Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

“Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s check it out. Just stay behind me.”

Warren loosened his grip and fell in behind Biggs as he crossed the floor and slowly pulled back the curtain. He snapped on his light and peered into the room. At first, yes, he thought it was a person, somehow crouched in the corner. The ground was smeared with blood. Viscera flecked the nest of blackened sheets on the bed and the smell of rot cut through his mask. The ape—a chimp, it seemed—snarled, showing long yellow fangs. Before Biggs let the curtain drop, he caught a glimpse of metal ring mounted to the animal’s hairless head, posts disappearing into the skull. A crown of empty wire ports. Biggs backed away, pulling Warren, as the animal bounded through the curtain, tearing it off its rings. They retreated to the nurses’ station as it fought to throw off the cloying material, then trotted past them and onward, down the corridor, its feet and hands padding against the tiles, crowned head darting left and right, ducking under shafts of light. Trailing handprints of browned blood.

HE told them, “She told me the news over the phone and I drove straight home from somewhere. I brought three roses, one for each of us. When I gave them to her they had changed into orange rinds. She showed me the ultrasound and we were astonished. Something was moving. We went to breathing classes and had regular checkups. Carolyn had morning sickness for the first three months, but no weird cravings. We did another ultrasound and we could see that it was going to be a girl. But another showed that we had a boy on the way. This kept changing every time we looked away then looked back. This person hasn’t decided yet, the technician said. Carolyn ballooned and her tiny frame looked absolutely hijacked by this new bulk. Her belly gleamed and sometimes rang like a bell at night from the kicks inside. We had to induce because our doctor was going to be away on a ski trip on our delivery date and Carolyn really wanted her to do the delivery because the doctor had vowed to take special measures. We drove to the hospital without panic. They put us in a delivery room and we listened to Daniel Lanois’s first album, the one with ‘The Maker.’ She tried to deal with the contractions but after a while it made no sense to go forward without the epidural. They brought in a shaved cat and gave it the epidural. At first the anesthesiologist couldn’t find the right spot on the cat’s spine. Then it didn’t seem to work and I realized I was standing on the thin tube that carried the medicine into the cat. Carolyn started trembling violently and I ran out to get someone. They came in and made some adjustments to the cat and this stopped the trembling. When it was time, the doctor came in and told me to hold Carolyn’s left leg. It was just the three of us until the baby emerged and then there were four of us in the room. When I cut the cord it seemed to me that the cord was just a strand of gelatin, incapable of carrying nutrients and waste, or messages of any kind. Yet here was a baby being drawn into Carolyn’s arms as if they had already been introduced.”

THE move and monitoring of his sleep that followed could not be seen as anything other than a punishment. It was a reprimand from Lee, Biggs believed, for failing to convey the dreams with sufficient purity and verisimilitude—too much plot, too much spin, really. Too much Carolyn. This was what he suspected, in spite of Lee’s denials. The plan was to put him in the smart room, which was wired for dream research.

The community of survivors didn’t like this idea, but their opposition was not in defense of their dreamer, Biggs. The smart room had been where Felicia lived before she made her rescue attempt. They confronted Lee about the issue at a morning meeting, after Biggs had recited yet another dream about returning home and finding Carolyn alive and well in the loft.

“We all love Felicia,” Lee said, “and we all want her to return safely. And I’m confident she will. We’re still looking for her, as you all know. Whenever we can spare the guys, they go out and they do their best to track her. One of these days, they will bring her back. I really believe that.”

Biggs heard the quiver in Lee’s voice, a coating of gloss.

“Will you leave her things there?” Fran asked, voice trembling. “Because we think it’s important that she knows her place is waiting for her.”

Lee nodded reassuringly.

Lee said, “Her things are in their true place and we wouldn’t want to undo that. We just need the equipment that’s in that room. There are dreams moving under the dreams we’re hearing about, and we need to get down to them. To stay human, yes, but also because there may be answers there, about how we can all return to our natural state.”

THEY didn’t understand the whole point of the dream recitals.

Lee told them, “There is a constant pressure, a tide of animal energy. It has surged and eroded away the walls we have erected over the millennia by migrating the contents of our dreams into this world. Everything around us, the remnants of our world, was birthed in a dream, brought forth and hardened under the sun: the roads, buildings, the institutions of thought and knowledge, the urgings of the heart, the fuel of desire. Sleep is the bridge over which these fantastic constructions have been passed, piece by piece, particle by particle. You see us from a distance like ants carrying a shiny white brick of future in our thorny mandibles. Sometimes that white speck is a bone from a beast, evidence of their own elaborate infrastructure—the only hard thing about them. We carry it across the bridge too. Now that bridge has been brought down, except for one silken strand. This is what our dreamer provides—a way to carry the contents across.”

“But,” they said, “every dream is about his wife. It has nothing to do with us.”

“That’s how it may seem,” Lee said. “But believe me, it has held us in place. Without these recitals, you, Warren, would have already grown antlers. You would be trapped inside a coat of fur.

“And, you, Fran, you would have gills and large unblinking eyes on opposite sides of your flattened face.

“And Porter, he would be brooding from under his cobra’s hood.”

MORALES waited for him to catch up in the corridor. He said, “You probably thought I was joking about what I said before. But you know what, bro? You don’t know what it’s like. When your head doesn’t work right, when it stops telling you stories. It’s like there’s just a hole there. You throw stuff in it and nothing comes back. You can even hear that shit hit the bottom. It’s just falling forever into nothing. You don’t think that will drive a person insane? I got to have something of what I had.”

Biggs heard a waver in his voice and glanced over as they walked. There, under his eye, a shining trail.

Biggs liked Morales. He was the first person from the center that Biggs had encountered. What he desires, Biggs thought, is desire.

THEY moved him from his bunk in the common room to Felicia’s room and shaved his head. From the bed, he could see an arrangement of mementos Felicia had set up on a narrow metal desk in the corner. There was a small stack of books—mostly trade paperback novels, but also psychology and physiology textbooks fringed with sticky notes. Small brass figurines of a pig, an owl, and a squirrel sat inside a tangled ring of necklaces made from amber and polished stones. A small jar filled with tin Mexican milagros. An older couple posed in a small, ornately carved gold frame. No doubt those are her parents. The ones she went to rescue, he concluded.