Black Moon

5

JUST PAST ST. GEORGE, IN THE BASIN OF A valley walled with Irish-setter-colored stone, they were pulled over by a patrolman. The trooper sat in his dust-coated car for a prolonged moment before approaching, giving Chase ample time to turn pasty with fear. He grabbed at his own throat and squeezed. “We’re fucked,” Chase said. He began to hyperventilate.

Jordan kept his hands on the wheel and stiffly watched through the rearview mirror without turning his head.

“Just hold it together,” Jordan told him through clenched teeth, talking like a ventriloquist, as if to be seen conversing would somehow incriminate them. “It’s just about speeding. I think I was speeding.”

Chase turned in his seat to see the lawman approaching, edging along the driver’s side, one hand sliding along the top of the car. He could hear the squawks of static coming from the officer’s radio, a jangling. Keys, maybe. At the sight of the badge, the heavy gun belt and holstered pistol, Chase’s chest locked up, his throat clenched.

“I can’t breathe,” he said.

“Relax,” Jordan said calmly. “Don’t give him a reason.”

Now the trooper stood at the window, swaying slightly, waiting. Jordan turned and rolled down the window. “Hi,” he said cheerily. “Was I going too fast?”

Chase could not see the trooper’s face, only his khaki shirt straining against the swell of belly. The cop belt of weapons and restraints. The officer held out his hand. Chase heard him mumble, “You know the thing.”

He fluttered his fingers, as if to say, hand it over.

“License?” Jordan said.

“Let’s go,” the cop said. The fingers fluttered more impatiently.

Jordan retrieved his wallet from his back pocket and handed over the card. The officer shuffled back to his car without leaning in and inspecting the interior, without even seeing Chase imploding in the passenger seat. Jordan watched him in the rearview, then turned to Chase. “See? He’s just writing a ticket.”

Chase dared a glance over his shoulder. He could see the policeman’s form behind the windshield. Sitting in shadow, head bowed, he did seem to be writing, or reading. Maybe staring into a laptop as it crunched Jordan’s specifics.

“Don’t stare,” Jordan said, studying Chase out of the corner of his eye. “If he sees you, he’s going to want to search the car. You look guilty as fuck.”

“We are,” Chase said. “We are guilty as fuck.”

“I’m going to say you’re sick, you’re dying, and I’m trying to get you to the hospital. That’s why I was driving so fast.”

“Don’t say that. What if he decides to give us an escort?”

Jordan, still staring into the mirror, said, “You watch too much TV.”

They waited. A truck blasted by, then the occasional car, moving past with a flash of color and glare, a whoosh of air. They heard the piping call of red-winged blackbirds from the roadside grass, the whistle of wind passing over the bristled expanse. A hawk circled overhead and its shadow slid over the road.

“If he goes for the trunk, we have to distract him,” Jordan said. “You have to fall down and scream like you’re dying. Grab your side like you’re having an appendicitis or something.”

“Seriously?” Chase said.

“You have a better idea?”

Chase didn’t. The cop would have to be very motivated to find the stash, which was under the floor of the trunk in the spare wheel well. A good portion of the pharmacy was stuffed there, in their signature trash bags, both black and white. Anyone searching would first have to remove the tent, clothes, a camping stove, and some boxes of canned goods and pouches of dehydrated trail food. They had tossed in some blankets and comforters, along with Chase’s sleeping bag and some clothes, which formed yet another layer of hassle for anyone digging around.

None of this was of much comfort to Chase. There must be some kind of search going on for Jordan back home. This would come up on the cop’s dashboard computer. Dots were being connected, he sensed. He closed his eyes and waited to be ordered out of the car at gunpoint.

But the order did not come. After fifteen minutes of nothing, Jordan said, “What’s he fucking doing back there?”

Chase took a quick look. “He’s still just sitting there.”

“What the hell?”

They waited another ten minutes. When the officer failed to reappear at the window, Jordan opened the door and stepped out of the car.

Chase shook his head. “Dude. No.”

“Just wait here.” Jordan left the car door open, as if he might have to make a quick escape.

Oh, fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Chase watched his friend raise his hands and slowly approach the cruiser. He heard him say, “Officer? Is everything okay?”

Jordan approached the driver’s-side window and peered in. Chase saw him wave his hand in front of the window, then give a one-knuckle knock. He bent over and practically pressed his face into the glass before stepping back and scanning up and down the stretch of highway. When he saw Chase looking, he shrugged and came back to the car. He slid into the driver’s seat.

