"I CAN prove that no man has ever set foot on the moon," the voice from across the alley said. "I have photographs of an area near Fort Colt, Arizona, that match in every respect the so-called official government photographs of the astronauts on the surface of the so-called moon."
"Sam?" said Ina's voice from the bed. "Sam? Why aren't you asleep? Does your leg hurt?"
"It doesn't hurt, it itches under this damned cast," Sam Melish told his wife.
"Just suppose," the Midnight Rider said, "that someone moved some rocks around in the desert and arranged an area in Arizona to look exactly like the moon landing site. In other words, how do I know your photographs and not the government's aren't devious duplications?"
"Come back to bed, Sam," Ina pleaded.
But Sam Melish tuned her out and continued listening to the radio blaring from the apartment across the alley. The man who lived there, Hanson, apparently slept with a dim nightlight on. Sam could make out the massive shape of the hated gigantic portable stereo—the kind with good reason called boom boxes—where it was set on a table. It was long and dark, somewhat humped in the center, where its glowing dials seemed to glare at Melish like malevolent eyes.
"Sam?"
"Quiet, Ina. Please! I have no choice other than to listen to that noise monster across the alley, but you can give me some peace."
But she couldn't, he knew. Ever since his leg had been broken when one of the aluminum-crushing machines fell on it where he worked as a bookkeeper at the City Waste Disposal Center, Melish had been confined to their tiny efficiency apartment, his right leg immobilized by a bulky cast. It wasn't the old-fashioned plaster kind; it was made of some sort of plastic. But it was permanent. That is, it would remain on his leg every uncomfortable second until the bone had mended and the doctor removed the cast. Right now his leg itched and he couldn't scratch it.
Yet that agonizing itch was no worse than the irritation in his mind, the outrage that crawled beneath his flesh and that he was equally helpless to scratch. The inconsiderate Hanson, in the fifth-floor apartment directly across the alley from Melish's, played his boom box at top volume constantly. Literally constantly! Around the clock!
During the day it was usually music, all types, but mostly rock or rap. At night it was sometimes music, sometimes inane twenty-four-hour talk stations. Melish could not escape the din. He'd tried wearing earplugs, but they barely reduced the decibel level and they gave him terrible headaches. Meditative concentration did nothing for him. During the past dreadful week Melish had come to hate the music as well as the disturbed and suspicious people who phoned in to such shows as the Midnight Rider's.
"Are you saying," the caller asked incredulously, "that you trust the government more than you trust me?"
But the Midnight Rider was too sly to fall into that trap. "What I'm saying, Bill—it is Bill, right?" Right.
"I'm saying that in this instance the evidence of a genuine moon landing outweighs your evidence, Bill. It's as simple as that."
Bill would not be dissuaded. "Anyone who'd trust the government more than a private citizen should leave this country and live in—"
"Turn it off!" Melish screamed. "Turn it off!" He stood teetering at the window on his crutches, glaring across the dark void above the alley.
After a few seconds, Hanson, a tall young man with bushy blond hair and hulking shoulders, came to the window and stood silently looking back at him. Melish could see him only in dim silhouette, a figure as unmoving and uncompromising as a statue.
"Off!" Melish shouted. "Now!" He staggered closer to the window on his crutches as if he might fly the width of the alley and smite Hanson like an avenging angel of blessed silence.
"Sam, my God, what are you trying to do?" Ina was behind him, clutching his shoulders to restrain him.
Melish saw the dark figure across the alley slowly raise a hand, then draw down the shade.
"Next you're going to tell me," the Midnight Rider said at top volume, "that the moon is really made of—"
"Gonna tell the man, gonna make my stand, gonna do it grand, gonna..."
Hanson had switched to a station blasting rap music.
Defeated, Melish fell back on the bed. The window air conditioner wasn't working, and perspiration soaked the sheets, glued his pajamas to him and stung the corners of his eyes.
