Black Moon

3

LILA FERRELL KNEW FROM THE INTERNET that it was happening.

Insomnia was a trending topic online. It had crept into everyone’s status updates. People were posting videos of attacks on sleepers.

So she knew what was going on when she emerged from her room one summer morning to find her parents sitting at the kitchen table, positioned exactly as they had been when she had said her goodnight. They looked ancient in the golden light from the desert pouring in through the windows. Slumped over warm wine, eyes ringed and twitching. Someone had shredded the napkins.

She said, “Oh my god, you have it.”

Mrs. Ferrell said, “Have what?”

“This insomnia thing.”

“What insomnia thing?” Dr. Ferrell said. He was a therapist at the base—an expert on sleeplessness who worked with war-haunted Marines, trying to get them through the night. A bad liar too. Lila knew.

DR. FERRELL once wrote: “In the dreams we have forgotten we have had many mothers. We have had many fathers, brothers, and sisters. Even as children we have parented many children of our own in our dreams—sons and daughters that gave us forgotten lifetimes of joy and torment, leaving only a shadow of a memory.

“Playing out of endless familial permutations is one of many tasks the mind tackles while we sleep, our bodies on hold.

“We know everyone we’ve ever seen with great intimacy.”

MOST of the students at the new school were military kids. The girls were pretty slutty, in Lila’s opinion. Seemed like everyone was a cheerleader. The boys were all what she liked to call soldier larvae, though her dad hated the term. Not soldiers anyway, he would say. Marines. Lila never saw the difference. They fight wars, don’t they, wearing uniforms all the different colors of dirt?

Some of the girls on the soccer team were okay, but Lila came in halfway through the season and didn’t really get to know them before summer vacation hit.

Lila decided she didn’t need them. These days, you could just keep your old friends by staying connected online. She went home after school and logged in and there were Arielle and Matthew, waiting for her as avatars in their virtual hangout. Arielle looked a lot like she looked in real life, but Matthew had a tiger’s head in that other world of theirs, where opting for an animal head was common.

THIS is not Earth, Mrs. Ferrell thought when they first arrived in the desert. He has brought us to some desolate planet. She had abandoned the notion that she could continue her real estate career in this place. It’s a landscape without selling points, she told her husband that first night. The only view it offers is that of the sun going down, the dying of the light slowing traffic like a fresh wreck on the side of the road.

“That’s putting a pretty morbid spin on things,” Dr. Ferrell had said.

It’s not a place that you can carry off in your heart, she concluded. This is not what her daughter will picture, years from now, when she tries to remember home. At the very least, memories of an American home involve trees.

ON the base, Dr. Ferrell was working with a Marine who had rolled a grenade into a tent where eight men were sleeping. The Marine had been an insomniac, though the media overlooked this at the time and focused on his Arab ethnicity.

The doctor had his own struggles with getting to sleep. Lately, it had worsened as he considered possible causes of the epidemic. Many in the scientific community were focusing on a known disease—fatal familial insomnia—the idea being that this was some kind of mutated strain of the already mutated variation called sporadic familial insomnia. Whereas FFI was believed to be hereditary and limited to less than forty families in the world, and took up to two years to kill the afflicted, this new iteration seemed to be some kind of unstoppable upgrade. Accelerated, resistant, moving through the four stages of demise at three times the speed.

But this was just the leading theory. No real connections had been made, and the medical community remained confronted by its greatest fear: a mystery.

Could it be? Not with fire, not with ice, but because of a protein abnormality? A change of amino acid at position 178? His mind kept whirring into the morning hours, a pinwheel spun by the current of his speculations: Maybe more like mad cow. He had seen a report. A chronic wasting disease superbug triggered by a weaponized mammalian prion, ticking in the thalamus. Born in the meat of elk and deer. Bambi’s revenge.