“What’d he say?” Chase asked.

“He didn’t say anything. He just sat there.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s just sitting there, with my license in his hand.”

“Is he dead or what?”

“No, he’s moving. A little. Like when I knocked, he kind of flinched. I can’t see if his eyes are open because he has sunglasses on.”

“Well, fuck, what do we do?”

Jordan sat in silence for minute. Then he started the car. “Let’s go.”

“We can’t just go.”

“What else are we supposed to do, just sit here all day?”

“What about your license?”

“I don’t need it anymore. No one does.”

Jordan pulled away slowly. Both of them watched for a reaction from the patrol car, but there was none as it receded behind them. Jordan picked up speed and soon they were over the grade. The road shimmered with fumes behind them. There was no pursuit. They kept going.

“I bet he hasn’t slept in days,” Jordan finally said.

MAYBE there was something to this insomnia shit, Chase thought as they pushed on through Utah, the vast salt lake like a massive spill of light to their left. He couldn’t explain the behavior of the patrolman. “Maybe he got a call with some bad news,” Chase proposed, miles later. “Like his whole family was killed in a crash or something.”

“Nope. He wouldn’t just sit there,” Jordan countered. “I’m telling you, he’s gone sleepless and his brain is fried.”

It was the second inexplicable thing Chase had witnessed in twenty-four hours. During the drugstore heist, the cops had behaved in a more predictable manner, doing exactly what Jordan had hoped they would do. After Jordan had deliberately triggered the alarm by opening the loading dock door, the police showed up like good little monkeys to deactivate it and check the store for any signs of a break-in. Chase and Jordan watched them from across the lot, where they sat in the car, parked among the junked wrecks that formed a ring of automotive tragedy around the body shop. Through the dark storefront windows they could see the firefly bobbing of flashlights, the occasional sweep of beam, as the cops searched the premises.

Mel, the owner, played his part too. Failing to rise from his deathlike way of sleeping and drive to the store to reset the alarm. Chase couldn’t blame him. It was three in the morning, after all. The cops pulled out abruptly, right on cue, and they were left with silence.

Chase had driven back down the access road to the loading dock door and dropped Jordan off, and it was while Jordan was in the pharmacy pillaging the bins that Chase saw the second strange thing. He had looped back to their hiding place among the wrecks to wait for Jordan’s signal. From this vantage point, he saw that the lights in the music store were blazing, when only minutes before the place had been dark as a cave. He watched as his former boss, Sam, appeared in the lit showroom, wearing a T-shirt as he danced around the floor with a cello in his arms, his long beard swaying. Chase leaned forward, watching as Sam waltzed behind cymbal trees and stacks of amps, then reappeared in the window, close enough for Chase to see that he wasn’t wearing any pants.

Before he could begin to make sense of the scene, a flash of light had caught his eye. Jordan signaling from inside the drugstore. He said nothing of Sam’s behavior as they put their homes behind them, catching the 15 North, hot wind roaring in the windows when they dropped into the desert. They glided past suburban matrices of light as they cleared the planned communities of Victorville and Hesperia. Four hours later, after passing through a wide expanse of darkness, they saw the dreamlike city of Las Vegas blazing in the distance. It read like an illuminated monument of wakefulness—a hive of unsleeping souls all working under the assumption, however temporary, that there was no tomorrow.

THEY took a cheap room in Idaho Falls, at a motel across from the river park. They had been driving for eighteen hours straight, not counting the half-hour pause with the state trooper. They collapsed on the narrow mattresses and both slept until late in the evening, when a loud truck pulled from the lot, gears grinding.

“I’ve stayed here before,” Jordan said from his bed. “With my dad.”

Chase looked over, checking Jordan for some sign of emotion. His father had been killed in a biking accident when Jordan was twelve. A year later, Jordan lost his eye. Jordan didn’t like to talk about either incident, nor the fact that his mother had squandered the lawsuit money. Maybe the trip, being back where he had spent time with his dad, had shaken things up. But Jordan’s face revealed nothing as he stared up at the ceiling. He asked, “You ever fish?”

“No.”

“I got really into it,” he said distantly. “There’s something really weird about feeling an animal, under the water, biting at the bait. That little tug. It’s like a mild shock, or a message coming from another world. I used to dream about it a lot, just that feeling in my hands.”

“I guess I did try it once, but I never caught anything.”

“Up where we’re going, you can see the fish in the water. Trout. Can catch your limit in less than an hour and cook them on the spot. I used to live for those trips.”

