Black Moon

13

IT TOOK ONLY HALF A DAY’S DISTANCE from the warehouse, walking through abandoned industrial parks and wide expanses of dry brush toward the foothills, for Biggs to conclude that he still slept, still dreamed. The insomniac had died on his own. The man was at the end of his rope already, and all the activity pushed him over the edge. The rage caused something inside him to snap. Broke his jaw throwing himself against the cage or the floor. Then blew a fuse and that was that.

And the ring? It was Maria who had given it back to him, he had always suspected. Slipped it onto his finger as a gesture of goodwill—a refund since, after all, he didn’t require her services. Or maybe an exchange for his wallet, which was missing when he woke up.

He tested his syntax by saying, “I can still sleep, and dream.”

He repeated this as he approached a cluster of abandoned cars in a parking lot. Out of habit, he peered in the windows, hoping to see a key jutting from the ignition. He could try each door, search the under the seats and floor mats, check the visors and glove compartments. But he had learned that this was an unrewarding and time-consuming endeavor, especially with deliberately parked cars. Chances improved when the cars had been abandoned on the road, but because they had been ditched by sleepless drivers with the engine running, it was likely the gas had already been burned through.

He walked on, making his way to a wide avenue that extended up into the foothills, where large homes lined the ridges. Power line towers stood like skeletal sentries, positioned at receding intervals up the grade, arms burdened by the endless dead lines that sagged toward the earth.

The once impeccably landscaped lawn of the median had gone feral and was now up to Biggs’s chest in places. He could see trails pressed into the grass by other walkers, maybe coyotes. Overhead, palm fronds clattered and creaked in the wind. Doves cooed. He was tempted to curl up in the grass and reclaim some of the many lost hours of sleep, since he was still in the red. To dream again, to maybe see Carolyn—to draw her out of the dark margin of his eye. But that would be reckless. After all, it seemed to him that the sleepless were now drawn to him when he slept, moths to flame.

He walked on. A short distance up the avenue, he caught sight of a billboard. It was suspended on a wide trunk of steel, sitting three stories over a used car lot—an ad for a vacation getaway. The graphic was an expansive white sand beach. The impossibly blue water sat beyond, framed by an arch of coconut tree trunks. The copy read: INSERT TOES HERE. An arrow pointed to a spot in the sand. It was a campaign he had worked on. In fact, the line was his. This was his creative legacy, this sign.

When Biggs saw that its retractable ladder was lowered, he headed toward it. He had become attuned to possible safe havens, like the cage in the warehouse or the abandoned Humvee he had inhabited for a short nap what seemed like years ago. Yes, the danger was that a safe place could easily become a trap. And he wasn’t great with heights. But if he was able pull up the ladder behind him and somehow sleep out of view—maybe on the floor of the catwalk along the sign’s base, if he laid down some cardboard—the billboard’s location would be worth noting.

He picked his way through the used cars. As he neared the ladder, he realized it was suspended higher than it looked from a distance. He stood under it and leapt for the first rung, grazing it with his knuckles before dropping back to the hot pavement. He looked around for something to stand on. Come on, he told himself, you can reach it. He took a few running steps and jumped. This time he caught it with one hand, then, after a wild swing, the other. He groaned and lunged for the higher rung, and the next, until he could bring his feet up onto the lowest rung. Now able to stand, he climbed up the ladder to the iron grate landing of the billboard.

He saw that the ladder could not be prevented from dropping back down. The crank lock was broken. He could, if necessary, use one of his locks to hold it up.

He was pretty high up. It looked higher than it did from the ground. Maybe four stories. He felt the altitude in his knees and wished he had Carolyn’s fearlessness when it came to heights. How she insisted on checking the weather by leaning far out of their sixth story window. How she once sat in the window frame, one leg dangling over the alley far below, as she snapped pictures of a nearby fireworks show. Just seeing her perched there had given his stomach a turn.

And yes, there was the skylight. She had climbed through it at least once, maybe more, pulling herself up the frail hook pole. What had she done up there on the roof, where no one goes? She had gone up and out of view, into a blind spot. She returned to earth with her bare feet blackened by tar. Of course he was reminded that there was another time, a longer stretch of time, that she had once disappeared into. A more significant blind spot—a cave of darkness that had once held her for six weeks. Even now, standing in the shadow of his sign with the foothills of her family home in sight, his mind tried to peer into the opaque fog of that lost chapter.

