Black Moon

16

SHE WASN’T SLEEPING, THOUGH IT MUST have been past midnight. This was unlike her. Lila was a sleeper—a natural sleeper.

Don’t freak out, she told herself. I mean, being up this late isn’t the usual, but it’s probably just because today wasn’t the usual.

Today she had met another sleeper, the first she had encountered in weeks. A pretty college girl with cropped hair: Felicia, now sleeping at her feet in the dark room. From where she sat in her owl mask, Lila could see the moon through the high window, floating beyond the branches of an olive tree. It was just a sickle of light, hanging in the sky among a wild spray of stars. All that cosmic luminance, traveling for millions of years, amounted to nothing more than a pale patch on the carpet.

Lila clicked on the flashlight they had found earlier and studied her new companion, who was lying on her back, hands lightly clasped over her flat stomach, ankles crossed. She had conked out exactly at ten o’clock, just like she promised she would. It wasn’t natural the way it happened, Lila had observed. There was no drifting off, no yawning or heavy eyelids slowly drooping. One minute she was lying on the mattress watching Lila rub her feet together, and the next she was asleep. Like a thing switched off. Eyes closed, mouth slightly open, looking even prettier than when she was awake.

“You won’t be able to wake me once I’m out,” Felicia had told her. She explained how the implant worked as they ate their power bars and night filled the room, wind gusting outside. She described how she would stay like that no matter what, even if the house was burning down or someone was slapping her face with a dead fish, until exactly seven o’clock in the morning, when she would wake all of a sudden and maybe jump up, gasping as if she had been held under water.

“Sometimes it’s like that,” she had told Lila. “Just warning you.”

Lila couldn’t help trying to wake her, to see if all this was true. First she tickled Felicia’s feet. Nothing happened and it was kind of creepy, like tickling a dead person. So Lila stepped up her efforts and pinched Felicia on her bare thigh. When there was no response, Lila remembered that the best place to pinch someone is on the back of the arms, especially toward the top. That’s where that total idiot Dylan used to pinch her during class, so that she would scream right in the middle of a quiz. But it did nothing for Felicia, who remained firmly unconscious.

Lila picked up her arm, lifting it high, then dropped it, and the arm actually bounced on the mattress: boing boing. She did it again, then picked up Felicia’s hand and cradled it in hers. It was warm and clean. They had both washed up before bed. Lila studied it under her light. It was the cleanest hand Lila had seen in a long time. No dirt under the nails and such soft palms. Her lifeline was long. When Lila curled it up into a fist to produce love lines, she could see that Felicia would have one true love.

Lila opened Felicia’s hand and lightly tickled the palm, watching Felicia’s smooth eyelids for any sign. “Tickle tickle tickle,” she said softly. Nothing.

She held the hand in her lap and suddenly very strongly wanted to feel it against her face, but to do that she would have to take off her mask. This gave her pause. She had been wearing the owl’s head for almost a month now, only removing it when she was alone, maybe when sleeping in the dark tunnels of the flood control channels, but sometimes keeping it on even then, thinking there could be rats that would try to nest in her hair or eat her tongue.

She slowly lifted the mask off her head, vowing not to fall asleep before putting it back on, just in case. It was always hot in the mask and feeling cooler air on her face was one of Lila’s few remaining pleasures. It was like standing by the doors of a mall in the desert. With the mask on the floor at her side, she combed the sweat-damp hair off her forehead, tucking her long bangs behind her ears. The wound on her scalp had mostly healed but she now avoided touching the area out of habit.

She scooped up Felicia’s hand as if it were a small pet, a kitten maybe, and brought it to her face. She put her cheek against the back of it, then turned it over and rested her chin in the warm palm. This, the light touch of another, caused a wave of warmth inside. Her throat tightened with emotion. Lila buried her face in the open palm, inhaling deeply, and closed her eyes as she moved the hand against her cheek, then bowed her head as she used it to stroke her hair. She felt it as a caress even though she was acting as the gesture’s puppeteer. She performed a tenderness that she had assumed no longer existed in the world. Her chin quivered and her eyes stung so she squeezed them tightly shut. “No tears now,” she told herself.