Chase noted that a wistful tone had finally crept in. He tried to say something cheerful. “Let’s do that when we get up there.”

Jordan didn’t respond. He continued to stare at the ceiling.

Chase stood and pulled on his pants. “I’m going to get us some food,” he said.

“There’s a pizza place next door.”

“I’ll get us some sandwiches.”

“Get me a meatball sub,” Jordan called after him as he stepped outside. He crossed the parking lot, checking to see that the car was okay. The thought occurred to him to dig out the pills—his pills—from the stash. He was eager to try them, to see if they worked, though he wasn’t even one hundred percent sure Jordan had bothered to get them. They had pulled over in the dark, as soon as they cleared the suburbs, and stuffed everything into the trunk. Jordan insisted he had grabbed the right stuff. “Decades’ worth of boners,” he said. Chase regretted not nabbing a few then. To do it now would put them at risk. Anyone could be watching.

He crossed the street and took the stone stairs down into the park. The river pooled there, where a small dam created a wide pond and water spilled like a layer of glass on the concrete banks into mild, stepped rapids. The sun had set, but there was still some seepage of light in the sky, beyond the black shapes of tall pines. Swifts darted over the water, through swarms of mayflies. The air smelled of forest and fish. Standing at the water’s edge, Chase pulled his phone from his pocket and called Felicia.

As expected, he got her voice mail. She had stopped taking his calls. If they communicated in real time, it was limited to text. She held to her assessment that they had said everything they could possibly say.

Had she answered, he would have skipped over the hello and jumped right into conversation, saying, “A year ago I was living under your bed.”

“Rent free,” she would probably respond, not missing a beat. It was true that, after his parents had rented out the house and left for Boston, he had had a gap of homelessness before he could move into the dorms. Their plan was to have him secretly stay in her room for a week, then relocate to a series of campsites on the beach. She would join him and they would live out the remainder of their summer in the same tent that was now in the trunk of Jordan’s car. Her parents weren’t fans of the idea, but they had little leverage since she was paying for college herself—with her saved-up waitress money, and now with her work-study salary as a lab assistant. She shamed him, really, with her drive and industry. His parents covered his tuition and he did not need to work, yet he sleepwalked through his courses and squandered his afternoons napping in his dorm room.

By the time they arrived on campus, all of their clothes and their hair smelled of campfire smoke and their shoes were filled with sand. They had spent their mornings waiting out the June Gloom, then tanning in view of the titlike nuclear reactors of San Onofre. In the evenings, they watched sparks fly from the fire ring. They had connected their sleeping bags and pressed together at night for warmth, but Chase would eventually pull away, defeated and frustrated when his body wouldn’t respond to her urgings. Sometimes he would go back out and sit by the fire until she fell asleep, telling himself that he was guarding her from psychos and rapists that wouldn’t hesitate to cut through the fabric walls and drag her into the night.

Now, hearing her voice instructing all callers—not just him—to leave a message, he felt the sting of losing her. At the beep, he said, “Hey. It’s me. I’m standing by a river in Idaho, believe it or not. I’m here with Jordan. It’s been kind of crazy but I wanted to remind you that we’re meeting up for your birthday, okay? It’s going to be different, Fel. It’s going to be so different. You’ll see. Yeah.” He didn’t know what to say, but didn’t want to hang up. “Hear that river? I’ll hold up the phone. Oh, Jordan says hi. I’m a little worried about him. It’s a long story, but basically he thinks the world is ending. Because of sleep, or people not being able to sleep. He’s so sure that he almost has me convinced. But if something like that was really happening, Dr. Dreamy would have told you already, right?” He immediately regretted saying that, so he deleted the message and said everything over, leaving out the dig at Felicia’s boss before hanging up. There was no reason to bring up his jealousy of Dr. Lee, whom she described as a genius, even if he had meant it playfully. It was time to at least act like he wasn’t threatened.

He hung up and stared into the darkening water. A shadow darted through.

WHEN Chase returned to the room, he found that Jordan wasn’t alone. A girl was sitting on his bed, laughing at something Jordan had said. Maybe twenty or so in age, blond hair pulled back, and wearing a blue industrial apron over jeans and a sweatshirt. This explained the cleaning cart outside the door.

“She thought the room was empty,” Jordan said. “She really wants to scrub our bathroom.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m just dying to do it,” the girl said, laughing.

Jordan introduced him. Her name was Michelle and her mother owned the motel. “I like working at night,” she explained. “Usually most of these rooms are empty, to tell you the truth, so I can even vacuum.”

