Black Moon

2

AS PLANNED, CHASE DROVE UP TO THE cinderblock dumpster corral behind the Sunrise Pharmacy and put the car in park, but left the engine running. The white trash bag was slouched in the corner as Jordan said it would be, soft from the heat. Chase scooped it up, backhanding flies, and was quickly back in the car, the bag riding shotgun like some kind of prop for a companion. He drove off, glancing once in the rearview mirror down the strip mall service road. There was no sign of anyone anywhere, just some litter twirling in his wake. He hadn’t been seen, he was pretty sure. Great. Now he too—just like that—was stealing drugs from the pharmacy with Jordan.

HE took the most direct route home even though that brought him past Felicia’s cul-de-sac. He couldn’t help glancing up at her parents’ house. She wouldn’t be there until her birthday visit later in the month. What if he did catch a glimpse of her car in the driveway as he shot by? I’d probably freak out and crash, he thought. Get found dead with a stolen bag of trash in my lap.

He noticed he was speeding past the tract houses, the residential rhythm of manicured yards, driveways, and personalized mailboxes ticking by. Whoa, slow down! He was giddy from the heist, and paranoid, constantly checking the rearview. Yet he made it home without incident, pulling into his parents’ garage. The automatic door closed slowly behind him, lowered by the creaking winch overhead. The space going dark. He grabbed the bag and went inside the quiet empty house.

They hadn’t discussed what he was to do once home. Just sit and wait for Jordan to get off work, he supposed. But meanwhile, here was all this incriminating evidence sitting on the low shag of the family room. Chase stared at the bag. Jordan had packed it earlier, mixing stolen drugs with trash, then setting it in the corral for Chase to pick up. Jordan had been doing this alone all spring. This was Chase’s first run. Maybe he should fish out the pills and burn the rest of it.

Probably better to just wait. Try to be cool for once, he told himself.

Still feeling the jangle of nerves, he went to the living room window and peered out at the quiet street. All was in order. Summer had only started and the world was still weeks away from an irreversible transformation. There was no hint of crisis in this suburban scene: the neighbors’ low houses, the pale sky. The sun poured down on the neighborhood, baking the tongue-colored Spanish tiles of the rooftops, yellowing the grass. Dusty leaves hung limply in the parkway trees. It was too hot for anyone to be out. Kids would emerge in the evening and couples walking their dogs. Someone would wash their car, sending suds down the gutter. He studied the sky for a hint of the mountains that loomed over the valley, but they were concealed by the dirty gauze of smog. He had been away for a year, studying at a university on the coast. Yet it felt as though he had never left, despite the fact that the house was completely empty, his family gone.

It had only taken him ten minutes to move in a few nights ago, reclaiming the house from the renters. His parents wouldn’t return from Boston—where Chase’s dad had accepted a visiting faculty position—until the end of summer. They weren’t thrilled about Chase moving in early, hoping he would find a summer job near the university instead. “But there’s no furniture!” his mother had tried. He assured them that wasn’t a problem. He’d bring his own.

As soon as classes ended, he packed up his meager belongings, tossing most of it into the massive move-out bins set up in front of the dorms. He was looking forward to putting some distance between himself and the campus, not to mention his roommates. The experience had been a hollow one. Next year, he would try living alone, off campus. It was one of the things he needed to discuss with his parents. He hadn’t told them about breaking up with Felicia and they would assume he intended to live with her. The thought of having to explain himself made him queasy. Maybe he wouldn’t even go back, he thought. Just work at the music store again.

His first night home, he had explored the rooms in the darkness, feeling very detached from the space, uneasy about the emptiness. He didn’t like being alone, not here. There were no curtains and a yellowy light seeped in from the street, casting skewed squares on the floors. Without furniture, the modest ranch-style home felt weirdly vast. In the bathroom his sneeze rang out as he studied his face in the mirror. How had he changed? He had gained some weight in college and now wore his hair cropped close to his head. His dark eyes looked wet in the glass, peering out from under his hooded brow, and his beard scruff framed his narrow face with shadow. This same glass had witnessed his pale youth, his scrawny chest and thin arms; his white, clenched ass and hairless groin. How did it recognize him now? What remained?

Something in the eyes, he knew. An uncertainty that he had thought would be gone by now. A childish worry, too, about being alone in the house—directly tied to his old anxieties about random violence and home invasion. An escaped prisoner, maybe, breaking in during the night, like what happened to that family in Chino years back.

