Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (24 page)

He walked away, stopping and bending like a jackknife to get under the line of yellow police tape that surrounded the house.

I waited around a little while longer, until I saw some kids trying to break into the news truck. I chased them away and left the scene.

I went back to the station, put up my tapes and my scripts for the morning drive-time newscasts, for poor Larry to arrange and make sense of, and all the while I was picturing the startled listeners—those much-coveted a.m. drive-time commuters waking up to hear the brutal, sad news of children gunned down, right here, right in their own world.

ELLA WASN'T ON THE
couch when I got home. She was already upstairs asleep. Lucky the Dog was curled up on his bed, keeping warm. He looked at me, let out a moaning yawn, and tucked his nose down again between his paws.

Hanging my windbreaker in the front closet, I could hear the wave machine that we'd just bought for Rusty's room. Rusty was maybe the only eight-year-old insomniac on record. It wasn't just monsters under his bed and all the standard stuff that keeps kids awake at night—bogeymen, fear of sudden death, a noise in the wall, a light in the window. He would sit in bed awake, looking out the window, eyes frozen and wide with worry. So we bought the lull and crash of an electronic sea to accompany him to sleep, and it seemed to be working fairly well. He'd slept through a couple of nights in a row.

I dropped a metal hanger on the tile floor, then scrambled to pick up the jacket and put it away. Afraid of waking Rusty from his fragile dreams, I left the closet door open. I didn't want the squeaking tracks of the door to rouse him.

And then, suddenly—yes, that's the only way I can describe it: suddenly—my careful quietness irritated me. Maybe I was still reeling from my shift, crazed from breathing the stale and sticky air of urban crime scenes, but I found myself filled with anger. In the kitchen, when I opened the oven door to find some leftover pizza warmed to a hard half circle, I shut the door with a satisfying, metallic thud. A few minutes later, I was eating the old pizza in front of a not-so-softly-tuned television and drinking my second beer when I heard Rusty call for Ella across the hall. Then Nina began squalling from her crib. I pressed the mute button on the remote control.

I heard Ella groan and get out of bed, the squeaking of the tired mattress, the slap of her slippers. "Michael," she called from the bedroom. "Is that you? Are you home?"

I went to the edge of the staircase and peered up into the dark hallway. Then I went back to the foyer, opened the front door, and left the house.

WHERE DO YOU GO
at three in the morning, when you are a grown man and you can't sleep and the walls of your house seem so close and confining that, as hard as you try to want to, you cannot go up the stairs and get into bed with your wife—cannot, irrationally and without explanation, go up the steps and hold your own crying baby?

I didn't know, so I just started walking.

Even at that late hour, the air was still and thick. Mosquitoes landed on my exposed neck as I walked. My shirt was already damp from working all night, and it stuck to my back. It had been a few years since I walked around this neighborhood in the middle of the night. And I had not snuck out of the house to do it since I was much younger, living in the basement of the house where now I lived with my family.

Maybe it was the windless, humid air, but the neighborhood felt heavier and more tired than I remembered it. I was still holding a bottle of beer, and I pressed it against my forehead. I looked around. The houses that had once seemed so sturdy and solid looked weak and worn out. The lawns were patchy with crabgrass and weeds, driveways sagging and broken. Grit and trash lined the sides of the streets, and in the heat, the night smelled vaguely of garbage and burning tires.

I lived in a dump.

I walked up Warren Avenue, following the nearly empty street and its flashing yellow lights past the darkened neon signs and marquees for pizza shops, party stores, and check-cashing places. Some of the signs were in Arabic as well as English now, and here and there, gang tags and anti-Bush slogans marked the brick walls alongside the stores.

I came to the parking lot that used to belong to the Black Lantern and now belonged to Uncle Al's, the falafel joint that had replaced our neighborhood bar. A few old-timers, Ukrainians and Poles and Greeks, still met there every afternoon for coffee as if nothing had changed.

For the first time that night I looked at the moon as I walked, and this is when I felt my feet leave the earth: I started walking a few inches off of the ground, as if I were following some invisible staircase.