"Want me to call the police, Sam?" Ina asked with compassion, though they both knew how he would answer her question.
"Why?" Melish asked. "So they won't come for an hour? So when they do come, Hanson will turn down his stereo, then turn it back up as soon as they leave?"
Ina switched on the bedside reading lamp and stared down at him. She'd just turned forty and was attractive in a way she hadn't been as a younger woman. Her gaunt features had of late taken on a softer look. Her large brown eyes, always gentle, were now wise. She seemed deeply contented in a way that Melish didn't quite understand and knew he could never attain.
"Just look at you, Sam," she said while he gazed up at her, "look how you've let that noise wear you down."
"It is wearing me down," he admitted.
"Gonna do it right, gonna make my fight, gonna see some fright, gonna …"
"It's violent, that music," Ina said. "Why does he listen to it?" She seemed genuinely curious.
"Why does he listen to anything?" Melish said. "Or everything? He tunes in to country-western, classical, talk shows, rock and roll, rap music, anything that's on the air. I think he's doing it to aggravate me. He knows about my broken leg; I've seen him staring over here through our window. Just standing and staring. This is a fifth-floor, walk-up apartment, so he knows I'm trapped here with this shattered bone. I'm not going to struggle down all those stairs, then back up them. I have no alternative! I have to listen!"
She didn't answer. Instead she switched off the lamp, and he heard and saw her shadowy figure walk around to her side of the bed. The springs whined and the mattress shifted as she lay down beside him.
"Try to get some sleep, Sam."
"You can say that. You could always sleep through anything. A fire, a war… For you sleep is an escape mechanism."
She touched his shoulder gently, and he knew she was smiling sadly at the truth of his words. And falling asleep.
"Gonna smoke some grass, gonna kick some—"
Melish wrapped the sweat-damp pillow around his head, then twined his arms around the pillow and squeezed, pressing its soft bulk as firmly as possible against his ears.
Hours later, he fell asleep to Handel's Messiah.
A warm breeze pushed in through the window the next morning while Melish and Ina were seated at their small wooden table eating a breakfast of low-fat cereal, toast, and coffee. Ina had spread strawberry preserves on her toast. Melish's toast was dry. Dr. Stein had warned Melish sternly to watch his weight, his blood pressure, his cholesterol. That had been the day before Melish broke his leg.
Hanson's radio was blasting out a report from a traffic helicopter. "Traffic approaching the bridges is backed up for miles," said a woman over the background noise of the craft's rotors thrashing the air around her. "Directly below us a truck and a car have had an accident and are blocking the west-bound lane. The drivers are outside their vehicles and they appear to be fighting."
"This city," Melish said around a mouthful of dry toast, "has become hell." He washed down the toast with scalding coffee that scorched his tongue.
"You used to love the city, Sam," Ina said.
"I still do, but it has become hell."
"It only seems that way to you because of your leg."
Maybe she was right, Hanson thought. His leg did itch like crazy beneath the cast, as if a centipede were in its death throes down where he couldn't possibly reach it. He hadn't been thinking about the leg before she'd drawn it to his attention, but now it itched.
He shifted his weight over one of his crutches, levered himself up to a standing position, then slipped the other crutch beneath his arm. Across the alley he saw Hanson standing at his window, staring. When Hanson realized he'd been seen, he slowly backed away out of sight in the dimness of his apartment, like an apparition fading into another dimension.
"Hanson was watching us again," Melish said. "I think he's spying on us."
"That's silly, Sam. Every time you've seen him looking over here, you've been looking over there. These apartments only have one window that looks out over the alley, and his and ours are directly across from each other."
"Are you saying I'm getting paranoid?"
"No," Ina said, "what you are is edgy."
Edgy, Melish thought. In his position, who wouldn't be edgy?
Hanson switched from local news, weather, and traffic to a station that played frenetic Latin music.
"You think he's not doing that to aggravate me?" Melish asked.
