Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

She pressed on, sometimes glazing over, zoning out, at the computer. Or wiping away tears as she adjusted the lights, her hands in oversized heat-retardant gloves. She would join him in bed when he couldn’t put off sleep any longer. They would make love—fiercely, but silent. He would try to keep her there for the night. “Give yourself a break, baby,” he would say, embracing her.

But she would shake her head and gently push away. “I need to keep working,” she would say, leaving the bed. “She’s so close.”

He realized she was trying to complete the film before her mother passed. Why? To show it to her? Would she even know what she was seeing? It seemed to Biggs that she was already too far gone. She was unconscious most of the time, and when awake, delirious. Hallucinating wildly, even confusing Carolyn with her own mother.

“Everything gets mixed together as you go,” she observed. “The past and present, dreams and memories.”

It seemed to him that Carolyn’s opportunity to share the film with her mother had long passed. Of course, he would never say this to Carolyn. Let her do what she has to do, he told himself. Everyone copes a different way.

They were still in school then. Still two semesters away from master’s degrees, less than a year from being married. As summer ended and Carolyn’s mother held on into fall, Biggs had to leave Carolyn and return to campus. She remained, continuing to spend her days at her mother’s side and her nights at her computer, doing the time-consuming work of animating the virtual models. She no longer needed him in the process. All that was left was the grind of production.

It was only two weeks into the semester when the day of her mother’s passing arrived. He returned and found Carolyn coping better than he had imagined. He had braced for a total collapse. Instead, she was exhausted and, yes, slow and pale with sadness, but also strong for her father and sister, taking the lead in organizing the funeral and wake. “What can I do?” he asked.

“Just be here,” she whispered, hugging him tight.

The night before the funeral, she led him into her room, where she had hung a screen above the bed. “Lie down,” she insisted, “and look up.” The projector was propped between them, shooting straight overhead. He watched her version of his dream flash on the ceiling. He understood that he was supposed to be redreaming The Dream. It played out as they had scripted it, very much like The Dream, but different in that he could see himself in it, as she said he would.

Yes, there was the rowboat tossing in the waves. Yes, there was the body wrapped in white, rising and falling, and the girl fighting the crash of the waves. There he was, running out to her, pulling her by the hair toward shore, holding her.

He looked over at her, but she indicated with a nod of her head to keep watching.

The story continued.

It went beyond what they had scripted, what he had dreamed. He watched as the girl broke away and charged back into the water. His figure stands helpless, watching her go. The girl swims out past the waves and climbs into the boat, curls down next to the body and continues to tightly embrace it as the boat disappears beyond the horizon and the screen goes black.

“I don’t understand,” he said as they lay in the dark.

She was quiet for several moments. “That version has to be in the world too,” she eventually said.

He asked, “Are you going to show it at the funeral?”

“No,” she said, turning to him. “No one else will ever see it. Just us. Really, it’s only important that you see it, since you are the one who dreamed it. I made it for you.”

She claimed, soon after, that she had erased it and purged all the files from her drives. “What matters is how it lives on in your head,” she had explained.

He had to concede, years later, that he sometimes didn’t know if he was recalling The Dream or the re-creation. She clapped her hands lightly when he told her this, then kissed him on top of his head.

THE CAR PASSED THROUGH DARK WASHLAND, skirting the occasional dead warehouse complex and looted strip mall. The front of the car was dented in, the hood slightly crumpled, from when she had crashed through the gate.

Felicia glanced at the clock, her face blue-lit by the dash. It was getting late.

The moon was full, so she could see the dim outline of the mountains towering over the flatness of the wide valley. My mountains, she thought. The familiar ridges served as a measuring stick. If she imagined a line extending down from one distinct notch, she knew it would bisect her childhood home. Humans are messed up inside and out, but the landscape is still true.

When she was a little girl, she believed the peak with the flat top was a dormant volcano. When would it wake up, she had often wondered, and send a thick soup of lava into this maze of tract homes?

Dogs trotted across the road ahead and she sighted them, using a speck on the windshield as crosshairs, like playing one of Chase’s video games. When she drove over snakes, they felt like thick ropes of wet clay under the tires. The dull sensation made her cringe.

Again she checked the clock. I’m running out of time.

If it was accurate, then she had only about ten minutes before her sleep shift started. We’ll see if the implant’s even going to work out here, she thought. I don’t know why it wouldn’t. It’s not a transmitter. The stimulator controls the schedule.

She took a hand off the wheel and felt for the pulse generator near her armpit—a hard, raised disk under the skin. She was convinced she could feel the wire running under her skin, up her neck and into her skull, where it connected to the electrode embedded in her brain. Not just the wire, but also the signal as it traveled through it—a warm buzz telling her brain to switch modes.

At the center, Lee had said, “That sensation is just our imagination, like a phantom limb.” He said he sometimes thought he felt it too, but he didn’t let himself believe it.

“I can’t control what I believe,” Felicia said. She often found herself uttering this little mantra these days.

Another glance at the clock. A decision. She was definitely not going to make it home tonight, not taking these dark surface streets. Time to pull over.

She turned down a dirt fire road, a rocky passage through the chaparral. But she was going too fast and the car began bouncing around, the wheel pulling as the rocks and rutted lanes bullied her course. To compensate, she jerked hard to the right. The car dropped into a hidden ravine, slamming hard. She yelped as the air bag exploded before her. The engine stalled with a whine and the cape of dust moved past her, drifting like a ghost into the beams of her headlights and onward.

A stillness rose around her, though her heart was thrashing as if it wanted to be let out. The car was severely listing to the right. She was hanging in her seat, unhurt, her necklace reaching for the passenger door.

Then she felt a purr along her neck and slumped against her seatbelt, asleep.

Her shift had started.

SHE woke up at seven A.M., the world at a tilt. Her driver’s-side window faced up at the pale sky, cut into strips by power lines. It was a dreamless sleep that Lee had given them, but it succeeded in resting the body and allowing for the nightly restoration of the mind, the conversion of experience into memory.

Gravity had pulled at her all night so that she was hanging over the passenger seat but held in place by the seatbelt. The air-bag was semideflated before her.