Black Moon

11

THE INSOMNIAC WOKE BIGGS, SHRIEKING like the braking of a train and rattling the cage. His would-be attacker was a middle-aged man with bruised arms, ruddy hairless head, and ragged beard, a wiry frame under a filthy yellow T-shirt. He had his fingers through the tight mesh and he was pulling hard, as though he were the one trapped inside. Biggs scanned for others in the massive space. Sunlight poured down from the skylights above, gleaming off the steel conveyor rollers. He figured he must have slept only a few hours—the exhaustion still sat heavy in his body, slowing him.

The cage was solid, the mesh refusing to bend or bow despite the efforts of the attacker. It was a security cage designed to be a safe partition in an electronics warehouse. It should hold, but there was no reason to just sit there waiting.

Biggs got to his feet and grabbed the heavy flashlight he had picked up in an abandoned hardware store. The weight of it was reassuring. He took two steps forward, looking grave. His proximity sent the insomniac into an even more animated fit of rage, bashing at the wire with his head. Biggs recoiled, tense. The animal screams echoed in the vast interior space and Biggs wished he would shut the fuck up.

“I’m going to break your fingers if you don’t let go,” Biggs told him flatly. “You understand?”

The man’s response was to press his face against the cage and bellow, his mouth open wide, exposing his silver fillings, his white tongue. Biggs wanted to shove the flashlight down the insomniac’s throat to silence him.

He stepped forward and beat at the man’s fingers until he let go of the cage, wailing and staring at Biggs in disbelief.

“I warned you,” Biggs said.

The insomniac charged again, pounding on the mesh. When he made the mistake of grabbing the wire, Biggs was there with the flashlight.

“Don’t!” Biggs yelled, swinging hard at the fingers and hearing the sickening crack of bone.

Again the man backed away, whimpering at his damaged hands, before making another charge, urged on by his own war cry.

For a while, Biggs batted at anything that came through the mesh, then sat down, actually winded from the effort, as the man raged on. From his makeshift bed, Biggs watched the insomniac kicking at the cage, ramming it with the canvas carts and boxes that littered the warehouse floor, flinging fistfuls of loose circuits that hit like a spray of insects. Biggs flinched with every blow. Yet the cage showed no sign of yielding. It would hold.

At least no one else was around, Biggs observed. Who would be? The warehouse was one of dozens in the middle of otherwise undeveloped washland. The only thing to do was wait it out. If he sat here long enough, wide-eyed and alert, maybe the insomniac would forget that he had ever seen Biggs sleeping. At this stage, he knew, they were a mental mess—the sleepless. Their thoughts seem to cycle madly through a headspace bustling with contradictory signals. Unfortunately, he had seen that they only came into focus when in this highly agitated state, a sustained rage triggered by the sight of a sleeper. This could be a long and dangerous wait.

The man circled the cage. He tripped over boxes and slid on the motherboards that cluttered the ground, but he never took his eyes off Biggs.

Who are you? Biggs wondered, studying the man for clues about his pre-epidemic past. Veined, worn hands. Maybe a contractor or maybe a plumber, an electrician. Or most likely someone who worked here, in this warehouse. Forklift driver or what? Foreman. Maybe a father.

The man continued to shriek and, when he threw himself at the cage, to groan as his legs churned, plowing him forward against the immovable structure. Biggs regretted not having a real weapon. A gun would be best. But even if he did, he doubted he could shoot this wreck of a human, now grating his own head against the tight gauge of mesh. He had never even fired a gun. Now, he promised himself, it seemed necessary to find one. If I ever get out of this cage.

“You going to let me leave?” he asked the insomniac.

This set off a deafening volley of shrieking that, much to Biggs’s relief, tapered off at the end. The man was screaming himself hoarse. That would be a good thing.

“Yeah? Then what happened?” Biggs said, now goading.

The man let out a ragged cry that bounced off the high ceiling. He bashed at the gate with his shoulder.

This response presented Biggs with a strategy. He got to his feet and provoked a series of fits, baiting the man by standing just on the other side of the wire wall, until he succeeded in reducing the outbursts to nothing more than gravelly expulsions. The man’s body was starting to give out as well. He was drenched in sweat and it took him longer to get back on his feet after tripping over boxes or bouncing off the mesh to the floor. Yet he persisted in circling and launching himself against the cage.

Biggs returned to his bed. He too was exhausted, and groggy from his own, more conventional sleep deficit. It had been the first time in days that Biggs felt safe enough to make an attempt. After finding the cage in the warehouse, and testing it much in the way it was being tested now, he had doubled back a few miles to a ransacked Home Depot he had spotted earlier. There he found four heavy locks, still packaged, and stuffed them into the pockets of his cargo pants—also a prize of looting. Back at the warehouse, he found some foam packing cushions and boxes and layered them on the floor. It wasn’t a bad bed. His plan was to get a couple of days’ sleep, then continue on to Carolyn’s father’s house, where he was hoping she had fled as she had done before.

