Black Moon

8

THEN JORIE WAS STANDING IN THE DOORWAY holding the baby, bouncing him lightly on her shoulder, trying to get him to sleep. She was wearing her fuzzy pink robe and athletic socks and her hair burst forth in every direction. The old floor creaked under her feet. Adam was watching from the musty nursing chair by the window. The baby was murmuring into his wife’s terry cloth shoulder. He heard the baby say, “Don’t answer that. It’s undoubtedly those telemarketers again.”

This struck Adam as a very odd thing to say since the phone wasn’t ringing.

THEN Jorie was in bed next to Adam causing a commotion. Adam had his back to her. He must have had microsleep. That’s the term they had learned on the radio. Experts said it would happen. Jorie was pushing and kneeing at his back. Was she trying to change the sheets without asking him to leave the bed? He felt he would never leave the bed. It was difficult to even imagine standing, walking about. The bed was now their white place of perpetual torment, a starchy pressure at their backs.

“Baby,” he said calmly, “you’ll never get to sleep going at it that way.” She hadn’t slept for five days. When she didn’t respond, only whimpered, he sat up to find her frantically searching the blankets. He assumed that she had lost her wedding ring. He said, “Do you remember when it was our thinking that we had lost it up at that rest stop in the redwoods and we drove back down the map half a day’s distance to dig through the trash with our hands and no gloves on them? We gave up and went on in our car up and up into the north and then it dropped in your lap from the map when you unfolded it to see what was that lake.”

“The baby,” she said, turning on him savagely. “I can’t find the baby that is ours!”

THEN Adam was on the couch with the baby like a dense beanbag on his chest. There was pale light coming in through the window. His hand rested lightly on the baby’s warm back, patting lightly on the little drum of tiny human torso. He was ashamed to find himself praying now, after all those years of silence. It’s not like I’m asking to have anything done for me, he insisted to no one.

THEN she was pregnant with the baby again. She knew that he was sitting right in the booster seat of her belly. How odd to know his face and fingers and toes, his tiny little fleshy hinges of wrists and ankles, and the feel of his hot little mouth pulling at her breast. All this before he is born again. She could not see over the mountain of her belly where Adam was holding the baby in the nursing chair. She could not move with the baby like a boulder in her middle. She felt confused and grounded at the same time. That was why, she recognized. Because everything is happening now at the same time. The mechanism that puts one minute after another has broken so that now it’s just forever in all directions at once.

THEN Jorie found the baby on the floor, between the sofa and the armchair, alive with battery-operated movement and a clear plastic mask on its face.

THEN she went into the nursery to check on the baby. The nightlight projected an aquatic glow over the walls. She peered into the crib, careful not to wake her sleeping son. She did not know if other newborns could sleep at this point, nor would she let it be known that their baby was still doing it several times a day. The insomnia epidemic had made people hungry for sleep and, in their starved state, capable of anything. They were always standing in the corner of her eye, until she looked at them directly and they vanished. She believed they would consume any vessel in which sleep was found, hoping to absorb the ability. Yes, she believed they would eat her baby.

The baby heard her think this and started to cry.

THEN Adam came out of the bathroom empty-handed, with the toilet gurgling behind him. She asked him, “Is the baby something you have?” He went back in and came out with the baby wriggling and squawking in his hands. “Oh my god, Adam,” she shouted. “That you cannot be doing!”

He wept and said, “Forgive this from me because my deficit is red.”

THEN sometimes she had the baby or knew where the baby was and sometimes he had the baby or knew where the baby was. Then the baby was sometimes perched on them, driving them like oxen, using a hard yoke of emotion. Then, sometimes, more and more often, neither of them had the baby or knew where the baby was.

THEN the baby turned up in Adam’s sock drawer. It had learned how to meow. Adam closed the drawer, but not all the way. It occurred to him that it was better to hide the baby from the two of them, since he now realized he would trade the baby for sleep without much hesitation.

Would he trade the baby for a year of sleep? Yes. Would he trade it for a week? Yes. Would he trade it for a day? Maybe, after all, he did not know the baby all that well. They had only met a few weeks ago. It’s not like they went way back. And babies didn’t have the value they did before. Just a month ago, they were so treasured. People would go to great lengths to get one. Look at Matt and Carolyn. They were desperate. Poor Carolyn. A complicated person, Jorie once said about her.

