Everyone I asked told me that the
Moo was an alien, something big and ugly – that’s how the children described it
– or gargantuan with an eerie aura – that’s how the adults put it. In any case, no one felt terribly pleased
when he or she suddenly received the urge. You see, the Moo had an inextricable
charisma that created a yearning distress in all who were near it – a kilometer
or so from its exhibition location – and an interminable addiction in all who
had seen it. The general public had logically
termed that addiction the urge, and
no one could use the word without reminding everyone of the monstrosity that
sat in the museum basement.
The Museum of Natural History was in
fact somewhat excited about its newest addition, for people would flock in
every morning to pay a visit to the Moo.
Of course, no one really knew who profited from the explosive volume,
since all the curators and various other museum workers lived in the basement
with the Moo, and the money paid to enter the museum sat in a lump next to the
front desk.
I was one of the last students at my
school to encounter the urge;
actually, I was the second to last, the final person to succumb being my
girlfriend, Maria. She’d been on
vacation with her family when the Moo arrived, so she had never even heard of
it until half the local population had experienced the urge. I told her she was
lucky, but she just shrugged the way she always shrugged, her shoulders gliding
downwards with a casual elegance. It
was only a matter of time for everyone, and we eventually got into the habit of
making the trip to the museum together in the morning before the sun even rose
so that we could avoid the huge crowds.
Besides, it was more intimate and romantic that way: it was just the two
of us, the sleeping museum staff, and the Moo.
I must confess, there were times
when I would spend more of the visit staring at the Moo than at Maria. She didn’t seem to mind, but she’d always
been considerate in that way. We
sometimes played a sort of game – I would sometimes suddenly turn away from the
Moo and watch her instead while she looked at it, oblivious to everything
around her, and I was convinced that she often did the same. It was serene, somewhat melancholy; her
fingers would pick at her grayscale sweater while her eyes remained fixed on
the Moo. My eyes would slowly drift
upwards from her fingers to her hair.
Maria’s hair was the most beautiful thing in the world to behold. She had a small mop of black strands that
she wore tied with a small ribbon in the back even though it wasn’t long enough
to be obtrusive even if she had let it down.
I think her hair was very important to her: she always seemed to be
touching it every five minutes or so, and more rapidly when she was viewing the
Moo. It was part of her humanity, she
explained to me one day when I asked her why all her childhood drawings were
stick figures with voluminous black hair.
For me, that was reason enough, and besides, it was beautiful enough to
be humanity all by itself.
I loved Maria and Maria loved me;
wasn’t that all it meant to be human, after all? We used to kiss each other at least four times before we said our
final goodbyes are school or after a date.
It was our own little addiction, I suppose, but Maria contended that it
was hardly harmful, so we couldn’t really use the word addiction, and certainly
not the word urge. More recently, we began to kiss and say
less. We were hardly falling out of
love – we had in fact started thinking about our common futures and all the
wonderful things we could do on our honeymoon.
We didn’t even think about the Moo when we said those luxurious words
and caressed each other under the waning moon.
However, the moments became more rare and something incredible seemed to
be looming upon the land.
Maria was the first to write
something down about the Moo. Everyone
else seemed rather content with just talking about it, but as Maria had
declared, no one really told the truth about the Moo. When she wrote in her small notebook, she’d always put on a pair
of very cute reading glasses and begin by tapping the tip of her pen against
the pages three times. She wrote
diligently, with a fervor of a hurricane.
Usually, she kept the notebook in her lap, since her desk was so
cluttered with other pieces of paper and various mini-sculptures that she loved
to dust.
It was about the time when she had
completely filled one notebook with observations on the Moo that the first
death was reported. The whole town was
in an uproar for a full week after the incident, for it was both ridiculous and
appalling. That boy was so innocent and
bright, everyone argued, citing his excellent relations with his peers and his
decent school grades and athletic involvement.
His parents, in an interview conducted two days after his death,
admitted that he had grown withdrawn and blue a day or two before he drowned in
the neighborhood pool in the evening (there wasn’t a lifeguard present).
The only person who wasn’t surprised
was Maria, who shrugged like she always did and reasoned that, from her
observations, the Moo had the potential to do something very dangerous to
people’s minds. She certainly stood
with the camp that declared the Moo to be a malignant alien, and she did all
she could to resist the urge. I tried to help her, too, by secretly
turning off her alarm clock so that I’d be the only one to visit the Moo in the
twilight of pre-dawn, but she woke up anyway.
On her part, she blocked up the door to prevent herself from getting
out, only to realize too late that she had just climbed out her window and
shimmied down the oak tree outside in her pajamas.
I, unlike Maria, did not really feel
strongly one way or another about the character of the Moo. As a result, I did not feel the same
desperation that she felt every time she failed to stop herself from going to
see the Moo. One time, she even pushed
me to the ground when I tried to explain to her that it was okay to want to see
the Moo, that everyone got the urge
once a day. With an exasperated scream,
she retorted that there had been twenty reported suicides already – now one
tragedy a day – and the Moo had grown
immensely large, occupying the majority of the basement. We viewed it from the large whole it had
created in the middle of the first floor.
We all wondered why someone didn’t
just kill the Moo. After all, it wasn’t
like we cared about it in any way. As
has been stated, it was hideous. In its
obscene atrociousness, there was something beyond human comprehension, and it
ate away at the mind.
In the middle of the night on a
Friday, Maria suddenly knocked on my front door, forcing me to get out of
bed. She asked me, quietly, if I would
care if she were to vanish forever. Of
course, I said yes and that I loved her very much, but she still seemed to be
very shaken about something. I hugged
her and dragged her into my house; she didn’t put up any resistance.
The night had stilled the world; we
could not hear the Moo breathing.
Tenderly, we simply clung to each other, rocking back and forth until we
fell asleep.