“So you sleep all day?” Jordan asked.

“Most. Well, to about three thirty in the afternoon.”

Jordan gave Chase a knowing glance and he wasn’t quite sure how to interpret it. Chase handed him a sandwich, which was wrapped in foil.

“So you’re a vampire,” Jordan said, smiling slyly at the girl. He unpeeled the foil and took a huge bite of the sandwich. It was the old Jordan.

“Maybe I am,” the girl said, grinning, “but I like ice cream, not blood.”

Chase said, “Do you want some of this?”

He held out half of his own sandwich.

The girl shook her head. “That’s sweet, but I already ate.”

Jordan said, “She’s ready for dessert.”

“You guys finish those sandwiches, and I’ll take to you to the best place in town for banana splits.”

“Don’t you have to work?” Chase asked.

The girl shrugged. “That’s what’s cool about working for your family. I mean it’s not like they can fire me,” she said with a laugh.

JORDAN didn’t put up much resistance when Chase said he was going to opt out of the banana split hunt. He was polite enough to ask twice if Chase was sure, but quickly let it drop. Again, he flashed a look that Chase now read as a signal that he was interested in this girl. It seemed he was able to put his apocalypse on hold to spend some time with a Mormon cutie in Idaho Falls. This relieved Chase, since it made Jordan more familiar. But it also confused him, after a conversation they had had a week earlier, following their late night drinking strolls along the horse trails, when Chase revealed why he was willing to help Jordan.

Chase wasn’t exactly sure what he had said that night. He had drunk with the intention of bolstering his courage but had gone too far and eventually blacked out. He vaguely recalled uttering the names of the pills he wanted: “Viagra, Cialis, you know, Spanish Fly, whatever.” By the time Chase had woken up in his room the next day, Jordan was already back from work and standing over him with a bottle of water.

“Better drink this,” he said.

Chase took it and sat up while Jordan pulled back the blanket Chase had hung as a makeshift curtain. He poured the cold water into his mouth, the water glugging musically as it spilled forth. It made his teeth ache.

Jordan had sat on the narrow windowsill. Chase glanced his way. It was hard to read his face. Had he agreed to do it?

They sat in heavy silence.

Jordan shifted his position and said, “Didn’t you used to have a mural on that wall?”

Chase stared at the butterfly pattern before him. “It’s still there,” he said. “Underneath it.”

“What was it, some kind of animal, right?”

“A tiger.”

He recalled the rest of the painting—the abandoned city overwhelmed by jungle. The ruins of civilization. A sci-fi geek’s apocalyptic vision before he fell in love with Felicia. Now it was more Jordan’s thing, apparently, the collapse of civilization. He would see it as an omen, a prophecy of some kind, no doubt. But it was actually just proof that the mind moves on, that these dark preoccupations are really just retreats from coping with fears of growing up and that it’s life itself that helps you get past it. His parents had told him it would happen. He had come to their bedside when he was sixteen, woken them in the middle of the night to say that he didn’t think he could do it.

“Do what?” they asked in the darkness.

“All the things you’re supposed to do.” He listed his fears involving relationships, having kids, a career.

His father was first to respond after a long silence. “You’re thinking too much,” he said. “It works out.”

“Of course you can’t imagine it now,” his mother said. “You’re a kid. That’s why kids shouldn’t do all those things. You’re not meant to be ready.”

To help him get ready, they sent him to a psychiatrist once a week during his junior year. The doctor told him, on the topic of relationships, that what usually occurs is you start loving someone and a kind of alchemy happens, and all these fears, which are just fears of the unknown, turn into a desire to be brave or, even better, to move through your days, months, years, without giving all those dicey moments we all face too much weight. Sure enough, that’s what had happened. Almost. He had almost reached that place with Felicia.

He stood up and stepped out of the sleeping bag that gathered at his ankles.

“Watch this,” he said.

Chase pressed himself against the cool wall, remembering the image underneath against the measuring stick of his body, the span of his arms. For one entire high school summer, he had worked on the mural every afternoon. It was another kind of therapy. He still knew the wall intimately, because of the spatial demands it had placed on him. So much so that he was able to measure out a distance from the center, crab-walking his hands, until he came to a spot of interest. He scraped at the wallpaper there, eventually pulling away a strip to reveal two green eyes, the size and color of limes, smoldering with predatory intensity.

It was a good trick. Jordan actually smiled.