She had barricaded herself there in her childhood bedroom over a year ago. She wanted isolation, she had explained, to get fully immersed in a new project. Biggs had reluctantly endorsed this abrupt residency, having witnessed her mounting distress at being unproductive for weeks. It was a block, she insisted, attempting to explain her sleepless nights and mood swings. She just needed some space to work through it. The literal space she had in mind was the studio she had fashioned in her walk-in closet during high school, when she made stop-motion cartoons with repurposed Barbie dolls and hacked action figures.

She had asked him not to visit her, and she never showed him the work she had done there. When she returned to the city, she refused to discuss her time away. She seemed drained of her desire to create. He was perplexed by her sudden lack of drive, and by the unceasing agitation that lay just under the surface. She had long suffered bouts of insomnia—a pioneer of sleeplessness whose struggles reached new heights over a year ago, when she returned from her father’s house. What had happened there? What did she find in that darkness—tumbling in that void—that seemed to hang like a dark veil in front of her face?

He believed it was possible that he’d find her there now. Maybe whatever it was could somehow be their salvation now that the world had been turned inside out.

He took his bearings, sighting his path onward from the mountain ridges. He looked over his shoulder at the blue wall of motionless and silent ocean—the massive decal of colored dots smoothed over the backboard. Maybe, when he found her, this is where they would come. Away from the cave. They could live out their days on this narrow metal ledge, the two of them, sheltered by one of his bright ideas. Beachfront property, he thought. It was a peaceful scene, a dream vacation. An empty, two-dimensional dream he had authored. Nothing like the turbulent dream sea that had brought them together, but real in its own way.

As he stood there looking at the vast arrangement of tiled rooftops, a sleepless policeman passed underneath with no awareness of his presence. Carolyn was right, Biggs observed. No one ever looks up.

HE reached the house by late afternoon. It loomed above him, a sprawling, modern compound that Carolyn’s father had designed himself—an institutional-looking building with broad windows and glass bricks, a flat roof with cantilevered eaves. The front door was wide open. A bad sign, Biggs thought.

There were people in the house, but they were not Carolyn’s family. They were most likely neighborhood people who had just wandered in, confused. Biggs observed how they seemed baffled by the position of the walls, the location of doors, the height of the ceiling. The carpeting confounded them, as did late afternoon views out the window and the elegant mahogany furniture. They murmured to themselves as they picked through closets or stared at family photos, trying to situate their own dim histories—memories now distorted by the forces of exhaustion and hallucination—into the storyline that surrounded them. They were insomniacs under the impression that they were home, yet home had somehow disowned them.

Biggs was ignored as he moved among them, employing their shuffle, their twitching mouth and eyes. He counted at least fourteen people in the sprawling house. They were in various states of dress—men, women, some college-aged kids, a small child peeling off wallpaper in the dining room. They, and others before them, had toppled the furniture and flipped the beds. The hallway smelled strongly of urine. The family’s possessions were now a chaotic tumble that crunched underfoot. He found the flat surfaces of his father-in-law’s office brittle with the obsidian fragments of the man’s fabled vinyl record collection. The ground was littered with papers. Biggs kicked at them—business records, tax filings, ancient spreadsheets, letters.

He moved on to the far wing, toward Carolyn’s room, where he too had lived one summer. The walls of the corridor were hung with family pictures. Some had been knocked to the ground by the heavy swipe of an insomniac’s arm or the drag of a shoulder. Others were askew. A large picture of her mother served as a centerpiece. He remembered it from the memorial service. There were pictures of Carolyn and her sister, Mary, as children, wearing stiff dresses, socks bunched at their thin ankles.

He stopped before a picture from his wedding. He and Carolyn smiling into the camera. Behind them, a glimpse of the meadow. Nearby, he knew, just outside the frame to their left, was a long table where all their family and friends had sat for both the short ceremony and the all-night dinner party that followed. There was a series of smaller images taken that day as well. Carolyn lifting her dress and running barefoot through the grass, chased by children. Carolyn standing on his feet, his chin resting on her head. A shot of him, knee-deep in a pond in his wedding suit, holding Carolyn in his arms over the water. The whiteness of her dress like a cloud reflected on the pond’s surface.

It struck him, standing in her house and staring at these pictures, that he didn’t think he could live without her. He needed to find her. Nothing else made sense. He tore himself away from the images and continued down the hallway toward the bedrooms. The rooms had been preserved for the daughters, should the world send them running home. Carolyn had done exactly that over a year ago, so why not now?

