Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

He thought of how often he had wished it was Carolyn who could sleep, his family, not him. He recalled the last time he had talked to his parents, only two weeks earlier. How they didn’t seem to know who he was on the phone. His brother, Adam, had called, asking if he, Jorie, and their newborn could come stay with them, thinking it would be safer in the cities, since the military was being mobilized in urban centers. But he had said no to the idea. The baby would just make things worse for Carolyn. Everyone should just stay put and wait this thing out, he had felt. What had become of them?

Biggs felt a building rage suddenly wilt into sorrow as he thought about all that was already lost. He recognized now that a slow-moving catastrophe like this one was a series of surrenders. You lose something you assumed you couldn’t live without, but then you do live. So you fall back to your next most cherished possession. Then you lose that too, triggering yet another retreat and adjustment of expectations. At some point it has to bottom out. You either lose it all or start slowly gaining it back. He looked at Maria with impossibly tired eyes.

“You need more rest,” she said.

He laughed, but this time there was nothing cynical about it.

They sat, staring at each other.

“So it really is a song that you sing?” Biggs asked.

Maria nodded.

“When did you discover what it could do, this song of yours?”

“Right when I learned it. I could make my father sleep, before he hurt my mother. That’s why she taught me the song—to protect us.”

“Oh,” Biggs said. He looked at Maria and saw that a dark memory now moved through her. She looked through him at some ghostly scene.

“I want to hear it,” Biggs said. “Please sing it.”

His voice brought her back. Her eyes focused on him. “But you can already sleep.”

Biggs smiled. “Hey, I paid for it.”

“You should get your money back.”

“If this really works, you could be the key to stopping this whole thing.”

She moved toward him, gently pushing him back until his head found the pillow. “You could be too.”

Biggs thought about this, looking up at her. “The difference is that I can’t help others. It’s contained inside me. It—”

He was cut off by a voice at the door calling for Maria. “Hey, let’s go. People are fucking waiting,” the voice rasped. It was the Indian with the pistol, Biggs could tell.

“Are you a prisoner here?” he asked.

“No.”

“So you can leave?”

“Where would I go?”

“Anywhere you want,” Biggs told her. “If this thing works, you should be the one calling the shots.”

She shook her head and shushed him. He could see that she was fearful, that she hadn’t allowed herself to go down that path.

Then her hand was warm on his forehead. She slowly brought it down over his eyes as she leaned in, so close that he could feel her breath on his cheek. Then she began to sing. Biggs braced himself, trying to open himself to suggestion. It had to work like hypnosis, he figured. Or some kind of frequency thing.

The words she sang were not English. He was not even sure they were words. They were soft sounds, smooth vowels, candle-melt. Eroded stone. The consonants were like footsteps in the snow, hands tunneling in wet sand. The melody was weirdly complicated and difficult. Not exactly appealing, because it didn’t seem to follow any musical rules, like key or count. But she eased it gently into his ear, pushing it with a warm wind. He felt the warmth move into him and spread over his mind, bringing slow pulses of color—purple and blue washes, undulating streaks of cool neon dancing under his eyelids like an aurora.

Then he woke up and got to his feet.

Then he was untying Carolyn from the chair. She slumped into his arms. He lifted her and carried her to their bed. He could feel the weight of the sleep in her, like a soaked sponge. She was so heavy with it he feared the bed would break and she would crash through the floor and continue falling, onward into a glowing abyss. But he was able to lower her onto the mattress, which she sank comfortably into, nestled. He put a comforter over her and lifted her head for a pillow. The movement caused her to slowly open her eyes.

“Go back,” he told her.

She focused on him and smiled. “You’re tired,” she said.

He nodded and they studied each other. He worried she would notice the missing ring. It was better, he decided, to show her rather than try to hide it. He held up his hand, only to discover that the battered ring was there. He looked at it, confused.

She smiled knowingly.

“I’m glad you never had it repaired,” she said. “It was made more perfect by damage.”

He struggled to make sense of the ring’s return. “Did you do this,” he asked, “between the frames?”

“If you say so, my love. You’re the dreamer.”

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.