Waking the Moon

the main gate, and headed down the gravel drive to R Street.

At the gate the woman with the bell stood, smiling and nodding as we all filed out. When at last Dylan and I passed through she called a final, “Good evening.” Then she pulled the gates closed. A lone guard locked the great curved iron arch. Dylan and I stood blinking in the golden sunlight of the street. I felt as though I had dreamed the entire afternoon: the honeyed light, the smell of roses and honeysuckle, Dylan himself. I yawned, rubbing my eyes. When I glanced around, all the other visitors had disappeared. We were once more alone.

“Well, I guess we could think about dinner now,” I suggested. “Or cocktails. It’s five.”

“I’m not old enough to drink.”

“But you do?”

He grinned. “On special occasions.”

“Well, consider this a very special occasion—”

We walked down to Wisconsin Avenue and caught a cab to Mamma Desta’s, a dinky little restaurant in a dicey part of town that had the best Ethiopian food in the city. The place was little more than a storefront with a handful of Formica tables lit by fluorescent lights, and two ceiling fans spinning dizzyingly fast overhead. We shoved into a corner table and Mamma Desta herself came out and took our orders, a tiny cheerful woman with frizzy greying hair and a bloodstained chef’s apron. We ate with our fingers, food so hot we could watch beads of sweat pop out on our cheeks. Tibs, zilzil wat, bits of spiced meat and vegetable and sauce sopped up by spongy thick white pancakes that looked like foam insulation. We drank tej, sweet honey wine served in globular glasses like alembics. I had never been able to knock back more than one or two of these—too sweet, the taste of honey too unfamiliar—but that evening it went down like water, after all that hot food and the unsettling experience of meeting Dylan.

“My mother says that in ancient Crete they embalmed their dead in honey,” he remarked, rolling a bit of injera between his fingers. “They’d curl up the corpses and put them into big clay jars and bury them.”

“Ugh. Thanks for sharing, Dylan.”

“And sometimes to torture a prisoner, they’d stick him in a vat of olive oil and leave him there, so eventually his flesh would just melt away. And they raised vipers, and used their venom as a hallucinogen—”

“Dylan. I am trying to eat.”

“I thought you were an anthropologist. I thought you’d like to know these things.”

“I’m an armchair anthropologist. I like to look at pictures of colorful peoples, I like to eat in exotic restaurants I can reach by cab from my home, I like to purchase my voodoo masks from The Artifactory and get my clothes at Banana Republic.”

“So I guess watching dawn break over the Great Pyramid at Cheops is out, huh?”

“Dylan, I don’t even have a passport. I’ve never had a passport. I mean, your mother—she leads the life I always wanted to lead. She’s been to all these places, she’s unearthed things in Crete and Italy and god knows where. And me, it’s hard for me to find my shoes in the morning. She has all these theories about civilization, and I’m a civil servant.”

I picked up my globe of tej and smiled bitterly. “I mean, I wanted to do the stuff she does, but somehow I never did. Sometimes I feel like the prince in one of those Russian fairy tales—you know, the guy whose soul is stolen by the witch, and he spends his life in a coma while Baba Yaga is out there watching dawn break at Cheops.”

Dylan was silent. I thought I must have angered him, talking about Angelica like that; but suddenly I didn’t care anymore. I was tired and drunk and probably had sunstroke, I was exhausted by the effort of trying to carry on a conversation with someone who not only didn’t remember the day Kennedy died, he didn’t remember the day Sid Vicious died. “I think it’s time to call it a night, kiddo,” I said, and motioned for the check.

Outside it was dusk, cars and passersby and crumbling buildings all cloaked in a blue-black haze. The sky was like one of those paintings on velvet, violet streaked with yellow and red, lurid yet also soft, and the smells of cumin and cayenne and coriander spilled out into the street with us, mingling with the putrid scents of rotting gingko fruit and stagnant water.

“We’re going to have a hard time getting a cab here,” I said, glancing down the street. “It’s not a great neighborhood—”

“I’ll get you a cab,” Dylan said. He stepped to the curb, his effort at gallantry somewhat marred by his stumbling gait. I started to say something about walking over a few blocks, but he had already raised his arm.

As though he had summoned it from the underworld, a Yellow Cab came roaring up, its front wheel scoring the edge of the curb as Dylan and I jumped back.

“Step inside, step inside,” called a rumbling voice.

Dylan looked at me and burst out laughing. “Wow! I’ll have to try that in Rome sometime—” He yanked the cab door open and gestured extravagantly “?pres-toi, mademoiselle.”

I slid into the cab, the seats warm as skin, the air smelling like Pine-Sol. Dylan sat beside me, so close our thighs touched. A broad-shouldered figure turned to look back at us, his hands resting lightly on the wheel.

“Where to, my man?”

I gasped.

“Where’re we going, Sweeney?” asked Dylan. But I couldn’t say anything, only stare at the cabdriver, his license dangling from the rearview mirror.

Yellow Cab Number 393, with its neatly patched seat backs and glove compartment cracked open ever-so- slightly, so that you could just make out the gleaming barrel of a gun inside, hidden in a nest of yellowing newspaper clippings covered with shadowy images of Cassius Clay and Sugar Ray and a square-jawed young black man beautiful enough to be a movie star.

“My man?” the driver repeated gently.

It was Handsome Brown.

“Uh—the Hill, we’re going to 19 Ninth Street Northeast—”

“No—” Dylan suddenly leaned forward. “Take us down around the Washington Monument. Just drive around for a while; I’ve never been here before.”

Handsome Brown looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “Is that what the lady wants?” he rumbled.

“Yes,” Dylan said, before I could protest. He took my hands, pulled me gently but irresistibly to him. “So you never saw the pyramids,” he said. “So we’ll go look at an obelisk.”

“Fine,” I said hoarsely.

“Very good, very good. I’ll have to charge you extra zones, my man, taking the grand tour like that.”

“Whatever you say,” said Dylan.

He took us through that warren of back streets and narrow alleys that only Handsome Brown had ever known, labyrinthine precincts of the city that I had seen years before, with Oliver dozing in the cab beside me and an unfinished bottle of Pernod in my lap. Embattled tenements behind their chain link fences; neat little row houses where old women sat fanning themselves with copies of The Watchtower; side streets rank with the gingko’s shattered fruit.

Then we were cruising down Embassy Row, past mansions with battlements and minarets and towers, fake Tudor facades and Moorish splendors and crepe myrtles blooming everywhere in explosive bursts of magenta and rose. Handsome Brown said nothing, only turned up the radio. It was tuned to a station that played nothing but the lushest most soul-melting ballads, Al Green and Teddy Pendergrass and Prince wailing heartbreak like the world was going to end at midnight. Every now and then Handsome Brown’s face would fill the rearview mirror as he glanced back at us, unsmiling but his eyes keen as blades.

I stared out my window, biting my lip and trying more than anything not to see him there beside me, though I could feel him and if the music died, I could hear his snores and his even breathing. There was a ghost there in the purple darkness, his long hair slipping around his shoulders like black rain and his white shirt undone at the throat, there were two ghosts—Oliver and myself, circling the city forever while outside the night deepened and distant laughter rose from the Tidal Basin—