Black Moon

17

HE TOLD THEM, “SHE ONCE SAID THAT NO one ever looks up. I remembered that she had shinnied up the skylight pole and onto the roof. I went back to the loft to see if she was there. When I opened the door, I found her sitting at the table, fully restored, with Maria, the lullaby singer, sitting across from her. They were eating baked pigeons and a salad of nests. My wife smiled and nodded toward an empty chair. Sit down, she said. There is enough. I sat and they put food in front of me. I held a bird’s body in the palm of my hand and it pulsed like a heart.”

HIS audience listened with their usual indifference. Distracted. Studying their hands or staring out the window as seagulls floated, held in place by the wind blasting up the bluff from the ocean. Some stared off at an abandoned aircraft carrier, sitting out in the blue expanse. It drifted in the current like a skyscraper on its side. Some looked bored enough to doze off. But of course they couldn’t do that. Not until exactly ten at night, when the switch was flipped in their dreamless heads.

AFTER the recital, when the survivors had shuffled off to their chores, he approached Dr. Lee. He said, “I need a car and some guys. I want to check if she’s there.”

“It was only a dream,” Lee said.

Biggs laughed. For Lee to say this. He who had built a cathedral to dreams. Lately, Lee was only sometimes Lee.

He told him, “Once I woke up and her feet were dangling from the ceiling, black with roof tar. I had forgotten all about that.”

“We can’t put you or the guys at risk,”

Lee said. “Just give me Morales.”

Lee shook his head. “The city is a long way away.”

HE told them that it wasn’t his child. That’s why she had expelled it from her body. She had explained everything. She had been attacked by a creature that was half man, half bear. Only, she explained, the bear was the outside half and the man was the inside half. The creature had lured her into an underground laboratory where it was conducting experiments. She watched as it put the dream of a cat into a chicken. The chicken fell forward, dead. Then it put the dream of an eel into a hamster. The outcome was the same for the hamster, though it stood up on its hind legs before dropping. The only way for an animal dream to live inside a human, it explained, was to grow an entire dreaming animal inside a human. The dream needed the animal container as a kind of filter of flesh. The beast held her down and put the animal inside her womb with a few quick thrusts. As soon as she was able, she cast it out, along with its tiny bladder of toxic dreams.

ONLY Morales, the security muscle, spoke to him at first. Biggs had encountered him one night smoking on the deck and staring out at the dark field of ocean. He was moving past the security man, seeking his own solitude, when Morales spoke without looking at him. “So, bro, do you take requests? What I’d like to hear,” he said, “is a seriously nasty sex dream. I’m talking quadruple X. I know you have them. Don’t hold out on us, dude.”

DR. LEE approached Biggs in the lunchroom later, standing at his table as Biggs slowly turned pasta on his fork. Lee said, “I feel like there’s too much interpretation happening. Maybe too much crafting.”

“It’s impossible not to,” Biggs said. “I have to speak them, not somehow broadcast them into their minds.”

Lee sat down and Biggs winced as the chair chirped loudly against the concrete. The tabletops were blazing with light coming in through the windows.

“They’re just so tightly fitted to your situation,” the researcher said. “I’m hoping for something more universal, so that they can see something of themselves in them.”

They watched a gull just beyond the window, hanging in the air.

“Could Carolyn really be all that you dream about?”

“Maybe not,” Biggs said. “But they are the only dreams I remember.”

Lee laid it all out again, patiently explaining the purpose of the recitals. “You are the dreamer. What we’re doing is exposing the community to the texture and fabric of the dream world. Without it they won’t stay human for long. We are the only species whose dreams are interchangeable. We can live inside the dreams of others, we can breathe there. That says something about the human family, and the true smoothness of our faces, our odorless souls. You’re dreaming for all of us now,” he said. “You can’t get in the way of whatever’s coming through.”

So many words. This was not at all like Lee, Biggs thought. I may be dreaming right now.

