Waking the Moon

house.”

He fell silent, and stared fiercely out to where the wisteria leaves hung limply from their woody vines. I waited before saying anything. My mouth was dry, I felt chilled in spite of the torrid heat; but if it killed me I wasn’t going to let Angelica and her weirdness into my carriage house.

“So she had a premonition,” I said at last. “Well, thank god she did, or you might have been hurt, right?”

“Oh, sure,” Dylan said bitterly. He shook his head, his long hair spilling across his shoulders. “A premonition! My mother has nothing but premonitions! Hurricane Andrew, Mount Pinatubo, some mudslide in Bangladesh—she’s always got an inside track on natural disasters. This woman told me once that my mother had told some scientists—women scientists—to leave Finland, because there was going to be some kind of disaster, and it turned out she was right: it turned out she was talking about Chernobyl. Her and her followers, they’re always on the first train out of town, a good twenty-four hours before the storm hits.”

I took a deep breath. “So—what are you telling me, Dylan? Do you really think Angelica knew about all those things before they happened?”

Dylan turned those burning blue eyes on me. I saw a sort of desperation in him: that I didn’t believe him, that I thought he was crazy. For the first time I could see how it might have been hard for him—despite his beauty, despite the gold earrings and Doc Martens and all the other trappings of flaming youth—to find a girlfriend. Hard maybe to make any friends at all.

“Yes,” he said, daring me to argue. “She did.”

I waited. Then, “I believe you, Dylan,” I said softly. I reached to touch him on the shoulder, half-expecting him to flinch or turn away. But he didn’t. He turned and took me in his arms. I could feel him trembling as he whispered, “She scares me sometimes, Sweeney. I know she’s my mother, but she scares me…”

“Me too,” I murmured, and stroked his tangled hair, the two of us holding each other so tightly that not even the golden air could slide between us.

“The way she talks,” he went on in a low voice, like a child comforting himself. “All this crazy goddess stuff, but the way she goes on about it in her books and all, it almost makes sense. You can really see how these women fall for it. It’s not just that she knows about these things. I can believe that. I mean, animals know when there’s going to be an earthquake, right? But some of the people who’re into all her New Age stuff, they think she makes it happen! Like in Hawaii they think there’s this goddess Pele who makes the volcanoes blow up—these people think my mother can actually do that!”

He rubbed his forehead as though it pained him. “Sometimes, I think my mother believes it herself.”

“Oh, she does, Dylan,” I whispered, but he didn’t hear me.

“You know what she’s like?” he said at last. “This picture I saw when I was at Lawrenceville. An X ray of the inside of a nuclear blast, taken out at White Sands. Have you ever see that? Outside you can see all this smoke, this huge mushroom cloud and flames everywhere. But inside it’s just all this fire, and then in the very middle, there’s a black hollow core. Like there’s all this destruction around it, but in the middle there’s nothing there at all.”

I shuddered and reached for my glass. “Maybe we should think about going out to get something to eat,” I suggested, finishing my wine. “You hungry?”

Unexpectedly, Dylan laughed, as though we’d been talking of nothing more serious than the weather, then rolled over to slide his arms around my waist. “I could be,” he said, nuzzling my throat. “Maybe. If I had the chance to work up an appetite—”

Later, we went out to eat.

When we returned that night, Dylan tried calling Dr. Dvorkin, to see about picking up his things from the main house. But Robert was out, no doubt caught up in selecting the new regent, or else with the Aditi or the Mall’s Independence Day celebrations or any of the million other things that consumed his life. I finally gave Dylan my key, so he could get into the house and retrieve his things. He returned to the carriage house with a knapsack, a gym bag stuffed with clothes, a personal CD player, and a couple of paperbacks, Shampoo Planet and Pylon and a book about the Neanderthals.

“That’s it?” I stared at the overflowing gym bag. “That’s all you brought for the entire summer?”

Dylan shrugged. “My mom’s coming out for my birthday. She’ll get me some more clothes then.”

We called in sick the next day, and the day after that. We stayed in my bedroom in the carriage house, with the wisteria trailing through the open window and the old fan in the belfry humming like a hornet’s nest. At night we’d venture out onto the Hill, walking as in a trance through the blue-veined air, drunk on sex and heat and wine, both of us not a little stunned to find the city still around us, the sound of firecrackers and police cruisers crackling somewhere just out of sight. At twilight government workers filled the outdoor cafes, crowding the little round marble-topped tables. Street kids vied with each other along the southeast strip of Pennsylvania Avenue, kicking through spent blossoms and McDonald’s wrappers and the frayed blackened tails of firecracker strings. At 3:00 A.M. the streets filled with revelers leaving the bars, and their laughter became part of our sleep and our lovemaking, laughter and the crash of bottles breaking against the curb, like surf pounding a far-off shore.

“I love you, Sweeney,” Dylan would whisper, his hands warm against my breast. Before I could fall asleep again, I would wait to hear his heavy breathing. I would wait, to make sure that he didn’t disappear.

When I finally awoke, it was as though I had awakened to find myself in another city. The city I had first glimpsed years before, the city that Oliver had shown me, with its ghosts and transvestite hustlers and phantom cab drivers. Sometimes Dylan and I heard gunshots and far-off screams; more often the tired banter of lawyers and nannies, and college students walking home at 4:00 A.M. from tending bar and waiting tables on the Hill.

Best of all, early one evening, we saw a little family walking from Union Station: mother, small boy, father in military uniform, the exultant boy swinging between his parents and then suddenly bursting free, to run shouting into the empty traffic circle with its lines of American flags, arms raised as he yelled at the top of his lungs,

“ALREADY I LOVE IT!”

Dylan fell onto the sidewalk, laughing helplessly. I joined him, and we watched as the family raced gleefully toward the Capitol.

“Sweeney, this is a great place,” said Dylan, wiping his eyes and turning to drape his arm around my shoulder. “Already I love it.”

So that, too, he gave back to me: the city I had fallen in love with once, the city I thought I had lost forever—

Always you will arrive in this city.
Do not hope for any other—

When at last we went to work again we walked with arms linked down Pennsylvania Avenue, disentangling ourselves when we reached the Mall and putting on our best sober faces when we got inside the museum. No one seemed surprised that I’d taken time off. Whenever I passed Dylan in the hall, whenever he ducked into my office, I felt as though wisps of smoke must hover above our heads like Pentecostal flames. But no one else seemed to notice at all, or if they did, no one cared.

Still, we tried to be discreet; at least I did. Dylan seemed immensely pleased to be carrying on an affair, and I suspected he was just waiting for someone to ask him so he could spill the beans.

“Don’t,” I cautioned him, almost daily. “I could get in trouble for this.”

“How? We’re consenting adults.”

Well, one of us is, I thought. But I only said, “Dr. Dvorkin is very, very paranoid about this kind of thing, okay? This is government work, and there are big problems with sexual harassment in this city, and I just would rather we be discreet, all right?”

Dylan rolled his eyes and slung his hands into his pockets. “Of course. Discreet.”