Ina smiled. "Yes, he knows you can't mambo, Sam, and it's killing you."
Melish saw that he was getting nowhere. He picked up the morning Times that Ina had brought in from downstairs and tried to read it. It was full of news about Latin America, so he set it aside.
It wasn't long before Hanson tired of the Latin music and switched to a talk show featuring a man who claimed that the president had once had sex with an extraterrestrial, noting that the president had not specifically denied the allegation.
Fifteen minutes later, Hanson tuned in to rap music. Melish recognized the recording artist, a young man known as Mr. Cool Rule.
"She be a police snitch, gotta off that bitch…"
Melish tried not to listen. He watched as Ina finished with the dishes and left them propped in the yellow plastic drainer to dry. "Why would a person have sex with an alien?" he asked.
"I don't know, Sam."
"There would be the possibility of a rare socially transmitted disease."
Ina wiped her hands on a dish towel, draped the towel over the oven handle, then said, "I'm going out."
"I'm going mad," Melish said.
"We need food for lunch. Do you want anything in particular?"
"Anything," Melish said. "I can enjoy nothing, so I'll eat anything."
Ina stared at him, shook her head, then left.
Melish heard the key and latch rattle behind her as she locked him in for security's sake. He worked his way to a standing position, then limped on his crutches over to the window that looked out on the street. After a few minutes, far below, he saw her foreshortened figure emerge from the building and walk toward Second Avenue and Fleigle's Market.
He was about to return to his chair when he noticed a figure on the other side of the street. Hanson. The man's stereo was blaring, and he wasn't even in his apartment! As Melish watched, Hanson began walking along the opposite side of the street, in the same direction as Ina.
Turning away from the window, Melish felt his fury grow. Here he was trapped and crippled and assaulted by sound, while Hanson blithely roamed the streets.
He picked up the Times again, thinking he might be able to read about Latin America now, but bile rose bitter in his throat and he hurled the paper back down. He limped to the refrigerator, got out the orange juice, and gulped some directly from its glass pitcher. The cool liquid felt good going down, and it soothed his burned tongue.
"She the mother that cook my brother."
The pitcher slipped from Melish's hand and shattered on the tile floor. Glass fragments flew and orange juice flowed beneath the sink in a tidal wave.
Melish automatically started to stoop so he could right what was left of the pitcher and stop the flood of orange juice. The abrupt motion made him lose his balance. He caught himself on the sink, bumping his elbow painfully, and one foot slid in the juice and his pajama leg got soaked up to the knee of his uninjured leg.
There was only his fury now, his anger at himself for being so clumsy, his rage at the relentless barrage of sound that flew like sharp spears across the alley and assailed him in his home.
When Melish's father had died three years before, among the worthless junk and keepsakes Melish's siblings had foisted off on him was an old .22 hunting rifle. Melish had never known his father to hunt and had never seen him use the rifle, which had always been kept locked in the basement of the family home. The gun had been a gift to his father, and now Melish had it because he was the only brother or sister without children who might be endangered by its presence. Melish had years ago laid the rifle on the back of a closet shelf, tight against the wall, and forgotten about it.
Now he remembered it.
And he remembered placing the small box of ammunition in the drawer where he kept old sweaters he couldn't bear to discard.
Amazingly, he was almost nimble on his crutches as he got down the rifle and located the bullets. His hands, his fingers, were swift and purposeful as he loaded the magazine. Hanson was gone from his apartment, so there was no danger of doing harm to a fellow human. It was Melish versus the radio. No, it was civility versus chaos. Consideration versus callousness. Civilization versus anarchy.
Surely Melish was right to do this.
He worked the rifle's bolt action and jacked a round into the chamber.
