Black Moon

4

WHEN BIGGS FIRST ENTERED THE MAIN room of the loft and found her gone, he froze as his mind took in the evidence—the overturned chair, the rope and bungee cords loosely nested on the floor, the socks he had used to pad the bindings, the open window. He rushed to it, shouting her name, sending it echoing through the alley. There was no sign of Carolyn below. As he checked the bathroom and the closets, he tried to see her fate as ambiguous, sidestepping the obvious: the only way out was down.

He searched the neighborhood for her, hoping to turn a corner and see her sitting on a stoop, confused, maybe scraped up a bit and babbling, but okay. Back in the loft, he sat in the darkness, suffering fits of guilt. Why hadn’t he tied her more securely to the chair? Why had he left the window open? Of course, the biggest mistake was that he allowed himself to sleep for so long in the bedroom. How could he have been so weak when so much was at stake? The same way people fall asleep at the wheel of a vehicle traveling at high speed, he knew. Sleep, if held off for too long, had a way of overriding even the body’s most basic directives to persist. And though it had lost its grip on everyone else he knew, sleep retained him as its servant. Why? He did not know. Nor did he know if there were others like him.

It occurred to him that Carolyn might have tried to return to her father’s house in the suburbs. Maybe she had somehow found her way to the ground, maybe leaping to the fire escape—something she might have tried in her delirious state—and started out for her childhood home. They had discussed this retreat as the epidemic began, wondering if it would be a safer place to ride out the crisis, but he insisted on staying in the city.

His preference was always for the city, even though he was from an incorporated sprawl of housing developments thirty miles out. As early as high school, he had vowed to escape what he perceived to be suburban somnolence. Inheriting his father’s insurance agency would be like agreeing to a lifelong coma. Throughout college, his experiences downtown—attending readings and workshops, mixing with artists, musicians, and filmmakers like Carolyn and her friends—confirmed his belief that cities were the flashpoint of consciousness; the suburbs were the geography of sleep. Even now, as the city howled and shuddered, he believed that it was the better place to be—that help, if it was coming, would surface here first.

She didn’t buy it. She had wanted to retreat to her childhood bedroom in a city neighboring his own hometown. They had spent their first summer together in that room as she nursed her dying mother and distracted herself by animating The Dream, which had brought them together. Just over a year ago, she had hidden there for weeks, trying to work through what she called a creative block.

“We’re safer here,” he tried to convince her. “Six floors up, where no one can reach us. Plus, everything we need to survive is within a few blocks.”

“Everything that can kill us is within a few blocks too,” she told him. People were her greatest fear, and in the simple math of her reasoning, there were more here, around them, going slowly insane with sleeplessness. At least her father’s sprawling property had walls, a gated entry, dogs.

He couldn’t help replaying this conversation over and over in his mind, finding it hopeful. If she were to go anywhere, it would be there. Yet he was trapped by indecisiveness. What if he left and she came back?

He decided to wait another twenty-four hours. He put together his old hiker’s backpack with items he surmised were necessities: a first aid kit, a flashlight, a tin plate and cup from a camping set. He excavated the closet to retrieve an old lightweight sleeping bag. Sleeping bag. The term already felt archaic and provocative. Sleeping bag, he had said to himself as he cinched it to the pack. Sleeping bag sleeping bag sleeping bag. That’s a funny combination of words when you think about it. Sleeping bag. He let out a single bark of laughter and the sound startled him.

With the pack ready and positioned by the door, he returned to Carolyn’s abandoned studio.

It struck him as he surveyed the props and tabletop set that she had made a career of being invisible. Carolyn was not present in her stop-motion films, but rather slipped in between frames—in the gap where time was vast and formless—and incrementally repositioned her actors, her landscapes and sets, before retreating behind the lens to snap the shot. “The human eye can only see so much,” she once said in an attempt to explain frame rate to him. “There are spaces between the events we see where things get past us. Magicians know this too, with their sleight of hand tricks. If you can find the rhythm of those spaces, the openings in time, you can hide whole worlds inside them.” Is that where she had gone? he wondered. Had she slipped into the gap?

The evidence of her presence was seen in the lifelike movement of her film worlds, the tiny furrowing of brows or gentle flicker of cellophane flames, or the ropy limbs of a warrior churning with momentum past the hand-cranked scroll of sky. It was impossibly time-consuming work, resulting in only seconds of screen time at the end of a week. She had enjoyed the magic of it, the power, but worried over every detail, continually burdened with that particular brand of inner torment reserved for artists. It eventually became too much, her patience or ideas depleted, he never fully knew. She hadn’t attempted to make a film—neither stop-motion nor computer animation—in over a year. Not since returning from her stay at her father’s house.

