Kenneth Calhoun: Black Moon

In bed, Biggs lay on his side, next to Carolyn, watching her face. His plan was to see if she would drift off, then follow her up into the clouds. His demonstration would be held as a last resort. He also wanted to make sure she didn’t leave the bed and start pacing around. This was how she would pass the night lately: walking about the loft or standing in corners mumbling a litany of regrets to one of her doll actors.

He would get out of bed too, and sit at the table in the middle of their studio, urging her to at least lie down on the couch. Early in the crisis, they watched TV, but now only the words “no signal found” appeared on the screen.

He wanted very badly to sleep on those nights, but fought it off for the sake of convincing Carolyn that he was also afflicted. He had no idea why he had been spared, at least so far. In fact, he was constantly wondering if he had somehow succumbed and had taken to sneaking off for power naps to test his fears. It was rest he sought, but also proof that the capability persisted, sitting like leaden silt in his veins.

Unlike Carolyn, he had never had trouble sleeping. Early in their relationship, his ability to drop off anytime, and anywhere, had been a point of occasional contention. It offended her not only in that she felt he was using sleep as a means of avoidance, but also because she held sleep so precariously. The slightest noise or change in the light could wake her. Her mind, roaring in the chassis of her skull, pounced on painful memories and worries about the future or the challenges of her studio work, batting them around for hours as she tossed and turned. Meanwhile, he snored at her side. They had decided that sleep was his super-power, just as causing computers to crash or pens to run dry were hers. And not getting pregnant, she sometimes added.

SLEEP, or rather dreams, had played an important role in their story, he often felt compelled to remind her, especially when she was critical of his afternoon naps. Soon after they first met, at a forty-eight-hour film festival at school in which writers and filmmakers were randomly paired, Biggs had what they now called The Dream. It wasn’t as though they had taken special notice of each other. They weren’t even teamed up for the festival. So the fact that Carolyn had been the subject of a particularly intense dream seemed significant to Biggs and, later, to both of them.

In the dream, Biggs was standing on the shore of a vast lake or sea. A dark storm hung low over the water, dragging along curtains of rain and stirring up the waves. A young woman—that film nerd Carolyn from school, he recognized—ran past him, into the water. She leaned her small wiry frame into the current. Her black hair, wildly animated by the wind, was slicked down, tamed, as a wave crashed over her.

She was calling out, but her words were garbled by the wind. Biggs noticed a small boat, a rowboat, drifting out to sea. The riptides pulled it out into the waves as Carolyn struggled to make her way toward it, waist-deep in the churning water. He could see her struggling to stand. The current was tugging at her legs beneath the surface.

He could see, as the rowboat tilted up the side of a wave, that there was someone in the boat. Someone dead. A body lying lengthwise, wrapped tightly in white cloth. The boat rose up the face of the waves, hanging nearly vertical—the shrouded body practically standing on the water—for an instant before flopping over the crest. Carolyn, however, struggled through the wash before her as it rumbled whitely up the shore, knocking her off her feet and pushing her back, then dragging her out in green-black churn.

She screamed after the boat and fought on, but it was clear to Biggs that she would drown. She was already beginning to panic. Then he was in the water reaching out to her, telling her to stop flailing. Lie down in the water, he yelled over the crash of waves. Pretend to sleep on the water facing up at the sky. She followed his instructions and leaned back until her toes surfaced. She drifted within reach as the rowboat continued to travel beyond the waves. He saw it in glimpses as the horizon shifted, now small and close to forever gone.

He was able to grab a fistful of her black hair and draw her into his arms. She clung to him as he carried her back to shore and held her, restrained her, until the rowboat dipped behind the horizon.

Later that week he sought her out on campus, eventually finding her in the dark cave of editing suites. She was cutting together an animation she had made with an origami dove. He watched through the sliding glass door as she composited the dove over a still of an unidentifiable city. Its wings flapped as the city slid slowly by. He had to knock several times to cut through the noise in her bulky, ancient headphones. She turned, frowning. Even as a student, she was capable of a furious degree of focus and hated interruptions when in the zone.

He slid open the door. “Do you mind if I come in?” he asked.

It was clear that she did mind, but manners overrode her impulse to say no. It was pretty, he thought, how her mouth and eyes weren’t in agreement.

He entered and sat on the console table as she pushed the headphones down and wore them at her throat. “What’s up?” she asked, even as her fingers hit the keyboard shortcut for saving her file to the hard drive.

“Hey, it’s Carolyn, right?”

“Right.”

“I’m Matt. Matt Biggs? We were introduced at the festival? That forty-eight-hour thing?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, I remember. You’re a writer.”

“Well.” He smiled sheepishly. “Not really.”

She looked him over, waiting. Her eyes eager to return to the screen.

“Okay, look,” he said. “I know this is going to sound really weird, and I’ve tried not to bother you with this, but it’s been a few days now and I can’t shake it.”

She smiled and shook her head. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Okay, well, yeah. Basically,” he said, “I had a dream. A dream about you.”

She couldn’t help wincing. He saw her brace herself for something inconvenient and potentially embarrassing for both of them.

“Not that kind of dream,” he reassured her. Then he told her about the waves, the rowboat and its cargo, how she almost drowned.

Her expression went from a thinly veiled impatience, to skepticism, to a long gaze into the nowhere that hung between them. Tears came to her eyes and he stopped talking.

“Oh, hey,” he said. “God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She covered her face and cried hard into her hands.

“I should go,” he said. He stood and was reaching for the door when she said, “It’s my mother. She’s dying and won’t admit it.”

He stood, staring down at the pale part in her hair, then sat back down.

NOW in bed, trying to feel the pill working, she sighed, a hint of frustration already present in this wordless utterance. He wanted to use The Dream, to reference it as a source of authority. He wanted to say, I had a dream that these pills would cure you, just like when I had a dream that your mother was going to die and you would need to be rescued from your despair. But he had never used The Dream that way. It was a sacred text in their own domestic religion.

She mumbled to herself.

“Shh,” he said softly, as though she were a restless child. Imagine what it must be like, he thought, feeling a dull crushing in his chest. He almost said out loud, It’s a blessing that we never brought a little someone into all this. His thoughts flashed quickly to his brother and his wife, together with their newborn in their suburban home. A kind of hell had happened, even out among those quiet streets.

She looked at him.

“Close your eyes,” he told her.