two moons (1/2)
title: two moons (1/2)
word count: 3336 (6237 overall)
summary: jensen occupies herself with the business of a stranger who only returns to that phone booth every two years and a day
---
“We’re both looking at the same moon, in the same world.
We’re connected to reality by the same line.
All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.”
- Haruki Murakami
---
Jensen lived in a superstitious town on the side of a highway where the only interruption of the straight road was the emergency phone booth the town had placed by the highway. At four years old, she was barely old enough to understand the concept of danger, let alone know when she was in it. She was, however, old enough to think her parents knew everything and they were always right. When they told her to never talk to strangers, they had one particular person in mind, but she didn't know that. She accepted their warning without question.
Exactly two years later, they told her vague stories of a demon boy, with dark, untidy hair and even darker, empty eyes. The tale was popular in their little town that was as in the middle of nowhere as a town could get. They told her to stay home until they said it was safe to go outside again.
The next night, Jensen looked out the window and saw a tall figure stumbling down the highway.
(She didn't know that the nearest town was very, very far away and this man didn't have a car.)
The man slipped into the emergency phone booth, and Jensen could see his shadow through the clouded windows.
Jensen saw him exit the booth the next morning. She had been woken by the sound of her siblings crowding around the window to watch the demon boy leave.
The moons were disappearing and the sun was rising.
He wouldn't be back for two years and a day.
---
“I miss you.”
“I know. I miss you too.”
---
When Jensen was eight, she started learning basic astronomy in school. She learned about the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and their own planet Earth.
Outside of the classroom, her classmates spoke of a second moon in hushed voices, saying it was the appearance of the moon which signified the appearance of the demon boy.
Her parents said it was only a rumour. No one had ever seen a moon that didn’t belong in the night sky on the nights the demon boy appeared. There was no proof of one.
Jensen was curious about the demon boy, because she’d seen him. He didn’t seem so bad at all. He only went to the phone booth, and left again in the morning, leaving behind nothing.
She wondered who he was calling.
---
“I’ll be back one day.”
“Don’t overwork yourself.”
---
When Jensen was ten, she learned more about space (planets and stars and faraway galaxies beyond human imagination), and her parents told her more about the demon boy.
The demon boy had been appearing for the last fourteen years - so maybe he wasn’t really a boy anymore, but it didn’t seem like he ever aged - and he always closed himself in the phone booth. He would stay there until the moon went down, and the sun would start peeking over the horizon. Then he would walk back where he came from, wherever that was; far, far away down the highway.
People liked to gossip; they come up with their own theories surrounding the demon boy and those with very straightforward, unimaginative minds would deny the existence of the demon boy vehemently. Yes, there was a boy - that was undeniable. But he wasn’t a demon.
Without fail, the demon boy always appeared after two years and a day. Seven hundred thirty one days, seventeen thousand five hundred forty four hours, no more, no less. No one could figure out the significance of the number of days and hours, but it was always constant. And so the townspeople would lock themselves into their houses, because the mystery the stranger brought to their little town was unwelcome.
Before the sun rose, Jensen slipped out of her bed. Watching the demon boy exit the phone booth had long since lost its appeal for her siblings to huddle by the window to observe. She pulled on her shoes - she didn’t have socks on - and padded out the front door, closing it gently behind her.
“Good morning.”
Jensen hadn’t seen him leave the phone booth. She was just standing outside it, but she hadn’t seen the demon boy leave the phone booth and face her with a serene, carefully composed expression on his face.
“Good morning,” she replied. Her parents taught her to be polite, and she didn’t even feel like she was talking to a stranger, when she was. (Don’t talk to strangers, Jensen.)
The demon boy nodded, and Jensen realized something was off about his expression; something with his eyes didn’t match the relaxed stance the rest of his body took on. The problem was his dark, empty eyes.
If Jensen had been older, she would have had the capacity in her brain to know that this stranger, the one walking away now, the one labelled the demon boy, was yes, a boy, and a young one, by adult standards, he did have black hair that swept over his eyebrows into his empty, bottomless eyes the colour of midnight, and he was undeniably beautiful.