He found that his own room had been transformed almost beyond recognition by the absence of his childhood possessions. The walls had long been stripped of his concert posters and gig flyers, but most absent was the mural he had painted on the room’s only unpaneled wall. The renters had requested it be papered over, since they had intended to use the room as a nursery. The imagery, featuring a life-sized tiger and the jungle-infested ruins of a post-nuclear city, was too disturbing for an infant. Now the wall was covered with a pattern of cartoonish butterflies.

That first night, he had set up his small, archaic TV and unfolded two beach chairs that sat lightly atop the low, sand-colored carpet. He slid an old microwave, flecked inside with the remnants of exploded burritos, onto the kitchen counter. The renters had canceled the alarm service and he wished they hadn’t. He chained the front door and fell into his old habit of touring the house, making sure all the windows and doors were locked. He rolled out his sleeping bag in his room, threw a black trash bag of clothes in the closet, then called it a day. From the floor, the familiar ceiling looked impossibly high. He was exhausted, so it wasn’t long before he started to drift off with hopes of seeing Felicia in his dreams. But the sound of a soft fire crackling in the closet caused him to sit up abruptly.

It was only the trash bag, decompressing in the dark, slowly blooming like a monstrous black rose.

NOW, three days later, a white trash bag sat in the family room, smelling of bandages. Chase was standing at the kitchen counter, staring at the bag, when he heard Jordan’s car pull up to the curb. He waited for the sound of the door and, after minutes passed, he went to the window. Jordan was still sitting there, frozen behind the wheel of his weathered Tercel. By the time Chase opened the garage, Jordan was walking down the driveway in his blue Sunrise Pharmacy smock and nametag. He was leaner that he had been in high school, with sinewy arms and a face going prematurely gaunt. He had always worn his hair short and spiky, and sometime during the last year he had pierced his ears. The holes in his lobes now held thick black cylinders.

“What were you doing?” Chase asked.

“Working.”

“No, I mean now. Sitting in the car.”

“Oh, yeah, that.” Jordan nodded as Chase slapped the switch and the door descended behind them. “That was one of the few mainstream media stories I’ve heard about the crisis. I had to hear the end.”

“On the radio?”

“Yeah. NPR.”

Chase studied Jordan as he walked past, stepping into the house. He didn’t believe there had been a story about insomnia on the radio, nor did he believe in the so-called sleep crisis that was Jordan’s apparent obsession. Yet, for reasons he was reluctant to reveal, he was helping Jordan steal sleeping pills from the Sunrise Pharmacy. The end of sleep was near, Jordan had explained two nights ago. The human species will die in a fit of hallucinations and devastating physical and mental exhaustion. The drugs, he believed, would not only ensure that he would continue to sleep when no one else could, but they would be a powerful bartering tool when cash, even gold, would mean nothing. He speculated that pills would be the new currency.

“It’s coming,” Jordan said. “Even the clueless are picking up on it.”

He followed Chase into the family room and they stood looking at the white plastic trash bag. Jordan greeted it. “Hello, little dude.”

“What did they say?” Chase asked, testing.

“Who?”

“The story on the radio. Did they say what’s causing it?”

Jordan reached into the loose pocket of his smock and produced a box cutter. He snapped it open and shook his head. “They’re not there yet. They can’t afford that kind of honesty. They still have to disguise it as a story about the stock market.”

Chase smiled and nodded. He could see that this annoyed Jordan.

“Don’t believe,” Jordan said with a shrug. “Hang with the sheeple.” He had a dead eye that was fogged and streaked with a jagged scar, the result of a childhood accident when a defective hammer shattered in his face. When he glared, which he did now at Chase, the wound amped up the menace.

Jordan dropped to his knee and grabbed the bag. He bleated like a lamb, then punched in the blade and slashed out a long stroke, revealing the contents inside.

Chase wasn’t ready to let it go. “I bet they didn’t even say the word ‘sleep.’ ”

“When they talk about Big Pharma still raking it in, they’re talking about sleep,” Jordan said as he sorted through the trash. “This is what they’re selling. I’ve seen it in the store with my own eyes. Shit’s flying off the shelves.”

He arranged a number of sleep aid products on the floor—boxes that held plastic bottles stuffed with cotton and pills, foil-backed sheets bubbled with capsules. This was his evidence of apocalypse: the anecdotally observed spike in sleeping pill sales combined with online rants of conspiracy sites. He had shown Chase a few, which Chase wrote off as typical Web-based hysteria.

“They say anything about Bigfoot plotting to kill the president?” he had joked.