At midnight, he slipped out the entryway of the building, legs unsteady with emotion. Over the darkened city, the sky was vibrant, dusted with stars. He crossed the vast, empty post office parking lot as rats scurried from shadow to shadow and office paperwork sliced through in the wind. He called out for Carolyn one last time, then stood motionless listening for a response.

Behind him, his building howled like an asylum. Human voices in every mode of despair seeped through the walls after him. Biggs turned away, the pack bouncing on his back as he crossed the open pavement to the concrete channel where black water slid slowly by. Across the flood channel, the massive post office and train station complex stood silent and dark. He could see people stumbling across the unlit overpasses of the freeway. He knew he could move among them, passing as sleepless so long as he aped their jittery movements and circular speech patterns, their slurry delivery and convoluted logic. But his fear of accidentally falling asleep in their presence was enough to steer him away, knowing the rage it would trigger.

He took his bearings and aimed himself in the direction of Carolyn’s childhood home in the suburbs.

AT SUNRISE, Biggs realized he was only a block from the first place they had rented together—an apartment in an old deco building. Could she, in her confusion, have gone back there? He decided it was worth a shot and cut through a weedy lot, then ducked through a gap in a chain-link fence, placing himself on the street of their first address. The building stood under tall, creaking palms. There were doves cooing somewhere in the shelter of fronds and the narrow shadows cast by the shaved trunks stretched across the road. Theirs had been the third floor balcony on the pink stucco structure. He thought about calling up to it, but was reluctant to draw attention to himself.

The front doors were locked, so he set down his pack and hopped the low fence of the yard. Small bungalows lined the yellowy patch of lawn. He stood where Carolyn used to sunbathe, in her own modest way—shorts rolled up, a bikini top or sleeveless T-shirt, the sun bringing out the freckles on her shoulders. They both loved this place, which seemed to be stuck in the 1930s. The building had the qualities of a ship, with its nautical angles and prowlike façade. A church, which had been converted into a banquet hall, loomed behind it. On the cupola, a golden angel lifted a horn to its lips. Newer properties crowded in, including a bland cinderblock medical center next door, which drew anti-abortion protesters on weekends.

Once, standing on their balcony, Biggs had watched as a lone woman parked her car and removed a sign from the trunk. The sign featured the grotesque image of a mutilated fetus torn from the womb. The woman made exactly one pass in front of the building, heels clicking on the sidewalk, before throwing the sign back into the trunk and driving off. When he told Carolyn about it, she speculated that the woman was conflicted and realized she didn’t feel right about her stance. Biggs was less generous. He saw it more as a checklist gesture. Buy groceries. Check. Take car in for tune-up. Check. Protest abortion. Check. “That’s awful cynical, Mr. Biggs,” Carolyn had said.

He went up the stairway along the side of the building and found himself on the second floor landing, peering into the windows of the apartment there. They both knew the floor plan well, since they had spent many hours inside with the elderly couple who once lived there. Carolyn had adopted the Whitneys, who were in their eighties when Mr. Whitney had a stroke. Every day for nearly two months, she went downstairs in the morning to help Mrs. Whitney wash and dress her husband. She prepared meals for four, and their casserole dishes and plates migrated downstairs. Biggs helped too, lifting Mr. Whitney from his wheelchair and setting him gently into bed.

One night, he had found Carolyn on the balcony, crying silently.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“She wants me to contact their son,” Carolyn said. “To find him.”

“He should know,” Biggs said gently, pulling her close. Moths ticked against the light. Beyond her, he saw the many planes—just a loose string of lights that extended toward the horizon—slowly advancing on the international airport, like lanterns on the tide.

She pulled back. “You know what that would mean.” Yes, they had discussed it. The family would come and put their parents in a rest home, box up their belongings and conclude the couple’s mastery over their own lives.

“They need the care, Carolyn.”

“I’ll take care of them!” she said fiercely. She was acting very much like a child who had found a sack of abandoned kittens. He knew this was connected to her mother’s sad demise. Yet that was different: the entire family had been there with her as she passed away at home. Carolyn, her sister, and their father. Maybe that’s what Carolyn wanted for Mr. Whitney—a death at home. Yet she knew that the children, whose failures and cruelty Mrs. Whitney had detailed, wouldn’t see their father through it.

As the situation arced toward the inevitable, Biggs began dreading what it would ultimately do to Carolyn, who was so slow to recover from grief. He was relieved when Carolyn honored Mrs. Whitney’s request and tracked down the son’s contact information on the Internet.