She brought Felicia’s hand to her lips and kissed, pressing hard. The last person to kiss her had been her mother, desperately begging for Lila’s forgiveness. Both of them a mess, their tears mixed together as her mother covered her face with kisses. The memory stabbed at Lila, triggering charged images: her mother and father chaining themselves to the piano, her father grabbing for her under the car, spitting threats. She pressed her lips harder into Felicia’s hand and tried to think back to earlier times, when they had no clue about what was coming.

The memories scrolled before her eyes. Lying in the backseat of the car as they traveled into the mountains, the sun signaling to her through the trees. The three of them in bed on Saturday morning, listening to her father’s stories about all the weird stuff he saw during his residency—the man who thought his own hand wanted to kill him; the boy who couldn’t feel pain. Now, sitting in the darkness, she imitated the way her mother whispered at cats. She listened, hoping to hear her mother playing the piano downstairs or her father singing in the shower. In the morning, they would go to the coffee place in the bookstore, where they would read entire books and she would steal sips of espresso and chai lattes from her dad’s blue cup and gnaw on biscotti. They would have lunch in the diner, playing old songs on the jukebox.

These scenes had the power to both comfort and sadden her. It all depended on her state of mind. At the moment she was feeling hopeful, so the memories brightened her. Felicia, appearing out of nowhere, had brought that hope. Felicia could sleep, more or less, and there were others who could do it too. There was some kind of hospital—a center, she called it—where they lived at a university overlooking the ocean. All of them with implants that put them to sleep at night and woke them in the mornings.

Felicia had promised to take her there.

As soon as she found her own parents she could take them to the center, too. That was Felicia’s goal.

Lila looked at her new companion with pity. Even though she was probably five years younger than Felicia, she felt smarter about what was out here in these dark, hollow houses. Felicia, she knew, would only find bad things in her parents’ home or nothing at all. Her own home was waiting in the desert with horrors inside. She would never go there, never open that door again. But sometimes, when her mood was darkened by hunger and fear, she couldn’t help imagining it. They would be in bed, she believed. Her mother and her father. They would look like they were sleeping—sleeping! But they wouldn’t be jolting to life at seven in the morning or any hour to come. They had fixed themselves forever.

She curled up against Felicia and hugged her warm body. She told her, “It’ll be okay. I mean, look at me. I’m fine. It hasn’t stopped me and it won’t stop you, I can tell. Everyone is an orphan now.”

As she reached around Felicia to pull her even closer, she felt something hard near Felicia’s armpit. The hint of machine. She drew back. Slowly her hand returned to the spot. She pressed at the area, determining that the thing there—like a battery cover on a toy animal—was about two inches in diameter. She wanted to see it but didn’t think she should. It would mean opening Felicia’s shirt.

Fifteen minutes ticked by as they lay side by side in the dark, Lila’s curiosity growing. It’s not a big deal, she decided. They were practically family, even though they had only known each other for a day—sisters in sleep.

She sat up abruptly, aiming the light as she undid the buttons and peeled back Felicia’s shirt. Then she moved to Felicia’s other side. She aimed the light at the place where the pulse generator sat under Felicia’s skin. There was nothing much to see. Just a raised area, as though a disk had been slid under there. She reached out and felt it, her fingers circling the ridge along the device’s edge. Then she pressed her palm over it. She was sure she felt a very faint vibration, an almost feathery buzz.

She returned Felicia’s body to its original pose and retreated to her own mattress by the wall. She studied the scene, shining the light around the room. Everything looked right except for the giant owl head sitting on the ground, eyes staring back at her. Eyes always open. She crawled to the edge of her mattress and leaned over Felicia’s legs to grab it. Like a deep-sea diver suiting up for a submersion, she lowered the mask over her head. The mesh texture of the eyeholes came down between her and the world, breaking it up into a mosaic of tiles.

She snapped off the light and lay back, the smell of her own sweat and mildew crowding in as she looked on, waiting for sleep.