BIGGS volunteered for a scavenging mission. The task at hand was an equipment and supply run that would take a team outside the compound and into the nearby hospital, which they looted regularly. Most of the residents dreaded the idea of leaving the security of the center. But it was much less dangerous now, since it was rare to encounter the sleepless, yet common to stumble over a body. Other than the security team, no one would volunteer. By stepping forward before Lee followed through on his threat of randomly selecting people, Biggs hoped to win points with Lee and the community.

They passed through the desolate university campus in two vans, skirting the edge of the campus, cutting through vast parking lots, rolling past the International Studies Center, the woolly, unkempt clover playing fields, the abandoned supercomputer and boxy student apartment complexes. The elephant-gray dorm towers jutted above the brittle eucalyptus fringe, and the school’s famous glass library, like a crystal hive perched on concrete pilings, flashed through the trees. When they took the narrow access road along the base of the structure, they found themselves fording a lumpy moraine of books that seemed to have been deposited by the receding glacial library.

The caravan rode on, arriving at the loading docks for the hospital. They waited in the vans for the security team to check things out. Dr. Porter went over the long list of things they were after and distributed surgical masks. He paired them into teams, partnering Biggs with Warren, who had been a graduate student at the lab when the crisis hit. Their assignment was to find paper for EEG printers.

“Paper?” Warren asked through his surgical mask. “That’s it?”

They followed a hand-drawn map that Porter gave them, with a final directive to use their flashlights sparingly. They passed through the lobby and up two dark flights of stairs, their lights probing feebly before them. On the fifth floor they found themselves in the intensive care unit—a series of patient rooms ringing the semicircular cluster of the nurses’ station. Sunlight poured in from the skylight but seemed reluctant to venture too far into the rooms.

Biggs said, “There’s probably a supply closet around here.”

“Did you dream that?” the young man asked.

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” Biggs said crisply. Then, realizing it was an earnest question, he softened his response. “I didn’t dream it, but it makes sense, right?”

Both of them were avoiding the dark patient rooms, but when they failed to find any surplus of paper, they knew they had to at least check the bedside machines. “You start at that end, and I’ll work toward you,” Biggs suggested.

Warren shuddered, then made his way across the floor. Biggs had managed two rooms, finding neither paper nor bodies, when he heard Warren come up behind him, whispering, “Pretty sure there’s someone in there.”

Biggs could see that Warren was spooked behind the mask. Warren leaned in close and said that he had seen someone moving in one of the patient rooms and thought he heard something. A moan, a whimper. Biggs started cautiously toward it.

“Why don’t we just leave?” Warren asked, grabbing his arm.

“Because it could be someone,” Biggs told him.

Warren took this in, then looked up, eyes wide. “You think maybe it’s Felicia?”

“Felicia?” Biggs knew the name, knew the story. She was the student worker who had fled the compound, stealing a car, with a plan to rescue her parents. She was also the first person to volunteer for the implant, he had been told, after the principal investigator, Kitov, died in the operating chair. They all talked about her like some kind of guardian angel, still setting a place for her during meals and taping notes to the door of her room imploring her to come back. He was indebted to her as well. After all, she was the reason he had been found. When Lee had sent out security people to look for her, they found him instead. Warren’s hopeful eyes, his desperate assumption, both moved Biggs and revealed possibilities. There was much to consider, but not now.

“Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s check it out. Just stay behind me.”

Warren loosened his grip and fell in behind Biggs as he crossed the floor and slowly pulled back the curtain. He snapped on his light and peered into the room. At first, yes, he thought it was a person, somehow crouched in the corner. The ground was smeared with blood. Viscera flecked the nest of blackened sheets on the bed and the smell of rot cut through his mask. The ape—a chimp, it seemed—snarled, showing long yellow fangs. Before Biggs let the curtain drop, he caught a glimpse of metal ring mounted to the animal’s hairless head, posts disappearing into the skull. A crown of empty wire ports. Biggs backed away, pulling Warren, as the animal bounded through the curtain, tearing it off its rings. They retreated to the nurses’ station as it fought to throw off the cloying material, then trotted past them and onward, down the corridor, its feet and hands padding against the tiles, crowned head darting left and right, ducking under shafts of light. Trailing handprints of browned blood.