But what did he know? He wasn’t a researcher or physician. He still practiced the talking cure, his mind tending toward more karmic causes: all those warriors he worked with, afraid to dream, heads crowded with scorpions. Maybe that’s where it started and they brought it back from the desert, some kind of contagious psychic wound, guilt based—the empathy system hyperactivated by the policy of preemptive war, the outsourcing of torture. Maybe it was the ugliness that showed itself after the election, the town hall rage and rallies. Except it wasn’t restricted to America. Her enemies were also pacing the floor.

Christ, maybe I did it, he proposed. Maybe it was taking this job. It was the last sellout the universe would tolerate. Trying to help Marines by asking them to write alternative endings to their nightmares.

THE one interesting place was the aqueduct, Lila thought, which was basically a long concrete-sided canal that cut through the desert. It lay just beyond the cinderblock wall at the edge of their backyard. The banks were steep, also concrete, and when the water was low, it settled into a deep, mossy trough that ran down the middle. Dark, tinted water, silent and deceptively still. At breakfast one morning, her mother read her an article about a picnicking Latino family that was lured in, one after the other, all drowning in their attempts to save one another.

The current was strong, but invisible because there were no rocks to show resistance in the form of rapids or waves. Only a rusted post jutted out of the middle of the stream, and the water parted smoothly around it. A hawk was often perched there. In vast stretches, for miles and miles, there were few opportunities to climb out, since the walls were steep and smooth. She went there every now and then, daring to sit on the slanted cement bank, legs splayed out toward the water. She imagined the drowned family, passing by like figures frozen in the thick amber sap of the water, twisting and tumbling past the saguaro and chaparral toward the faraway sea. They would look like they were sleeping, she imagined. Like I was seeing into their dreams, the nightmare of their family drowning.

NO ONE will understand this, Dr. Ferrell was certain. The mainstream media was reporting on it now, making it real. The cities showing signs—commuter traffic dropping, two out of five employees missing work, hospitals filling up and first responders unable to respond. Numbers and trends, but no explanations. He turned off the TV and glanced at his wife, who appeared to sleep at his side.

The reasons, the source. No one understands the economy, or the climate either. If we’ve learned anything it’s that we are in the dark. Come to think of it, maybe it’s the dark matter. Makes up most of the universe and we can’t even see it. Maybe that vast reservoir of dreams has been depleted.

IN THE posted video Lila found online, someone is rolling with a camcorder, filming a man with a chain saw. He revs it and the sound is too loud for the camera mike, causing it to distort. Then he starts sawing at a tree. The camera pans up and you can see a woman stirring high in the branches. Other people gather around. They look and sound like neighbors, but they are yelling angrily at the woman in the tree, shaking their fists. Even throwing things up at her. It sounds like Russian, or Polish. Lila can’t tell. The woman is screaming down at the man, clearly begging him to stop. But he doesn’t and the tree starts leaning, then falls with a loud cracking and moan, shuddering on impact with the ground. The woman comes down with it but the camera can’t find her on the ground, in the branches of the fallen tree. Someone titled the video: Insomniacs Kill Woman Sleeping in Tree.

FOR. the second night in a row, Mrs. Ferrell was pretending to sleep as her husband paced the floor or watched TV in the bed next to her. Her thoughts flashed just on the other side of her eyes. A deluge of fears. What happens now? The body has to shut down at some point. It just can’t keep going on and on, forever circling the drain.

She wasn’t sure why she was keeping it from him. A cure would emerge before it got too bad. Or it would just stop, ending itself because the alternative was unthinkable. Sometimes she would act as though he had woken her. Then she would attempt to sound groggy as she asked him what the news was, what they were saying about it.

“Go back to sleep,” he would say with an odd urgency. And when he said it that way, it seemed to her that he meant “sleep” as a place—a physical location, a state or country that she should take Lila and return to, as if it had once been their home. It was only exhaustion, she concluded, that made her hear it that particular way.

LILA pulled a blanket over herself in the backseat of the car. It wasn’t cold in the dark garage, but she needed it as protection, as camouflage. Then, curled up, she did it without any problem—the thing everyone was trying to do. Sleep was the summer craze, the must-have of the moment.