She was tired. But sleep stayed away.

An hour later, her mind churned inside the globe of fake feathers, trying to understand why she was still awake. When she shut her eyes, she saw a rapid pulsing against her eyelids. A dizzying strobe that beat faster than her heart and seemed to be fueled by some incessant whirring, like the blades of a fan spinning before a shaft of sunlight. She found it more comfortable to keep her eyes open. She watched the moon sail slowly across the frame of window and began marking off its progress against the rooftops of neighboring houses. The olive tree branches wavered in the wind that had arrived from the high desert—a Santa Ana. She sighted up the thin trunk, declaring it the finish line. By the time the moon crosses it, I’ll be deep asleep.

When it did, and she was still staring into the darkness, she moved on to the next landmark: a darkened lamppost.

She tried to put herself in a receptive state, tamping down her worries by telling herself that she was just excited. She had been found, rescued! That’s what has gotten her so hyper. Just quiet down inside and it will happen like it always happens. A drowsiness creeping in, then flashes of images, little scenes that are like bursts of speed down a runway, trying to lift off the ground. Just let that happen. Think about something on purpose until the thinking continues on its own. She thought about flying a kite.

Hey, she realized, it’s working. I’m not thinking about sleep.

Then, of course, she was.

Daring a glance out the window, she could see that the moon had passed the lamppost. Oh, man. This isn’t good.

She sat up and felt the first jolt of panic, a terror freeze. Why? Why would it happen now? It wasn’t because she had broken her routine or abandoned a good sleeping place. This was the most comfortable setting she had chosen for sleep in weeks. It was a bedroom, after all. A place for sleeping. So much better for slumber than the drainage tunnel, webbed in with trip wires. She was actually lying on a mattress, not cardboard or a pile of dead people’s clothes. So what was the problem?

Maybe it was the power bars. Some of them were energy bars. Or maybe it was just eating so much. Usually she was hungry at night. Maybe her body just wasn’t used to not feeling hungry. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was the mattress, since she wasn’t used to such a soft place to sleep, but maybe it was the power bars. Who knows what they put in them to give you energy. She recalled her mother saying, as they first started hearing about the crisis, that it was all those energy drinks and energy bars and energy pills people were taking. “Everyone is so goddamn energized,” she had said, and they all laughed, because no one thought that everything would happen the way it did.

She lay awake trying to control her thinking, focusing on her surroundings as she searched for a clue, still certain that sleep would eventually come. She thought, Maybe I should try to make myself throw up those power bars. But maybe it was too late, and maybe it wasn’t them anyway. Maybe it was the air in the room. It was pretty stuffy. She was hot in the mask, so maybe she should take it off. But it would be strange at this point not to sleep with the mask on. She had gotten so used to it. Maybe it was the season changing, from summer to fall. Maybe it was the air in the room. Maybe it was the excitement about finding Felicia. Maybe it was just having a new friend. A friend, period. Someone like a sister. Maybe I’m asleep now, she thought.

She heard the tinkling of a wind chime.

Not the one she had hung on the doorknob as an alarm, but farther away, turning in the wind. A clear, sparkling sound. Metal chimes, not glass, not bamboo. Lately, she had started collecting them for her bag of noisy things. She sat up, listening to the chimes as they sang out in the darkness, coaxed into raucous arias by sudden gusts.

She needed it, she decided. If they were going to walk out of here, maybe all the way to the coast, they would need all the bells and whistles they could find. Outside, the wind was building in strength, pushing against the house, causing it to creak. The shingles clattered on the roof. She heard the chimes again. They sounded close, but the wind was playing tricks with distance. It carried the sound forward, then drew it back. The chimes were in the neighborhood, she was certain. She would just go grab them and come right back. Maybe getting out, getting some air, would help with the sleeping too.

Minutes later, she was picking through the elaborate array of trip wires she had woven across the staircase earlier. The twine, pulled tight and weighted with bells and empty cans, formed an ornamented cat’s cradle that even she, with her careful movements and knowledge of the pattern, couldn’t negotiate without triggering a rattle of empties. It’s not like Felicia would be bothered by it, dead to the world up in the room with the wind shaking the window glass. But that’s no reason to tear it down and then have to redo it all when she came back, she figured.