Something must be complicated about her because the way to get a baby was not at all complicated since all he and Jorie did was fuck a few times and they got one. Carolyn’s insides must be a labyrinth. Put two bodies next to each other and it practically happens on its own. Cock rises and plunges. Stuff comes out. They could make another one anytime they wanted, even in the shower or the car or the kitchen. “We could give the baby to Matt and Carolyn and live off the ground six floors up for a trade,” he said to Jorie when she may or may not have been in the room. Some shadow was there.

The city is where help will come, they believed. And it was less dangerous because the law dries up away from cities first like a puddle evaporating along its edges. The law was almost vapor just a few miles out at this point.

But Matt had said no, it’s too dangerous.

“It’s because the baby will upset Carolyn,” Jorie had said sadly, when Adam got off the phone with his brother. “And when this ends and our lives come loping back like a lost dog we tried to ditch in the woods she won’t talk to us.”

THEN Jorie wanted to know what the officers had brought that would turn off their heads for a while, knock them out and let the aching in their bones move one way or another off an unreachable place.

The police couple was sorry but they had brought nothing. “That’s because there is nothing,” they said.

Adam stood up, the chair falling back behind him, and snapped into a rage. He fell to the ground and bit at the table legs. “You have sleeping in you, the way you talk and your eyes are telling me so fucking obviously so!”

THEN the baby told Adam a bedtime story into his chest. The words went through the sieve of skin and bone, leaving behind a pool of drool. The baby said, “Even though you had heard reports of the giant sparrow, you brought me to a certain park in the carriage. You and mother had a picnic when the bird came down from the black trees and landed on the handlebar of the stroller. Its weight—because it was the size of a dodo—caused the stroller to spill forward and I flew into the bird’s beak. I was wailing into the sparrow’s dry tongue, which smelled like fresh mud. The beak was locked down on me, solid as furniture, and in a tumble and roll, with flapping like an umbrella opening again and again, we were aloft. Your shouts and Mother’s screams were muffled and growing distant but not gone. It took me up into the trees where it perched and tipped back its head, working me into the tight suitcase of its gullet. It was like being born into darkness. You and Mother hunted for us in the trees with your eyes, but the bird had roosted in the girding under a bridge, tucking its head under a wing. I was inside, refusing to be digested. I knew what to do since the bird, on the inside, was not unlike Mother. I introduced a maddening nursery rhyme into the bird’s tiny brain, preventing it from sleeping. Deprived of food and sleep, the bird became very susceptible and it was then that I began a campaign of unreasonable suggestions. When the bird was weakened and the belts and tethers of its dark interior had gone slack, I assumed the role of pilot and puppeteer. I pulled sinews from the weave of the fleshy fabric and, using nubs of bone from digested animals as spools, built an array of pulleys that controlled the bird’s every move, even after it had died. At the time, you knew nothing of this. The police couple that came to investigate were outraged by your claims. You were alternately persons of interest, then suspects. They separated you and lied about what the other had said. But you and Mother held firm, when not quaking with grief. You were with the police in the park with their cadaver dogs when the bird appeared above you, flying with the jerky movement of a marionette. I landed it in the grass with a tumble. The skin, which was now as dry as paper, tore upon impact and I tumbled out, little fists curled around the bone handles and levers I had devised. Mother scooped me up and attacked the remains of the bird with her boots, until I made it clear to her that the animal had died a long time ago.”

THEN the police came to the door. It had been four days since Jorie and Adam had reported the baby missing. The police that came were a couple. They knocked at the backdoor with a flashlight and Jorie thought they were shadow people. She looked at them directly, through the window in the door, and they did not disappear. She went right up to the glass and stared at them for a long time. They stared back, a man and woman in uniform, holding light in their hands. “Open the door,” the man was saying. “We’re here about a missing baby.”

THEN Jorie cleared dishes out of the sink with the intention of giving the baby a bath and was startled to see the drain at the bottom of the basin. Of course it made sense that it would be there, but she found its existence oddly surprising and novel. She recalled a time when she and her brother, only four and five years of age, would wander around their home and point out things that were always there—light switches, door stoppers, vents in the floor—saying, Remember this? Remember this? It was as though they had already lived a thousand years and had forgotten the basic, utilitarian details of their surroundings after initially learning their purpose, marveling at them, then moving on to other discoveries.