HE told them, “She told me the news over the phone and I drove straight home from somewhere. I brought three roses, one for each of us. When I gave them to her they had changed into orange rinds. She showed me the ultrasound and we were astonished. Something was moving. We went to breathing classes and had regular checkups. Carolyn had morning sickness for the first three months, but no weird cravings. We did another ultrasound and we could see that it was going to be a girl. But another showed that we had a boy on the way. This kept changing every time we looked away then looked back. This person hasn’t decided yet, the technician said. Carolyn ballooned and her tiny frame looked absolutely hijacked by this new bulk. Her belly gleamed and sometimes rang like a bell at night from the kicks inside. We had to induce because our doctor was going to be away on a ski trip on our delivery date and Carolyn really wanted her to do the delivery because the doctor had vowed to take special measures. We drove to the hospital without panic. They put us in a delivery room and we listened to Daniel Lanois’s first album, the one with ‘The Maker.’ She tried to deal with the contractions but after a while it made no sense to go forward without the epidural. They brought in a shaved cat and gave it the epidural. At first the anesthesiologist couldn’t find the right spot on the cat’s spine. Then it didn’t seem to work and I realized I was standing on the thin tube that carried the medicine into the cat. Carolyn started trembling violently and I ran out to get someone. They came in and made some adjustments to the cat and this stopped the trembling. When it was time, the doctor came in and told me to hold Carolyn’s left leg. It was just the three of us until the baby emerged and then there were four of us in the room. When I cut the cord it seemed to me that the cord was just a strand of gelatin, incapable of carrying nutrients and waste, or messages of any kind. Yet here was a baby being drawn into Carolyn’s arms as if they had already been introduced.”

THE move and monitoring of his sleep that followed could not be seen as anything other than a punishment. It was a reprimand from Lee, Biggs believed, for failing to convey the dreams with sufficient purity and verisimilitude—too much plot, too much spin, really. Too much Carolyn. This was what he suspected, in spite of Lee’s denials. The plan was to put him in the smart room, which was wired for dream research.

The community of survivors didn’t like this idea, but their opposition was not in defense of their dreamer, Biggs. The smart room had been where Felicia lived before she made her rescue attempt. They confronted Lee about the issue at a morning meeting, after Biggs had recited yet another dream about returning home and finding Carolyn alive and well in the loft.

“We all love Felicia,” Lee said, “and we all want her to return safely. And I’m confident she will. We’re still looking for her, as you all know. Whenever we can spare the guys, they go out and they do their best to track her. One of these days, they will bring her back. I really believe that.”

Biggs heard the quiver in Lee’s voice, a coating of gloss.

“Will you leave her things there?” Fran asked, voice trembling. “Because we think it’s important that she knows her place is waiting for her.”

Lee nodded reassuringly.

Lee said, “Her things are in their true place and we wouldn’t want to undo that. We just need the equipment that’s in that room. There are dreams moving under the dreams we’re hearing about, and we need to get down to them. To stay human, yes, but also because there may be answers there, about how we can all return to our natural state.”

THEY didn’t understand the whole point of the dream recitals.

Lee told them, “There is a constant pressure, a tide of animal energy. It has surged and eroded away the walls we have erected over the millennia by migrating the contents of our dreams into this world. Everything around us, the remnants of our world, was birthed in a dream, brought forth and hardened under the sun: the roads, buildings, the institutions of thought and knowledge, the urgings of the heart, the fuel of desire. Sleep is the bridge over which these fantastic constructions have been passed, piece by piece, particle by particle. You see us from a distance like ants carrying a shiny white brick of future in our thorny mandibles. Sometimes that white speck is a bone from a beast, evidence of their own elaborate infrastructure—the only hard thing about them. We carry it across the bridge too. Now that bridge has been brought down, except for one silken strand. This is what our dreamer provides—a way to carry the contents across.”

