Not for sure. What we knew was that Eliot had ordered a telescope straight from China – not more than $200, we were shocked – and he had shown us – photographed it first with his phone pressed to the eyepiece – the purplish frayed shadow at the edge of the moon. Mountains as lace. The shadow! he’d been saying.
Then there’d been the shots. Three of us gone silent and pert as meerkats. Fireworks? It wasn’t, we knew. All our heads turned north. Calculating, same as Eliot had calculated which lens to search for Jupiter and found instead the moon. Three blocks. Should we call? Listened a minute more. Then it was my turn. Don’t move it. I know. It’s just it took a long time to- I know. Do you see it? It was mountains lit like lace. Edge of the moon. Bend of it. Someone had stood up there. A broken rocket slingshot round it. A poem, even, I’d heard, had flown on Odysseus, one more try to touch that lunar surface. To land. That lunar stillness.
More shots. Same place. We froze again. Pictured the low concrete houses those three blocks between here and the hospital. Nine? I counted nine. Silence. Still silence. We had called once. Were trained now, weren’t we: policeman on the line had asked: Did you hear anything after? Screams? Screeching tires? He’d actually asked that, like some Hollywood producer spec’ing sound effects. The way all these things could be faked. That print of a boot on the moon. Lunar dust heavy as the grit of cremation floating away weightless as talc. But they’d definitely been shots.
We count it back in our heads. Don’t want to be those fools that prove the claim how faulty witness memory can be. There’d been bell of the train. There’d been Eliot saying, The shadow! Can you see it? God it’s beautiful! A car, yes there’d been a car. But quietlike, someone just home from the shops, someone passing through. Then, crack crack crack. Then, Don’t move the telescope… It took a long time to get that view. Someone said, Wolf Moon. We’d argued if it were truly full. Someone had asked Siri, Is there sound on the moon? and there’d been argument there, too: a bell? static? a flute? utter perfect vacant interstellar silence? Then, My god it’s beautiful. Then, crack crack crack crack crack crack.
Eliot turned a page in his notebook. Dutiful citizens, be ready to testify. Just as carefully as he’d penciled the degree of angle, the power of the lens, he marked down the time. Estimated street and block number. Caliber. The number 9. Like the number of planets when we’d first learned them. No, that’s all right, the officer was saying through the line, we’ll run past and see if we see anything.
Might not have been a murder. No scream. No getaway. Just the shots. Thanks for the call. And there’s the fringe, yet, purple shadow of the moon. And Eliot saying, Have you ever seen Saturn’s rings?