He pushed the door to her room wide open. She would be there, he hoped, reading in her bed. The Carolyn he knew from years ago flashing that mischievous smile at being discovered. Mysteriously recovered and reaching out to him, erasing the images in his head, burned there the last time he saw her—a snarling, red-eyed insomniac tied to a chair—and even those from just before, when she moved with a weary yet beautiful sadness.

He took in the ransacked space—her clothes, papers, books cluttering the floor, the bed. The collage that each life produces, arranged by the artless hands of sleepless strangers. Light sliced through the vertical slats of the blinds, striping the otherwise dim room. No Carolyn.

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “of course not.”

He could hear glass breaking somewhere in the house, followed by the toppling of something heavy. People moving about. It was desperate to come all the way out here. But he had had no choice, he told himself. He entered the room, stepping on books that littered the floor. What else did he have to go on? She had vanished without a trace. This was the only place she would have gone, if she had the presence of mind to steer in a specific direction.

The disappointment, though not unexpected, washed coldly through him. He knocked aside the clutter on the bed and sat down heavily. They had made love in this bed many times, early in their relationship. Silently, so her father wouldn’t hear. It was the summer she came home to help with her mother’s hospice. Biggs had joined her, since wasn’t that what The Dream suggested?

With a sweep of his arm he brushed all the remaining items off the bed and lay down, face pressed into her pillow. The sweet odor of her was faintly held there. He recalled her skin, the goose bumps that appeared when he touched her. The hunger of her mouth when she forgot herself: the light electric scrape of her teeth, the erotic shock of her tongue. She was like that about everything. Either intense to the point of hurting herself, or overly self-conscious and constrained. There was no middle ground with her, and he loved this about her, once he got used to it. How many times had she refused to talk to him on the phone, saying “I can’t talk now,” then hanging up? It took him several years to learn not to take this personally, to understand that her mind was just savagely engaged in something else.

He turned and, lying on his back, stared up at the ceiling. This is it. The exhaustion of his very limited ideas. Two places on the planet where she would most likely be, and yet she wasn’t. He felt the frightening range of maybes open up beneath him, the vast expanse of anywhere. He pressed both hands against his eyes, blocking out all light, holding everything in. Creating a vault of darkness. This, he thought, is where she lives now. Here but hidden.

As he removed his hands and his eyes adjusted, he saw a dark flutter again in the far right corner of his eye. He turned his head—half expecting to find someone standing there—and found himself staring at the door of Carolyn’s walk-in closet.

Biggs stood and stepped over the debris on the floor, then slowly pulled open the door to her makeshift studio. He squinted as he peered into the small, dark space. Could she be there, blending into the black backdrop? He needed more light. He went to the sliding glass window and opened the vertical blinds with a tug on the beaded chain. Late afternoon light pushed into the room and seeped faintly into the closet. Her dream chamber, he remembered her jokingly calling it.

The room had been outfitted for stop-motion shooting. Carolyn had mounted lights on the ceiling and draped the walls with black. A drafting table, which served as the production stage, sat against the far wall behind a cluster of tripods, portable dolly tracks, and light stands. He knew how the backdrop could be quickly switched from black, for puppetry, to a green screen for chroma-key work, depending on the film or scene, or the look she was after. The camera could be suspended over the table on a jib, shooting directly down, for flatwork, drawings. It was a scaled-down version of her studio at home, but fully functional on its own.

The room even came equipped with a computer—a laptop that she used to edit the files, set on a small desk. The desk was lined with metallic external hard drives. Filled, he knew, with projects dating back to her earliest attempts at filmmaking.

Biggs sat down at the desk and opened the laptop. He pressed the power button and, to his astonishment, the machine stirred. He heard the whine of the drive. The monitor lit up. First blue, then gray as the machine cycled through the start-up. Then he found himself staring at her cluttered desktop—the file icons nearly concealing the desktop image—and it was something like being in her presence. The files were mostly video clips, but he could also see documents for grants and scripts.

The disarray said something about Carolyn’s chaotic process. No time to organize things. Not with her breakneck pacing and laser-guided focus when she was in the zone. It occurred to Biggs that her last project, the one she came here to work on, was probably one of these files on the desktop. He swiped his finger along the touchpad and, with a point-and-click, rearranged the icons by date. The most recent file was indeed a video. A file named Missed.

He doubled-clicked the icon.