“But,” they said, “every dream is about his wife. It has nothing to do with us.”

“That’s how it may seem,” Lee said. “But believe me, it has held us in place. Without these recitals, you, Warren, would have already grown antlers. You would be trapped inside a coat of fur.

“And, you, Fran, you would have gills and large unblinking eyes on opposite sides of your flattened face.

“And Porter, he would be brooding from under his cobra’s hood.”

MORALES waited for him to catch up in the corridor. He said, “You probably thought I was joking about what I said before. But you know what, bro? You don’t know what it’s like. When your head doesn’t work right, when it stops telling you stories. It’s like there’s just a hole there. You throw stuff in it and nothing comes back. You can even hear that shit hit the bottom. It’s just falling forever into nothing. You don’t think that will drive a person insane? I got to have something of what I had.”

Biggs heard a waver in his voice and glanced over as they walked. There, under his eye, a shining trail.

Biggs liked Morales. He was the first person from the center that Biggs had encountered. What he desires, Biggs thought, is desire.

THEY moved him from his bunk in the common room to Felicia’s room and shaved his head. From the bed, he could see an arrangement of mementos Felicia had set up on a narrow metal desk in the corner. There was a small stack of books—mostly trade paperback novels, but also psychology and physiology textbooks fringed with sticky notes. Small brass figurines of a pig, an owl, and a squirrel sat inside a tangled ring of necklaces made from amber and polished stones. A small jar filled with tin Mexican milagros. An older couple posed in a small, ornately carved gold frame. No doubt those are her parents. The ones she went to rescue, he concluded.

He had heard some members of their little community refer to Felicia as a dreamer. One note stuck to the door said, Follow that dream. He assumed, as he looked around the smart room, which was still occupied by her possessions, that they meant it figuratively. That it was her nature to have aspirations, that she wouldn’t simply settle for the circumstances she had been given.

She was pretty, he noted, studying the pictures she had stuck to her mirror. They revealed her dark Latin looks—smooth hood of black hair, red mouth, proud nose. Her bright smile and shining eyes, a kindness there, something hopeful. He was happy to study it, though his own dour image, which loomed behind her snapshots, kept distracting him. How white his exposed scalp looked. How he, without hair, seemed to have aged. He had lost nearly forty pounds when he was on the streets, and though he shoveled as much lunchroom pasta into his system as possible, he had only gained back about ten.

A skeleton is looking back at me. A dreaming skeleton.

THERE was a hood of sensors that he was to wear at night. It would measure his brain activity and, immediately after a dream ended, ring the phone at his bedside. He would wake, the dream still fresh in his mind, and write it down.

“It’s like the poet who held a spoon in his hand as he drifted off,” Porter said as Warren, a tech, fitted him with the hood. “When the spoon dropped, the sound of it ringing against the floor would wake him and he would write what he had seen.”

Biggs rubbed at the stubble on his head, felt at the hardness of his skull.

When he was alone with Lee, he asked, “Am I a prisoner?”

“The opposite. But I can’t let you go,” Lee said. “You are an amazing gift to all of us. It would be wrong to put you in danger.”

“Don’t you think going back and seeing what there is to see will bring closure? Don’t you think it could clear the way for different subjects?”

“Yes, I’ve thought about that. I know that’s what you are seeking. Matt, along those lines, I’ve been doing some research and I found this.”

He handed Biggs a piece of paper, a page torn from a medical journal. Biggs quickly read the description of a delayed miscarriage—when the fetus dies of natural causes in the womb during early stages of pregnancy. When this happens, the clipping told him, the products of conception must be either surgically or medically removed. Both can result in complications that cause prolonged pain and bleeding.

Biggs looked up at Dr. Lee, not sure what to make of the information.

“Didn’t you say she titled the film you found Missed?”

“Yes,” he said. “The file anyway. I’m still not following.”

“Well, another name for a delayed miscarriage is ‘missed.’ A missed miscarriage.”