Jordan, as far as Chase was concerned, had become some kind of conspiracy geek. He watched Jordan stuff the litter back in the bag, then stand, looking down at their take. Not bad. He nodded and raised his hand for a fist bump. Chase obliged.

“Hold on a second. Be right back,” Jordan said, grinning. He slapped Chase on the back as he headed for the front door, moving like a man with a plan.

It was the first time he had seen Jordan smile since he had serendipitously reconnected with his old high school friend three days earlier. Chase had gone to the Sunrise Music Store, hoping to talk his old boss Sam into giving him his job back, if only for the summer. After learning that Sam had been out sick for a week, Chase exited the back way, through the service road, wanting to avoid the coffee shop where Felicia used to work. They would ask about her. They would hope to hear that she had left him. All those assholes were in love with her. Walking along the back of the stores, past the dumpster corrals, he was happy to encounter Jordan on the pharmacy loading dock, slicing up boxes.

That first conversation was pretty one-sided, with Chase explaining that he was only back for the summer. He was sure Jordan would ask about Felicia. After all, he had known her longer than Chase had. But he didn’t. He was aloof, remote, eyeing Chase as he continued to hack up the cardboard. Strange, because they had been close once, before Chase ditched everyone to be with Felicia.

Maybe this coolness was about college, Chase had thought. Maybe he still resents that we went off to school and he’s here, working his high school job. Jordan had had the grades to go. In fact, he had been accepted to several good schools. It came down to money. His mother, Chase knew, had squandered whatever they had won in the lawsuit over Jordan’s eye injury. She lived like a movie star for a few years, driving an expensive car and dating an army of men, before landing her and her impaired son back in a shady apartment complex. Everyone had known this at school. It was always under the surface, especially when the topic of college became central to their conversations.

Fuck college. You’re not missing much, Chase wanted to tell him. His freshman year had been a disaster, as far as he was concerned. With Felicia dumping him and making new friends while he shut himself alone in the dorm room and struggled to pass his classes. She blossomed in every school setting—in the classroom, intramural sports, at the parties—and was offered a coveted lab assistant job for the summer. He found himself with nowhere to go but back home. Now he was finding that even connecting with an old friend was a challenge.

Jordan eventually did look up from slashing boxes and engage, but only after Chase mentioned that he was living at his parents’ empty house alone until they moved back from Boston.

“Maybe I’ll swing by tonight,” Jordan had said, snapping his blade shut. “There’s a lot you should know.”

That was three nights ago.

Now here he was, returning from his car with two more large plastic bags on his back, like some kind of junkyard Santa. It was a matching set to the two already on the premises: one black, one white. Jordan untied the white bag to reveal his entire stash of stolen sleeping pills.

“Check it out,” he said. “That’s a month’s worth.”

“A month’s worth of sleep, or you’ve been doing this for a month?” Chase asked as Jordan scooped up the day’s score and added it to the mix.

“Doing it for a month. It’s an eternity’s worth of sleep if you take them all at once.”

“What’s in the other bag?”

Jordan retied the white bag and looked over at the black Hefty, staring at it for a beat. “That’s my stuff, man. Clothes and shit. I was hoping I could crash here for a while. I can’t take my mom’s new boyfriend. Guy’s a major dickhole.”

He looked up at Chase, eyebrows raised.

Chase was quiet, weighing things out. In truth, he liked the idea of having someone else in the house at night. He never felt this way at school, always seeking out privacy and hoping his roommates would go away for the weekend. But nights in the suburbs had always unsettled him. As a kid, he had read too many police reports and followed too many serial killer cases, looking for details that put him outside the victim profile. He had a handle on it most of the time. But if left alone, he knew it could color his thoughts in a dangerous way. Jordan’s presence would prevent this, he was sure.

“Well,” he finally said, “we do have the same taste in luggage.”

THAT night the housemates climbed up on the roof and got drunk with their backs against the chimney. The TV aerial, an artifact from another era, rattled in the wind. A breeze had picked up with the setting of the sun, which had dropped like a warped copper plate through the low, grainy belt of valley haze. They threw the empties onto the lawn below, where the weedy mix of grass silently caught each can. Cricketsong flared up and Jordan silenced it, for a moment, with a belch that rattled the Spanish tile shingles.

