Kenneth Calhoun: Black Moon

It had only taken him ten minutes to move in a few nights ago, reclaiming the house from the renters. His parents wouldn’t return from Boston—where Chase’s dad had accepted a visiting faculty position—until the end of summer. They weren’t thrilled about Chase moving in early, hoping he would find a summer job near the university instead. “But there’s no furniture!” his mother had tried. He assured them that wasn’t a problem. He’d bring his own.

As soon as classes ended, he packed up his meager belongings, tossing most of it into the massive move-out bins set up in front of the dorms. He was looking forward to putting some distance between himself and the campus, not to mention his roommates. The experience had been a hollow one. Next year, he would try living alone, off campus. It was one of the things he needed to discuss with his parents. He hadn’t told them about breaking up with Felicia and they would assume he intended to live with her. The thought of having to explain himself made him queasy. Maybe he wouldn’t even go back, he thought. Just work at the music store again.

His first night home, he had explored the rooms in the darkness, feeling very detached from the space, uneasy about the emptiness. He didn’t like being alone, not here. There were no curtains and a yellowy light seeped in from the street, casting skewed squares on the floors. Without furniture, the modest ranch-style home felt weirdly vast. In the bathroom his sneeze rang out as he studied his face in the mirror. How had he changed? He had gained some weight in college and now wore his hair cropped close to his head. His dark eyes looked wet in the glass, peering out from under his hooded brow, and his beard scruff framed his narrow face with shadow. This same glass had witnessed his pale youth, his scrawny chest and thin arms; his white, clenched ass and hairless groin. How did it recognize him now? What remained?

Something in the eyes, he knew. An uncertainty that he had thought would be gone by now. A childish worry, too, about being alone in the house—directly tied to his old anxieties about random violence and home invasion. An escaped prisoner, maybe, breaking in during the night, like what happened to that family in Chino years back.

He found that his own room had been transformed almost beyond recognition by the absence of his childhood possessions. The walls had long been stripped of his concert posters and gig flyers, but most absent was the mural he had painted on the room’s only unpaneled wall. The renters had requested it be papered over, since they had intended to use the room as a nursery. The imagery, featuring a life-sized tiger and the jungle-infested ruins of a post-nuclear city, was too disturbing for an infant. Now the wall was covered with a pattern of cartoonish butterflies.

That first night, he had set up his small, archaic TV and unfolded two beach chairs that sat lightly atop the low, sand-colored carpet. He slid an old microwave, flecked inside with the remnants of exploded burritos, onto the kitchen counter. The renters had canceled the alarm service and he wished they hadn’t. He chained the front door and fell into his old habit of touring the house, making sure all the windows and doors were locked. He rolled out his sleeping bag in his room, threw a black trash bag of clothes in the closet, then called it a day. From the floor, the familiar ceiling looked impossibly high. He was exhausted, so it wasn’t long before he started to drift off with hopes of seeing Felicia in his dreams. But the sound of a soft fire crackling in the closet caused him to sit up abruptly.

It was only the trash bag, decompressing in the dark, slowly blooming like a monstrous black rose.

NOW, three days later, a white trash bag sat in the family room, smelling of bandages. Chase was standing at the kitchen counter, staring at the bag, when he heard Jordan’s car pull up to the curb. He waited for the sound of the door and, after minutes passed, he went to the window. Jordan was still sitting there, frozen behind the wheel of his weathered Tercel. By the time Chase opened the garage, Jordan was walking down the driveway in his blue Sunrise Pharmacy smock and nametag. He was leaner that he had been in high school, with sinewy arms and a face going prematurely gaunt. He had always worn his hair short and spiky, and sometime during the last year he had pierced his ears. The holes in his lobes now held thick black cylinders.

“What were you doing?” Chase asked.

“Working.”

“No, I mean now. Sitting in the car.”

“Oh, yeah, that.” Jordan nodded as Chase slapped the switch and the door descended behind them. “That was one of the few mainstream media stories I’ve heard about the crisis. I had to hear the end.”

“On the radio?”

“Yeah. NPR.”

Chase studied Jordan as he walked past, stepping into the house. He didn’t believe there had been a story about insomnia on the radio, nor did he believe in the so-called sleep crisis that was Jordan’s apparent obsession. Yet, for reasons he was reluctant to reveal, he was helping Jordan steal sleeping pills from the Sunrise Pharmacy. The end of sleep was near, Jordan had explained two nights ago. The human species will die in a fit of hallucinations and devastating physical and mental exhaustion. The drugs, he believed, would not only ensure that he would continue to sleep when no one else could, but they would be a powerful bartering tool when cash, even gold, would mean nothing. He speculated that pills would be the new currency.

“It’s coming,” Jordan said. “Even the clueless are picking up on it.”

He followed Chase into the family room and they stood looking at the white plastic trash bag. Jordan greeted it. “Hello, little dude.”

“What did they say?” Chase asked, testing.

“Who?”

“The story on the radio. Did they say what’s causing it?”

Jordan reached into the loose pocket of his smock and produced a box cutter. He snapped it open and shook his head. “They’re not there yet. They can’t afford that kind of honesty. They still have to disguise it as a story about the stock market.”

Chase smiled and nodded. He could see that this annoyed Jordan.

“Don’t believe,” Jordan said with a shrug. “Hang with the sheeple.” He had a dead eye that was fogged and streaked with a jagged scar, the result of a childhood accident when a defective hammer shattered in his face. When he glared, which he did now at Chase, the wound amped up the menace.

Jordan dropped to his knee and grabbed the bag. He bleated like a lamb, then punched in the blade and slashed out a long stroke, revealing the contents inside.

Chase wasn’t ready to let it go. “I bet they didn’t even say the word ‘sleep.’ ”

“When they talk about Big Pharma still raking it in, they’re talking about sleep,” Jordan said as he sorted through the trash. “This is what they’re selling. I’ve seen it in the store with my own eyes. Shit’s flying off the shelves.”

He arranged a number of sleep aid products on the floor—boxes that held plastic bottles stuffed with cotton and pills, foil-backed sheets bubbled with capsules. This was his evidence of apocalypse: the anecdotally observed spike in sleeping pill sales combined with online rants of conspiracy sites. He had shown Chase a few, which Chase wrote off as typical Web-based hysteria.

“They say anything about Bigfoot plotting to kill the president?” he had joked.

Jordan, as far as Chase was concerned, had become some kind of conspiracy geek. He watched Jordan stuff the litter back in the bag, then stand, looking down at their take. Not bad. He nodded and raised his hand for a fist bump. Chase obliged.

“Hold on a second. Be right back,” Jordan said, grinning. He slapped Chase on the back as he headed for the front door, moving like a man with a plan.