At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. The image was very grainy, an array of black-and-white pixels. The camera eased back, revealing the full image, and Biggs understood that he was looking at an ultrasound of a womb, a snapshot. The camera locked in and focused, with the small, amphibian-like shape held in the center of the frame—a tiny blur of prehuman creature floating in the dark oval of uterus, anchored by the umbilical tether. The picture was slowly rotated, but the contents remained motionless until an aquatic sound faded up. There was a ripple of movement as the ocean sound—now the pounding of waves—peaked, then gave way to the two-step beat of a heart. The pixels swam, clenching and loosening. A flutter appeared in the torso area of the tiny embryo, a hand-drawn pulsing of concentric lines, and the large eye moved faintly under the translucent lid. The stillness undone.

The life, Biggs understood, restored by Carolyn’s invisible hand.

He watched the animated heart beating for nearly five minutes, expecting a cut, a new scene to start. But nothing of the sort happened. The rhythm continued, the beat played on, until, about seven minutes in, the screen went blank. The battery had finally expired. He tried a few times to reboot but there wasn’t enough juice to get past the start-up, then it stopped responding altogether. That was it. A vault of memories—a kind of mind—forever closed.

Unless there was a spare battery around.

He searched the closet, then raked through the clutter of the bedroom floor with his feet. What was that little film about? There had to be more to it. It couldn’t just be that single shot—the animated embryo, heart pulsing in a flurry of static. Maybe it was just a looping sequence that she nested in some other scene.

Biggs didn’t yet wonder where she got the image—the scanned ultrasound. She was always appropriating images from all kinds of sources. It didn’t occur to him that the image was actually a snapshot of her womb until, in his search for a battery, he came across a plastic jar of pills—brown-tinted bottle, white childproof top. Not placebos this time. The prescription details, under her name, were taped to the side. Painkillers: codeine. Take one capsule every four to six hours until pain subsides. Prescribed just over a year ago, when she had retreated to this room for her six-week remove from the city.

From him.

HE thought he understood the meaning of the film. It was a kind of wish fulfillment exercise—the authoring of an alternative ending. She had done it before. Here, in this room, where they stayed together as her mother was dying and produced a computer-animated remake of The Dream. She insisted it was therapeutic. That it was a creative way of coping. It was also something they could do together, since he was the dreamer of The Dream. They had been together for only a few months at that point. “It will make us tighter,” she had suggested.

“How can it bring us together when all I’m doing is telling you the same dream over and over?” he once asked, frustrated with her need to hear him tell it for what seemed like the hundredth time.

“You learn a lot about a person when you make stuff together,” she said.

The repetition seemed to work. The Dream’s place in the world transferred from his head to the shared space of reality. The telling of it, he observed, became its own thing: a script of sorts, scrawled by her hand on a yellow pad, then typed neatly on the laptop. It was a real thing, birthed from his head. Yet she insisted that he storyboard out the flow as well. While she was sitting at her mother’s side with her father and sister, he was in her room, struggling with his limited drawing skills to recall the angles, the positioning of the characters—the blocking, as she called it.

She would return to the room emotionally drained, hollowed out by watching her mother suffer through her final stages. Let’s go out, he would offer. Get some air, though he really meant perspective. He wanted her to see that the world rolled on. As foretold, she seemed to be purposely drowning herself in grief. He was here, he had to point out, to help her from slipping too far into it. The Dream, he reminded her.

But something had shifted in her. The remaking of The Dream, not his guiding presence in her life, seemed to be her salvation. He pointed this out and she smiled wearily. “Don’t you see they are the same thing?”

In her exhausted state, she refused sleep, insisting on making progress with the film. She studied his sketches and re-created them, using stand-in avatars in a 3-D environment on her computer, which she said would look more realistic than a stop-motion approach with dolls. She showed him how the program’s virtual cameras could be positioned anywhere along the x, y, and z axes. And how, though The Dream was witnessed from his perspective, the film would show him in the scenes. “Otherwise, if it’s shot entirely from your POV,” she explained, “it will be harder for us to understand your role in the action.”

“Okay. But that’s not how it looked in my head,” he said cautiously.

“It’s a re-creation, not a replica.”

“The difference is pretty subtle.”

“Maybe in the words, but not in the thing.”

The next step was shooting the reference videos. Biggs liked this step because they had to do it together. It wasn’t something she could leave him to do alone while she sat in a tormented state down the hallway, holding her mother’s hand. She pushed all the furniture to one side of her room and hung a green screen from ceiling to floor. “It’s a magic window,” she said, allowing just a flash of whimsy. “Stand in front of it and we can go anywhere.”

