Someday_ADE by Lynne Tillman Page B

course of twenty-four hours.”
    Vertigo restrained her from standing near expansive plate-glass windows on the upper floors of top-heavy skyscrapers. She teetered on high heels, the foundation undulating beneath her feet, or maybe she was moonstruck again.
    “The Moon is about the same age as Earth. When the Moon was created, it was much closer to Earth and appeared ten times larger in the sky.”
    In Sunday school, he asked his teacher, “Why did God make the Moon without people?” His father told him the moon was too cold for people, it was the dark side of God’s work; then his mother broke in, “Your father’s being funny. Look at the TV. Michael Jackson, honey, he’s moon-walking.”
    “The Moon is full when the Earth is between the Sun and Moon, it is a New Moon when the Moon is between the Sun and the Earth.”
    Nocturnal creatures, cats nightly play and prance, hunting mice, hearing their faint movements behind plaster walls, while their owners beseech moon gods for love and power.
    “The Moon is not a planet, but a satellite of the Earth.”
    Being an identical twin was way cooler than being a virtual one—adopted at the same time, same age, but studies showed virtuals were very different people. He and his brother were unique, even if they looked the same, and he didn’t moon about his lost individuality, the way his twin did.
    “An afterglow—also called post-luminescence—is a wide arc of glowing light that can sometimes be seen high in the western sky at twilight; it is caused by fine particles of dust scattering light in the upper atmosphere.”
    She loved the line, “When a pickpocket meets a saint, he sees only his pockets.” She scratched his right arm and nudged him. “Naked, you don’t have pockets,” he said, “unless you’re a fucking kangaroo.” Moonlight did nothing for this guy.
    “Alan Shepard, when he was on the Moon, hit a golf ball and drove it 2400 feet, nearly half a mile.”
    The moon is made of green cheese, and that crater on it, it’s really a man in the moon. And I haven’t drunk any moonshine.
    “At the full Moon, the times of moonrise and moonset have advanced so that the Moon rises about the same time the Sun sets, and the Moon sets about the same time the sun rises.”
    Their honeymoon, after years of living together, still scared up traditional illusions, intimations of ecstasy, a time out from reality, and when the second night of connubial bliss yawned on, she quoted George Meredith, “Where may these lunatics have gone to spend the Moon.”
    “Ramadan begins with the sighting of the new crescent Moon in the ninth month of the lunar calendar. But whose sighting counts?”
    She read the first sentence of the book: “A white dog bayed at the Moon, a true moon-dog, with moon-blindness, more blind sometimes than others.” The writer must be a lunatic.
    “Dr. Eugene Shoemaker, a geological surveyor who educated the Apollo mission astronauts about craters, never made it to the Moon… He was rejected as an astronaut because of medical problems. After he died, his ashes were placed on board the Lunar Prospector spacecraft on January 6, 1999… and fulfilled Dr. Shoemaker’s last wish.”
    Once in a blue moon, the tides pull at us. They invoke humans to recall primitive ancestors who shouted at the sky, noise-makers who yowled in the dark, beckoning forces and spirits to aid their survival. Now, domesticated dogs guard their masters’ lives, and house cats daydream about orangutans swinging happily from branch to branch. Human beings cannot stop being afraid of the dark or imagining complete freedom.

The Way We Are

    I walked over to the café on a sunny and boring Thursday afternoon in Amsterdam. I found him sitting at the bar, next to a young blond woman and an older man. Their heads were inclined toward each others’ at an angle that indicated drunkenness.
    “Let’s go to a movie.” They all looked up. “Come on,” I said to him, “I’m going nuts