The wind was roaming the neighborhood, shaking the trees and herding the loose trash down the street, pinning papers against fences and garage doors. It came in blasts, tugging at the owl mask on her head. It seemed determined to expose her. She held the mask down with one hand, the other clasping the flashlight. Through the mesh she could see the moon, now much lower in the sky. There were no clouds and the stars blazed. They hung low in the smogless sky. Close enough, Lila thought, to be blown out like birthday candles. This was the wind that had inspired area founders to plant rows of eucalyptus trees along the edge of their citrus groves—windbreaks to protect the crop. This was the wind that had knocked her ailing grandmother down one Christmas as she exited her old Cadillac, unsteady from the chemo, like a kite in her big coat. The wind tried to carry her away.

She studied the dark street for movement without turning on her light. The many For Sale signs swayed and turned in the wind. Storms of litter blew through, making it hard to see. People wandered the streets at all hours now, no longer following the pattern dictated by the sun and the moon and the turning of the earth. Yet other than those objects—trees, bushes, loose debris—animated by the wind, there was no sign of life up and down the street. She moved into it, twisting her entire body left to right in order to see out the mesh openings in the mask. The chimes rang out when the wind rushed through, allowing her to slowly zero in on the sound.

Trash churned around her, sticking to her mask, as the wind led her down the street and through the yards of two back-to-back houses, so that she emerged on the neighboring street. The houses were identical to those on the street she had just left—a mix of single- and two-story ranch-style homes. Steep driveways and two-car garages. Once-landscaped yards now cluttered with junk, the gutters bone dry.

The wind hit a lull so she had to stand in the street and wait, not sure which direction to go. When it picked up again, the chimes rang sharply to her right, like sparks of sound. She went to it and found herself in someone’s backyard, staring up at a second floor balcony. She could make out the general shape and movement of the chimes, which had been suspended from the corner. They shivered and danced as the wind rose and fell.

But something dark—two black forms—swayed next to the source of the sound. She heard the creak of the balcony railing as the shapes were slowly turned by the wind. A sweep of the light revealed what she already sensed. Bodies. One, a man. The other appeared to be a large dog. Hanging side by side as the chimes spun and stirred in their faces—producing a sound they must have carried into death as they kicked and jerked from the choke-chain collars that had cinched shut their windpipes.

Lila looked up at them. She had seen many bodies over the last month, but she had yet to become desensitized. The sight of the dead triggered a strange reaction in her: a coppery taste in her mouth. It made her resist swallowing, and the saliva accumulated in her mouth. She had to raise the mask, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand after sloppily spitting. The fear triggered by the sight above her was of the cold and sickly variety, like a large slug boring through her chest. She choked back the nausea produced by its slow undulations.

Still, she wanted those chimes.

She would have to go through the house to get them. The sliding glass door that opened to the patio was closed, but not locked. She slid it open and peered into the dark space. The void held patches of darkness. She clicked on the flashlight and put her hand over it, not wanting to signal her position should anyone be around. Her palm was illuminated, a ring of red flesh, until she pulled her hand away, allowing the light to stab forward and paint the scene.

Furniture piled up, an exercise bike on its side, a birdcage with a dead parrot inside. She noted a path through the clutter and put her hand back over the light. The wind shook the dark shelter around her.

In this way, she moved through the house, slowly navigating the carpeted stairs with flashes of light, passing down the hallway of bedrooms to the door at the end. There she entered the master bedroom, with its narrow balcony.

At the sliding door, she was hit with a blast of air. It blew through the gaping opening with a rumbling fury. The curtains whipped around, snapping at her. She dipped her head and stepped out, leading with the mask like a helmet. A heavy wrought iron table was pinned against the railing. The leashes had been cinched to its legs, so that it served as an anchor. The railing groaned as the wind swung the bodies hanging beyond view. Lila avoided looking down at them. She reached down through the railing on the side of the balcony, feeling the air for the chimes. But she retracted her hand, suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that someone, or something, would grab hold of it.