Biggs sat with this information.

“I don’t think she did it,” Lee said. “You see where I’m going with this, right?”

Biggs said nothing.

Lee stood. At the door, he turned back.

“Tell you what. I’ll send out Morales,” he said.

HE told them, “We drove up the coast, right on the beach. On the hard sand at the edge of the water. Morales knew the streets of the city. He got us there. We went up the stairwell and kicked open the door. A cold wind pushed through. We were standing on a meadow that spread out on the top of a mountain. There were purple flowers and giant rocks jutting out of the grass. A figure stood in the distance. I called out to it, called her name. The figure was either wearing a cape or had wings. We moved toward it but couldn’t close the distance. We started running but then tumbled into a hole with steep sides. We couldn’t climb out. We could only shout for help and watch the sky cloud over. There was nowhere to go but into the walls of dirt.”

HE told Morales, “The room was pitch black. The couple—the man and the woman there—had no sense of time or space. They had passed through sleep into a nothingness that formed along the shape of their bodies. There was only their bodies. He felt the heat of her skin, smelled her hair, the sweet sweat of sleep. Her mouth was a soft wet circle of heat that moved over his skin.”

He couldn’t continue.

A long silence passed.

Morales said, “Bro, it’s cool.” Morales squeezed his shoulder. “It’s all right, seriously. I’ll take you.”

THEY drove up the coast on the glassy sand, but not for long. Cliffs rising out of the water stood in their way. The waves beat against them and fell away defeated, reduced to a wash of foam. They turned inland. Morales drove along an estuary, flushing a flock of snowy egrets, and onto the highway, where they began their negotiations with an array of obstructions, including bodies from overpasses.

“Lee will have my fucking balls when we get back,” Morales said.

“Maybe. But maybe this will be good for everyone.”

“I’m telling you now to not get your hopes up, my friend. The only thing out here is bad news.”

He looked at Biggs. It was clear that he wanted to say something.

“What?”

“These search missions he sends me on? They’re bogus.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that we aren’t looking for Felicia anymore. You hear what I’m saying?”

Biggs studied his face. He saw that they had found her.

“You don’t want to know,” Morales said.

He drove on but after a few miles, he said, “Someone went after the implant, dug it right out of her head. Tried to pound it into his own skull with a rock. Bashed his fucking brains out. We think it was her boyfriend.”

“How long ago was this?”

“That we found her? Weeks ago, bro. Like right after we found you. Lee’s just pretending that she could still be alive. He says he’s doing it for them, but I think he’s doing it for himself.”

THEY had to stop once for Morales’s three-hour sleep shift. Like all security team members, his schedule was split into shorter shifts that overlapped with the other men’s. Biggs stood under a tree, waiting for downtime to end. With his eyes he followed a column of ants up the trunk, then squinted at the sun pouring through the leaves. In the distance, he saw a billboard and recalled how he woke to find himself alive, the front of his shirt soaked with vomit and the pattern of the floor grille pressed into his cheek. He remembered how, in his confusion, he thought she had been there with him. And how the ground below was littered with bodies. Like the man who cornered him in the cage, they must have ruptured with rage at seeing him unconscious.

His sleep, he noted, could kill.

After exactly three hours had passed, Morales woke with a start. Biggs watched as he looked around, then beeped the horn.

It took the entire day to reach the shattered drugstore, the small park where he had once stolen naps in the shrubbery. The building stood where he had left it.

He climbed the stairs, Morales right there behind him.

He pushed open the door.

IT WAS like visiting home in a dream. This is because, Biggs thought, I had decided to die. I had tried to die but I lived. Everything from before should be gone, but it’s here.

Here was their bed, their clothing hanging in the closets. Their books lined the shelves, a wall of stories receding into the past. He studied their pictures on the wall looking for discrepancies, changes. The great expanse between himself and his memories confused him. There was something more than time in the way. This may be me protecting myself, he thought. I wish I wouldn’t do that. Just break if you’re going to break.

