Lunar Park

what the side effects were? His physician had assured us that except for mild gastrointestinal problems there weren’t any, but that’s what they always say, and anyway, without the drugs Robby couldn’t sit still. Without the meds he wouldn’t have been able to visit the planetarium. Without the Ritalin he couldn’t have cruised the mall earlier in the week for a costume. I almost tripped over a skateboard as I entered his room, but the TV’s volume was so high that Robby, who was sitting on the bed, didn’t notice.

Robby’s room had a space-age theme: planet and comet and moon decals were pasted all over the walls suggesting that you were now floating within a night black sky somewhere deep in space. The carpet revealed itself to be a Martian landscape, impressively detailed with canyons and fissures and craters. Spheres made of glass beads dangled from a glittering, savage-looking asteroid that hung from the ceiling above a king-sized art deco bed fitted with a stylish comforter. Along with the ubiquitous Beastie Boys and Limp Bizkit posters were those of various moons: Jupiter’s Io and Saturn’s Titan and the massive rifts of Uranus’s Miranda. The room also contained a minifridge, brightly colored lamps, a leather sofa and a stereo, and one entire wall was a stark black-and-white photo mural of a deserted skate park. Video game cartridges were scattered across the floor in front of the wide- screen TV, now hooked up to PlayStation 2 amid a pile of Simpsons and South Park DVDs. There was a stack of new Tommy Hilfiger shirts on his bed. Japanese action figures lined the bookshelves, which contained mostly wrestling magazines and the entire Harry Potter series, and above the shelves was a large bronze painting of the zodiac. The remains of a Starbucks iced chai sat next to a giant translucent moon that glowed from the computer—Robby’s screensaver.

Robby was staring at Nintendo Power Monthly while slipping on a pair of Puma socks and then he was tying his Nikes. The TV was turned to the WB channel and as I stood in the doorway I watched a raunchy cartoon zap into one of the many commercials pitched toward the kids—one in a series of ads that I hated. A scruffy, gorgeous youth, hands on his skinny-boy hips, stared defiantly into the camera and made the following statements in a blank voice, subtitled beneath him in a blood red scroll: “Why haven’t you become a millionaire yet?” followed by “There is not more to life than money” followed by “You do need to own an island” followed by “You should never sleep because there are no second chances” followed by “It is important to be slick and evocative” followed by “Come with us and make a bundle” followed by “If you aren’t rich you deserve to be humiliated.” And then the commercial ended. That was it. I’d seen this ad numerous times and had yet to figure out what it meant or even what product it was trying to sell.

Robby’s shoulders were slumped and the Hilfiger sweater tied around his waist fell to the floor as he stood up and stretched. There was a young adult book on his pillow called What Once Had Been Earth. My son was eleven and had a Prada wallet and a Stussy camouflage eye patch and a Lacoste sweatband clung to his wrist and he had wanted to start an astronomy club but due to lack of interest among his peers it never materialized and his favorite songs had the word flying in the title, and all of this saddened me. He sprayed Hugo Boss cologne on the back of his hand and didn’t smell it. He still hadn’t noticed that I was standing in the doorway.

“So, Mom wouldn’t let you go as the rap star, huh?” I said.

He whirled around and gasped. And then he regained his composure.

“No,” he said sullenly. He looked shameful, handcuffed.

Something in me broke. I swallowed another mouthful of wine and walked into the room.

“Well, you need platinum blond hair and a wife to beat, and since you don’t have either . . .” I had no idea what my point was; all I wanted to do was make him feel better, but every time I tried, it just seemed to add to his general confusion.

“Yeah, but Sarah’s going as Posh Spice,” he grumbled as I turned down the volume on the television.

“Well, your mom has a problem with the whole rap thing . . .” I drifted off, then caught myself. “So what are you gonna go as?”

“Um, nothing. Nothing, I guess.” A pause. “Maybe an astronaut.”

