Kenneth Calhoun: Black Moon

Coming home with five magic beans.

He started for the loft, but circled back to the drugstore. He went inside and was able to find two bags of tea, which he gave to the old woman on the floor.

BIGGS took the stairs up to the sixth floor. The elevator still worked, but he was wary of being trapped, knowing that no one would come to his rescue. Because he didn’t want to encounter any of his afflicted neighbors, he took off his shoes and silently passed down the hall. He listened at his door before putting the key to the lock. Inside, the loft was dim, with the exception of a soft square of light on the floor cast from the open skylight. It was a tiny, book-filled space: table and chairs, a stylish leather sofa. The windows on the far wall hung over a narrow alley and opened to a building identical to theirs, a converted wool warehouse now crammed with dimly lit, book-filled lofts. There was no sign of Carolyn in the main room.

He went to her studio, where she had, until about a year ago, made painstakingly detailed stop-motion films. Along with a small alcove that they used as a bedroom, the studio was the only closed-off space in the otherwise open plan. The walls were padded with sound blankets. The small room was crammed with tripods and lighting stands, racks filled with props, and outfitted with heavy blinds so she could control the light. She was there standing with her back to him, staring out the window.

“Carolyn?”

She turned and, at first, seemed unable to recognize him. She was ancient around the eyes, stooped with weariness and holding one of the articulated dolls from an early film. Her hair curtained her face. She was wearing a promotional T-shirt from a former client of his. It was far too large and hung off her thin frame like a shapeless dress. She had managed to find a slipper for one foot. The other—nails flecked with remnants of red polish—was bare against the wood floor. It gutted him to see her this way: even worse than when he left her, just hours earlier. He still entertained the hope that this thing destroying them would simply play itself out and stop, that he would come home to find her sleeping. He would press his lips against her closed eyes. He would feel her eyes moving as dreams unfurled before them, a churning kaleidoscope of stories.

“Where did you what?” she asked, her face now full of sorrow. “You don’t go for so long all around and around if you’re who you said you are.”

He assumed a smile, though it took a beat for his eyes to catch up with the curve of his mouth. With that, the show had begun.

“It’s over,” he said, taking her by the shoulders. “They’ve done it with a cure!”

He hugged her and felt her stiffen against him.

“Do you understand this that I say?”

It was important to keep the pose of his sleeplessness going, to perform the lazy scramble of diction, the hint of slur.

She looked up at him suddenly and asked, “Where’s my mother is she?”

“Your mother?”

“Mom was here earlier,” Carolyn said matter-of-factly. Her mother had been dead for almost nine years. Yet he was not surprised that she would make an appearance since she was a fixture of Carolyn’s dreams. Whatever lived there was now here, it seemed.

“She told me that you should up the floor,” Carolyn said, “if you think this is ever going to work so you can kill the scorpions there.”

What was this—some echo of old resentments, filtered and mutated as it passed through the sieve of hallucinations?

He led her to the couch and sat her down. The way she said thank you was distant and professional, as if he were a waiter seating her at a decent table. It got to him, but he pushed back on it and stayed focused. She was changing, slipping away with every hour. No one knew where all this was heading, but he didn’t want her going there. They had been together for nearly a decade, weathering his career change, her creative block and the resulting depression, not to mention the cosmic denial of their medically ritualized, vaguely carnal request for a child of their own. A project they had both abandoned. But all of that was preferable to what they lived with now.

“Listen,” he said, “everything’s going to be okay now because it’s over.”

“Over?” She looked up at him through her hair. She brought up her hand and traced the lines on his face with her fingers. He reached out to her other hand to remove the doll—an elaborate model of a moon goddess. She surrendered it without a word, allowing him to place it on the drawing desk.

“Baby, look,” he said. “This is what will fix us all.”

Now for the reveal. He showed her the pills in his hand, slowly peeling his fingers away. They looked pitifully inadequate in his palm, but smaller things have brought down beasts or ended empires. The smallest of things are the plot points of history.

“Hey,” she brightened, “what are those for doing?” She looked at them with sweet wonder. The temporary absence of exhaustion made her suddenly so familiar—the real her surfacing from under the swamp of sleeplessness. He needed to hug her.

“Big squeeze,” she said in his ear.

He saw an opening and told the story he had been working on in his head, like a campaign for a new client. He had always been good in a pitch and he tapped those skills now as he set up the backstory, explaining that the government hadn’t completely disappeared, as everyone believed.

“Representatives are in the city distributing experimental pills. They’re wearing such soothing blue suits, like they were cut right out of the sky. I mean, just seeing them makes you want to sleep. You should see the lines,” he told her. “They wind all around the park—old people, families, everyone. And the pills work. They had people in a glass bus, sleeping in bunks. Just people off the street who volunteered to take the pills, neighbors even. Mrs. Mineo from the third floor. Matt Rovogin, Marcy LeBreau. Bunch of other people from the building. You can see them sleeping in there, snoring away. Slobbering on those government-issue pillows. Someone has figured this thing out. Science is going to beat this thing. That’s what happens when we get our back to the wall, right? The answers come.”

He had ventured into wishful speculation now. Somehow, perhaps because he had yet to succumb, he had come to believe that the epidemic was merely a sticky little story of demise that moved like spores in the breeze and attached itself to the sides of people’s minds. His intention, with Carolyn at least, was to replace that story with another.

Carolyn listened, wincing as she stared at the pills in his hand. She managed to frown and smile at the same time, pained but believing. “I want to want to sleep so terribly, terribly bad,” she told him, adding: “Those birds are circling way up but they never come down for the take.”

She was no stranger to insomnia, struggling with it her entire life, especially over the last year. Early in the crisis, they had joked that she was sleepless before it was cool. Now she stared out at him from inside the catastrophe, hoping he could tug her out of the maelstrom. He grabbed her, pulled her close, adoring her. She squeezed his arm with both hands, as if wanting to wring answers out of his flesh.

“You will sleep. You take one of these pills and you will. We both will.”

“I want to take one of those pills,” she said, awestruck by what it offered.

She was buying it. The story itself might prove to be enough. Yet he was prepared to play his ace, if needed. To provide a testimonial that she could believe in. It was risky—dangerous for both of them—but it was the ultimate argument. He would show her that the pills worked.

He would sleep for her.

THEY swallowed their pills and sat looking at each other. Biggs watched Carolyn’s eyes dart around, as if she expected the cure to descend upon her, dropping like a net from above. He had made a big show of dressing in pajamas and coaxing Carolyn into her nightgown—items they rarely wore. Everything should be enlisted to urge along the suggestion. The stage was set for a theater of sleep.