Kenneth Calhoun: Black Moon

She let her heavy lids drop and pressed her cheek into the pillow.

He felt her rubbing her small feet together—a kinetic mantra, a physical focal point that she sometimes employed. She was trying and he loved her for it. He wanted to tell her to quiet her mind, to let the pill do its job, but he knew that would only cause her to think too much about it. The best thing to do was keep still and quiet. No touching, no singing, no counting of sheep. Just let the story do its job. Let it work its way in.

Minutes passed and she fell still, even her feet coming to rest. Could it have worked already? He studied her face, allowing some hope to spark. But it was immediately snuffed when she clapped her hand over her mouth. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, crushing out tears.

“Baby,” he said softly. “Carolyn.”

She shook her head, refusing to open her eyes.

“Come on, don’t quit now. I can feel it working in me, that pill in my blood.”

She covered her eyes with her hand, concealing her mounting skepticism.

Now it was time, he recognized. Time for the stain to magically disappear, the hair to grow back on the barren scalp. Time for the blind to suddenly see, the dead to emerge from the cave. Show her.

“Look,” he said, providing an introduction, as if a new actor had arrived on stage.

He yawned loudly. Hearing it—that ancient intake of air—her eyes snapped open between her parted fingers. She stared into his mouth as his body put itself in that obsolete mode. Eyes glazing over, blinking slowed.

She watched, her eyes now wide and intense, her mouth gaping. Was she trying to mimic his yawn? He wasn’t sure that this was the reaction he hoped for—this expression of astonishment she now wore.

“See what’s happening?” he said, knowing she hadn’t seen him yawn in days. Hadn’t yawned herself in almost a week. He shut his eyes, let his head sink into the pillow, and spoke to her in whispers: “It’s working. It will with you too but just might take a little longer since you’ve been without for more.”

Sleep was tugging at him now, pulling him toward the edge, away from her. He let it happen, tumbling off the summit of consciousness in mere minutes. A black honey spread warmly in his mind, smoothing over any cautionary murmurs from the reptilian part of his brain: vague warnings about Carolyn’s sudden focus, the clenching of her fists.

HE had only slept for what seemed like seconds when his skull exploded.

A lamp had come apart in her hands, but she continued to swing it at his head. His arms came up instinctively, covering himself briefly, then striking out to bat away her blows. He yelled for her to stop, but nothing seemed to get past her animal grunts. He threw himself at her, wrestling down her arms, shaking her. It was as though she was the one asleep, attacking him in a trancelike state. He pinned her to the mattress and she screamed.

She spat out a stream of words from underneath him. She tried to buck him off a few times, but he held fast, pinning her arms behind her head. Eventually she went limp and only the words came at him. The jolt of adrenaline seemed to have provided a window of clear diction, of proper syntax. He listened, pressing the gash on his brow against the sheets and printing a scarlet wound there. He tried to distinguish those utterances that were true attempts to communicate with him from those that seemed to be received from some far-off transmission.

The yawn, she told him, was like a paper lantern or a bag that had opened in front of his face, forming a pink tunnel through his head and revealing his contents. There was shiny stuff in there, and ignorance like charcoal.

When she was a child, she told him, she had seen a man suffering a heart attack on the street. He was a clerk in a liquor store and his co-workers had sat him against a telephone pole on the sidewalk as they waited for paramedics. The man clutched at his chest, doubled over with pain. Carolyn never told her mother this, but she had seen a large spiderlike creature on the chest of the man. Instead of claws, it had drills and it was boring through the man’s sternum. No one had ever said anything about this detail, though she was sure everyone, her mother included, had seen it.

I tried to make dreams that would change real dreams, replace them, she told him, adding that this was a great sin, like bringing back the dead.

I’m like the bottom of the ocean inside, she told him, crushing submarines.

Then she broke down, sobbing, “I’m so tired of animals and their fucking secrets. Who gives them their orders?”

He rolled off her, releasing her hands.

She cried into them and he was moved to gently squeeze the back of her thin neck. “Baby,” he said. “I’m right here.”

“What do you know about it?” she mumbled. “Nothing has ever died inside you.”

She talked into the night, her logic and language gradually falling apart, reverting to a scrambled state. His story, with all its props and stagecraft, had failed to save her.

The next morning he started tying her to a chair.

AS PLANNED, CHASE DROVE UP TO THE cinderblock dumpster corral behind the Sunrise Pharmacy and put the car in park, but left the engine running. The white trash bag was slouched in the corner as Jordan said it would be, soft from the heat. Chase scooped it up, backhanding flies, and was quickly back in the car, the bag riding shotgun like some kind of prop for a companion. He drove off, glancing once in the rearview mirror down the strip mall service road. There was no sign of anyone anywhere, just some litter twirling in his wake. He hadn’t been seen, he was pretty sure. Great. Now he too—just like that—was stealing drugs from the pharmacy with Jordan.

HE took the most direct route home even though that brought him past Felicia’s cul-de-sac. He couldn’t help glancing up at her parents’ house. She wouldn’t be there until her birthday visit later in the month. What if he did catch a glimpse of her car in the driveway as he shot by? I’d probably freak out and crash, he thought. Get found dead with a stolen bag of trash in my lap.

He noticed he was speeding past the tract houses, the residential rhythm of manicured yards, driveways, and personalized mailboxes ticking by. Whoa, slow down! He was giddy from the heist, and paranoid, constantly checking the rearview. Yet he made it home without incident, pulling into his parents’ garage. The automatic door closed slowly behind him, lowered by the creaking winch overhead. The space going dark. He grabbed the bag and went inside the quiet empty house.

They hadn’t discussed what he was to do once home. Just sit and wait for Jordan to get off work, he supposed. But meanwhile, here was all this incriminating evidence sitting on the low shag of the family room. Chase stared at the bag. Jordan had packed it earlier, mixing stolen drugs with trash, then setting it in the corral for Chase to pick up. Jordan had been doing this alone all spring. This was Chase’s first run. Maybe he should fish out the pills and burn the rest of it.

Probably better to just wait. Try to be cool for once, he told himself.

Still feeling the jangle of nerves, he went to the living room window and peered out at the quiet street. All was in order. Summer had only started and the world was still weeks away from an irreversible transformation. There was no hint of crisis in this suburban scene: the neighbors’ low houses, the pale sky. The sun poured down on the neighborhood, baking the tongue-colored Spanish tiles of the rooftops, yellowing the grass. Dusty leaves hung limply in the parkway trees. It was too hot for anyone to be out. Kids would emerge in the evening and couples walking their dogs. Someone would wash their car, sending suds down the gutter. He studied the sky for a hint of the mountains that loomed over the valley, but they were concealed by the dirty gauze of smog. He had been away for a year, studying at a university on the coast. Yet it felt as though he had never left, despite the fact that the house was completely empty, his family gone.