Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

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.

THEY CRAWLED UP THE SWITCHBACKS until they could park and stand on the edge of the mountaintop plateau. Below they saw the jagged range extending toward the horizon, the Beartooth biting at the sky, and the curve of the earth. Glaciers hung like blue-white banners in the sunless crags. Lakes, down in the pockets of hanging valleys, shining back at them. A storm seemed to crab-walk over the plateau, rushing toward them on crooked stilts of light, and wind filled their mouths with thin, cold air.

Then the descent.

Jordan rode the brakes all the way down the treeless heights, careening past the towering banks of talus. Chase told him three times that he was drifting over the line. What if a truck was coming around the curve? Soon they passed through shadow and forest, then found themselves between foothills, where the land flattened out enough for cattle ranches and, only miles away, the town imposed a feeble grid on the landscape. The campground was where Jordan remembered it being—the numbered campsites cut into the brush and pines along a loop of a narrow rushing creek. Each site came with a carved-up picnic table and a blackened fire ring. There were no rangers, only a drop box and some envelopes for the fees. It was the honor system and Chase insisted they pay.

Biting deerflies attacked them as they set up the tent. They worked quickly. Jordan knew the drill and directed Chase with terse commands. The clang of tent poles and the hammer ringing against the spikes announced their presence to the scrub jays, who responded by screeching in the trees, and to one other group of campers: a pale family with faded Jesus stickers plastered on the back of their trailer. They did not come over and offer a neighborly welcome as Jordan predicted they would.

The tent was from another era—canvas, not nylon. It smelled musty and was stained with rain. It was shaped like a pyramid. They threw clothes and the sleeping bags inside it and, after stepping out of their shoes at the entry flap, flopped down on the bed of clutter. The nearby creek sounded like wind in the trees or the wind in the trees sounded like the creek. Chase couldn’t decide. He was already thinking about how he would get back home in time for Felicia’s birthday, now that he had what he wanted.