Meet Me in the Moon Room Read Online Free Page A

chaos. I mean isn’t the world full of portent? Isn’t every single thing connected and concerned with every other thing? Isn’t it true there are no coincidences? Doesn’t every little breeze seem to whisper . . .”
    “Oh, please!” Rebecca said.
    “Doesn’t everything mean something?” Kenneth asked.
    “Certainly not,” the ghost said. “Internal consistency is not good for you. It is a system for rejecting possibilities. It is a straitjacket for the mind. What you’re forgetting is that sometimes a cigar really is just a banana.”
    “What is all this talk of cigars and bananas?” Rebecca, still wearing the mate of the Ghost of Christmas Shifted Sideways in Time, crawled over to Kenneth. “Can’t you just say what you mean?”
    She snuggled up to his side, but as soon as she touched him, she stiffened like she’d grabbed an electric wire. The sock on her hand jerked her arm up into the air, and Kenneth realized that sometimes a sock wasn’t just a sock. The Ghost of Christmas Shifted Sideways In Time and the Ghost of Maybe We Should Have Gone To My Mother’s For Christmas twisted together like snakes and rose up and up and around in a kiss high above Kenneth and Rebecca, forcing them together in a face to face confrontation.
    They stared into one another’s eyes.
    “I’m sorry I called your mother an old poop,” he said, the close-up of her brown eyes convincing him that he had been in the wrong all along.
    “Now that you mention it,” she said, “it occurs to me that your remark was the inspiration for me calling you an anal cartoon. I’m sorry, too.”
    “I’d blocked that part out,” he said.
    “Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it again.”
    “No, I’m glad you did,” he said. “I deserved it.”
    Her eyes invited and he accepted the invitation and leaned in and kissed her.
    “Er, excuse me, kids.”
    They broke the kiss. The ghosts above them leaned over to look down at the new voice. Kenneth and Rebecca turned to look down too, resulting in them being cheek to cheek. They saw that another sock had gotten onto Lord Byron’s head and now the sock was talking. The conglomerate creature looked like a cat with the long neck and head of a cobra.
    “I am the Ghost of This Particular Christmas,” said the cobra cat, “and boy was I feeling insubstantial there for a while! Now it looks like we can dine on impossible things for breakfast after all.”
    “How do you dine at breakfast?” Rebecca whispered. “And my god, whose arm do you suppose is in that sock?”
    “You use a spoon,” said the Ghost of This Particular Christmas. “What we need now is a holy contradiction, something to jump you out of the grooves you have so doggedly dug for yourselves. The two of you must become Beatniks with Banjos, or Compassionate Conservatives, or no wait, I’ve got it—Christian Atheists. That’s the ticket. The best of both worlds. Take what you like and leave the rest. Close your eyes and imagine it. Get down in the trenches. Come on, no more fooling around!”
    “But doesn’t this fast and loose philosophy of yours mean that we can be absolute scoundrels?” Kenneth asked.
    “Yes,” said the Ghost of This Particular Christmas, “but if you were scoundrels, being internally consistent would just make you more narrow-minded and dangerous.”
    “But doesn’t this mean we can believe whatever we want?” Rebecca asked.
    “Yes,” said the Ghost of This Particular Christmas, “it means you can believe whatever you want. Who’s to stop you?”
    Who indeed.
    The sudden realization that his mind was his absolutely and that no one was listening in, that no one was clicking a censoring tongue at him from some astral plane washed over Kenneth in waves of freedom, of joy, and he gasped and pulled away from Rebecca and looked into her sparkling eyes and saw that she had made the same glorious realization. You could believe totally in both sides of an argument at the same time!
    Green