The wind blew and the chimes rang below her.

She shook off the thought. Nothing’s going to happen! Just grab it and get out of here. Again, she reached through. She pushed into the railing so that the mask pressed up against her face as her hand felt at the air. It fluttered in space as if waving to someone below, until her fingers hooked the line and she was able to bring up the chimes, landing them like a fish pulled from the water. They went silent against the slat floor.

She quickly retraced her steps through the house, chimes held tightly in one hand, flashlight in the other. Once outside, she crouched at the edge of the backyard, again looking for human movement. The wind surged in a massive gust. She heard the snap of tree limbs and the clatter of tiles torn free. Dirt blasted up from the ground, but it was screened by the mesh before her eyes. She stood and walked the length of the side yard, holding the mask down, then passed through the yard of the house to the rear. Toppled trash bins slowed her progress. She made her way to the street, where she studied the row of identical structures, looking for the house where she had left Felicia. She strained to make sense of the scene, which had been sifted by the wind. The FOR SALE signs were no longer standing and the loose debris had been violently rearranged.

But before she could recognize that she was still a street away—having forgotten that she had crossed two streets earlier—she heard another chime. The wind carried the sound to her from down the street. She hesitated. But why not? She still wasn’t sleepy. And a night like this, with all this wind, is the best time to gather up more noisy things.

She started down the street. She kicked away papers that the wind attached to her legs and peeled them off her chest—shreds of newspaper, magazines, ads. Boxes were blown along like tumbleweeds. The feeble parkway trees bowed in the face of the explosive gale.

This time the chimes were hanging from a rafter on the front porch of a house that at first glance she believed was the very house with Felicia inside. But she would have noticed the chimes earlier. And the olive tree out front didn’t seem tall enough. It wasn’t even an olive tree, was it? There was no FOR SALE sign either.

Before she was even able to drag a patio chair under the chimes and lift them off a nail, she heard another ringing out nearby.

Swimming through swirling currents of trash, she followed the sound as it drew her farther away, deeper into the maze of streets—the suburban labyrinth. She was lured by the wind into one cul-de-sac after another, one development, two, three, away from Felicia and her dreamless sleep, gathering chimes in a kind of midnight harvest.

The wind eventually stripped the mask from her head and rolled it down the street. She chased after it, the chimes she had gathered ringing out like an alarm.

BY DAWN, when the wind finally died down, she was wandering with her mask in her hands. She had made the decision to fill it with the wind chimes, after the wind made it impossible to keep it on her head with the chimes in her hands. It now served as a soft bucket filled with muted noise, grinding like shards of glass when she hugged it close as she walked on, looking for Felicia. The sun rose over the mountains. Her long shadow stretched out beside her, sliding over the cluttered yards. It was the second time in her entire life she had stayed awake through the night—the first being the night of the car crash, which seemed like a lifetime ago.

How had insomnia worked its way in? In her distressed state, she could only think that it had something to do with Felicia’s appearance. More specifically, she kept feeling the faint phantom buzz of the pulse generator against her palm. She never should have touched it, she concluded—her mind already fogging over from lack of sleep, thoughts sticking together in unreasoned clusters. The toxic elements of the epidemic traveled in a vehicle of vibration into her system. And like the sleep directive the pulse carried through the wire in Felicia’s neck, the signal had traveled deep into her brain. Only the message had gotten garbled, scrambled, and it was received as on instead of off.

And now what I’ve seen happen to everyone will happen to me, she recognized with a shudder. To have dodged it this long was an impossibility—succumbing was inevitable. Yet a part of her had believed she was truly immune. Somehow special. Endowed with a resistance that was possibly the product of her parents. Their blend of genes, their blood. But no.

Oh my god.

She needed to find Felicia, to return to the center with her. She needed one of those implants. It caused all this, but it could fix it too.