She saw how it could be true, what her father had been saying about insomnia being real in some people and imagined in others. You worry so much about sleeping that you can’t sleep. A self-fulfilling prophecy, he called it. It had this effect on her, but only to a point. Then exhaustion simply took over and she saw, in pre-REM flashes, the rusted post—the hawk’s safe roost—in the aqueduct quickly approaching. She was sliding toward it on the raft. She knew she had to grab it and readied herself.

SHE can do it, her mother seemed to say.

Through the door, she heard her father say something low and calm, but Lila couldn’t make out the exact words.

“She’s doing it under her bed,” her mother insisted, after a long silence. “And I bet that’s what she’s been doing in the car.”

LILA heard them talking in bed right before she opened the door, their voices sawing like stringed instruments through the wall. His low friction of worry, her high pluck of anger. Then there they were, still as statues. Pretenders. Eyes closed, flopped back on the pillows with the pale green sheets pulled up. She went to her mother’s side and looked at her face, examining the stillness for signs that she was there, awake under the surface. She was beautiful like this, Lila thought, admiring the full lips, the smooth contours around the eyes, the swell of cheekbones. And her dad, his face almost unrecognizable without the worried creases. They both looked younger this way, even if they’re faking it. Nice touch with the open mouth, Dad. Maybe I should drop a coin in there. What kind of song would I get?

MAYBE it was the hurricane upsetting a sealed storehouse of voodoo, Dr. Ferrell considered as his daughter hovered over them.

He distracted himself with his ongoing mantra of maybes.

Maybe it was the toxic dust from fallen towers, the ash creeping into our lungs. Maybe it was some ancient spore released by the melting ice. Maybe it was the earthquakes and the tsunamis they summoned. Maybe it was the hole in the ozone, the collapse of the upper atmosphere. Maybe it was the betrayal by the banks. Maybe it was the dead surpassing the living. Maybe it was the ground choking on garbage and waste. Maybe it was the oil blasting freely into the ocean, or the methane thawing at the bottom of the sea. Maybe it was the overload of information, the swarms of data generated by every human gesture. Maybe it was the networking craze, the resurrection of dead friendships and memories meant to be lost, now resurfacing like rusted shipwrecks to reclaim our attention and scramble our sense of time.

WHEN they first arrived, Lila and her mother talked about all the pretending going on. Everyone was pretending they weren’t living in a desert where no humans are supposed to live. It’s one thing for Marines to train out here, so they can be ready for those faraway deserts where the fight is sputtering on, but regular humans? They had a little joke about it. They would go to the store and every time they encountered another person, they would turn to each other and say, conspiratorially, Pretending. Or when they drove past the new rows of identical houses, with their feeble parkway trees: Pretending. At the brand-new bank, Mrs. Ferrell pointed to the little strip of lawn that lined the smoldering path. “Look how it pretends there on the ground,” she said.

Lila got in on the action, pointing to a playground that jutted from the side of a fast-food restaurant. The brightly colored plastic playthings about to melt in the white heat. “Pretending,” she said.

Her mother looked sad. “Maybe more than anything,” she said.

Everyone was still sleeping then.

MAYBE it was the death of an artist at the hands of a zealot. Maybe it was the preachers howling on the subways, or the political lies that hit us like the vibrating hand, killing us years later. Maybe it was the particles made to collide. Maybe it was the return of slavery. Maybe, like the nuts say, it was the chemtrails scarring the sky, the black helicopters, the UFOs hovering over sacred sites. Maybe it was the rewiring of our minds. Maybe the mapping of the genome. Maybe the blowing up of Buddhas. Maybe it was the death scream of dolphins ringing in our ears. Maybe it was the clash of gods, the tug-of-war over our souls, not one of them refusing to let go, instead opting to see us sliced in two by Solomon’s sword.

HER father sat down heavily on her bed. She was online at the time, her avatar dancing on an iceberg with some penguins. “Look, kiddo,” he said, “we know you can sleep. You don’t have to hide it from us. Well, you do, but unless we see you, nothing’s going to happen. We’ll make sure you do it in a safe place.”