“Just an astronaut?” I asked. “Can’t you think up something a little more . . . entertaining? Mom said that’s what you were last year.”

He said nothing.

I just shuffled amiably around the vast room and pretended to be interested in a variety of things.

“Is there something wrong?” I heard him ask worriedly. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No, no, no, Robby,” I said. “Of course not. I was just admiring your room.”

“But, um, why?”

“You’re very . . . lucky.”

“I am?”

I hated the way he asked that. “Yeah, I mean, you should be grateful for all the things you have,” I said. “You’re a fortunate kid.”

Wearily, slumped over, his arms at his sides, he looked around the room, unimpressed. “They’re just things, Bret.”

“I mean all I ever wanted was a TV and a lock on my door.” I made a superficial gesture with my hand. “All I wanted to do was play with Legos.”

I stared at the mobile of planets hanging in the middle of the room—the universe floating below the star- studded ceiling. The satellites in orbit, the rockets and astronauts, the spaceships and moon rocks and Mars and the fiery meteorite heading toward Earth and the concerns about extraterrestrial sightings and the need to establish colonies throughout the solar system. It all seemed horribly useless to me because the sky was always black in space and there was no sound on the moon and it was another world where you would always be lost. But I knew that Robby would argue that far beneath its freezing craters and treacherous sand-blown surfaces lay a warm and yielding heart. It took only two and a half seconds for a laser to flash from Earth to the moon and back again, as Robby had told me at that wedding in Nashville so many years ago.

“Yeah, I guess an astronaut,” he said.

“Okay, that’s cool,” I said. “I think that’s a cool costume.”

I finally noticed the helmet on the bed and the accompanying orange NASA suit hanging on a hook in the closet. “I’ll see you downstairs, bud.”

Robby kept staring at me until I left the room and closed the door behind me. I flinched when I heard it lock. A sconce flickered as I walked past it.

8. halloween

It was sweltering—the warmest October 31 on record—but having grown up in Los Angeles I was used to this weather, even though Jayne and the kids were sweating by the time we reached the end of the block. Robby had already taken off his helmet, his hair matted wet, and hooked up with Ashton Allen, who dissed the idea of going as a famous baseball player once the gay rumors surfaced, and whose parents, Mitchell and Nadine, now joined us along with their younger daughter, Zoe, who was trick-or-treating with Sarah and their guardian for the evening, Marta. (Zoe was Hermione Granger and, yes, Sarah was Posh Spice, complete with a T- shirt that read MY BOYFRIEND THINKS I’M STUDYING.) The two boys would wait on the sidewalk and then inspect their sisters’ treats before deciding to hit that particular house or not. I was drunk.

As we walked through the neighborhood I idly recognized the costumes from various video games (boys dressed as Shadow Phoenix Ninja and Mortal Kombat Scorpion) and movies (Anakin Skywalkers with Jedi hair braids wielding light sabers) while Harry Potters roamed Elsinore Lane everywhere you looked—wearing Quidditch robes, and they held broomsticks and magic wands, and there were green lightning bolt scars on their foreheads that glowed in the darkness as they chatted up a number of bloated ogres that I recognized as Shreks. There were no ballerinas or witches or hobos or ghosts—none of the simple homemade costumes from my childhood—and I was getting old and when I saw Nadine take a swig from the bottle of Fiji water she was carrying I suddenly craved another drink badly. Sarah kept running ahead of everyone, gyrating, while Zoe and Marta tried to keep up, and the four parents kept calling out to their children to stay in sight. There was collective murmuring about why there were so many cars this year—a long, slow-moving stream of them—with costumed kids meekly piling out and running up to the houses and then clambering back into the parade of SUVs that filled the lane. A quiet hesitancy hovered over everything. It was another reminder of the missing boys, and Nadine noted that there were more flashlights than usual and happier-looking jack-o’-lanterns (this was supposed to be an upbeat Halloween). I tried to listen