Elizabeth Hand - Last Summer at Mars Hill

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For Stephen P. Brown, who long ago helped me to find stories in the City of Trees

With love and thanks

And do not rely on the fact that in your life, circumscribed, regulated, and prosaic, there are no such spectacular and terrifying things.

C. P. Cavafy, Theodotus

EVEN BEFORE THEY LEFT home, Moony knew her mother wouldnt return from Mars Hill that year. Jason had called her from his fathers house in San Francisco

I had a dream about you last night, hed said, his voice cracking the way it did when he was excited. We were at Mars Hill, and my father was there, and my mother, tooI knew it was a dream, like can you imagine my mother at Mars Hill?and you had on this sort of long black dress and you were sitting alone by the pier. And you said, This is it, Jason. Well never see this again. I felt like crying, I tried to hug you but my father pulled me back. And then I woke up.

She didnt say anything. Finally Jason prodded her. Weird, huh, Moony? I mean, dont you think its weird?

She shrugged and rolled her eyes, then sighed loudly so that hed be able to tell she was upset. Thanks, Jason. Like thats supposed to cheer me up?

A long silence, then Jasons breathless voice again. Shit, Moony, Im sorry. I didnt

She laughed, a little nervously, and said, Forget it. So when you flying out to Maine?

Nobody but Jason called her Moony, not at home at least, not in Kamensic Village. There she was Maggie Rheining, which was the name that appeared under her junior picture in the high school yearbook.

But the name that had been neatly typed on the birth certificate in San Francisco sixteen years ago, the name Jason and everyone at Mars Hill knew her by, was Shadowmoon Starlight Rising. Maggie would have shaved her head before shed admit her real name to anyone at school. At Mars Hill it wasnt so weird: there was Adele Grose, known professionally as Madame Olaf; Shasta Daisy OHare and Rvis Capricorn; Martin Dionysos, who was Jasons father; and Ariel Rising, ne Amanda Mae Rheining, who was Moonys mother. For most of the year Moony and Ariel lived in Kamensic Village, the affluent New York exurb where her mother ran Earthly Delights Catering and Moony attended high school, and everything was pretty much normal. It was only in June that they headed north to Maine, to the tiny spiritualist community where they had summered for as long as Moony could remember. And even though she could have stayed in Kamensic with Ariels friends the Loomises, at the last minute (and due in large part to Jasons urging, and threats if she abandoned him there) she decided to go with her mother to Mars Hill. Later, whenever she thought how close shed come to not going, it made her feel sick: as though shed missed a flight and later found out the plane had crashed.

Because much as she loved it, Moony had always been a little ashamed of Mars Hill. It was such a dinky place, plopped in the middle of nowhere on the rocky Maine coasttiny shingle-style Carpenter Gothic cottages, all tumbled into disrepair, their elaborate trim rotting and strung with spiderwebs; poppies and lupines and tiger lilies sprawling bravely atop clumps of chickweed and dandelions of truly monstrous size; even the sign by the pier so faded you almost couldnt read the earnest lettering:

MARS HILL

SPIRITUALIST COMMUNITY

FOUNDED 1883

Why doesnt your father take somebodys violet aura and repaint the damn sign with it? shed exploded once to Jason.

Jason looked surprised. I kind of like it like that, he said, shaking the hair from his face and tossing a sea urchin at the silvered board. It looks like it was put up by our Founding Mothers. But for years Moony almost couldnt stand to even look at the sign, it embarrassed her so much.

It was Jason who helped her get over that. Theyd met when they were both twelve. It was the summer that Ariel started the workshop in Creative Psychokinesis, the first summer that Jason and his father had stayed at Mars Hill.

Hey, Jason had said, too loudly when they found themselves left alone while the adults swapped wine coolers and introductions at the summers first barbecue. They were the only kids in sight. There were no other families and few conventionally married couples at Mars Hill. The community had been the cause of more than one custody battle that had ended with wistful children sent to spend the summer with a more respectable parent in Boston or Manhattan or Bar Harbor. That lady there with my father

He stuck his thumb out to indicate Ariel, her long black hair frizzed and bound with leather thongs, an old multicolored skirt flapping around her legs. She was talking to a slender man with close-cropped blond hair and goatee, wearing a sky-blue caftan and shabby Birkenstock sandals. That your mom?

Yeah. Moony shrugged and glanced at the man in the caftan. He and Ariel both turned to look at their children. The man grinned and raised his wine glass. Ariel did a little pirouette and blew a kiss at Moony.

Looks like she did too much of the brown acid at Woodstock, Jason announced, and flopped onto the grass. Moony glared down at him.

She wasnt at Woodstock, asshole, she said, and had started to walk away when the boy called after her.

Heyits a joke! My names Jason He pointed at the man with Ariel. Thats my father. Martin Dionysos. But like thats not his real name, okay? His real name is Schuster but he changed it, but Im Jason Schuster. Hes a painter. We dont know anyone here. I mean, does it ever get above forty degrees?

He scrambled to his feet and looked at her beseechingly. Smaller even than Moony herself, so slender he should have looked younger than her, except that his sharp face beneath floppy white-blond hair was always twisted into some ironic pronouncement, his blue eyes always flickering somewhere between derision and pleading.

No, Moony said slowly. The part about Jason not changing his name got to her. She stared pointedly at his thin arms prickled with gooseflesh, the fashionable surfer-logo T-shirt that hung nearly to his knees. Youre gonna freeze your skinny ass off here in Maine, Jason Schuster. And she grinned.

He was from San Francisco. His father was a well-known artist and a member of the Raging Faery Queens, a gay pagan group that lived in the Bay Area and staged elaborately beautiful solstice gatherings and AIDS benefits. At Mars Hill, Martin Dionysos gave workshops on strengthening your aura and on clear nights led the communitys men in chanting at the moon as it rose above Penobscot Bay. Jason was so diffident about his father and his fathers work that Moony was surprised, the single time she visited him on the West Coast, to find her friends room plastered with flyers advertising Faery gatherings and newspaper photos of Martin and Jason at various ACT-UP events. In the fall Jason would be staying in Maine, while she returned to high school. Ultimately it was the thought that she might not see him again that made Moony decide to spend this last summer at Mars Hill.