The Infinite Miles by Hannah Fergesen

Author:Hannah Fergesen [Fergesen, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

SIXTEEN

IOWA, 1969–1989

Miles Murphy was born in an Iowa farmhouse on a twilit mid-June morning, the same year a group of American astronauts walked on the moon. He was the third of six children born in an agricultural town two hours from anything, where children were known to disappear without much to do, and where he was often confused for his brother Thomas by his parents, whose declining farm required long hours of work that tired them to the bone.

He had a few friends at school, other weirdos and a girl named Willa O’Leary, but they lived far enough in all directions that they rarely saw one another outside of school. While his brothers were off at the lake with the neighborhood boys or terrorizing animals in the woods, his older sister monopolized the television in the den, playing MTV nonstop when she wasn’t at school, and on the days when Miles did not have enough money from doing odd jobs to see an old western at the singleplex, he would sit with her while she groaned and sighed her way through that day’s homework, watching the glamorous musicians lip-sync to their own music against foggy backgrounds. Soon, he began teaching himself guitar on his father’s old untuned acoustic he found in the attic. He told his sister that he’d like to be a musician one day too. She’d just laughed and said, “Good luck getting out of Iowa.”

He had his favorites, of course—Michael Jackson and the Cure and the Bee Gees—but no one topped Miles Moonraker. He was nothing like the other musicians Miles loved—besides his raw croon, he kept his face painted in every video, every concert, stripes of green and blue and purple and so much glitter it was a wonder the rock star didn’t suffocate. The alien androgyny that would have gotten anyone beaten to shit out there in farm country seemed perfectly normal on the musician’s made-up face, and it forced people to pay attention to the music, melodies about people adrift among the stars.

And on his way home from school one evening, he found himself daydreaming about what a person had to do to have a life like that. Where did one go? How did they dress? How did they pass the point of being bullied and enter the phase of being taken seriously? He wondered about Miles Moonraker, who was . . .

Standing in the road in front of him.

Miles blinked. No, not Miles Moonraker after all—there was no paint on his sun-loved brown skin, no glitter gracing his brow. But the man’s bright eyes were framed with lines of smudged black, his Titian curls crisp with product, and the costume he wore was straight out of a Miles Moonraker video.

Something stirred in Miles’s heart, in his stomach. A kind of ache, a kind of longing.

“Ah,” said the man. He studied Miles curiously. “I see that someone has played a joke on me. You are wearing a more accurate representation of your planet’s uniform?”

Miles looked down.

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