One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

cares why until it happens directly to them, she thought to herself. Including yourself, Mr. Rexaphin. Did you really give a damn about this until you yourself got sucked into it? Of course not. Were you ever outraged when it applied to others? I doubt it. But now that it has happened to you...
    One of the broken neon stripes on the wall behind her sizzled and blinked on and off. She started to speak. She had said this all before and knew it all by heart. It was technical. She hated herself as she recited it.
    “The first recorded case of lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis occurred two hundred and seventeen years ago. It fell upon a girl — her name was Eleanor Biie. She only lived to be about nine before the people in her town killed her. Her mother had already committed suicide and her father was reduced to a mumbling idiot. No one had any proper explanation, and it is public record how the shock of the girl’s eye color created the most inexplicable mayhem wherever she was, starting with her own home. You are aware, I suppose, of what happened at your son’s birth. A nurse stared directly into your son’s eyes. She experienced a short circuit at the most profound neuro-perceptive level. Your son has an eye color that cannot possibly exist. The human body and mind can only reject it if one sees it. It is an intrusion of the cognitive assembly of human perception. And her reaction was indeed normal. The mind uses its eyes as its first communicative portal of sensation with the outside world. But eyes are only organs — flesh, made of normal body tissue. For millions of years, humanity and, most likely, its animal predecessors relied on a sensory schemata dependent upon only three colors: yellow and red and blue. A fourth primary color disrupts the basic three-color tripod of our visual relation with the world. We cannot comprehend the fourth primary color, especially when it is shown to us. And because people cannot comprehend it, they invent their own surprisingly crude reasons for its existence. Totally logical people accept farfetched mythological and religious explanations. And historically, this has gone in both directions. Some of the early One Hundred Percent Lunar People were thought of as gods or demigods. Others were condemned as being agents of the devil or something like the devil.”
    But Ringo could not bear to hear any of this. The more she spoke, the more technical and awful and pseudo-scientific and fanatically religious the whole thing began to sound. She lost him. He stopped listening. In the middle of her last sentence, he got up and walked out.
    She ran to the door and caught sight of his back as he walked away down the long neon-lit corridor. She ran to catch up with him.
    “Mr. Rexaphin! Wait!”
    He turned around, his body stiff as if he were a wooden board revolving. Two wet lines ran down his face from the tears he had successfully kept locked up until his back was turned.
    “Mr. Rexaphin, there is something else. Something you have to know. Something you must tell your son once he is old enough to understand.”
    His dark brown eyes stared into hers, resigned, defeated.
    “Sir, this is painful information I am about to give you. But it is true. And your son must be aware of this. It is very important. Your son must never become friends with any other child or person with LOS. Never. All LOS citizens, for their own good, must avoid one another.”
    “Why,” he began, his voice barely a whisper, “why might that be?”
    “If two people with lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis look at each other without their goggles on, they…”
    “They fall in love like normal people?” he asked bitterly.
    “No. They die.”
     
    Lunarcroptic ocular symbolanosis was rare — but not quite rare enough. It lay somewhere on the horizon, an ancient phantom from the dark, barely inhabited far side of the Moon. It would sweep in through the open window. It would leave a ball and chain on whomever it chose. It