She turned from the screen. “So it’s true that you can’t. Both of you.”

He looked at her, then slowly nodded.

“Why can’t you take something for it?”

“We have. It doesn’t work anymore. Makes it worse, actually.”

Her eyes welled. She blinked against it. “What’s going to happen?”

The doctor slumped, rubbed slowly at his face as if trying to locate a strand of spider web he had walked into. “I don’t know,” he said. He kept his knowledge to himself: how they would start to lose their minds, how their bodies would begin to fall apart, their immune systems collapsing. How they would seek relief at any cost, as some of his Marines had done. She and the dwindling numbers of those like her were rapidly becoming the only reassurance, the only hope, they had. Maybe they were immune. Maybe just late to the party.

“Daddy,” she said, reaching out and squeezing his wrist.

He looked at her hand, configured with fear.

“We knew you were okay when you came in the room the other night,” he said.

“When you guys were faking it.”

“You didn’t go ballistic, so we knew.”

SHE saw it happening like the stars going out, one by one. Her online friends dropping off and never showing up again. If it wasn’t summer, she bet school would have been canceled by now. Everything was shutting down, going dark.

HER parents had taken to handcuffing themselves to the piano and giving Lila the key, telling her to sleep in the master bedroom because the door could be locked from the inside. She could hear them talking, sometimes arguing about whether he had betrayed his beliefs by working for the military, or whether they—Lila and her mother—should have moved out here to be with him. Maybe they should have given him more time and he would have walked away from the job.

THEY all sat down at the kitchen table. Lila’s mother took her hand, squeezed it. The best thing was sometimes the hardest thing, they told her. They needed to protect her from the inevitable chaos, but also from themselves. More and more people were roaming the streets, trapped in visions. In other places, where they were further gone, they were tearing people apart. And yet Lila slept.

“I have been hearing about another base where people are gathering,” her father said. “People like you, who seem immune to all this. You’ll be safe there.”

Lila started shaking her head. “I’m not leaving. I’m not.”

“I’ve talked to someone—a sleeper, too. He’ll take you with him.”

“Listen,” Mrs. Ferrell said, “you’ll be safe there. Things are only going to get worse here over the next few weeks. You won’t even be able to trust us. Baby, you have to go as soon as we can arrange it. Just until things get—”

“I’m not leaving!” Lila shouted.

YOU could tell something was going on just by looking at the comments people were posting. Under one video, which showed a toddler sleeping on the floor, curled up next to the family dog, thousands had viciously called for the child’s death, describing in shocking detail the outrageous acts of violence they felt the child deserved for sleeping. Another video featured a man passed out on a moving train, a subway, maybe. His friends had filmed him, taking turns scrawling obscenities on his forehead and arms with a felt pen. Again, the enraged comments numbered in the tens of thousands.

HIS SLEEPERS THROAT IS TO BE CUTTED!!!

THEY pulled the piano over one night. It crashed to the floor with an explosion of sound in the still night. Of course it woke her.

She unlocked the door and peered out. Had they been crushed?

There they were, still handcuffed but staring back at her, their eyes red, lifeless.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“Oh, did we wake you?” Mrs. Ferrell said bitterly.

“Oops,” Dr. Ferrell mouthed, his eyes hooded under his angry brow.

They glared at her until she shut the door.

THEY say you start to hear things, voices. Mrs. Ferrell considered this. She sat back, pressing against the leg of the piano. Shadowy people appear in the corner of your eye, at the edge of your field of vision. Eric tells me about his patients—Marines who haven’t slept in weeks. He has a front row seat in how this all works, what it does to a person’s mind. They start speaking strangely, he has seen. Mixing their words up, scrambling the order. But he claims it’s somehow poetic, even endearing. I remember his mother, lost in a haze of Parkinson’s, talking about a zero flying under the bridge, a war putting too much light in the sky. Going to the Grand Canyon, she told us, because they have a great coffee shop out there. It was chilling and, yes, she could see how the ramblings of insomniacs could have a certain incidental lyricism. But there’s the violence too. The murderous rage they feel when seeing others sleep.