Two weeks later, just as they had predicted, the Whitneys were gone. Their absence put Carolyn in a dark place for weeks, but she eventually pulled herself out of it by finding the loft on the other side of town and urging that they buy it. It was an escape, Biggs knew. But they had been talking about moving for over a year anyway, to get away from the protesters that picketed the clinic every weekend. And they knew they needed to stop renting and buy something. That’s what grown-ups do. “Bottom line is, I’m tired of waiting for that angel to blow that thing,” she said, staring up at the statue overhead from where she had spread a blanket on the little lawn.

The loft was mostly one large room, but it had two small walled-off spaces. “One could be a studio and the other your office,” she insisted.

“Or a nursery.” He knew she wanted to hear this.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she said, but he saw the agreement in her eyes.

The move had the desired effect. She loved the new place—the studio and the fact that it had skylights. The walls were lined with shelves, and she insulated their nest with boxes of volumes collected over the years. Their décor was the many colorful spines. She threw herself into a new film and was soon able to wonder about the well-being of the Whitneys without descending into sadness.

Biggs had not returned to the building since the move. He took the outer stairs up to their old apartment, and it seemed as though nothing had changed. The kitchen door was unlocked. He hesitated, listening, then entered. The place was trashed. He waded through the clutter of their former kitchen, the living room where they had assembled their thrift shop furniture. The carpet was concealed under books and papers, cushions from the couch. Biggs picked his way through to the bedroom. There he was startled to find an obese man standing against the wall, blinking in his direction. Or, rather, the man, who was naked except for a sheet that he wore like a diaper, was pressing his back against a mattress that he had propped against the wall.

He looked directly at Biggs, drifting forward a bit so that the mattress sagged toward the floor. “There is supposedly a guy there standing,” he said to no one. “But magic of the mind is all it is.”

“No, I’m real,” Biggs said. He wondered what proof he could offer.

The man studied him from behind a wild red beard. His pink complexion flushed, his gut sagging over the sheet, which was held up by a belt. “If so, then pillow me,” he nodded at a pillow at his feet and held out his hand. “Pillow me, then we’ll see.”

Biggs stepped closer, watching the man cautiously, and scooped up the pillow. The man snatched it from him and tried to put it behind his head. He seemed to be under the impression that he was lying down. The pillow stayed in place until the man leaned forward. It fell to his feet, and when he bent down to pick it up, the mattress folded over him. In a rage, he shouldered the mattress hard against the wall and kicked at the pillow. “There it is where it was so you are useless,” the man said.

Biggs backed away.

“Yes! Get back to the other side of my eyes,” the man said.

Back in the living room, Biggs called out for Carolyn.

“Oh, Carolyn is who you are looking?” the man called from the bedroom.

Biggs returned to the bedroom and stood in the doorway. He had once stood here before, during an earthquake. Carolyn had refused to leave the bed. He studied the man, who stared back at him. Biggs said, “Was someone named Carolyn here?”

The man scratched at his enormous belly. “Here and lots of places. There even.”

Biggs frowned. This guy was out of his fucking head. Or maybe not. “Listen, was someone here named Carolyn in the last few days?”

“She was here but very smallishly here,” the man said.

Did he mean that Carolyn is small? She is small. Petite. “What did she look like? What did Carolyn look like?” he asked.

The man didn’t respond. He pressed against the mattress and shut his eyes, as if to be sleeping.

“What color was her hair?”

“Ha! She has no hair but fur that’s white and orange,” the man offered without opening his eyes. He added: “Someone was calling her for her in the other room. She did not come that I know of but stayed under the bed.”

He’s talking about a cat, Biggs concluded. The person calling for her was him, only minutes ago. The man attempted to toss and turn against the mattress, drunkenly acting out the postures of sleep. He will fall over soon, Biggs speculated. And he will not be able to get out from under the mattress.

Biggs retreated through the kitchen. Before leaving, he checked the cabinets and found a box of cake mix. He tore it open and ate a fistful of the powder while staring out the window, into the empty courtyard of the medical center next door. He could hear the fat man pretending to snore in the other room.

EVEN the quieter streets at the edge of the city offered evidence of crisis. The total collapse of infrastructure could be quickly read in the chaos—urban order rearranged into a collage of artifacts. The looted stores lined the junk-strewn streets, dark and empty. Occasionally, a telling stench would rise from under a pile of litter and debris tossed from windows, and Biggs would glimpse a bloodless hand, a foot or clump of hair, entangled in the clutter. Bodies were turning up everywhere.

