for because cookies know.”

“You do know cookies aren’t alive, right?” she asked.

“Maybe not,” said Peter-thing, “but does cookie know that?”

“Okay, this is getting a little existential for me. Thanks for trying, guys, but this isn’t working.”

She nibbled her treat but didn’t have the heart to finish it off.

She started the trudge back to her apartment. Somehow West beat her to the top of the stairs.

“It’s not the end of the world,” he said. “Fenris will tear his way from this reality, but the damage will only be temporary.”

“Aha! I knew that you knew.” Grinning, she stabbed her finger at him, though it made very little sense since she hadn’t caught him lying. He hadn’t slipped up. But she’d take all the victories, real or imagined, she could.

“The universe will survive. It will stitch its broken shards into something workable. It always does. It’s not any different than when World War Three was postponed to next week. Or that time brown became yellow and yellow became the number seven. This change will be bigger than that, but if you’re speaking of the literal end, then it’s not that.”

“Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop trying to get me not to care.”

“Are you sure about that?” he asked. “It’s a lot easier when you n’t.”

“This is my world we’re talking about. Maybe stuff like this happens all the time. And maybe I never noticed before. But I’ve noticed this time, and I don’t like it.”

“So it’s about you then?” asked West.

Her first response was to deny that, but it came to her that he was right. If the world ended tomorrow, who would be left to mourn it? Just her. She didn’t want it to end or change or whatever because she didn’t want to be left alone, to be deprived of her lifeline to the sane and normal, although even that was an increasingly frayed thread.

“Yes. Damn it, yes. That’s what it’s about.”

“Fenris is inevitable.”

She knew she had him here. Having fortuitously, if accidentally, lured him into a verbal trap, she wasn’t about to let him go.

“According to you, it’s all inevitable. It’s inevitable that I’ll go mad, and it’s inevitable that the sun will blow up someday. It’s inevitable that bugs from the future will one day travel back in time and rewrite history. It doesn’t mean I have to sit back and take it.”

“No, you don’t have to. But it’ll be better for everyone if you do. Because interfering in this one will only make it worse.”

“Says who?”

“Says me. When you’ve been doing this job as long as I have, you get a sense of these things. And I can tell you that some futures can be averted. Some changes should be avoided. And some are unavoidable. Some cannot be stopped, and to try will only cause more harm than you can imagine.”

“And I’m just supposed to take your word on that.”

“That’s up to you. But you came to me for my perspective, Number Five. Seems strange to ignore it just because it wasn’t what you wanted to hear.”

His bag of batteries clacked like a maraca as he descended the stairs.

Diana almost swore, but her frustration left her drained. She wanted to save her world, but it wasn’t about her world. It was about her. If she could do something positive in the midst of all this confusion and madness, then she just might be able to convince herself that she wasn’t so trivial and unimportant after all. Just because she wasn’t certain there was any grand plan to this didn’t mean she couldn’t come up with one.

She walked back to her apartment, where her monsters waited for her. Vom and Smorgaz sat on the couch, watching a version of the old Land of the Lost TV show that seemed to be filmed from the Sleestaks’ perspective. Zap hovered in the corner, staring at the wall or maybe the greater mysteries behind it. And Pogo hopped at her feet and whimpered.

It was comforting. Like a Norman Rockwell painting populated by infernal manifestations. The monsters were just like her, lost souls, and if there was anywhere she belonged, this was it. She wasn’t an outsider. Not anymore.

All things considered, there were worse places in the universe to call home.

The phone rang. It was Sharon.

“Greg wants to meet you. Tomorrow night.”