Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

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.