That Heavy Moon Just Won’t Quit Staring

by Joe Koplowitz

She died. That was the way Nodder liked to think of it. She hadn't passed over, on, or away. She wasn't resting in peace, or meeting her maker, or pushing up daisies. She hadn't gone Shuffling Off the Mortal Coil. She wasn't crossing any River. There was no farm to be bought, no Good Night in which to go, Gentle or otherwise. Just dead, nice and heavy. A word that cut off conversation. That could be spat in people's faces, left to drip down their cheeks as he walked away.

A woman of her age, it shouldn't have been much of a surprise. She had been seventy-four, three years his senior, and they had often talked of death. It had crept into the corners of their bedroom and slid its way under their sheets. It lay between them as they slept, and in the mornings it joined them for breakfast around the small wooden table in their airy kitchen. Sometimes as a black joke she would pour a third bowl of cereal or fix a third plate of scrambled eggs and set it at an empty seat. “We know he's here, we might as well make him feel comfortable,” she would say, and they would laugh about it. But this death they joked about was a friendly one. He was the calm, compassionate death of the elderly. The painless death of slipping away in your sleep. It will be easy, he told them. You'll be having the most fantastic dream of your life, a dream of youth and color and the leathery smell of your first car, and that dream will go on forever. It will unfurl into the eternities and wrap you up in its endless patchwork. That dream will become you. And you'll be dead.

That was the promise, and Nodder, who in his seventy-one years had never once given anyone his complete trust save his wife, had believed it. How stupid you are! he'd thought to himself after it happened. How pathetic, to believe those hollow promises! He had seen many of his friends, guys he'd chummed around with in those hazy days of boyhood, go in terrible ways: cancer, dementia, stroke, cancer, heart attack, cancer, cancer . . . yet even those deaths held a certain appeal. There was time for preparation, time to gather your family, to say your goodbyes, to pick out a subtle-yet-authoritative headstone. Time to have your body pumped so full of Morphine that the stuff would leak, cool and numbing, from your ears and eyes. Time, period. In those deaths, there was time.

But not for her. On some of his better days, when the swollen clouds of anger lifted oh-so-briefly from his mind, Nodder could find a sort of grim irony in what had happened. Even after the wrinkles had overtaken her face like a colony of thin white worms and her hair had grown wispy and gray (a cobweb coif, she'd called it), she had still given off a manic energy, a rowdiness, a teenage disregard for the prim and proper. Until their mid-sixties, when neither of their bodies could handle the strain any longer, they had had sex almost every day, and not the kind of sex you would imagine from two old farts. In fact, she refused to refer to it as sex at all . . . “We don't have sex and we don't make love,” she would say, “we fuck. And that's damn sure something to be proud of at our age.” And it was. They fucked in her flower garden, on the kitchen table, in the back seat of the Buick Century as it sat parked in the garage. Once, they had snuck out of a meeting at the JCCA and fucked in the front row of the empty synagogue under the watchful eye of Yahweh. She loved stuff like that, mischief, misconduct, disrespect, and he loved her for loving it.

So she had lived like a teenager, and so she had died like one: unexpectedly, without the luxuries of time and preparation. Without saying goodbye. Nodder had come home one day from his afternoon walk to find the car missing. A note on the garage door, where she always left them, informed him that she'd gone down to the store to pick up a few things to cook for dinner. It was signed, as always, with a strange new pseudonym: Penny Knollwood. She used a different name every time. Jessie Jezebel, Kortni DeVon, Heather Salamander. Never repeated one, not once in fifty years. They always made him smile.

He sat down in his tattered La-Z-Boy, flipped on the TV, and fell promptly asleep. His dreams were full of dim hallways and pounding footsteps. He awoke slicked in sweat, a strange taste in his mouth like the ashes of an extinguished fire. Outside, the sun had dipped below the horizon, and the orange afterglow was quickly fading to dusk. He shook off the last clinging strands of sleep and cocked his head, listening for the sounds of her. There should have been pots and pans clanking out an awkward melody in the kitchen, the low hiss of the stove, the radio turned to the oldies station. There were none of these noises. The house was sepulchrally silent.

He rose from the chair, the joints in his knees going off like M-80s, and before there was even time for the liquid unease that had begun to form at the base of his brain to solidify, the phone was ringing. It was an ancient, matte black rotary-dial with a full-bodied mechanical ring, a phone she had insisted on keeping even as the new cordless models with the built-in answering machines became cheaper and cheaper. “I like the way it sounds,” she had said. “I don't want any digital twitters.”

He picked it up. The voice on the other end was flat and anonymous, the practiced monotone of a man who has spent his life doling out bad news to folks he'd never make eye contact with. “Sir,” asked the voice, “are you the owner of a silver 1985 Buick Century?”