Now that his mind was made up, he moved almost like an automaton, limping to the window, his right thumb hooked over the cross brace of his crutch, his fingers clutching the barrel as the rifle's wooden stock dragged across the floor. It was a small-caliber rifle that would make a sound not much louder than a sharp hammer blow. Hardly noticeable in this city that had become so raucous and rude, so ripe with sudden, unexpected danger. No one would, in fact, be able to hear the shot over the racket of Hanson's stereo.
His heart pounding against his ribs, Melish leaned the rifle against the wall. Then he dragged over a kitchen chair and arranged it in front of the window. He sat down, picked up the rifle, and rested its barrel on the sill.
Took careful aim.
"She the one that tell, so she goin' to hell."
Melish squeezed the trigger.
The shot sounded like a palm slapping a flat surface. The humpbacked stereo seemed to move slightly on the table.
"Throw the switch on the bitch—"
Melish fired another round.
Silence.
Precious silence.
Peace.
Even before he opened the door to his apartment, Hanson knew something was very wrong.
The stereo was no longer playing, which meant the demons held at bay by its sound had somehow silenced it. No longer repulsed by the waves of life-saving noise, they had entered the apartment, the very place where Hanson lived. Now there was no sound protecting him. No sanctuary.
No peace.
God had forsaken him and sided with the administration.
Hanson slumped on the edge of the bed and began tearing at the flesh of his left hand with the nails of his right. Rage, sorrow, hopelessness swept over him.
He wept.
"It was an act of madness," Ina said after Melish had told her what he'd done.
"It was an act of necessity," Melish said.
But now that he'd calmed down, now that he could think in the silence, he was beginning to feel regret. He'd lost his composure. Acted like a wild animal protecting itself against attackers. This was a civilized society with rules, with laws, so that reasonable people could live alongside each other. He knew he should not have used the rifle.
"You might have killed the poor man," Ina said, cleaning up the mess Melish had made when he dropped the pitcher of juice.
"He was out, or I would never have shot over there," Melish said. "I looked out the window and saw him down in the street, following you."
"Following me?"
"Walking in the same direction, anyway."
Fear crossed her dark eyes like a shadow. "Why on earth would he follow me?"
"I don't know. I don't think he was actually following you. I said he was going in the same direction."
"Well, you'd better apologize to him for what you did."
"Are you kidding? What I'm going to do is stay quiet and hope he does the same."
"He'll know what happened," Ina said.
Melish knew she was probably right. It wouldn't take a ballistics expert to figure out who'd shot Mr. Cool Rule and the Midnight Rider.
He lay in bed beside Ina that night in silence, but he didn't sleep.
In the morning, without the usual clamor of the news and traffic reports, he gazed across the alley and saw Hanson standing at his: window staring at him.
Melish stared back, then shrugged apologetically and silently mouthed the words "I'm sorry."
Hanson gazed glumly at him for another few seconds, then lowered his shade.
Why had the man Melish shot the stereo? Hanson could think of only one reason. Melish had been possessed by the demons and become their agent.
And Ina, the woman who'd lain down with Hanson, was she also one of the possessed?
Their affair had begun months ago when they'd stared at each other from their windows, then met down in the street by accident. The attraction that had arced across the space between their windows was even stronger when they were close to each other, and neither of them had resisted it, though Hanson knew she was Melish's wife. A passion like an edict from God had gripped their souls and bodies, making Ina's professions of guilt and conscience seem absurd to Hanson.
He knew she thought he was strange. And dangerous. She was secretly afraid of him, but she liked that. He was so unlike Melish, who was so like every man. She had told Hanson once, whispered it hoarsely in his ear, that he was exotic. That was something Melish was not. Hanson hadn't told her about the Building Commissioner and the Commissioner of Public Works and about the demons. He knew she would think they were something other than exotic and would be even more afraid of him, and she would refuse to see him again. That was a thought he couldn't bear.
When Melish was away at work they would use her apartment, sweating and grappling in the bed and sometimes on the floor. She would smell like wildness and make throaty sounds like an animal, and he could hear her even over the noise of his stereo roaring through the open window.
