Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

HE waited another day, staring out over the endless echo of rooftops as his thoughts darkened and despair settled in. The mountains beyond like gnarled and kinked muscle. He ignored the ragged people below waiting to kill him. He had tuned them out as his grasp of the world became increasingly loose. The dark blur in the corner of his eye remained, he realized. It was Carolyn, hiding there. “Come out,” he urged her. “You owe me an explanation. We need to talk.” But it was only the tip of a black shroud that blew inward. It wrapped around his mind and soaked up his memories. It weighed down his head so that his chin cut into his chest. He saw that there was no way out of this. The idea, reinforced by the decimated world around him, by the fad of extinction and the sheer unpopularity of carrying on, filled the few hopeful spaces inside him with a dense blackness. When it came to erasing herself from her worlds, she had always embraced the tedium of it. There was something of duty in her resigned approach to removal. He suddenly understood that now.

An hour before sunrise on his third night, his body wilted and his mind scrambled, he ate all the pills in the bottle.

LATER he would tell them, “I had taken the pills and I was just waiting, lying faceup on the billboard landing. I could hear them below, screaming up at me. There was no other way out. I thought I saw a bird land on the top of the billboard, but when the shape of it dropped down over me I saw that it was her. I said, I’m almost there, and she said, You can’t. She turned me on my side and put her fingers in my throat. They tasted like clay. Everything inside me came up, except the dreams yet to be dreamed. The pills fell in clots through the metal grille. She positioned me, curling me up, my face staring at the beach scene on the billboard. Then she seemed to drop away, and one by one I heard the shrieking from the sleepless people go silent.”

Because he was the dreamer, they did not know if what he was telling them was a dream or not.

When they asked, Dr. Lee would say, “It doesn’t matter.”

SHE WASN’T SLEEPING, THOUGH IT MUST have been past midnight. This was unlike her. Lila was a sleeper—a natural sleeper.

Don’t freak out, she told herself. I mean, being up this late isn’t the usual, but it’s probably just because today wasn’t the usual.

Today she had met another sleeper, the first she had encountered in weeks. A pretty college girl with cropped hair: Felicia, now sleeping at her feet in the dark room. From where she sat in her owl mask, Lila could see the moon through the high window, floating beyond the branches of an olive tree. It was just a sickle of light, hanging in the sky among a wild spray of stars. All that cosmic luminance, traveling for millions of years, amounted to nothing more than a pale patch on the carpet.

Lila clicked on the flashlight they had found earlier and studied her new companion, who was lying on her back, hands lightly clasped over her flat stomach, ankles crossed. She had conked out exactly at ten o’clock, just like she promised she would. It wasn’t natural the way it happened, Lila had observed. There was no drifting off, no yawning or heavy eyelids slowly drooping. One minute she was lying on the mattress watching Lila rub her feet together, and the next she was asleep. Like a thing switched off. Eyes closed, mouth slightly open, looking even prettier than when she was awake.

“You won’t be able to wake me once I’m out,” Felicia had told her. She explained how the implant worked as they ate their power bars and night filled the room, wind gusting outside. She described how she would stay like that no matter what, even if the house was burning down or someone was slapping her face with a dead fish, until exactly seven o’clock in the morning, when she would wake all of a sudden and maybe jump up, gasping as if she had been held under water.

“Sometimes it’s like that,” she had told Lila. “Just warning you.”

Lila couldn’t help trying to wake her, to see if all this was true. First she tickled Felicia’s feet. Nothing happened and it was kind of creepy, like tickling a dead person. So Lila stepped up her efforts and pinched Felicia on her bare thigh. When there was no response, Lila remembered that the best place to pinch someone is on the back of the arms, especially toward the top. That’s where that total idiot Dylan used to pinch her during class, so that she would scream right in the middle of a quiz. But it did nothing for Felicia, who remained firmly unconscious.

Lila picked up her arm, lifting it high, then dropped it, and the arm actually bounced on the mattress: boing boing. She did it again, then picked up Felicia’s hand and cradled it in hers. It was warm and clean. They had both washed up before bed. Lila studied it under her light. It was the cleanest hand Lila had seen in a long time. No dirt under the nails and such soft palms. Her lifeline was long. When Lila curled it up into a fist to produce love lines, she could see that Felicia would have one true love.

Lila opened Felicia’s hand and lightly tickled the palm, watching Felicia’s smooth eyelids for any sign. “Tickle tickle tickle,” she said softly. Nothing.

She held the hand in her lap and suddenly very strongly wanted to feel it against her face, but to do that she would have to take off her mask. This gave her pause. She had been wearing the owl’s head for almost a month now, only removing it when she was alone, maybe when sleeping in the dark tunnels of the flood control channels, but sometimes keeping it on even then, thinking there could be rats that would try to nest in her hair or eat her tongue.

She slowly lifted the mask off her head, vowing not to fall asleep before putting it back on, just in case. It was always hot in the mask and feeling cooler air on her face was one of Lila’s few remaining pleasures. It was like standing by the doors of a mall in the desert. With the mask on the floor at her side, she combed the sweat-damp hair off her forehead, tucking her long bangs behind her ears. The wound on her scalp had mostly healed but she now avoided touching the area out of habit.

She scooped up Felicia’s hand as if it were a small pet, a kitten maybe, and brought it to her face. She put her cheek against the back of it, then turned it over and rested her chin in the warm palm. This, the light touch of another, caused a wave of warmth inside. Her throat tightened with emotion. Lila buried her face in the open palm, inhaling deeply, and closed her eyes as she moved the hand against her cheek, then bowed her head as she used it to stroke her hair. She felt it as a caress even though she was acting as the gesture’s puppeteer. She performed a tenderness that she had assumed no longer existed in the world. Her chin quivered and her eyes stung so she squeezed them tightly shut. “No tears now,” she told herself.

She brought Felicia’s hand to her lips and kissed, pressing hard. The last person to kiss her had been her mother, desperately begging for Lila’s forgiveness. Both of them a mess, their tears mixed together as her mother covered her face with kisses. The memory stabbed at Lila, triggering charged images: her mother and father chaining themselves to the piano, her father grabbing for her under the car, spitting threats. She pressed her lips harder into Felicia’s hand and tried to think back to earlier times, when they had no clue about what was coming.

The memories scrolled before her eyes. Lying in the backseat of the car as they traveled into the mountains, the sun signaling to her through the trees. The three of them in bed on Saturday morning, listening to her father’s stories about all the weird stuff he saw during his residency—the man who thought his own hand wanted to kill him; the boy who couldn’t feel pain. Now, sitting in the darkness, she imitated the way her mother whispered at cats. She listened, hoping to hear her mother playing the piano downstairs or her father singing in the shower. In the morning, they would go to the coffee place in the bookstore, where they would read entire books and she would steal sips of espresso and chai lattes from her dad’s blue cup and gnaw on biscotti. They would have lunch in the diner, playing old songs on the jukebox.