There was nothing spectacular about the accident. No drunk driver, no hairpin turn, no rain, no deer running out into the middle of the road. She had been driving down Olive on her way to the grocery store and simply. . . lost control. “Just one of those things,” an officer had told him when he arrived at the scene. “Ain't no rhyme or reason to it. Makes you feel any better, she was wearin' her seat belt.” Oh yes sir. That makes me feel just fine and fucking dandy.

The Buick had swerved to the right, dove into a ditch, and collided head-on with an oak tree as thick as a grain silo. She was thrown from the car, the seat belt shearing straight through her left arm, the windshield shattering her skull, the car crumpling like an accordion. The police had tried to keep Nodder away from the accident, but he pushed past them, walked right up to the tree and kicked it as hard as he could. Pain bloomed up from his toes and coursed through his leg, and the tree just stood there, arms crossed, staring down at him. It's not my fault, old man, the tree seemed to be saying, so he kicked it again. And again. And again. That was when someone had grabbed him under the armpits and dragged him away, his leg still swinging out uncontrollably, three words running through his mind in an interminable loop: not like this not like this not like this not like this not like this.

A seventy-four-year-old woman killed in a car wreck. The very idea of it filled him with a pummeling rage. A rage that cauterized his sadness. That settled in behind his eyeballs and throbbed there, red and blistering. That never left.

In the months after, alone in the house that now seemed to have developed an aural quality of absence, an echo where there should have been another body, Nodder began to experience a slippage. That was the only word he could find to describe it. It was as if her death, the circumstances of it, the suddenness, had pulled from him a linchpin, and without it his parts were slowly beginning to fall out of sync. There was, he thought, an incredible balancing act within a person. Everything had to be timed, rhythmic, churning along to the steady metronome of the heart. His machine was off time. Things were starting to get blurry around the edges.

It began with the dreams. All his life, Nodder had been subject to vivid, powerful dreams, dreams that would stick with him for the rest of the day, that he could call to mind with the clarity of film running through his head. Now, he couldn't remember a single one. He woke up mornings with the odd sensation that his waking was in fact his falling asleep, that his life had become the dream. The things that had once seemed so familiar to him took on an air of mystery, and he found himself wandering the house in a daze, like a shipwrecked man who has returned from a long stay on an isolated island. One morning he spent almost two hours inspecting the toaster, pushing its lever down and watching it slowly creep back up, observing the coils as they warmed and oranged, running his fingers over the dents and imperfections in the metal. He had never seen this toaster before, he was sure of it, yet certainly it had to be the same toaster that had sat stoutly on the counter for years, a gift from a friend whose name he could no longer recall. He knew this, yes, but he could not believe it. He would recognize that toaster. Perhaps someone had come in the night and replaced it without his knowing. Perhaps they had taken everything, the furniture, the appliances, the carpets, the wallpaper, and replaced them all with near-identical stand-ins. The thought terrified him.

Then there were his afternoon walks. Once he'd hit fifty, his doctor had told him that he needed at least an hour of exercise per day, just to keep the ol' blood pumping. So Nodder started walking. As the years passed and he honed his route (Meadow Lake to Dautel, Dautel to Graser, Graser through Rainbow Village park, from the park onto Weatherby, Weatherby to Barbary, Barbary to Momarte, Momarte to Niehaus, Niehaus back to Meadow Lake), those walks became his favorite part of the day. Even in the winter, when the sun was little more than a sliver of dull alloy at the farthest corner of the sky, and the temperature crackled below zero, Nodder would walk. There was something about the beat of his footfalls, the whistling of breath through his nostrils, the street names flowing together like some sort of abstract poetry, that served to clear his head of all thoughts. But as the slippage began to take hold, and the rage blossomed like a poisonous flower, those walks turned sinister on him. It seemed that suddenly the world was much sharper than he remembered it to be. There were angles everywhere, and corners, points and tips and tines and barbs. His eyes would ache after only a few minutes of looking at it all, and he would turn around and shuffle back to the house, head down, hands clenched in quivering fists. He would bolt the door behind him, lock the windows and draw the curtains, convinced that soon enough that sharpness would make its way into his home and drive him instantly mad.

Without the walks to calm him, Nodder felt something immense and terrible building up in his chest. One evening in early spring he went to the cellar, down the crude wooden steps onto the hard-packed dirt floor, and dug out his old Remington Model 1100 12-gauge shotgun. The wooden stock was rough with age and disuse, and the barrel had rusted slightly in the perpetual damp of the cellar, but the gun still felt good pressed up against his shoulder. Felt damn good. He found a box of shells and loaded them in, pleased with the way they fit so smoothly, like the world's simplest puzzle. After the gun was loaded, Nodder flipped it around and inserted the barrel into his mouth. It was cold as a dead kiss against his tongue and tasted only vaguely metallic, like blood. He left it there for a moment, a lurid, hideous smile breaking big across his lips, before deciding that this was not the final piece of the puzzle. Nevertheless, when he pulled the chain on the single bulb that hung from the ceiling and made his way back upstairs, he brought the gun with him. He placed it at the foot of his bed, still loaded, and went to sleep. The last thought that passed through his head before he entered that dreamless darkness was, at least it's here, just in case. In case of what, he did not know.