“That’s talent,” Chase said, but Jordan didn’t laugh. He was different now, humorless, and the transformation was a little unnerving. After all, Jordan had been the class clown. He had always loved pranks, like the Sunrise Guyz calendar he had threatened to make. An ironic beefcake calendar, he liked to call it, featuring the nonhunky dudes of the dilapidated strip mall where they both had worked their high school jobs. He had walked the idea around, taking imaginary orders and signing up the most unlikely models from the mall’s ailing shops: sad-faced Sandy, the cook from the Pizza Palace; the obese Jerry Tift from the auto body shop; the mustachioed Mr. Sato at the nursery, who would add an element of Oriental elegance, Jordan insisted. It was a fantasy artifact that people now talked about as if it had really existed. This pleased Jordan. That’s so much better than if we had really made it, he liked to say, grinning.

But there was no sign of that whimsy now, as they watched bats swoop at the insects swarming the streetlights and listened to coyotes yapping in the chaparral foothills. Jordan stared intently into his surroundings, speculating aloud about the number of insomniacs sitting behind the glowing windows in the nearby houses. He said, “Look, we’re going to have to step it up. Over-the-counter stuff isn’t going to cut it in the long run. We need to get at the stuff that’s like a hammer to the head. Schedule two stuff that you see all those commercials about.”

“Can you do that?” Chase asked.

“We can,” Jordan said.

Chase could feel him staring at the back of his head, waiting for a reaction. He sensed that Jordan was asking him to do more than merely swing by to pick up the stash. His impulse was to back out now, tell him he wanted no part of it. He was too paranoid, too fearful. But the fact was that he did want a part of it. It had occurred to him soon after encountering Jordan at the pharmacy. Jordan could help him. Knowing this had made Chase both tolerant—of Jordan’s new weirdness and delusions—and bold. But in two days of wrestling with it, he had yet to come up with a way to tell Jordan what he wanted without revealing his failure with Felicia. He thought he could get it across disguised as a joke—Hey, while you’re in there, grab me some of those man pills. Jordan would see into that. At least the old Jordan would, and he wouldn’t let it go until he knew the whole story. Maybe the new Jordan wouldn’t give it a thought. Maybe it’s time to say something, get it over with. The alcohol helped.

But when he turned to face Jordan, his friend’s piercing gaze shut him down. There was something tightly coiled, a lacerating energy, behind Jordan’s eyes. The guy really did appear to believe that the world was about to end, and the weird thing was, he seemed to be looking forward to it. He looked determined not only to survive it, but to rule whatever was left. It was spooky, but also potentially useful. At least for now.

“What do you need me to do?”

THE plan was simple, but not without risk. They discussed it while tripping along the winding horse trails between the houses, peering through wood-slatted fences or chain-link at the black glossy surfaces of swimming pools and into the TV-lit dioramas of identical homes. Wind chimes stirred, clinking musically in the late night breeze, and heat lightning flashed beyond the mountains, lashing at the warm banks of air over the desert. They kept knocking shoulders and drunkenly lurching off course as they passed a bottle of inky wine between them.

Jordan had done his homework, watching for gaps to exploit while cutting up boxes and stocking shelves. Only pharmacists and techs could get into the cage, which is what they called the elevated and secure area behind the pharmacy counter where the bins were lined with serious drugs. Jordan wasn’t a tech. He was only a cashier, which meant he did everything from ringing up purchases to dry-mopping the aisles. The only time he was let into the cage was for cleanup, but he was never alone. A pharmacist had to be present. Even the store managers couldn’t get back there alone. There were spare keys, but they were kept in a safe, inside sealed envelopes. The only vulnerability, Jordan had determined, was Mel, the aging owner whose every waking hour was spent aiming anger vibes at the large pharmaceutical chains that were popping up all over town. He claimed they were driving him out of business, despite the fact that sales were up for everyone.

Jordan put his arm out in front of Chase, stopping him, and nodded toward a high window. A silhouette—man or woman, they couldn’t tell—appeared behind the blinds, pacing relentlessly. “See that?”

“Yeah, but so what?” Chase went right up to the fence and peered through the chain-link, swaying from the alcohol. He gripped the fence to steady himself.

“What time is it?” Jordan asked.

Chase checked his watch, squinting as he tried to lock in on the numbers. He saw some ones. “It’s either eleven eleven or one eleventeen.”

“Yeah, late,” Jordan said. “Past bedtime.”

“That doesn’t prove jack,” Chase said, nodding up at the person in the window. He pushed off the fence like a swimmer from the side of the pool. “People pace,” he said.

They stumbled on, with Jordan rambling about dreams and how insistent they are, how they have to happen. “Because if you stay awake long enough, you have them whether you’re sleeping or not. Hallucinations, man. Don’t you see what that means? It means that it’s where we really live, and when we’re awake, we’re just coming up for air.”

