Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

The man circled the cage. He tripped over boxes and slid on the motherboards that cluttered the ground, but he never took his eyes off Biggs.

Who are you? Biggs wondered, studying the man for clues about his pre-epidemic past. Veined, worn hands. Maybe a contractor or maybe a plumber, an electrician. Or most likely someone who worked here, in this warehouse. Forklift driver or what? Foreman. Maybe a father.

The man continued to shriek and, when he threw himself at the cage, to groan as his legs churned, plowing him forward against the immovable structure. Biggs regretted not having a real weapon. A gun would be best. But even if he did, he doubted he could shoot this wreck of a human, now grating his own head against the tight gauge of mesh. He had never even fired a gun. Now, he promised himself, it seemed necessary to find one. If I ever get out of this cage.

“You going to let me leave?” he asked the insomniac.

This set off a deafening volley of shrieking that, much to Biggs’s relief, tapered off at the end. The man was screaming himself hoarse. That would be a good thing.

“Yeah? Then what happened?” Biggs said, now goading.

The man let out a ragged cry that bounced off the high ceiling. He bashed at the gate with his shoulder.

This response presented Biggs with a strategy. He got to his feet and provoked a series of fits, baiting the man by standing just on the other side of the wire wall, until he succeeded in reducing the outbursts to nothing more than gravelly expulsions. The man’s body was starting to give out as well. He was drenched in sweat and it took him longer to get back on his feet after tripping over boxes or bouncing off the mesh to the floor. Yet he persisted in circling and launching himself against the cage.

Biggs returned to his bed. He too was exhausted, and groggy from his own, more conventional sleep deficit. It had been the first time in days that Biggs felt safe enough to make an attempt. After finding the cage in the warehouse, and testing it much in the way it was being tested now, he had doubled back a few miles to a ransacked Home Depot he had spotted earlier. There he found four heavy locks, still packaged, and stuffed them into the pockets of his cargo pants—also a prize of looting. Back at the warehouse, he found some foam packing cushions and boxes and layered them on the floor. It wasn’t a bad bed. His plan was to get a couple of days’ sleep, then continue on to Carolyn’s father’s house, where he was hoping she had fled as she had done before.

Now he drank some water that he had stashed, watching the man over the top of the plastic bottle. He lay back on his elbows and considered his predicament. Weird how a cage seemed like a good place to make a home, however temporary.

When you think about it, the whole setup—life as we know it—is one cage inside another inside another, he remembered telling her. This was at a time when his slowly accumulated disillusionment with ad work had begun to ferment. What he found he could no longer tolerate was the seriousness of it all: the desperation of clients to please their corporate overlords, the desperation of the agency to please the client. How a currency of such shallow ideas was treated as gold. It was all an illusion. “Well, it’s either a cage or a cave,” Carolyn once told him.

He recalled how she showed him the difference between the two. It happened at the most unlikely time: when they were trying to get pregnant. Biggs would sometimes come home from the office at lunchtime—if Carolyn’s calendar indicated it was that optimal phase of her cycle. She would be waiting, often washing up in the bathroom if she had been painting props or puppets in her studio. He would come in and sit on the Murphy bed in the main room of the loft, kicking off his shoes and peeling off his pants. They joked about how clinical things had gotten, and somehow the joking made it less so.

“Your sperm donkey has arrived,” he called glumly through the door after an especially dreary morning at the agency. “Let’s make a zygote.”

“Be right out,” she responded over the hiss of the sink and the gentle splashing of her scrubbing.

“Your sex Eeyore,” he mumbled.

“Oh boy,” she said, stepping out in her bra and panties—a sight he never tired of, even during those days of constant trying. She sat next to him, sensing, he knew, that he wasn’t in the right frame of mind. No doubt taking in his pants bunched up at his ankles, the slump of shoulders, not to mention the lackluster delivery of his jokes. It wasn’t like him to brood, but today it felt like a default setting. She leaned into him and kissed his cheek, sniffing his stubble at the same time.

“Yep, it’s you,” she said.

She claimed he had a unique aroma—a pleasing one that was part soap, part coffee, with a dash of some faintly musky perfume generated in his pores while he slept. Only she could smell it. It was strongest in the mornings, she insisted, often telling him that her sniff test was a surefire way to screen for dastardly clones and doppelgangers.

She threw her long thigh over his lap. Her shin was smooth, even shiny. She still had hope, an engine of possibility still purred inside her. This was her upbeat era. Their efforts at conception had yet to foreshadow the desperation to come. She leaned back and looked at his face, reached up and scratched lightly at the back of his head—unhurried, calibrating his mood. Invisible colors passed between them. She knew this was about his job. There was no reason for him to say anything. They had covered his career frustrations many times over—the meaninglessness of it all, the enslavement of storytelling, he had once melodramatically labeled it. The artless art, he once proclaimed.

“You know what we should do?” she asked.

“What’s that?”

“We should drag the mattress into my studio where we can block out all the light. We’ll make it pitch dark and silent. I have those thick black curtains, you know, and sound blankets. Then we should get under the covers and just sleep.”

“Just sleep.”

“That’s it. No baby making, no talking, no thinking. Just sleeping. And we should try to sleep for as long as we possibly can. Days, maybe weeks.”

“What about my job?” he asked, though he was already buying in. “I have a call with Chicago at two.”

“You won’t need a job where we’re going, baby.”

“You mean in our dreams.”

“You’ll dream up a whole new life. What’s your dream job?”

He thought for a moment. “I always wanted to be the guy who delivers mail to some tropical islands by rowboat.”

“Really? Huh.”

“It would be a good daily workout, and imagine the tan.”

They followed through on the plan, converting her studio into a sleeping den. A cave deep inside a snow-covered mountain, she suggested.

After fifteen minutes, they found themselves making love in the lightless chamber. He fell asleep soon after. When he woke, he felt for her in the darkness, expecting her to be gone. She rarely slept during the day and barely slept at night. But she was there, warm and silent next to him. He drifted off again and woke up when she was sniffing his neck, the room still thick with an impenetrable darkness. “Is it me?” he whispered.

“Aren’t you wondering if it’s me?”

“How long did we sleep?”

“I don’t know.”

“What time do you think it is?”

“What day, you mean.”

“Day? Really?”

He started to sit up but she pulled him down. “No, let’s stay here,” she said. “Don’t you see that we’re completely lost in time and space?”

“Hey,” he said, finally getting it. “Yeah.”

“I never want to leave,” she said. “I always want to be here with you.”