She insisted that they be naked for these shoots. “We have to see how the muscles move,” she said. Not a problem for him. Their bodies were well acquainted at this point. They had been voraciously intimate from the start. Her sexual needs seemed to stand apart from everything else happening in her life, he had initially observed. He finally realized, as they came to endure her mother’s decline, that her hunger for release had everything to do with her growing sadness and anxiety.

But the reference videos weren’t a kind of foreplay, he soon realized. They were short clips that would inform how she moved the 3-D models in each of the scenes. Carolyn positioned his body or the tripod with the same professional coolness. In this mode, she did not seem to see his body as the flesh-and-blood incarnation of her lover, but rather as a life-sized puppet for her to control. She asked him to repeat his movements over and over as she stood back watching the monitor. Her directions were precise: “Now walk forward as if you are seeing me in the waves. Now raise your arms, cup your hands in front of your mouth, and call to me. Now run in place like you ran to the water. Wait, start that over,” she directed. “Remember, you’re hitting the waves about five steps in, so you want to show a reaction to it. It’s cold water, remember? It’s like ice.”

She pressed on, sometimes glazing over, zoning out, at the computer. Or wiping away tears as she adjusted the lights, her hands in oversized heat-retardant gloves. She would join him in bed when he couldn’t put off sleep any longer. They would make love—fiercely, but silent. He would try to keep her there for the night. “Give yourself a break, baby,” he would say, embracing her.

But she would shake her head and gently push away. “I need to keep working,” she would say, leaving the bed. “She’s so close.”

He realized she was trying to complete the film before her mother passed. Why? To show it to her? Would she even know what she was seeing? It seemed to Biggs that she was already too far gone. She was unconscious most of the time, and when awake, delirious. Hallucinating wildly, even confusing Carolyn with her own mother.

“Everything gets mixed together as you go,” she observed. “The past and present, dreams and memories.”

It seemed to him that Carolyn’s opportunity to share the film with her mother had long passed. Of course, he would never say this to Carolyn. Let her do what she has to do, he told himself. Everyone copes a different way.

They were still in school then. Still two semesters away from master’s degrees, less than a year from being married. As summer ended and Carolyn’s mother held on into fall, Biggs had to leave Carolyn and return to campus. She remained, continuing to spend her days at her mother’s side and her nights at her computer, doing the time-consuming work of animating the virtual models. She no longer needed him in the process. All that was left was the grind of production.

It was only two weeks into the semester when the day of her mother’s passing arrived. He returned and found Carolyn coping better than he had imagined. He had braced for a total collapse. Instead, she was exhausted and, yes, slow and pale with sadness, but also strong for her father and sister, taking the lead in organizing the funeral and wake. “What can I do?” he asked.

“Just be here,” she whispered, hugging him tight.

The night before the funeral, she led him into her room, where she had hung a screen above the bed. “Lie down,” she insisted, “and look up.” The projector was propped between them, shooting straight overhead. He watched her version of his dream flash on the ceiling. He understood that he was supposed to be redreaming The Dream. It played out as they had scripted it, very much like The Dream, but different in that he could see himself in it, as she said he would.

Yes, there was the rowboat tossing in the waves. Yes, there was the body wrapped in white, rising and falling, and the girl fighting the crash of the waves. There he was, running out to her, pulling her by the hair toward shore, holding her.

He looked over at her, but she indicated with a nod of her head to keep watching.

The story continued.

It went beyond what they had scripted, what he had dreamed. He watched as the girl broke away and charged back into the water. His figure stands helpless, watching her go. The girl swims out past the waves and climbs into the boat, curls down next to the body and continues to tightly embrace it as the boat disappears beyond the horizon and the screen goes black.

“I don’t understand,” he said as they lay in the dark.

She was quiet for several moments. “That version has to be in the world too,” she eventually said.

He asked, “Are you going to show it at the funeral?”

“No,” she said, turning to him. “No one else will ever see it. Just us. Really, it’s only important that you see it, since you are the one who dreamed it. I made it for you.”

She claimed, soon after, that she had erased it and purged all the files from her drives. “What matters is how it lives on in your head,” she had explained.

He had to concede, years later, that he sometimes didn’t know if he was recalling The Dream or the re-creation. She clapped her hands lightly when he told her this, then kissed him on top of his head.