Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

She had taken to cooking the food after Claudio, their cook, nearly burned down the center after attempting to cook a pot of rags, which he believed to be salted cod fillets. By helming each meal, providing the small crowd of delusional diners with plates of pasta and hunks of bread, or salads made from whatever vegetables were foraged from the grad student apartment gardens, she secured her place as the small community’s mothering presence. An odd position given that she was, in fact, the youngest resident.

They were drawn to her not only because she was still mentally sound, at least comparatively, but also because many assumed she had the inside scoop on the doctors, particularly Lee. Even before the phenomenon, many believed that she and Dr. Lee were having an affair, regardless of her vigorous denials. Yes, there was some small measure of smoke, but no fire. She was a student, after all, and Lee carried himself with a relentlessly uptight professionalism. If he had been harboring any interest, let alone something resembling desire, she had seen little evidence. Maybe a lingering gaze, a hint of uncharacteristic warmth, but nothing more. Her friends claimed he treated her differently.

Whether or not they were intimate, they insisted, surely she must know what the doctors were up to, since she was around them so much. Assisting with their procedures and lab work, privy to their schemes. They can sleep, some insisted. “They cooked up a cure that they’re keeping to themselves,” Davis, a security officer, proclaimed. “They’re just letting the rest of us fall apart so they can study what happens to us. Pretty soon they’ll start giving us God-knows-what and say it’s a cure and we’ll grow fucking asparagus out of our foreheads.”

With increasing frequency, she felt compelled to defend the doctors. “Look at them. They’re suffering just like us,” she told them. “They want a cure just as badly as everyone else.” It wasn’t hard to quell their suspicions, since sleeplessness had made her fellow residents unusually open to suggestion. The fact that she was already held in high regard, mostly due to her ongoing attempts to care for them as they unraveled, gave more weight to her appeal for reason.

“They’re trying to fix this,” she would tell them.

And, at least for now, they would believe her.

THOUGH she no longer slept, she retreated to bed out of habit. She was fortunate to have her own room, assigned when Kitov urged everyone—those who hadn’t already fled to their families—to stay. It was his promise of a cure that held her. She could very well be in the right place at the right time, she told her parents during their last phone call. She would come for them when it was clear they could be helped. But that moment had yet to arrive, and she could feel the margin of possibility rapidly narrowing. The tide of sleeplessness was advancing, consuming all the sand castles of coherency and logic as it crept forward. Even now, sitting on her bed, she sensed dark figures standing in the periphery of her vision. They seemed to be watchers from another dimension, now somehow visible due to a tear in the veil. Always present unless looked at directly, pressing in on her.

She quickly turned her head, hoping to catch a glimpse of her observers before they slipped behind the blind of dark matter, and was startled to find Dr. Lee standing in her room instead. He looked terrible, with heavy bags under his eyes, a washed-out complexion. His cheeks and chin were peppered with stubble and his black hair was uncharacteristically tousled. He persisted in wearing his white smock, though it was unbuttoned to reveal a T-shirt and olive cargo pants. He was falling apart just like everyone else, yet he continued to make his self-imposed rounds.

“Hanging in there?” he asked.

She stared at him, her heavy eyelids slowly dropping, then snapping wide open. She nodded, afraid to speak, not wanting to reveal the distance she had descended by providing a sample of eroded language.

“Do this,” he said. He performed a minor feat with his fingers, a roadside sobriety test that he had asked her to do before. Counting one through four and back again as he touched each finger to his thumb. He had no trouble with it. Maybe the others are right, she considered. Maybe the doctors had come up with an effective cocktail of serotonin and glycerin and they were keeping it for themselves. A part of her hoped this was true. Maybe they were just testing it before going public.

She did as he asked, running through the drill, fingertips to thumb. She was relieved to see—as if watching from outside herself—that she did it well despite her burden of exhaustion. Lee was pleased too, faintly nodding encouragement. He took her by the wrist and she felt the spark of his touch. She couldn’t tell if he was taking her pulse or finally making some kind of pass at her.

Now he was looking intently into her eyes, leaning forward.

Here it comes—the kiss that she had been told was inevitable. Or had she? She suspected she was having a false memory. Remembering a dream, maybe, as though it were real.

“Settle down. He’s just checking your eyes,” Chase said. “The dilation.”

She turned her head to the right, where her former boyfriend’s voice hung in the air. But Dr. Lee reached up and gently nudged her chin so that she was looking at him again. He pushed in close, his breath on her lips. She waited. Nothing. It appeared that he was indeed checking her eyes, the dilation.

“You’re not so bad,” Lee said. “Probably still of all them the best.”

There it was. The messed-up syntax.

He quickly corrected himself: “The best of all of them, I meant.”

As if he had heard her thoughts.

“We’re going to need your help,” he said.

“What with?” she dared to say, when he stood back and stared for a long silent moment, blinking and swaying slightly on his feet.

“The procedure. With Kitov. He is insisting on it for the implant. That it’s him.”

She understood. The old man was going to go under the knife—or actually the drill—first. There had been talk of this. Some thought it was a brave and noble thing to do, given that it was untested. Others thought it was like the captain of a sinking liner being first into the lifeboat. It was hard to tell how Kitov saw it. He seemed capable of both motivations, possibly at the same time.

“When?”

“Tomorrow at eleven. Get some rest.”

She could not tell if this was meant to be a joke.

SHE had gotten in the habit of watching the sunrise from the deck. Though, looking west, what she saw was the flat plain of the leaden ocean slowly separate from the sky as it took on color. The sun rose behind her, behind the compound on the bluff and the university towers above. In the evening, it lowered itself slowly into the Pacific without a sound, igniting both sea and sky with pink and orange.

When they first arrived at the university, she and Chase had become participants in a daily ritual, sometimes driving down from the school and joining others who parked along the coastal roads at dusk. It delighted these two inland kids—refugees from the smoggy suburbs—that the locals would do this: gather at the edge of the earth, go still and quiet to watch the sun die its daily death. They would witness it together, everyone sitting in the padded pews of their cars. Then, as if a service had ended, turn their ignitions, check their rearviews, and drive off into their lives.

“It is religious,” she had once said.

“It’s better,” Chase responded, though minutes later, after driving in silence back up the bluff and into the dorm parking lot. She recalled sensing his growing disdain for the place. It had killed her that she was partly responsible for his increasing detachment at school. But there were forces, like the shifting plates of the earth, pulling them apart, however typical and predictable: his need for insulation and control, her desire to have new experiences, to live beyond their plastic past. There were other problems. His—she didn’t know what to call it—sexual hang-ups? She could so easily recall the dark weight of him in the bed next to her, sinking deeper into shame as his body failed him yet again. “You don’t understand,” he said in the darkness, “how much I want you in here.” She heard the thud of his fist against his bare chest.