Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

She cautiously moved closer, afraid that he might somehow rise up and grab at her like the last time she saw him. But other than the movement of his eye, he did nothing to acknowledge her. The mask, she thought. She reached for it, then paused. But how could he be dangerous? He was so messed up. Her throat clenched and she fought the impulse to cry. She couldn’t help feeling responsible. “Oh, man,” she said.

She slowly lifted off her mask. He seemed to watch, but again there was no change to his anguished expression. She thought then that maybe he was paralyzed. She brought up her hand, covered her mouth. She had thought to ask him where he had been taking her, or how to get home, but what came out instead was an apology.

“I’m so, so, sorry I fell asleep,” she said.

He couldn’t help trying to attack her, she silently acknowledged. That’s just how they get. Nothing could stop it—not even the need to keep your eye on the road. Not even if the sleeper was your own daughter.

She was startled when his arm moved, dropping to his side. His hand began clawing at his thigh. It took a moment for her to realize that he was digging at the low pocket of his blood-soaked cargo pants. She waited for him to stop, but he persisted, groaning again. His eye darted from her face to the feeble business of his shattered hand. It pulled at the snapped flap, but failed to access the pocket itself. He wanted help.

She reached out and pulled at the flap until the snap released. She saw the white edge of an envelope. The Marine’s hand fell away and he stared up at her expectantly. She drew out the envelope and saw her name written on it in her mother’s handwriting.

The letter, which she read by the fire, told her never to return to the house. It said that they were already gone, that they went to sleep forever. Sleep! We will carry the memory of you, of every minute of your life, it said, into whatever place of dreams follows the terrible nightmare this world has become.

By the time she returned to the Marine’s side, he was dead.

THE TRANSACTION AT THE GATED DOORWAY took longer than Biggs thought it should. He had to twist the ring off his finger. They tested the gold by biting it. The ring had a serious ding to it—the result of once falling six stories from their loft window. But they didn’t seem to mind its condition. Biggs did his best to maintain his sleepless pose, mumbling and swaying on his feet. They looked him over, saying, “Mother Mary time, but you got to leave the backpack with us.”

Biggs stalled. He didn’t know how to go about protesting this without revealing his lucid state, so he just violently shook his head. But they were already lifting it off him. “You’ll get it back,” they said.

He doubted this. But he could see how the pack itself could become a liability. The sleeping bag was practically an announcement. People would ask about it. No one else was walking around with luggage. He let it go. If Carolyn was in fact here, they would hike back to the loft and barricade themselves inside. After all, it was only a day’s walk away—shorter without all the wrong turns.

He was led through the lounge, past the bar and padded ox-blood booths. The lighting was dim and Biggs’s eyes were slow to adjust. He could make out a few figures sitting in the booths, smoking in the darkness, as he scanned for Carolyn. There were no women in the room as far as he could tell. Biggs could smell the pornographic scent of peppermint cutting through the smoke. There was a low runway that ran down the middle of the room, fringed with tinsel, a pole at each end. The scene could easily be mistaken for a slow weeknight during more typical times. This wasn’t a setting where he had imagined encountering sleepers, if it was really happening here. He wondered if Mother Mary was the street name of some kind of narcotic.

His guide, a massive man with a thick, dirty beard, pulled him by his elbow toward the stairway at the far end of room. Biggs tripped over a chair, stumbling forward, but the man held him up. “Easy there,” the man said quietly. His movements were solid and his speech clear. He was getting sleep somehow, this guy.

The stairs, hollow and narrow, creaked under them. Biggs and his guide went up two flights, their steps reverberating in the hard, small space. The landing opened into a hallway lined with doors. Biggs was led to a small room at the end of the corridor. The space contained nothing but a twin-sized bed. Biggs was startled to see movement in the dark window that hung on the wall, then realized it was a mirror and the form moving there was his own.

“Take off your shoes and lie down,” the man said.

Biggs hesitated. Should he tell this man that he was here looking for his wife? Should he ask him about Carolyn? It almost seemed safe.

The man backed out, shutting the door behind him, as Biggs lowered himself onto the bed. The mattress was hard and the room smelled faintly of incense. He sat still, waiting to hear the big man’s steps shuffling away from the door, but heard nothing. His eyes adjusted as he glanced about. A simple room, filled by the bed. This is a brothel, Biggs acknowledged. He looked up at the ceiling, then scanned the blank walls. It felt like he was waiting for a doctor.

He found himself sleepily rubbing at the place on his finger where his ring had been for the last eight and a half years, with one brief exception. He recalled how the announcement that his sister-in-law was pregnant had triggered a complicated reaction in Carolyn. She had only recently returned from her self-imposed exile in her childhood bedroom when Biggs’s brother, Adam, called with the news. The ensuing turmoil led up to a moment when, while lying awake in bed late one night, Carolyn picked up Biggs’s wedding ring from the nightstand and casually dropped it out the window. They heard the small chime when it hit the brick alley six stories below.

“There,” she said. “You’re free at last.”

Biggs was already out of bed, pulling on his pants, working to stay calm. “A band of metal isn’t what keeps me here.”

“At this point, I have no idea what does.”

“Carolyn.”

“I’d feel cheated if I were you.”

“We’ve said all this enough, don’t you think?”

He left her in bed and took the elevator down, flashlight in hand. In the alley, he scanned the ground under their window, which floated high above, a dim portal to their complicated world, the warmly lit space behind the glass dense with dissatisfaction. Yes, he had regrets, he wondered how it would be if, or if, or if. Imagining different outcomes, different lives. But he never considered leaving her. They were supposed to be together, weren’t they?

The Dream, which had lit the fuse to their relationship, seemed to suggest a certain spiritual endorsement. He was brought to her. She was his calling. He had married her one bright day eight and a half years ago and meant it.

Then there was all that they had weathered together since. Were those experiences not the ingredients for a kind of emotional superglue, a fusion of sorts? The mystery of her held him as well. That she was still, in many ways, unknown to him. That after all these years, she still possessed uncharted regions, still kept him guessing. He liked how she refused to be predictable: slipping into his shower, drawing him as he slept, returning from a predawn walk, her head crowned with feathers. Climbing through the skylight to see the stars from the roof, her feet dangling high above their bed.

Throwing his ring out the window. Maybe not one of her more charming stunts.

He searched under the cars parked along the far wall of the alley. Maybe the ring had bounced there. The lane was narrow. During the day it was often blocked by trucks making deliveries to the corner store or nearby pub. He imagined one of these trucks flattening his ring. When he found it, in the gutter perilously close to a drainage grille, the impact had put a nick in the ring, but the integrity of the circle survived.