---
“The moon is fading. It’s starting to die.”
“I’ll be back before it’s gone, then.”
---
As Jensen advanced into adolescence, she slept less, spending her nights instead checking the notebook she kept under her pillow. The first page had one tally mark for each passing day, sectioned into groups of five - and she spent several minutes every night scanning every tally mark, and then recounting them.
Seven hundred thirty marks.
She grabbed a pencil from the desk across the room and messily marked the page.
Seven hundred thirty one.
The demon boy was due back that night.
The rest of her family retreated to their bedrooms with the routine goodnights and wishes for sweet dreams and subtly disguised warnings to not step outside the house. Jensen accepted the first two, and ignored the last.
Jensen approached the phone booth at the same time as the demon boy. He’d gotten taller over the last couple years, like she did. He looked like he had aged much more, yet he still looked as youthful as ever. Though his eyes were the same and he was still beautiful. With pleasant realization, Jensen thought his hair looked like the boy who offered to share his cookies with her the week before. (It was after that incident, that she began to see that classmate in a different light.)
“You look different,” she said.
“You do, too.”
“Why do you come here?”
The demon boy tilted his head curiously, his eyebrows bending in slightly over his nose. “What do you mean?”
“Every two years - and a day. Seven hundred thirty one days. You’re always here.” Jensen gestured roughly to the town. “They call you the demon boy.”
He blinked. “Yes, I am.” He didn’t specify which of her statements he was referring to. (He didn’t know that anyone had counted the time between his appearances. He also didn’t know they called him demon boy.)
“Why?” She didn’t specify what she was referring to either.
The demon boy cast a look - it seemed almost longing - at the phone booth, then back to her. “Come back in the morning.” With a quick nod of acknowledgement, he gracefully concealed himself inside the enclosure without waiting for an answer.
Jensen didn’t ask a single question - there was no point talking to thin air - and trudged home. Maybe she’d sleep and wake up early then, so she’d come back before the demon boy left. Because she was so undeniably curious, and the demon boy wasn’t very demon-like at all.
---
“One of the townspeople came to talk to me tonight.”
“Oh? After all this time?”
“A girl - eleven or twelve, maybe. She wants to know who I am. They call me a demon boy here.”
“Boy? You’re not much of a boy.”
“In this world I am.”
---
Jensen went back in the morning, still twelve, and stopped the demon boy with shock when he closed the door to the booth behind him. He hadn’t expected her to return.
They sat on the dry ground on the highway side - away from prying eyes of the townspeople and because no one ever came down this stretch of highway - and Jensen was distracted enough not to worry about how dirty her pajamas were getting.
Jensen learned about galaxies and stars and planets that were very, very far away from humanity's greedy fingers from a demon boy who spoke with such enthusiasm and sincerity, that there wasn't even a remote idea in Jensen's head that it could all be a fabrication, a creative world of twisted words and hybrids of everything she knows. A world that, as far as the demon boy knew, was falling apart. A world that had everything and everyone he wants to be near again, but he had left behind to try to find some sort of salvation on this planet.
His planet had its own moon, just like Jensen’s planet. His moon, he said, was silver, and bright, somehow illuminating their planet on its own. Not like the human moon - a faded sort of yellow, riddled with craters and only reflecting light from their sun. His moon was better, he thought. Jensen thought his moon sounded much better, too.
The demon boy only came to the phone booth to make calls - Jensen had been right about that. But he could only connect to the planet he wanted when the paths of the two moons intersected the first time of the night, and they appeared in the same sky until they crossed again. (That’s when the overlap between the worlds would disappear, and fade away until the orbits crossed again.)
(He wasn’t worried that she would tell anyone. If she did, they would never believe her, and if anyone ever knew she’d approached him, they’d never let her come back to see him. The ever elusive and mysterious demon boy.)
