The Tale of the Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon

Gypsy Lou began

"He was a discarded lover of mine. In one night of skin to skin romance I had seen all I wanted to know and was now seducing some don from Madrid who drove a BMW. Meanwhile the reject sat on a park bench with his head in his hands, black finches on his knees as they tried to cheer him up with their latest melodies.

What could there possibly be left to live for? He was empty, crushed and spat out to rot in the gutter along with all the other unwanted trash. He could never hope to have such beauty for his own ever again and there could not possibly be anyone on Earth to compare with me, the memory of my touch still occupying the attention of every cell of his body.

Then he looked up.

No one on Earth, maybe but there, just above the afterglow rouge in the Western sky, hung the sweetest smile he'd ever had the luck to see. There was just a slight trace of the shy lip's relief - wry and a little cocked to one side but radiating the innocence of a virgin babe, learning to express herself for the first time. He watched, enraptured for an hour, until she retired for an early bed into her purple bedroom glow.

The next night he was there again in the little park that gave him a clear view of the evening's arena. He waited impatiently on his wooden bench as the blue sky between the branches of the trees blushed in anticipation of the approaching night. After the Sun made its farewell bow and declined an encore, then the Moon felt bold enough to take the stage from a more raised pose, smiling down upon the young man with even fuller lips than before. The promise of maturity added a pout to her expression and he felt a little guilty at losing his heart to a little girl, far away from womanhood. Yet he recalled that the Arabs traditionally married their daughters before they reached the age of ten.

As the days passed, her confidence grew brighter until she no longer waited for the fat Sun to sweat his exit before she laid grace to the sky. Her lover in the park below took a notebook and pen and began to work out when she’d make her appearance each day. She was very punctual and never stood him up. Each evening he watched the Eastern sky for her entrances that grew later each time as her face required more and more make up.

By the tenth night she was well into adolescence and stepped into the blue in low cut evening gowns that drove him wild with desire. Yet her light was teasing and capricious as he paid court to her through the nights, whispering promises of what happiness they would have together. The pubescent Moon flirted in non-committal radiance, neither saying yes or no but always catwalking across the sky, leaving him to sit in dejected darkness for the hours before morning called him to bed.

At last, on the fourteenth night, just as he was afraid that she might have found someone else, she rose up onto the scene in her full brilliance. He watched anxiously as she struggled to float her beauty up into the sky but, once free of the horizon, she found new strength and took command of the night. Her love soaked the Earth in silver perfection and, under her spell, he felt like an angel.

He howled and danced and declared his love for her in a thousand languages but the Moon remained as unbearably silent as ever. He wondered what proof she required of his heart. He climbed the tallest trees in an effort to come closer and begged the owls to deliver his love notes to her. But she refused to give him an answer and, by the end of the night, he was exhausted with passion.

And when the moon rose the next evening, he feared that the effort of the previous night had been too much for her. For though she was dressed in celestial luminescence, yet a subtle vitality seemed to have slipped away. Her edges appeared a little less defined and he worried about her diet.

His fears were confirmed by the pattern of the next few days but the only doctor that he managed to drag to the park dismissed him as an idiot once he saw the intended patient. And so he had to watch her loveliness wither and fade by the day, attending her with all the anxiety of a devoted husband by the bedside of his dying beloved. He prayed for her through each of his waking moments and held his vigil long into each day as she courageously surfed late into the mornings.

At last came the day when she failed to rise at all and he felt that his life had come to an end. He refused to consider the worst and held on beyond all hope, leaving his park bench only to bring more bread and coffee on which he now lived, oblivious to the odd looks he drew from passers-by. They clucked their tongues and threatened to report this unwashed, bearded freak who stared maniacally at the sky all day. I took pity on him and suggested we go for a coffee if he’d only take a bath first. But I don’t think he even heard me.

After two more weeks, reality was but a blur to this young lover who scanned the heavens with feverish eyes. His gaze had become so bleary that he scarcely believed it when he saw her again like a ghost, restored to baby face youth, a slither of immortality in the West. He celebrated with a bottle of wine and drank to her health with teary praise, though his sweetheart was, of course, far too young to drink.

As she set into the dusky bed laid by the Sun, he looked around and realised that the electric glaze of the city polluted the arena in which he solicited his love. What a fool he’d been. To think that she’d respond to his courting in the presence of so many strangers. Without a moment's hesitation, he pulled up his blankets and walked all night and day to the middle of a scrub desert. Here there was no neon to contaminate his vision. He and the moon could finally share their love alone.

She was delectable in her new setting and he fell into his old pattern of courtship - tender and paternal at first but with increasing cheek as she matured, wooing her with full-blooded passion as soon as she came of age on her eleventh night. For months he carried on in this way - savouring her delicious growth from babe hood to the full peak of her femininity and then collapsing into despair again as each time she diminished after reaching her fullness, decreasing little by little just as she’d grown. The darkness of the barren two weeks of each month was even more desolate under the black desert skies and the emotional strain added years to his face.

Finally he decided he could take it no more. On her fourteenth night, he took a long knife and plunged it deep into his chest. He withdrew a small piece of his heart and hooked it onto the end of a fishing line. Then he cast the bait up high to the right of the Moon. It was not long before one of the stars clustered there took a bite and was hooked. Blood ran down the line and stained it with the red love. He ran down the bank of sand to a new spot and cast out another piece of bloody bait. He carried on like this until he had seven stars hooked onto his lines and he tied the other ends around his heart. The cords formed a mesh around the full moon and, as he had hoped, she was unable to escape.

For the first time in her life she was unable to love and leave the Earth, forced to remain with the cage of devotion set up by her Moon-struck admirer below. Night after night she was held in place in her full regalia and she was made to suffer the full length of blinding days of Sun that were never meant for her.

She begged the stars to release her and they explained that they were themselves prisoners of one man's love down below. She cast her gaze down and at last saw this crazed, lonely man in the middle of the desert, whose heart was attached in agony to the lights of the cosmos. This pain he was willing to endure just to hold her near.

But the effort was destroying all of them. So she leant some of her strength to the stars and they hoisted up the devoted lover like a puppet, through the sky and into the vastness of space. He swayed from side to side and bled profusely as they carried him closer. They dropped him down on the surface of the Moon and he wept as he finally embraced his Beloved.

"Why the fuck have you held us here for so long?" The Moon asked of him.

"I could not bear to have you leave me anymore." He cried. She smiled and replied:

"You moron. Didn’t you realise your love was killing us all? How are we to remain eternal unless we move on? But let go now and maybe you can ride with me."

He cut the strings of his heart and settled down to coast across the skies with his sweetheart through all of the month, in darkness and in light, singing of his eternal devotion to her.

On a still night, you might even hear him.”

They gazed up at the moon again, squinting to see if they could make out the man amongst the images indented on her surface. A wind blew chill and with the embers glowing but a dormant red it was suddenly quite cold.

“Somehow, I never imagined the moon would talk like that!” Kifkef admitted, shaking his head sadly.”

“Whatever. Now can we get the fuck out of this freezer?”

Baba Gene nodded. He took one last look of longing across the valley and lit the chillum, crying: “Bom Shankar!”

Each took deep draughts upon the clay tube and soon the smoke wafted around them like thick mist, banishing the view, smell and touch of the cave. Wrapped in a cloak of intoxication they could no longer be sure of whether they were in the Himalaya or, indeed, anywhere else in the world.

Chapter 10