Now, sick with exhaustion, Jorie felt the same sense of rediscovery, looking into the drain. And, like her child mind, she marveled again at the practical details. Who could ever have thought of it all and how did human living get so cluttered with detail? For a lucid moment, she believed she understood that the epidemic was somehow connected to this accumulation of practical—not ornamental—details. A threshold had been reached.

THEN Adam wondered out loud why he could never make a kite that actually flew. “Maybe it’s time to try to make love to each other,” he said to Jorie. He didn’t care if there were people sometimes standing in the corners of the room. In the corners of the world, Adam thought. Shadow people was what they were calling them on the radio. Just figments of the sleep-deprived mind.

THEN he was so tired that he vomited. There were things in it that he didn’t remember eating.

THEN they had to start taking averages of their perceptions. If they saw the baby on the left side of the couch three times and on the right side three times, they would conclude the baby was in the middle of the couch. If it was two times on the left and three times on the right, then their conclusion put the baby slightly to the right of the middle of the couch. If the baby said, This can’t go on, but the baby also said nothing, then what they heard was more like Go on or Can’t go or This can’t.

THEN the baby was gone. They tore the house apart looking for him. Adam searched the garage, took apart the car, while Jorie checked every can, carton, and box in the pantry and squeezed out every tube of medicinal pastes. In the yard, there was a pile of leaves that they gently combed through. They did not blame the other. The search, in some ways, brought them together. They made love for the first time since the baby was born. It was safe to do so.

THEN Adam insisted that the officers tell them what the news was regarding the epidemic. “What would be good to be knowing,” he said, “is how we’re finding the things we need to make it stop us from ever sleeping at all.”

The policeman and policewoman said that things were tough, explaining that it took them four days to respond because the entire city was being served by less than a dozen police officers. There were rumors about help from the government, but also rumors that the government had collapsed. The only thing they could do was their jobs, which is what they had come here to do. “Let’s just tackle one problem at a time and find your baby,” the policewoman said.

THEN the baby told Jorie a story while flopped over her shoulder for a burping. “I became fixated on the notion that I was going to hurt you,” the baby told her. “I knew that as I grew I would encroach on that which was you. If things continued and I was never to emerge from you, I would take from you beyond what your body was prepared to give. Life would slowly transfer from me to you and I would eventually shed you like a snake sheds its skin. All this resulted in a great deal of worry, made all the more excruciating by the fact that I could not willfully refuse nourishment in the attempt to end the escalation of presence. I loved you even before I was led to you. It broke my tiny heart to know I could not stay within you, since that would mean your demise, nor could I leave you without causing damage and pain. If you recall, being birthed is much like being drawn slowly toward a gaping drain. You feel the pull very subtly at first. Before long, it has taken you like a riptide and it’s in everyone’s best interest not to resist its demands. I had to recognize that the moment of surrender had arrived and all I could do is keep my head down, my shoulders hunched, and hope I didn’t cause a tear in making my exit. And it worked, or so it seems. I was so relieved to learn that a cut at the opening was not necessary. I can only hope that this was in some way a result of my efforts since I love your flesh as though it were my own. More so, actually, since it continues to provide nourishment and mine already strains toward decay and dust.”

THEN the police couple walked into the living room, looking at the mess Adam and Jorie had made in their searches for the baby. The couch was overturned and the shelves emptied of books. The TV was in pieces on the floor. CDs and DVDs were scattered about like fallen leaves. The policewoman looked at the policeman and then both looked at Adam and Jorie. “When and where did you last see the baby?” the policeman asked.

Adam pointed to a place on the floor, which was approximately the middle point between the two places where he believed he last saw the baby, but Jorie patted her shoulder. The police officers exchanged looks again and ordered them to stay in the kitchen while they searched the rest of the ransacked house. They came back into the kitchen and Adam shouted at the officers and fell on the floor, thrashing and biting like a sick animal. “We smell that you have sleeping in you!” When they tried to handcuff him to the table leg, Jorie screamed and threw herself on the back of the policeman. The policewoman grabbed her by the throat and slammed her to the floor. They were both left facedown on the floor, hands cuffed behind them.

The police couple went outside and began searching the yard, the shed, the garage. Adam could see their flashlight beams cutting at the air. The officers must have split up, searching different areas of the house, because they could hear the policewoman call to her partner, saying she found something.

“Oh, Jesus,” they heard her say.

THEN they were staring at each other with the same idea burning behind their eyes.