Kenneth Calhoun: Black Moon

HIS audience listened with their usual indifference. Distracted. Studying their hands or staring out the window as seagulls floated, held in place by the wind blasting up the bluff from the ocean. Some stared off at an abandoned aircraft carrier, sitting out in the blue expanse. It drifted in the current like a skyscraper on its side. Some looked bored enough to doze off. But of course they couldn’t do that. Not until exactly ten at night, when the switch was flipped in their dreamless heads.

AFTER the recital, when the survivors had shuffled off to their chores, he approached Dr. Lee. He said, “I need a car and some guys. I want to check if she’s there.”

“It was only a dream,” Lee said.

Biggs laughed. For Lee to say this. He who had built a cathedral to dreams. Lately, Lee was only sometimes Lee.

He told him, “Once I woke up and her feet were dangling from the ceiling, black with roof tar. I had forgotten all about that.”

“We can’t put you or the guys at risk,”

Lee said. “Just give me Morales.”

Lee shook his head. “The city is a long way away.”

HE told them that it wasn’t his child. That’s why she had expelled it from her body. She had explained everything. She had been attacked by a creature that was half man, half bear. Only, she explained, the bear was the outside half and the man was the inside half. The creature had lured her into an underground laboratory where it was conducting experiments. She watched as it put the dream of a cat into a chicken. The chicken fell forward, dead. Then it put the dream of an eel into a hamster. The outcome was the same for the hamster, though it stood up on its hind legs before dropping. The only way for an animal dream to live inside a human, it explained, was to grow an entire dreaming animal inside a human. The dream needed the animal container as a kind of filter of flesh. The beast held her down and put the animal inside her womb with a few quick thrusts. As soon as she was able, she cast it out, along with its tiny bladder of toxic dreams.

ONLY Morales, the security muscle, spoke to him at first. Biggs had encountered him one night smoking on the deck and staring out at the dark field of ocean. He was moving past the security man, seeking his own solitude, when Morales spoke without looking at him. “So, bro, do you take requests? What I’d like to hear,” he said, “is a seriously nasty sex dream. I’m talking quadruple X. I know you have them. Don’t hold out on us, dude.”

DR. LEE approached Biggs in the lunchroom later, standing at his table as Biggs slowly turned pasta on his fork. Lee said, “I feel like there’s too much interpretation happening. Maybe too much crafting.”

“It’s impossible not to,” Biggs said. “I have to speak them, not somehow broadcast them into their minds.”

Lee sat down and Biggs winced as the chair chirped loudly against the concrete. The tabletops were blazing with light coming in through the windows.

“They’re just so tightly fitted to your situation,” the researcher said. “I’m hoping for something more universal, so that they can see something of themselves in them.”

They watched a gull just beyond the window, hanging in the air.

“Could Carolyn really be all that you dream about?”

“Maybe not,” Biggs said. “But they are the only dreams I remember.”

Lee laid it all out again, patiently explaining the purpose of the recitals. “You are the dreamer. What we’re doing is exposing the community to the texture and fabric of the dream world. Without it they won’t stay human for long. We are the only species whose dreams are interchangeable. We can live inside the dreams of others, we can breathe there. That says something about the human family, and the true smoothness of our faces, our odorless souls. You’re dreaming for all of us now,” he said. “You can’t get in the way of whatever’s coming through.”

So many words. This was not at all like Lee, Biggs thought. I may be dreaming right now.

BIGGS volunteered for a scavenging mission. The task at hand was an equipment and supply run that would take a team outside the compound and into the nearby hospital, which they looted regularly. Most of the residents dreaded the idea of leaving the security of the center. But it was much less dangerous now, since it was rare to encounter the sleepless, yet common to stumble over a body. Other than the security team, no one would volunteer. By stepping forward before Lee followed through on his threat of randomly selecting people, Biggs hoped to win points with Lee and the community.

They passed through the desolate university campus in two vans, skirting the edge of the campus, cutting through vast parking lots, rolling past the International Studies Center, the woolly, unkempt clover playing fields, the abandoned supercomputer and boxy student apartment complexes. The elephant-gray dorm towers jutted above the brittle eucalyptus fringe, and the school’s famous glass library, like a crystal hive perched on concrete pilings, flashed through the trees. When they took the narrow access road along the base of the structure, they found themselves fording a lumpy moraine of books that seemed to have been deposited by the receding glacial library.

The caravan rode on, arriving at the loading docks for the hospital. They waited in the vans for the security team to check things out. Dr. Porter went over the long list of things they were after and distributed surgical masks. He paired them into teams, partnering Biggs with Warren, who had been a graduate student at the lab when the crisis hit. Their assignment was to find paper for EEG printers.

“Paper?” Warren asked through his surgical mask. “That’s it?”

They followed a hand-drawn map that Porter gave them, with a final directive to use their flashlights sparingly. They passed through the lobby and up two dark flights of stairs, their lights probing feebly before them. On the fifth floor they found themselves in the intensive care unit—a series of patient rooms ringing the semicircular cluster of the nurses’ station. Sunlight poured in from the skylight but seemed reluctant to venture too far into the rooms.

Biggs said, “There’s probably a supply closet around here.”

“Did you dream that?” the young man asked.

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” Biggs said crisply. Then, realizing it was an earnest question, he softened his response. “I didn’t dream it, but it makes sense, right?”

Both of them were avoiding the dark patient rooms, but when they failed to find any surplus of paper, they knew they had to at least check the bedside machines. “You start at that end, and I’ll work toward you,” Biggs suggested.

Warren shuddered, then made his way across the floor. Biggs had managed two rooms, finding neither paper nor bodies, when he heard Warren come up behind him, whispering, “Pretty sure there’s someone in there.”

Biggs could see that Warren was spooked behind the mask. Warren leaned in close and said that he had seen someone moving in one of the patient rooms and thought he heard something. A moan, a whimper. Biggs started cautiously toward it.

“Why don’t we just leave?” Warren asked, grabbing his arm.

“Because it could be someone,” Biggs told him.

Warren took this in, then looked up, eyes wide. “You think maybe it’s Felicia?”

“Felicia?” Biggs knew the name, knew the story. She was the student worker who had fled the compound, stealing a car, with a plan to rescue her parents. She was also the first person to volunteer for the implant, he had been told, after the principal investigator, Kitov, died in the operating chair. They all talked about her like some kind of guardian angel, still setting a place for her during meals and taping notes to the door of her room imploring her to come back. He was indebted to her as well. After all, she was the reason he had been found. When Lee had sent out security people to look for her, they found him instead. Warren’s hopeful eyes, his desperate assumption, both moved Biggs and revealed possibilities. There was much to consider, but not now.