“No one’s here,” Morales said. He turned to see that Morales was holding one of Carolyn’s stop-motion puppets. He had checked the studio.

“How can we get up there?” Biggs asked, pointing up to the skylight, which indeed was open. Had they left it that way? The hook pole hung down. It wouldn’t support either of them, even if they were nimble enough to climb it.

They brought a stepladder out from the studio and put it on the dining table, which they pulled under the opening in the ceiling. Biggs went up, pushing the bubble window wide and pulling himself through. The sun was going down, but the heat still rose from the tar. He sat in the opening as she once had, his feet dangling. Below him, Morales waited for him to report what he was seeing, but he said nothing.

There were her footprints in the dust. There was no way to know if they had been pressed there a year ago, when she first went up, or recently—if that is, in fact, how she had found her way out. He put his hand in one of the prints, aligned his fingers with her toes. His palm came away blackened by dust. He slowly stood and took in the surroundings—the elevator housing, vents, and stovepipes. A low brick wall crowned the roof. He looked beyond it, holding his hand against the low sun, and scanned buildings, the city flaring with sunlight and, far away, the low ridge of the hills to the west.

The footprints marked a path along the circumference of the rooftop. She had walked along the edge numerous times, the footprints overlapping and obscuring the form of her feet. He walked alongside the prints and, feeling very certain that he was being watched, glanced back at the skylight opening, expecting to see Morales’s head jutting through. But no, he was still below.

At the far end of the roof, there was a shed. Yes, she had investigated it herself. Her footprints disappeared into the doorway. Biggs approached it and peered in, dreading what he might find there. Stacked against the walls were buckets of tar, rolls of tarpaper. The shed’s roof angled upward and beams formed a narrow shelf. He was startled to see a large owl there looking down at him. Its eyes gleamed as it calmly observed him, saw all of him, he felt, every vision that had passed through his head. For a moment he braced himself, expecting the bird to fly at his head. But instead it leapt over him and, with two silent wing beats, drifted over the side of the building. Biggs accepted an unspoken invitation. He stood on a bucket and saw the eggs there, sitting among the loose twigs and dried bits of fur and bone.

BY the time he returned to the loft, Morales was eating the food they had brought along from the center—pasta sandwiches and raw squash from the graduate housing gardens. He helped him down from the ladder and put a sandwich in his hand.

Biggs wondered if Morales had heard his ragged sobs, the primal groan. If he had, he would probably be under the assumption that Biggs had found Carolyn, or all that remained of her. But the outpouring Biggs had finally felt, as if the membrane holding back a flood of anguish had finally given way, didn’t require evidence that Carolyn was gone. He suddenly felt it.

Morales didn’t ask what Biggs had found, or not found. Instead, he said, “You’ve told us so much about her, you know, the dreams of her. But I got to admit that I wasn’t sure she was real.” He nodded at a framed picture—the wedding picture of Biggs holding Carolyn over the water as he stood in the lake. “Hey, now I kind of feel like I’m standing in one of your dreams.”

“This place is everywhere she should be but isn’t,” Biggs said, looking around.

“She moved,” Morales said, chewing thoughtfully. “She’s got a new place inside you now. Must be even more crowded than here. Dude, I had closets bigger than this place. I bet you paid a fortune for it too, right? City suckers.”

Biggs knew his face was blackened with dust from his hands. It didn’t matter, he thought, if he wore that blackness forever.

Morales agreed that it was a good idea to stay the night. Biggs said he would sleep in the studio so Morales could keep watch in the main room, after his three-hour shift on the sofa. “Maybe I’ll read some of these books,” Morales said.

Biggs dragged the mattress into the studio, just as he and Carolyn had done a few years ago. He pulled her black, light-proof curtains over the door and window and found himself in total darkness. The scent of her was still there, in the blankets, on the pillow. Faintly, faintly there. He waited to feel her sniffing at his cheek.

“Is it me?” he would ask.

He fell asleep and dreamed about something else entirely.