Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

Biggs sat down at the desk and opened the laptop. He pressed the power button and, to his astonishment, the machine stirred. He heard the whine of the drive. The monitor lit up. First blue, then gray as the machine cycled through the start-up. Then he found himself staring at her cluttered desktop—the file icons nearly concealing the desktop image—and it was something like being in her presence. The files were mostly video clips, but he could also see documents for grants and scripts.

The disarray said something about Carolyn’s chaotic process. No time to organize things. Not with her breakneck pacing and laser-guided focus when she was in the zone. It occurred to Biggs that her last project, the one she came here to work on, was probably one of these files on the desktop. He swiped his finger along the touchpad and, with a point-and-click, rearranged the icons by date. The most recent file was indeed a video. A file named Missed .

He doubled-clicked the icon.

At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. The image was very grainy, an array of black-and-white pixels. The camera eased back, revealing the full image, and Biggs understood that he was looking at an ultrasound of a womb, a snapshot. The camera locked in and focused, with the small, amphibian-like shape held in the center of the frame—a tiny blur of prehuman creature floating in the dark oval of uterus, anchored by the umbilical tether. The picture was slowly rotated, but the contents remained motionless until an aquatic sound faded up. There was a ripple of movement as the ocean sound—now the pounding of waves—peaked, then gave way to the two-step beat of a heart. The pixels swam, clenching and loosening. A flutter appeared in the torso area of the tiny embryo, a hand-drawn pulsing of concentric lines, and the large eye moved faintly under the translucent lid. The stillness undone.

The life, Biggs understood, restored by Carolyn’s invisible hand.

He watched the animated heart beating for nearly five minutes, expecting a cut, a new scene to start. But nothing of the sort happened. The rhythm continued, the beat played on, until, about seven minutes in, the screen went blank. The battery had finally expired. He tried a few times to reboot but there wasn’t enough juice to get past the start-up, then it stopped responding altogether. That was it. A vault of memories—a kind of mind—forever closed.

Unless there was a spare battery around.

He searched the closet, then raked through the clutter of the bedroom floor with his feet. What was that little film about? There had to be more to it. It couldn’t just be that single shot—the animated embryo, heart pulsing in a flurry of static. Maybe it was just a looping sequence that she nested in some other scene.

Biggs didn’t yet wonder where she got the image—the scanned ultrasound. She was always appropriating images from all kinds of sources. It didn’t occur to him that the image was actually a snapshot of her womb until, in his search for a battery, he came across a plastic jar of pills—brown-tinted bottle, white childproof top. Not placebos this time. The prescription details, under her name, were taped to the side. Painkillers: codeine. Take one capsule every four to six hours until pain subsides. Prescribed just over a year ago, when she had retreated to this room for her six-week remove from the city.

From him.

HE thought he understood the meaning of the film. It was a kind of wish fulfillment exercise—the authoring of an alternative ending. She had done it before. Here, in this room, where they stayed together as her mother was dying and produced a computer-animated remake of The Dream. She insisted it was therapeutic. That it was a creative way of coping. It was also something they could do together, since he was the dreamer of The Dream. They had been together for only a few months at that point. “It will make us tighter,” she had suggested.

“How can it bring us together when all I’m doing is telling you the same dream over and over?” he once asked, frustrated with her need to hear him tell it for what seemed like the hundredth time.

“You learn a lot about a person when you make stuff together,” she said.

The repetition seemed to work. The Dream’s place in the world transferred from his head to the shared space of reality. The telling of it, he observed, became its own thing: a script of sorts, scrawled by her hand on a yellow pad, then typed neatly on the laptop. It was a real thing, birthed from his head. Yet she insisted that he storyboard out the flow as well. While she was sitting at her mother’s side with her father and sister, he was in her room, struggling with his limited drawing skills to recall the angles, the positioning of the characters—the blocking , as she called it.

She would return to the room emotionally drained, hollowed out by watching her mother suffer through her final stages. Let’s go out, he would offer. Get some air, though he really meant perspective. He wanted her to see that the world rolled on. As foretold, she seemed to be purposely drowning herself in grief. He was here, he had to point out, to help her from slipping too far into it. The Dream, he reminded her.

But something had shifted in her. The remaking of The Dream, not his guiding presence in her life, seemed to be her salvation. He pointed this out and she smiled wearily. “Don’t you see they are the same thing?”

In her exhausted state, she refused sleep, insisting on making progress with the film. She studied his sketches and re-created them, using stand-in avatars in a 3-D environment on her computer, which she said would look more realistic than a stop-motion approach with dolls. She showed him how the program’s virtual cameras could be positioned anywhere along the x, y, and z axes. And how, though The Dream was witnessed from his perspective, the film would show him in the scenes. “Otherwise, if it’s shot entirely from your POV,” she explained, “it will be harder for us to understand your role in the action.”

“Okay. But that’s not how it looked in my head,” he said cautiously.

“It’s a re-creation, not a replica.”

“The difference is pretty subtle.”

“Maybe in the words, but not in the thing.”

The next step was shooting the reference videos. Biggs liked this step because they had to do it together. It wasn’t something she could leave him to do alone while she sat in a tormented state down the hallway, holding her mother’s hand. She pushed all the furniture to one side of her room and hung a green screen from ceiling to floor. “It’s a magic window,” she said, allowing just a flash of whimsy. “Stand in front of it and we can go anywhere.”

She insisted that they be naked for these shoots. “We have to see how the muscles move,” she said. Not a problem for him. Their bodies were well acquainted at this point. They had been voraciously intimate from the start. Her sexual needs seemed to stand apart from everything else happening in her life, he had initially observed. He finally realized, as they came to endure her mother’s decline, that her hunger for release had everything to do with her growing sadness and anxiety.

But the reference videos weren’t a kind of foreplay, he soon realized. They were short clips that would inform how she moved the 3-D models in each of the scenes. Carolyn positioned his body or the tripod with the same professional coolness. In this mode, she did not seem to see his body as the flesh-and-blood incarnation of her lover, but rather as a life-sized puppet for her to control. She asked him to repeat his movements over and over as she stood back watching the monitor. Her directions were precise: “Now walk forward as if you are seeing me in the waves. Now raise your arms, cup your hands in front of your mouth, and call to me. Now run in place like you ran to the water. Wait, start that over,” she directed. “Remember, you’re hitting the waves about five steps in, so you want to show a reaction to it. It’s cold water, remember? It’s like ice.”