There were living people too, aimlessly roaming the streets mumbling to themselves. They displayed varying degrees of sleeplessness, with those newer to it still somewhat alert to the world around them, walking fairly straight lines. Biggs staggered his stride, blinking as he moved past them. Others were further gone, shouting and growling in the shadows like Carolyn during that last week, when he failed to cure her with his placebo. The memory of her raging against her bindings until the chair fell over. He leaned against a wall, looking very much like the afflicted around him, hand covering his face, shoulders quaking.

She wouldn’t want this. She had always said one of his great qualities was his reluctance to feel sorry for himself. It was the thing that had helped her endure her mother’s long, terrible death as a victim of cancer, then grieve. She claimed she saw herself through his eyes, which had little tolerance for self-pity and were somehow able to find illumination from the sparest light. She would not be that creature he saw in The Dream, propelled by self-pity into the blackish sea. Just as he, now, should not allow himself to be drawn into the void of her absence. After all, he could still sleep, still dream. Who knew what those dreams had yet to reveal?

He started moving again and made the effort to target earlier times in his memories of her. Stumbling along the street and recalling how she would rest her head on his chest at night—the vanilla smell of her skin and the pleasing weight of her leg thrown over his thighs. Her exotic, short-lived food obsessions: green apple sandwiches, then crab Rangoons, then Vietnamese subs. The erotic and funny shadow plays she produced with her hands, projected against the far wall by the flood of evening sunlight.

He noticed more people on the streets. Maybe, lost in his thoughts, he had ventured into the busy center of this particular neighborhood. He headed toward the nearest intersection with the intention of ducking the crowd and taking the quieter side streets, when he noted that everyone seemed to be shuffling along in the same direction, a trend. This was an odd sight.

Biggs was drawn into the current. He did not fight it. Maybe word was out that there was help of some kind being handed out somewhere down the street. He followed the flow of people, which came to a stop as a small, loose crowd in front of a shop of some kind. Empty cars clogged the street and people climbed over them or pushed around them, filling in the spaces between like soft mortar. The crowd prevented Biggs from seeing the entry and whatever activity that was taking place there. He could see from the signage that the establishment was not a store. It was, or had been, a strip club called Delicious. The windows were painted over and a cagelike iron grille had been pulled across the entire storefront. Biggs climbed up onto a car for a better view. He could see a couple of massive men standing in the dark entryway, on the other side of the gate, looming like bouncers. Could this be about sex? Biggs wondered.

“What’s going on?” he asked the man standing next to him on the hood of the car. The man turned, looking both dazed and puzzled. Biggs realized he had dropped his sleepless pose. He started to back away, then lost his footing and fell into the crowd. He hit the press of bodies backpack first, generating a chorus of complaints that was abruptly silenced by a loud clap of gunshot.

The sound hit Biggs like a slap. He righted himself, stunned. The crowd collectively ducked and, until they slowly rose back into place, Biggs could see through to the doorway where a small man with a pistol was now standing between the bouncers.

“Shut up and listen!” he heard the man shout. He had an Indian accent. The crowd quieted enough for Biggs to clearly hear his pitch. “You want to sleep, you step up with gold. Just gold. Don’t have gold? Go get some. Yank some hobo’s teeth, rob your church. I don’t give a fuck. Just get it. That’s the only thing that will get you through these doors and into a bed, where Mother Mary will have you sleeping like a motherfucking baby.”

The crowd reaction was mixed. Some surged forward, either in anger or in desperation, Biggs couldn’t tell. Others scattered. In the crush of bodies, he backed away, then turned and staggered down the street. He wasn’t sure what to make of the offer, but to think there might be other sleepers compelled him. It seemed like a volatile scene, though. And why at a strip club? Best just to keep moving. Besides, he didn’t have any gold, and he guessed that the gun-wielding bouncers at the door weren’t open to negotiation.

Biggs walked on, but the strange neighborhood had turned him around. An hour later, he realized he was heading back into the city. Backtracking, he knew he had walked a loop when he found himself in front of Delicious, where a small crowd was still gathered. Night was descending. Biggs, exhausted and frustrated at having made no progress, sat on a car across from the strip club and studied it. The barred storefront, the blackened windows, the dim windows on the second and third floors. He was scanning the building, searching for a way to sneak in, when he thought he saw Carolyn at a third floor window. There she was flashing by—hair pulled back, arms bare—glancing quickly down at the street, at the crowd.

At him?

He stood, his eyes darting over the dark façade. Could it really have been her? He had to get inside. He covered his mouth with his hand, as if suppressing a scream, and felt a metallic coolness against his lips.

His wedding ring.