“It’s probably the same with any other planet,” he mused carefully. “You can call it, so long as the moons’ are in the same sky. Or maybe it’s different for planets with multiple moons. I don’t know.” He looked down at his thumbs and fiddled them a bit, “The paths I want crossed only cross about every two years. Every seven hundred thirty one days.” He looked at Jensen warily, “That’s why I’m here.”
“Who is it you’re calling?”
The boy hesitated for the briefest of seconds. “Someone back home.”
Not a demon, she concluded when he went off down the highway. She noticed he followed the white line on the edge of the road, every step parallel to the line. The demon boy was not a demon, just a boy, but he was most definitely not human.
---
“The moon is dying. Come home.”
“I’m trying, I’m trying.”
---
When Jensen was fourteen, she watched from the window as the boy stepped into the phone booth, and listened as someone behind her murmured some dark words about the demon boy. Not a demon, she reminded herself, but not human.
Jensen went to meet him in the morning. He recognized her and - if the surprised, yet somehow resigned expression on his face meant anything - he hadn’t expected her to remember him, let alone return. Still, he accepted her company without complaint.
“Can you tell me more?” she asked carefully, sitting down. (Two years ago, when she had gotten home, she’d written down everything she could remember in her notebook and started a new page of tally marks.)
The boy remembered where he’d left off, and picked up his story again, only casually mentioning that someone. “I’m working here, on this planet, trying to find something to send home; to save our home. Then I can go back, and be with everyone and everything I left behind.”
“What if you don’t find it?”
The boy’s gaze shifted and darkened - Jensen marvelled at this, because his eyes were already so dark. “I have to. I have no other choice.”
“Are there others? Looking for something?”
“I think so. I haven’t had contact with any of them.” The moon is dying, he wanted to say, some of them might be heading back now anyways, to die with their families at home.
“Oh.”
Or trying to. There might not be enough energy for travel.
“Couldn’t you go back anyways?”
“I could,” he conceded, “but then there’s no point. We’d just waste away with the planet then. Deal with the consequences of our carelessness.”
“Oh,” Jensen blinked. “That’s horrible. I can’t imagine.”
You’re doing the same thing to your planet. You have no place to be sympathetic about mine.
---
“The moon is dying.”
“I know. What if you came here?”
“You know I can’t.”
“But what if-”
“I can’t. Earth - it isn’t for me.”
---
Somewhere between when Jensen was fourteen and when she was sixteen, she slipped in and out of her first relationship and the boys she knew had slipped in and out of their phase of alien conspiracies, and faraway planets populated with the strangest things. Some onlookers put it down to a phase, a simple delirious belief that would make room for more rational thoughts in the near future. Some others just watched, choosing not to believe in anything.
But what if, the boys insisted adamantly, what if they’re already here? What if aliens already infiltrated the planet and they’re plotting to take over our world and humanity?
Close, Jensen thought to herself. She didn’t believe the majority of the things they said, because those little green creatures with massive heads didn’t match her image. But the words the skeptics said got to her - what if she was putting her otherworldly beliefs into someone who was just telling her stories? Simple fabrications? What then?
The idea of there being something else in the universe wasn’t too farfetched - it was an endless space - but what if the demon boy, who isn’t a demon, is just a human who likes playing with minds and calling his friends from obscure places?
She wanted to believe him anyways, and allowed herself thoughts of yes, aliens are already here. But they’re just trying to save themselves.
She found it so difficult to think of a species willing to destroy another one to save themselves.
(But really, what did she know?)
Her doubts were recorded into that little book. She’d bought a new one - a nice one bound with leather, and spent hours meticulously transferring everything she’d written before into it. She kept it with her, and never let anyone touch it.
Jensen still went to meet the boy the morning after the seven hundred thirty first tally mark was drawn.
“It’s my birthday tomorrow.”
“Happy birthday, then.”
“I’ll be seventeen.”
The boy hummed in acknowledgement.
“How old are you?”
“In human years?”
“I guess.”
He paused, “In human years, I’d be a lot older than I look. In my thirties, maybe. Early forties.” Maybe it wasn’t fair to call him a boy anymore.
“You look like you’d be twenty, maybe. You don’t look so different at all, over these last few years. That’s why people think you’re a demon.” Demon boy.