“WE have to get Lila out of here while our sentences are still straight,” she said.

“I’m making the arrangements. I told you that.”

“For what, though? This place you’ve heard about? This rumor?”

“I’m trying to confirm it.”

“Where is it, this supposed sanctuary?”

He leaned close, and said in a whisper, though there was no one else around to hear them, “Somewhere near San Diego. I think it’s Miramar. The air station there. I think they are flying people out of there.”

“To where?”

“I’m not sure. Somewhere else.”

THE water in the aqueduct didn’t look very realistic. Lila had seen better water in virtual worlds online. Still, she dreamed about floating down it on a raft, through the desert, then through the city, and all the way to the beach.

SHE was sleeping under the car, not in it, when they found her. Her father rammed his head against the side of the vehicle trying to reach her. She woke to his garbled threats. “You will never close them again no,” he told her, peering in at her. There was blood seeping down from his brow into his eye.

“I will break open your head,” he said. “I will bite out your fucking eyes.”

She screamed and kicked at his hand, edging away. Trying to roll, but not enough space, so squirming up toward the engine.

Her mother shrieked from the other side, releasing a piercing, inhuman sound. Lila could see her feet as she kicked at the car, bashing her shins over and over. Then she saw her mother back away and the car started to rock. Her mother groaning, possessed, as she tried to push it over.

“Stop it! I’m awake,” Lila yelled. “Stop!”

WHAT she ended up doing was taking a rubber raft her father stored in the garage with the camping gear. She pumped it up, then carried it to the aqueduct at dusk. She plopped it in the water and rode the silent current, paddling out into the middle, then grabbed the rusted post. She tied onto it and felt the water pulling at the raft as it swung around and aligned itself with the current. She lay down on her back, head resting against the inflated bow.

Recalling the apologies had made her cry. The raft shook with her sobs and slapped at the water moving under her. She had never seen her parents so devastated, both of them tortured, begging for forgiveness. It was almost as though they had actually killed her. It was not them, they were not them. She wasn’t convinced either by new precautions they had taken. Her father bolting rings to the floor, chaining both of them to it. Leaving just enough slack to reach the bathroom, the kitchen. Dogs panting on a leash. The piano had collapsed. They had pulled the legs out from under it trying to get at her. The keys littered the floor like giant broken teeth.

The water moved under her, a black flow of melted glass. She heard the coyotes yipping their wounded lullabies. The thick electric wash of cricketsong, swarming particles of noise. Soon the desert stars seemed to blaze just beyond her reach. Her face was smudged, painted with dusty tears. She hugged herself, curling up, and was able to quickly drop off, exhausted by terror.

Just before dawn, she was woken again by an angry shriek. She looked up in time to see someone in the dim light flying out toward her from the bank, but falling short into the dark water with a heavy splash. Lila peered into the gray light, seeing only a flailing arm, a kick of leg, swallowed by the glossy water. Then, seconds later, the gargled coughs of someone drowning—a man.

SHE came crashing through the door and there they were, sitting shackled to the iron rings in the floor. Her mother looked at her with alarm, misreading Lila’s anguish.

“Oh no,” she said.

Her father was afraid to ask, but put a sentence together: “You sleep?”

MAYBE it was food becoming a prop for food, the rise of corn and its many guises maybe it was the fluoride in the water maybe the author of us all decided to see what would happen maybe it was a distant comet dusting us with its tail of poisoned ice the moon was having its revenge someone uttering a combination of syllables that should never be uttered maybe it was the kids who weren’t given a chance maybe it was the fingerfucking of the priests the rise of autotune the piracy the orgy of infringement all the bad books and movies the shift to decentralization the emergence of collective intelligence the flattening of the world. Maybe it was the turtle on whose back we all live slowly shifting its feet the Sasquatch sending out vibes sharks swimming far upstream the game we inhabit had a glitch.

Maybe the angel’s horn had finally been blown.