“Whoa, dude, you’re blowing my mind,” Chase said sarcastically. “Just tell me how you’re going to get into the cage.”

“What cage?”

“The cage at the fucking pharmacy.”

“Yeah, the cage.” Jordan leaned against a eucalyptus trunk and tried to focus. “Here’s the thing. The security gap is Mel. Why? I’ll tell you why. Because he’s a serious, big-time napper.”

A dog pounced at them from the other side of the fence, snarling and barking in frothy rage. They ran, startled, crossing a street and pushing into another dark neighborhood. The dog’s threats receded behind them. When they were in the clear, Chase said, “Ha-ha. The gap is the nap. That’s just perfect.”

“Isn’t it?” Jordan slurred. “His nap is our way in. Every day, he falls asleep at his desk in his office. Head back, mouth all open. I’ve seen it. If you listen you can hear his fucking snores on the floor. Just talk to him around two and his eyes are drooping shut. He says it’s because he’s borderline diabetic and something about low blood sugar. The point is I’m going to snag his keys and you’ll come in and take them and copy them and then bring them back and I’ll have them back on his belt loop before he wakes up again.”

“Great plan,” Chase said, teetering then tipping into irony. “But what if he can’t sleep? What if he gets the insominitis! Oh no! The whole plan will be foiled! It’s the end of the world!”

“Jesus, keep it down!”

Chase ran down the trail in a pantomime of panicked citizenry. Arms flailing, screaming in silence. He quickly lost steam, stopped, and smiled crookedly, head lolling, as Jordan caught up.

“You think I haven’t thought about that?” Jordan said, still serious. “That’s exactly why we have to do it soon.”

“Dude,” Chase said, nearly falling backward. “Speaking of pills, take a chill pill.”

But Jordan didn’t seem to hear him. Instead, he was focused on something over Chase’s shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “isn’t this Felicia’s house?”

They looked into the yard. There were the three avocado trees standing watch over the small pool. There was the diving board that Felicia liked to lie on, reading a book that was held between her and the sun. A memory flapped up. A scorching summer day when they had ridden her scooter from the ice cream shop. He held a cone in each hand as she drove, stirring up a hot wind that attacked the vulnerable scoops. Twin trails of colorful splatter followed them as they raced for home, where their towels were spread by the pool. She accused him of eating them down to the cone during the short ride. It was just like The Old Man and the Sea, he explained. How the sharks got most of the big catch. She pushed him in the pool and he emerged with the mushy cones, which they molded to their noses and pecked at each other’s mouths like angry toucans. Her brother, sitting in the shade with The Wall Street Journal, told them to get a room.

Get a room. Reliving the suggestion now pained him. He wanted to rewind and get back inside that assumption—that they would be doing what young couples do—before things got too tangled in his head and his body refused to follow. And it’s not like nothing ever happened. After all, he had been her first, as she had been his. But it had taken a lot of trying, and it soon became clear that it wasn’t just some kind of performance anxiety that he would get past after their bodies became more familiar with each other. Later, when she gently pressed him for an explanation, he could only say that he loved her too much. That her tenderness made him feel brotherly toward her. Yet he knew he possessed desire for her. It was there in his dreams. That’s where they had explored each other, where he could answer her shape with his.

One time, she had been waiting at the edge of sleep, when he dreamed they were entangled in the kind of embrace his waking mind wouldn’t allow. She felt it animating him behind her, and she tried to cross into his dream by gently taking him inside her. His hands, heavy with sleep, came up to her waist and held her tightly as he rocked against her, pushing deeply into her so that she had to muffle her gasps by biting her arm. But as he surfaced from sleep and his mind began to reorganize his world, she felt him receding. Still half asleep, he fought against it, but his determination quickly took on a tone of anger, of violence. She tried to pull away but he rolled on top of her, pinning her. She fought him off, kicking at him. His head hit the wall. He backed away, then quickly gathered up his clothes and left. That was the last time they shared a bed. A few weeks later, after they had exhausted all possibility of talking their way through it, she pushed him out into the world, telling him to get help—a directive his shame prevented him from pursuing.

All this swam through his mind as he stood looking down at her parents’ house, but it was displaced with the sudden, sobering observation that Felicia’s dad was sitting on the porch. He could clearly see the man’s dark form, backlit by interior light passing through the sliding glass door. Was he talking to someone? His mouth was moving, head bobbing slightly. Maybe he was on the phone? Strange, but nothing Chase wanted to explore at the moment. The thought of being spotted standing at the backyard fence of Felicia’s house at two in the morning sent him running.