Within a few seconds, I was six or seven inches off the ground, and then, as quickly as it happened, I stumbled on nothing, some invisible obstacle in the air, and landed hard on the ground, rolling my left ankle.

I sat on the asphalt for a minute, my ankle starting to pulse and the palms of my hands raw and smarting from my landing.

As I tried to get to my feet in the darkness, still dazed, I saw a shadow of a man approaching. He was large, with wild curly hair. It was dark, but he appeared to be shirtless.

Ever since I have become a father, I have been somewhat afraid of the night. In the darkness, whether I am walking through my own neighborhood or driving down a stretch of rural highway, or even peering out my own front window into the darkened yard, I have had the sense that something, someone, is out there in the shadows, prowling and stalking, waiting. In the night, when I can't sleep, my heart tends to race and I imagine the worst scenarios, people coming to harm my family, breaking down the doors and overpowering me, hurting my wife and children. This is one reason I agreed to the night shift at the radio station. I was having trouble sleeping anyway, and thought some months spent awake and working in the darkest hours of the twenty-four might help me overcome my fear.

The man stopped in front of me and looked down. It was Nick.

He was wearing a pair of running shoes and blue jeans and nothing else. He said, "Mikey, what the fuck are you doing on the ground?"

THAT NIGHT, NICK HAD
been up late in his garage, as had become his habit that summer. He was drinking beer and listening to Springsteen's
Nebraska
album—best fucking album of all time, he said—when he went to change the spark plugs in his truck. It occurred to him as he worked his wrench that he hated the old pickup truck in front of him. It looked ridiculous, he said. He couldn't stand to look at it anymore, with its rusty extended cab, jacked-up all-terrain tires, and ladder rack, the sign that said
KOZAK'S SUN & SNOW.
All that he had intended to do was change the spark plugs, he said, but the idea of doing any more maintenance on the old engine suddenly infuriated him. He wanted a new truck, but of course, he and Sunny had just had their second child and money was tight. Plus, he said, the economy was shitty and people had started mowing their own lawns and he figured that they'd be clearing their own driveways that winter. Money, he said, was just not available to him.

All he wanted was to do a little preventive maintenance to keep his equipment running through one more winter. And then, he said, he fell apart.

"I was just trying to get through the motions," he said. "And I was kind of praying, you know, not to God or anything, just kind of hoping that we'd get a winter with some heavy goddamn snow, for a change.

"And then I thought of my father, and how he did the same goddamn thing for so long, how he spent every winter for almost two decades hoping there would be enough snow, and there never was, never close to enough snow to pay all the bills."

"And then what?" I asked him.

"I decided I wanted a goddamn Volvo or Saab or something," he said. "I decided I didn't want to be a guy who drives a pickup with a ladder rack anymore."

I laughed. I couldn't tell if he was serious or not.

"And then I started walking," he said. "And I walked here."

IF THE BARS OR
party stores had still been open, Tom Slowinski would have been drunk already. He'd been sober for more than two years by that point; that night, he said, he woke up at midnight, after his wife and kids were fast asleep, and the only thing he wanted was a drink. It had been so long, really, since he wanted anything that it felt almost good to battle an urge like that. He was out of work again, this time because Gorski's Family Hardware on Warren Avenue, where he'd worked as the assistant manager, had shut down a few weeks earlier. He'd just put in his application at a new Home Depot out by the mall, but for the first time since it had opened, the store was not hiring. It was now one of the best jobs in Maple Rock, working at Home Depot, and the slots filled up quickly.

Tom had developed the habit of watching his children as they slept.

"It isn't like I just look in on them," Tom said. "Not normal father-looking-in-on-his-kid stuff. I mean, I poke my head into their room—he had twin boys, one-year-olds—"to check that they were sleeping, but then I get the idea in my head—it's fucked up, I know it—that if I leave them alone they'll stop breathing in their sleep.