The streets were a scrambled mess, a picture of epic disarray. She ran through the cul-de-sacs, the chimes in the mask emitting a metallic crunch with each step. All the houses looked the same. She entered a few, convinced she was in the right place. She began to cry as her fears mounted. With her hands occupied by the mask, she had to wipe her eyes by pressing her face into her shoulder. She tried desperately to remember where Felicia’s parents’ house might be, but Felicia had said nothing about its location.

Her only option was to walk the streets of the developments, stepping over the fallen tree branches and shattered roof tiles, kicking aside the duff of documents and records expelled from home offices and sifted by the Santa Ana. The sun bore down. She walked past the occasional insomniac down on hands and knees combing through the littered yards—that ceaseless searching. Why fear them now? she thought. Why hide? I’m one of them. Mask or no mask, she was largely ignored as she passed through the abandoned neighborhoods. There was only a germ of relief in this.

In the early afternoon, she found herself at the edge of the neighborhood looking out over an undeveloped expanse. Even the tawny chaparral was now speckled and dotted with windblown trash as far as she could see. The scene was divided by a chain-link fence that ran from the foothills down through the entire valley. She made her way to it. The fence ran along the cracked concrete banks of an aqueduct. Peering through, she saw the dark, mossy water slowly passing through the channel. With a flash she remembered the man who had drowned trying to get at her as she floated on the tethered raft. Could this be the same aqueduct that ran past their house in the desert? Her father had said that it ran all the way to the ocean, carrying water from the Sierras to the reservoirs of the L.A. suburbs and inland valleys of farmed land, then onward to the sea.

If she followed it, would she find herself on the beach? And from there, could she find the university where the sleep center was located?

She walked along the fence until she found a gate. It was locked but the gap between the posts was wide enough for her to squeeze through. Only the mask, with its noisy cargo, could not fit. She decided to heave it over the fence, stooping over and swinging it between her legs, then catapulting it upward like a beaked basketball. It cleared the top of the fence, chimes spilling noisily out of it, then came down hard on the steeply sloped concrete bank with an explosion of sound, a chandelier crashing from the sky. The mask rolled to a stop at the bottom of the basin, where there was a bank of flat cement that dropped away abruptly to the wide channel at the bottom. There the water flowed slowly along.

She squeezed through the gap and edged her way down the slope, collecting the loose chimes as she went. They jangled as she scooped them up. The mask was in poor shape. The impact had blown out one of the eyes and a seam in the back had split. She picked it up and held it together so the chimes wouldn’t spill out.

Down in the channel, she could see up the endless corridor of concrete to the north, where the mountains loomed—crisp and detailed in the wind-cleared air. To the south, the dark water ran away from her, narrowed by distance into a thin black line slicing through the valley.

Yes, it probably ran all the way to the sea. She could walk along the edge, following it down, all the way to San Diego. Scanning the ridges for the campus Felicia described. They would see her. They would hear her, jangling noisy things with her feet in the cool water. Felicia would be astonished to see her.

But another thought struck her: it could also lead her home, to her parents. It was maybe the first opportunity she had had since the crash that stranded her here to find her way back.

It made no sense to go there. They were gone, she was sure. But something tugged at her—a strong current of emotion pulled her toward home. She could show them that she was the same. That she was just like them now.

Upcurrent, about thirty yards away, she saw the dark maw of a drainage tunnel opening into the steep cement bank that blazed whitely in the sunlight. She angled up the bank, carrying the mask in her arms, and eased into the cool, dark space. It wasn’t the first time she had sought refuge in a drainage tunnel. She peered into the impossibly dark hollow as she sat down, her back bending to the curved wall. What she needed was some time to stop and think.

If this was it, if she was now sleepless, the notion of going home pulled at her. That’s where she would be reunited. She would wait out the heat, then start the journey.

She propped the mask behind her and lay back, resting her head on its lumpy form. The chimes clinked dully under the weight of her head. She imagined walking up to her house and hearing her mother playing the piano inside. She could hear every note of the music so clearly.

Minutes later, the music echoed on into her dreams. She had once again found her way to sleep.