The next morning, he looked at the gun and felt a wave of nausea slam through his guts. “You're losing it,” he said aloud. “You're slipping right on over the edge.” He went to the small safe under the bathroom sink and removed 3,000 dollars in neatly stacked twenty-dollar bills. He'd never trusted banks, always felt the need to keep at least some of his money where he could see it, touch it, run away with it if he had to. It was one of the few things he had ever really fought with her about; she couldn't stand having that much cash around the house. He put the money into his red duffle bag, slung it over his shoulder, and walked the three miles over to Dave Gibli's used car lot. After an hour of browsing, he drove off the lot in a beat-down '83 Sedan DeVille, eggshell white with matching leather seats. The car smelled mostly of cigarettes, though there were faint undertones of sweat and stale french fries. The driver's seat was warped and sunken, bits of foam peeking out from beneath the cracked leather like bone. Nodder liked it the minute he sat down behind the wheel.

From that day on, the afternoon walk became the afternoon drive. He would head out around two o'clock and wouldn't stop until the sun began to leak from the sky, in towns whose names slipped through his head like snakes through wet grass: Rolla, Neosho, Eureka, Chesterfield, Wright City. The rides were long and soporific, and for the first time since he had kicked the tree he could feel some of his anger, some of his slippage, receding. Often he would pull off the interstate and realize he had no memory of the past few hours at all. Rather than frightening him, these blank spots were his only relief, and he tried to hold onto them for as long as he could. Maybe, he thought, if I could just drive forever, I could forget myself completely.

When evening fell, he would cruise through whatever small town had been closest to the highway until he found the local diner that looked the least charming, a place where the waitresses were black-and-blue and the neon signs were half burnt-out. He ordered the same thing every time, a cup of coffee and a side of hash browns, and as he sat there sipping the coffee he could actually feel the rage pumping back through him. It started as a trembling in his toes and worked its way up through his legs to his stomach. Please just stop there. Ican handle you there. Please don't go any further. But of course it did, and eventually its warmth would slither up the back of his neck and soak over his head, and he was lost in it, flailing, unable to stay afloat. If there were any girls in the place, sitting six to a booth and giggling over their grilled cheese sandwiches, he would stare at them and imagine their bodies twisted and splintered in the flaming wreckage of fatal car accidents. He wondered how many of these nameless girls he would sacrifice to have her back. The answer was as many as it would take.

Sometimes after dinner he stopped at a bar and had a drink while some shitkicker jukebox pounded out the kind of honky-tonk country crap he'd always hated. Sometimes he just got in the DeVille and went home. Driving back, he would talk to her, though he knew he was only talking to himself. It was something he'd never done before the drives started. The things he said were feeble and maudlin, and he wished he could take them back just in case she might actually be listening. When he got to the house, he would park the car in the driveway and sit on the hood, listening to the engine tick-tick-ticking itself to sleep. He would look up at the sky. He would make silly, meaningless deals with the sky. If that cloud moves from in front of the moon, it means she's out there somewhere. Come on. Come on. Move, goddammit. MOVE! And he would stay outside until the cloud drifted in the wind and the moon shone down knife-cold and merciless, and he would know that it had nothing to do with her. Clouds float through the sky at their leisure, and the moon shines regardless of ghosts, and the only ghosts out there anyway are the stars, shining down dead through millennia, haunting the sky with their dumb, unblinking eyes.

* * *

The bar was called Kathy's Cozy Up, just five stools and a 26-inch Trinitron suspended from the wall. Nodder sat there, nursing a Jack Daniel's, trying to remember the name of the town he was in. Effingham, maybe, or Matoon. He supposed it didn't matter. Wherever Iam, that's where Iam, he thought. The words had a nice flow to them, and he began murmuring them under his breath like some nonsensical conjuration: Wherever Iam, that's where Iam. Wherever Iam, that's where Iam. Occupying the stool on his right was the red duffle bag. He looked over at it occasionally, as if assuring himself that it hadn't sprouted legs and walked off on him. He was on his fifth drink. “Slippage,” he said loudly. “That's what it is. Everything's just . . . slipping away from me.”