Now he drank some water that he had stashed, watching the man over the top of the plastic bottle. He lay back on his elbows and considered his predicament. Weird how a cage seemed like a good place to make a home, however temporary.

When you think about it, the whole setup—life as we know it—is one cage inside another inside another, he remembered telling her. This was at a time when his slowly accumulated disillusionment with ad work had begun to ferment. What he found he could no longer tolerate was the seriousness of it all: the desperation of clients to please their corporate overlords, the desperation of the agency to please the client. How a currency of such shallow ideas was treated as gold. It was all an illusion. “Well, it’s either a cage or a cave,” Carolyn once told him.

He recalled how she showed him the difference between the two. It happened at the most unlikely time: when they were trying to get pregnant. Biggs would sometimes come home from the office at lunchtime—if Carolyn’s calendar indicated it was that optimal phase of her cycle. She would be waiting, often washing up in the bathroom if she had been painting props or puppets in her studio. He would come in and sit on the Murphy bed in the main room of the loft, kicking off his shoes and peeling off his pants. They joked about how clinical things had gotten, and somehow the joking made it less so.

“Your sperm donkey has arrived,” he called glumly through the door after an especially dreary morning at the agency. “Let’s make a zygote.”

“Be right out,” she responded over the hiss of the sink and the gentle splashing of her scrubbing.

“Your sex Eeyore,” he mumbled.

“Oh boy,” she said, stepping out in her bra and panties—a sight he never tired of, even during those days of constant trying. She sat next to him, sensing, he knew, that he wasn’t in the right frame of mind. No doubt taking in his pants bunched up at his ankles, the slump of shoulders, not to mention the lackluster delivery of his jokes. It wasn’t like him to brood, but today it felt like a default setting. She leaned into him and kissed his cheek, sniffing his stubble at the same time.

“Yep, it’s you,” she said.

She claimed he had a unique aroma—a pleasing one that was part soap, part coffee, with a dash of some faintly musky perfume generated in his pores while he slept. Only she could smell it. It was strongest in the mornings, she insisted, often telling him that her sniff test was a surefire way to screen for dastardly clones and doppelgangers.

She threw her long thigh over his lap. Her shin was smooth, even shiny. She still had hope, an engine of possibility still purred inside her. This was her upbeat era. Their efforts at conception had yet to foreshadow the desperation to come. She leaned back and looked at his face, reached up and scratched lightly at the back of his head—unhurried, calibrating his mood. Invisible colors passed between them. She knew this was about his job. There was no reason for him to say anything. They had covered his career frustrations many times over—the meaninglessness of it all, the enslavement of storytelling, he had once melodramatically labeled it. The artless art, he once proclaimed.

“You know what we should do?” she asked.

“What’s that?”

“We should drag the mattress into my studio where we can block out all the light. We’ll make it pitch dark and silent. I have those thick black curtains, you know, and sound blankets. Then we should get under the covers and just sleep.”

“Just sleep.”

“That’s it. No baby making, no talking, no thinking. Just sleeping. And we should try to sleep for as long as we possibly can. Days, maybe weeks.”

“What about my job?” he asked, though he was already buying in. “I have a call with Chicago at two.”

“You won’t need a job where we’re going, baby.”

“You mean in our dreams.”

“You’ll dream up a whole new life. What’s your dream job?”

He thought for a moment. “I always wanted to be the guy who delivers mail to some tropical islands by rowboat.”

“Really? Huh.”

“It would be a good daily workout, and imagine the tan.”

They followed through on the plan, converting her studio into a sleeping den. A cave deep inside a snow-covered mountain, she suggested.

After fifteen minutes, they found themselves making love in the lightless chamber. He fell asleep soon after. When he woke, he felt for her in the darkness, expecting her to be gone. She rarely slept during the day and barely slept at night. But she was there, warm and silent next to him. He drifted off again and woke up when she was sniffing his neck, the room still thick with an impenetrable darkness. “Is it me?” he whispered.

“Aren’t you wondering if it’s me?”

“How long did we sleep?”

“I don’t know.”

“What time do you think it is?”

“What day, you mean.”

“Day? Really?”

He started to sit up but she pulled him down. “No, let’s stay here,” she said. “Don’t you see that we’re completely lost in time and space?”

“Hey,” he said, finally getting it. “Yeah.”

“I never want to leave,” she said. “I always want to be here with you.”