“I’d be quite old, at home, actually. That’s the problem. People lived too long, and didn’t look it, and there weren’t enough resources to save everyone who needed help.” He’s most definitely not just a boy.
“So who got the help?”
“Whoever got to it first,” the boy (or man, now) sighed. “That’s the problem. You can’t be completely equal, or everyone will suffer. But you can’t be the opposite, because everyone will still suffer. It became survival of the fittest.”
“But what happened?”
The man smiled painfully, “I’m not entirely sure.”
“Are you trying to take Earth’s resources, then? To send home? Earth is overpopulated too. We don’t have enough either.” Jensen had a shocking flashback to everything those boys had said. Planning to overtake the human race.
He laughed dryly. “No, Earth has more than enough resources. You just don’t use them properly. That’s not it, anyways. That would be a last resort, most likely.” He blinked at the sky, the stars reflected back in his eyes. “We’ve heard stories. Others, from other planets who have been here before us to save themselves, and beings that belong here but aren’t human that even you humans don’t know about.”
“You don’t have those?”
“Our planets dying, remember? They’ve all left.”
Jensen stayed silent, sifting through the dirt and gravel at the side of the road with her fingernails. What did she know? Did she believe in those things - is he referring to mythology? Like all the many, separate, possibly contradicting higher beings so many people believed in? And if he was, how could he have hope he could find them, if they even existed?
“Why hasn’t everyone left then?”
“A lot of them don’t want to.” His voice became strained, his pleasant tone forced. “They’d rather die at home than uproot everything.” Jensen didn’t press on the matter. “Good luck, then,” she said stiffly.
He looked at her for a long moment. “You don’t believe me anymore, do you?”
Jensen blinked in surprise at his blunt words, “What do you-”
“It was about time, anyways.” The man leaned back until his head thudded lightly against the phone booth. “The things I told you are pretty hard to believe, aren’t they? Either way,” he moved forward again, clasping his hands and pressing his elbows to his knees, “I won’t be coming back much longer. A few more times, if I’m lucky.”
“What do you mean?” It was the same question he had interrupted just a few moments earlier, but she wanted a different answer this time.
“The moon is dying - my moon. Its light energy is fading out. Eventually, I won’t be able to call home anymore.” Because the moon will be dead. And the planet will waste away.
To your ‘someone back home,’ Jensen thought neutrally. It was implied, and as close to factual as an implication could be. “Why don’t you go home then?”
His eyes flashed. “I want to find something - I don’t want to go home empty-handed.”
“But don’t you use that overlap for traveling too?” At his surprised look, she tacked on, “It just makes sense. If you can’t call…” she trailed off, unsure of how to word her thoughts.
“I can’t go home and disappoint h-everyone.”
Jensen raised an eyebrow. The man was still thinking about that one person. “Why haven’t you ever told me anything about her?”
“It’s not important.” His fist clenched in the corner of Jensen’s eye.
“It must be,” Jensen persisted, “if you come here to call them every two years.”
“It’s not any of your business.”
Jensen stayed silent for several long minutes. The sun was higher in the sky, boring into their eyes, when she spoke again. “Why didn’t they come with you?”
“Didn’t want to,” he said curtly. “He said Earth wasn’t for him.”
Oh.
They sat there for a while longer, legs stretched out towards the empty highway, backs pressed against the phone booth with faded paint curling up at the corners. Squinting into the rising sun was uncomfortable, but not so much that they had to look away.
Jensen thought she heard someone calling her name. The red and yellow streaks in the sky had blended into a faded blue, and time was passing at an undiscernible speed. Maybe she was hearing things.
The man pushed himself onto his feet, and brushed dirt from his hands. Jensen scrambled up next to him, wiping smudges off her jeans.
“Happy birthday,” the man said again. “Early birthday,” he corrected.
Jensen nodded, “Thank you. I’ll see you in a few years.”
The man shrugged, and started away down the highway. Jensen noticed his feet still followed the line at the side of the highway.
Old habits die hard.
part two