The Trinitron on the wall was turned to ESPN, where Brett Favre sat in front of a microphone wiping tears from his gray-stubbled cheeks. The volume was turned down to make way for the jukebox. Nodder shook his head slowly back and forth. Favre was finally giving it up. Hard to believe. Hard to believe indeed. “I always liked the guy,” Nodder said to no one in particular. “You could see it in his eyes that he meant well.”

The bartender, a sweet brunette with tight lips and a wide forehead, touched him lightly on the arm.

“Everything alright, sugar?”

Nodder realized he, too, was crying. Jesus, he thought, am I crying over Brett Favre? He couldn't tell.

“Just fine, thank you.”

“Don't look too fine.” She smiled at him the way the young always smile at the old, genuine but distant, a smile to make clear the canyon of decades between them. He smiled back and thought he saw her flinch away from it. “You just let me know when you need a refill.”

“I certainly will.”

Nodder turned back to the Trinitron. Favre was running a hand through his close-cropped hair, his bottom lip quaking, unable to bring his eyes up to meet the cameras. “It's the end of an era,” said Nodder, and as he spoke Favre raised his head and stared out at him through the matrix of pixels.

“Well,” said Favre, his comfortable, chewy drawl ringing in Nodder's ears, “you could call it ‘Apocalypse,’ or you could call it ‘The Reckoning,’ but it ain't so much a biblical thing. It ain't like all the souls are gonna rise from the ground and go burning off into the sky. Nothin' so clean as that. But it is the end of times, and you better not get any grand ideas. Because in a few years, there ain't gonna be no sign of us left 'cept for the bridges and the dams, and maybe not even them. Concrete ain't much more permanent than bone when you get right down to it. It's all dust and dirt, deep down.”

Nodder slugged back the rest of his drink and rubbed his chin. Favre's eyes were still fixed on him. Eyeballs threaded on a string, thought Nodder, not knowing where it came from.

“So what do you suggest we do?” Nodder asked. “How the hell are we supposed to deal with something like that? When everything that matters is just dust and dirt?” The bartender shot a glance in his direction. She looked nervous.

“I guess what I'm trying to say,” Favre said, tears dribbling down his beard, “is that it's best to just let go. No sense packing your bags or givin' your dog one last pat on the head. That's only gonna make it worse. Just. . . let it all go. There's a fire comin', and its flames are white like angels' wings, but at the tips they glow redder than a Mississippi sunset, and that fire's gonna lay us all down. It's gonna tuck us in and turn out the lights and poof. Put us right to bed.”

Nodder drew the back of his hand across his eyes. He was really crying now. “That's no kind of answer,” he said. “I can't just let it all go. I mean, I tried. I really did. But it keeps on coming back to me. It is me.”

Favre shot him a sly wink. Nodder didn't know what to make of it.

“Not all of us can let go,” said Favre. “Some folks, they gotta go out with a big, bad bang. And all I'm gonna say to them is: If you're gonna do it, you better do it soon.”

The bartender walked over and shut off the Trinitron. Then she turned to Nodder and gave him that smile again. This time he felt it like a knuckle jammed into his spine.

“We're about to be closing up,” she said, her voice betraying her smile. She sounded scared.

“Well I'll just be getting out of here, then.” Nodder raised his empty glass to her in a toast. “To Penny Knollwood,” he said, and hurled it past her shoulder where it exploded against the wall.

“What the hell?” She stood there, frozen, her arms limp at her sides. Nodder reached over and grabbed the duffle bag. He unzipped it and pulled out the Remington. The bartender's face snapped into a rictus of fear.

“It's the end of times, sweetheart,” he said, and the words came off his tongue like shrapnel from a grenade. “Don't bother packing your bags.”

When the gun bucked in his arms, it was gentle as a baby's kick.

Outside, he looked up at the sky, and there was that machete-blade moon. Seeing it, Nodder felt awash with heat, with fury, and he dropped the shotgun to the asphalt.

“She's not up there!” he shouted, the cables in his neck bulging, his eyes lunatic-bright. “She's not! So just stop it already!”

And then he threw a punch. He could feel his arm stretching, extending, as if his bones had gone to taffy. He watched as that arm, which no longer seemed to belong to him, flew up into the sky like a wild prayer. There was a faint burst of light high above as his fist went sizzling through the atmosphere, a meteor in reverse, and then a deafening blast as it connected with the moon. He felt the impact of the punch reverberate down through his arm, and when it reached his shoulder it knocked him flat. His arm came snapping back into place like a giant, fleshy rubber band. He looked up again just in time to see the moon shatter into a million pieces. It came raining down around him like sharp, fluorescent snow, and with that Nodder picked up the shotgun, tucked it under his arm, and walked off toward the DeVille.

There was plenty of time left for a man to go out with a big, bad bang. He planned on doing just that.