Then Melish had broken his leg and he was home all day, trapped in the apartment.
But Ina could leave. Hanson had followed her this morning, as she knew he would, and they'd been together in the park. Melish had no idea what his wife was.
But now Hanson understood what had happened, how the demons, once frustrated, were laughing at him. They had used Ina to seduce him and lure him away from his apartment. It had been part of the demons' plan that Hanson couldn't help staring at the woman's smooth flesh, her warm brown eyes, the gentle roll of her hips. How deceptive. How clever of the demons to compel him to watch her through her window and to want her until he ached in the core of him. They had been in her and they had used her to trick him. And they had possessed Melish and used him to destroy the noise that had been Hanson's salvation.
He thought about buying or stealing a new stereo, but he knew that wouldn't save him. The demons were in now, and they wouldn't leave. They'd been sent by the administration and they would accomplish their deadly task. It was all political, but it was lethal and on some level intensely personal. And if he moved to another apartment, they'd follow. They were in his clothes, and beneath his skin and inside his brain now like malignant tumors, and they were waiting and scheming and it was too late. He was doomed.
But it wasn't too late for Ina and Melish, also victims of the demons.
They could be set free.
It would be an act of kindness.
Hanson walked into the kitchen and removed from a drawer beneath the sink a wood-handled meat cleaver and a long boning knife. He was perspiring heavily in the heat, his T-shirt plastered to his flesh, but he shrugged into the green sports jacket he'd gotten from the Salvation Army and slid the cleaver up his right sleeve, the knife up his left. With his arms at his sides, he could curl the middle-finger of each hand and keep both cleaver and knife out of sight, though the point of the knife hurt his finger and was probably causing it to bleed. That hardly mattered now. Destiny was walking in Hanson's clothes. He would deal the release of death to the man and woman as a kindness and a vengeance and a gift and then carve and eat their flesh corrupted by the demons and give himself screaming to the eternal fire.
Stooping slightly and holding his right forearm horizontal so the cleaver wouldn't drop from his sleeve, he opened the door and stepped out into the hall.
Both arms at his sides again, his weapons of fear and freedom concealed beneath his jacket sleeves, he trudged downstairs to the street.
The voices were between his brain and the inside of his skull now and were screaming at him all at the same time so it was as the Tower of Babel but the judgment and lightning of God would not be denied and Hanson would wield the steel and then embrace and breathe in the fire, the fire, the fire the fire the fire…
Ina happened to glance out the window and see him coming.
"It's Hanson," she said. "He's crossing the street, Sam. I think he's on his way here." She slumped into the chair she'd just gotten up from and clasped her hands in her lap.
Melish heard the fear in her voice and was again ashamed of what he'd done. But maybe it was good that Hanson was coming. They would talk. Melish would apologize, explaining that in the heat and the noise and with his broken leg that never stopped itching beneath the cast, he had lost his head and acted rashly and wrongly. He would offer to buy Hanson a new stereo if he would promise not to play it too loud. Reasonable people could and would learn. These things could be resolved.
Melish and Ina stared at each other as they heard the sound of footsteps out on the stairs, then in the hall outside their door.
The knock was gentle and didn't seem angry.
Ina started to rise from her chair, but Melish motioned for her to sit back down.
He worked his way to his feet, leaning on his crutches, and hobbled to the door. He unfastened the chain lock, then turned the knob on the dead bolt, thinking that in the silence, in the peace, he and Hanson could talk and come to an understanding, two reasonable men. Neighbors should talk and get to know one another. Everyone had to live in this city together, had to learn to treat each other with consideration and perhaps, eventually, even with kindness. It was possible.
We should all hope.
When he opened the door, he was relieved to see that Hanson was smiling.
"Mr. Hanson," he said, "I'm glad you dropped by. I think we should talk."
"I understand you're with the administration," Hanson said.