He went back to work the following Monday, after sleeping through most of Friday. But it was as though a seed had indeed been planted. It took only two weeks to bloom. He resigned and packed up, all in one afternoon. She met him downstairs, and brought along her equipment dolly to help him bring up the boxes of his personal belongings. It was the beginning of a new era, maybe an era called the end.

THE assault was losing steam when Biggs reset the man’s rage by yawning. At first he froze in astonishment, then was overwhelmed by violent convulsions. His rage took the form of a seizure and he fell to the ground, kicking and punching at the cage. He pulled himself up against it and climbed his legs up the wall, so that he was upside down, seething with an epic tantrum. Yet his cries were now mere hisses.

Biggs looked on sadly. It was a terrible thing that had set upon them all. His own father and mother must have passed through this stage as well, if not everyone else he knew. He did not know the fate of his brother. If he couldn’t find Carolyn, he would make his way to Adam’s house and see what had become of him.

Maybe he’s like me. A sleeper. Why not? We have the same blood, same wiring—if that has anything to do with it.

When Biggs yawned again, he simply rolled onto his side, turning his back on the human explosion it again triggered only a few feet away. He allowed his head to sink into the balled-up clothes that served as his pillow.

Maybe it was only for a few minutes, maybe an hour.

He thought he heard someone say his name.

There was a clinking, the crunch of footsteps on the circuits scattered all over the floor. He sat up on his elbows and turned toward the movement. Maybe, Biggs wondered, I am an insomniac too. The shadowy figures, the voices. That’s what you eventually experience. He watched, surprised, as the figure emerged into view.

It was Carolyn, dressed in black—her studio clothes that hid her in the darkness at the outskirts of the frame, or allowed her to puppeteer some quick on-camera movement while obscured against a black felt backdrop. She would then use a pen tool and tablet to manually erase every pixel of herself from each digital frame of the footage, replacing the hint of her shape in the darkness with a truer emptiness. It was grueling work that she called cleanup, this removal of herself from her worlds.

Now time seemed to be held up. Not frozen solid, but quivering in a tight loop. The scene flickered, pulsed, as though the cosmic playhead was jumping between two nearly similar frames. The insomniac’s back seem to shudder violently, flickering along the edges. Biggs wanted to warn Carolyn that the man was dangerous, but his mouth would not open at his mental urging, nor would his throat issue a sound. She glided toward his attacker without pause and stood over him, studying him. It was an expression of concentration he had seen before, when standing at the door of her studio, well past midnight, to ask her if she was coming to bed. She leaned in, tilting her head, squinting, then reached out. He heard her hands at work—the moist molding of clay, a sudden cracking as she grit her teeth and bore down. There was a burst of light. The man’s form jolted, then settled back into the looping shudder.

Carolyn stood back and studied the figure sitting before her, again squinting, considering. She leaned forward and made some adjustments. Satisfied, she turned and said to Biggs, “What next, dreamer?”

“Next?”

“Everything happens in your head first.”

“How did you get here?” he asked.

“I dropped in,” she said. “From the skylight. No one ever looks up.”

She moved toward the margins of his periphery and seemed to settle there, just out of view, a soft dark edge to his field of vision.

He tried to follow her, turning his head, but the dark area moved with him. Rising to his knees, he shifted focus and scanned the room. There was no sign of Carolyn anywhere, other than a strange dark feathering to the extreme right corner of his eye. He rubbed at it, thinking there was something there—a hair, a mote of dust—but it remained. Had it always been there? Why hadn’t he noticed before? Then the thought that was always there too: Was he finally succumbing?

The insomniac was now still and silent, slumped on the floor, his back pressed against the cage. Biggs stood and nudged the man’s back by kneeing the wire wall. Nothing. He bent over and stuck a knuckle through the mesh, poking the man in the spine. Still no reaction. He yelled and kicked hard against the cage.

When the insomniac remained still, Biggs grabbed the flashlight. He dug in his pocket for the key to the lock. The gate opened with a creak and he stepped out onto the silent warehouse floor. When he came around the cage, he was startled to see the insomniac staring up at him. He raised the flashlight, ready to swing. But the man’s eyes were locked in an empty stare. His mouth was frozen open to an unnatural degree. His jaw was clearly broken, and his chin was still wet with drool. Biggs could see that he was dead, yet he crouched over the body and slowly sent out his hand to touch the man’s cool, lifeless flesh.

He stood and searched the warehouse for signs of Carolyn. She was watching him, he was sure of it. But from where? Like his wedding band, which had reappeared on his finger when he awoke at Delicious, there was physical evidence of her presence. He studied it now, half expecting the ring to be gone. But there it was, as real as the corpse sitting before him.