"When I was drinking," he said, "I never got thoughts like that. But now—man, it's the only kind of thought I get. So, anyway, I end up, half the night, sitting on a tiny chair that's between their two beds, looking at Joseph for a minute, and then over at James, and I can't believe they are alive and so dependent on me. Usually, I finally fall asleep sitting in that chair, and when I wake up again, it's close to dawn, and I feel like I can finally leave them sleeping alone."

That night, Tom said, after he left them, instead of schlepping down the hall to get into bed with Tanya, he went into the living room.

"I used to keep a bottle of scotch right next to my chair," he said. "So I wouldn't have to get up from there while watching TV. It was easier to stay drunk if I didn't move."

AND THEN THE
others arrived:

Peter Stolowitz had driven in from West Bloomfield, where he worked as a dentist. He said that something in the way the light of the moon came through his window woke him up. He said his wife looked blue in the light. He said he had three kids, and a fourth on the way, and sometimes, when he tried to sleep, all he could imagine was the ocean, and the noise of the waves—imaginary goddamn waves of all things—kept him awake. He had his head down when he arrived; he's the richest and most successful among us, and it made him sheepish and humble in our presence. We only saw him at weddings and funerals, and even on those occasions he'd duck out early.

Walker Van Dyke was working as a third-shift janitor at the mall. He was trying to wash some graffiti off a bathroom mirror when he felt a little odd, like he might faint. He put down his bucket and brush, blaming the fumes of the industrial cleaner he was using, and went outside to the loading docks for some fresh air. After about fifteen minutes, he said, the last thing in the world he could bring himself to do was to go back into the mall and clean that bathroom stall. For a while, he just stood staring at the service entrance, and then looking at the key ring in his hand. And even though he had a whole four hours of work to go, he went to his truck and drove to the parking lot of the old Black Lantern.

Michael Pappas was working at the tire factory. His vision started to cloud up, and then his head spun, and the foreman came over and relieved him. He got sent to the urgent care clinic and the doctors said that maybe he'd developed a migraine.

"But I never had a goddamn migraine in my life," Michael said.

Then he drove straight to the parking lot.

Jimmy Nelson was working on a painting, a still life of a gas can, some red roses, and a bottle of beer. He had been taking an art class at the community college, and painted still lifes in the evenings to help himself relax. He was a manager at UPS, and the stress got to him.

"At night, I don't sleep," he said. "I paint pictures of things."

J.J. Dempsey, who sold life insurance, had been watching the Discovery Channel. It was Shark Week and J. J. said he had been staying up all night for a week, watching the same shark documentaries over and over and over.

"I should have been a marine biologist," he said. "I could've lived in the sea."

Pete Ziggouris was still at the warehouse he owned. He was known around Detroit as the Restaurant King, and he sold food service supplies all over the state. He said that he'd been putting off going home that night, and eventually it was midnight and then it was three and then he finally got into his car, but instead of heading to Novi, where he lived now, he turned the opposite direction and came back to his old neighborhood.

"I just felt like I couldn't do it," he said. "I felt like going home would ruin something for me and my family. Like if I went home without really wanting to go home, something terrible would happen to us."

Kyle Hartley was still driving the same old work van, a 1984 Dodge Ram. We heard him coming from a quarter of a mile away, that troubled engine of his grinding its way down Warren Avenue.

They came from all the corners of our neighborhood, and from the city and its widespread suburbs, they came with hair messy from sleep and faces shadowed by stubble, they came worn out, they came overweight and underweight, they came with their stories, their marriages and divorces, their births and their deaths, their baptisms and their sins, they arrived one and another and another, and the moon, whistling above them, sang the melody we had forgotten to fear, sang the soft and hushed sound of our names.

***

THE QUESTION I HAVE
to ask myself is probably the one you are asking: After all those years—twelve of them—did I really still believe that my father was on the moon? The truth is, of all the men from Maple Rock who disappeared so many years ago, not one of them has ever reappeared. We have done Internet searches and scanned phone books and hired private investigators. The truth is, they're gone. There's no trace.