He stood and came over to the wall. With his fingernail, he worked up a tiny flap just below one of the eyes and pulled at it. A strip came away, revealing the side of the tiger’s nose. A stripe of tooth and tongue.

Within minutes they were tearing furiously at the wall, uncovering the tiger’s face, the piercing gaze and tensed mouth. The rich orange of the animal’s fur blazed out at them. They revealed the heavy paws and muscled shoulders of an animal regally posed in the heart of its reclaimed dominion: the crumbled buildings overtaken with vines, the entire scene lushly framed by the glossy, wide fronds and the curling tendrils of ferns. Over the beast’s shoulder, partially hidden by vines, was the dark mouth of a cave—the tiger’s lair.

Standing back, it looked as if someone had thrown a chair through a window, punching through to an alternate world. Chase saw his work with fresh eyes, thinking it would embarrass him. But it wasn’t bad. He had always been a good painter. He had a way with images. But the subject seemed to him laughably childish. Hopefully Jordan saw it that way too, and recognized that he had now embraced the same common and trite fantasy in his world without sleep.

“Pretty lame, right?” Chase had finally said.

Jordan looked at the wall, then turned and put his back against it. “Actually, I think it’s pretty fucking cool. Come, Armageddon, come,” he sang.

And though he had leaned away, it seemed to Chase that he had closed the distance between them, smiling the way he was, showing some hint of warmth.

“You know what else I think?” Jordan had asked.

“No idea,” Chase said. He had started raking up the shredded strips of wallpaper with his feet.

“I think I should kiss you. I think that would be the best thing for you.”

Chase looked up. “What?”

“I said I think I should kiss you.”

“I don’t get it,” Chase said. “What? You think I’m gay?”

“No one isn’t,” Jordan said.

“So you’re into guys now? Is this what you’re saying?”

“It’s not even a thing,” Jordan said. “It’s one of the things we’ll lose when we stop sleeping.”

Chase put it together. He must have given details about the problems he had with Felicia. Jordan had come to an obvious conclusion. It didn’t exactly surprise Chase. After all, Felicia had suggested the same thing. But it wasn’t true. If it was true, what about the dreams? To this Felicia had said maybe he was just suppressing it all. People are good at denial, she told him. It sounded implausible to Chase. Just something she had picked up from her psych classes. Or maybe something Dr. Dreamy had told her. The thought that she had maybe discussed their situation with a stranger horrified him.

Chase didn’t want to talk about it then or now, with anyone. But what was Jordan telling him about himself? He immediately thought back through Jordan’s history, looking for clues. There were plenty of girls. Was this openness part of Jordan’s new end-of-the-world outlook somehow?

Jordan stood.

“Get the fuck away,” Chase said, his fear spiking and urgent.

Jordan raised his hands and sat back down in the window. “Whoa.”

“Why do you have to say such weird shit?”

A long silent pause passed.

Finally Jordan spoke. “What I’m saying is you have to get down to the truth of things, and pretty soon that’s all we’re going to have, so you might as well get ready. Those pills you want are just lies. A lot of pills are just that—shiny little lies that we choose to swallow. They won’t help you. Pretty dumb, or desperate, to think they will, don’t you think?”

Chase looked at Jordan in the window frame. Behind him the air was unusually clear, blown west by a mild Santa Ana. He could actually see the jagged, moon-colored mountains that rose up like storm clouds over the valley. They looked muscular, dense, convoluted. Orange light from the descending sun colored the peaks. Jordan followed his gaze, turning to look out the window. The mountains were like a massive fist hanging over them. Somewhere along the way, living in the foothills of these often shrouded peaks, Chase had picked up the belief that truth was conditional and subject to change. Sometimes it was as real as a mountain range. Other times it was just a blank space in the sky. “Look,” Chase finally said, glancing up from the floor. “I don’t believe in your stupid insomnia thing and I’m still helping you.”

Chase recalled how Jordan hadn’t looked his way. He seemed to mull things over, then nodded slowly out the window. It was as if he was signaling someone on the mountain to let time keep rolling forward, if only to see how it went.

NOW here they were, three states north, the heist behind them. Jordan had somehow managed to pick up a girl without leaving the room. The girl tried to entice him to join them by describing a local attraction: two graves side by side in the graveyard, one inscribed WERE, the other WOLF.

“It makes for an awesome profile picture,” she insisted.

“I’m really tired,” Chase said. This was true, but he had another motive for staying behind.

As soon as he was alone, he went to the car and began his excavation of the trunk.