Kenneth Calhoun: Black Moon

So she knew what was going on when she emerged from her room one summer morning to find her parents sitting at the kitchen table, positioned exactly as they had been when she had said her goodnight. They looked ancient in the golden light from the desert pouring in through the windows. Slumped over warm wine, eyes ringed and twitching. Someone had shredded the napkins.

She said, “Oh my god, you have it.”

Mrs. Ferrell said, “Have what?”

“This insomnia thing.”

“What insomnia thing?” Dr. Ferrell said. He was a therapist at the base—an expert on sleeplessness who worked with war-haunted Marines, trying to get them through the night. A bad liar too. Lila knew.

DR. FERRELL once wrote: “In the dreams we have forgotten we have had many mothers. We have had many fathers, brothers, and sisters. Even as children we have parented many children of our own in our dreams—sons and daughters that gave us forgotten lifetimes of joy and torment, leaving only a shadow of a memory.

“Playing out of endless familial permutations is one of many tasks the mind tackles while we sleep, our bodies on hold.

“We know everyone we’ve ever seen with great intimacy.”

MOST of the students at the new school were military kids. The girls were pretty slutty, in Lila’s opinion. Seemed like everyone was a cheerleader. The boys were all what she liked to call soldier larvae, though her dad hated the term. Not soldiers anyway, he would say. Marines. Lila never saw the difference. They fight wars, don’t they, wearing uniforms all the different colors of dirt?

Some of the girls on the soccer team were okay, but Lila came in halfway through the season and didn’t really get to know them before summer vacation hit.

Lila decided she didn’t need them. These days, you could just keep your old friends by staying connected online. She went home after school and logged in and there were Arielle and Matthew, waiting for her as avatars in their virtual hangout. Arielle looked a lot like she looked in real life, but Matthew had a tiger’s head in that other world of theirs, where opting for an animal head was common.

THIS is not Earth, Mrs. Ferrell thought when they first arrived in the desert. He has brought us to some desolate planet. She had abandoned the notion that she could continue her real estate career in this place. It’s a landscape without selling points, she told her husband that first night. The only view it offers is that of the sun going down, the dying of the light slowing traffic like a fresh wreck on the side of the road.

“That’s putting a pretty morbid spin on things,” Dr. Ferrell had said.

It’s not a place that you can carry off in your heart, she concluded. This is not what her daughter will picture, years from now, when she tries to remember home. At the very least, memories of an American home involve trees.

ON the base, Dr. Ferrell was working with a Marine who had rolled a grenade into a tent where eight men were sleeping. The Marine had been an insomniac, though the media overlooked this at the time and focused on his Arab ethnicity.

The doctor had his own struggles with getting to sleep. Lately, it had worsened as he considered possible causes of the epidemic. Many in the scientific community were focusing on a known disease— fatal familial insomnia —the idea being that this was some kind of mutated strain of the already mutated variation called sporadic familial insomnia . Whereas FFI was believed to be hereditary and limited to less than forty families in the world, and took up to two years to kill the afflicted, this new iteration seemed to be some kind of unstoppable upgrade. Accelerated, resistant, moving through the four stages of demise at three times the speed.

But this was just the leading theory. No real connections had been made, and the medical community remained confronted by its greatest fear: a mystery.

Could it be? Not with fire, not with ice, but because of a protein abnormality? A change of amino acid at position 178? His mind kept whirring into the morning hours, a pinwheel spun by the current of his speculations: Maybe more like mad cow. He had seen a report. A chronic wasting disease superbug triggered by a weaponized mammalian prion, ticking in the thalamus. Born in the meat of elk and deer. Bambi’s revenge.

But what did he know? He wasn’t a researcher or physician. He still practiced the talking cure, his mind tending toward more karmic causes: all those warriors he worked with, afraid to dream, heads crowded with scorpions. Maybe that’s where it started and they brought it back from the desert, some kind of contagious psychic wound, guilt based—the empathy system hyperactivated by the policy of preemptive war, the outsourcing of torture. Maybe it was the ugliness that showed itself after the election, the town hall rage and rallies. Except it wasn’t restricted to America. Her enemies were also pacing the floor.

Christ, maybe I did it, he proposed. Maybe it was taking this job. It was the last sellout the universe would tolerate. Trying to help Marines by asking them to write alternative endings to their nightmares.

THE one interesting place was the aqueduct, Lila thought, which was basically a long concrete-sided canal that cut through the desert. It lay just beyond the cinderblock wall at the edge of their backyard. The banks were steep, also concrete, and when the water was low, it settled into a deep, mossy trough that ran down the middle. Dark, tinted water, silent and deceptively still. At breakfast one morning, her mother read her an article about a picnicking Latino family that was lured in, one after the other, all drowning in their attempts to save one another.

The current was strong, but invisible because there were no rocks to show resistance in the form of rapids or waves. Only a rusted post jutted out of the middle of the stream, and the water parted smoothly around it. A hawk was often perched there. In vast stretches, for miles and miles, there were few opportunities to climb out, since the walls were steep and smooth. She went there every now and then, daring to sit on the slanted cement bank, legs splayed out toward the water. She imagined the drowned family, passing by like figures frozen in the thick amber sap of the water, twisting and tumbling past the saguaro and chaparral toward the faraway sea. They would look like they were sleeping, she imagined. Like I was seeing into their dreams, the nightmare of their family drowning.

NO ONE will understand this, Dr. Ferrell was certain. The mainstream media was reporting on it now, making it real. The cities showing signs—commuter traffic dropping, two out of five employees missing work, hospitals filling up and first responders unable to respond. Numbers and trends, but no explanations. He turned off the TV and glanced at his wife, who appeared to sleep at his side.

The reasons, the source. No one understands the economy, or the climate either. If we’ve learned anything it’s that we are in the dark. Come to think of it, maybe it’s the dark matter. Makes up most of the universe and we can’t even see it. Maybe that vast reservoir of dreams has been depleted.

IN THE posted video Lila found online, someone is rolling with a camcorder, filming a man with a chain saw. He revs it and the sound is too loud for the camera mike, causing it to distort. Then he starts sawing at a tree. The camera pans up and you can see a woman stirring high in the branches. Other people gather around. They look and sound like neighbors, but they are yelling angrily at the woman in the tree, shaking their fists. Even throwing things up at her. It sounds like Russian, or Polish. Lila can’t tell. The woman is screaming down at the man, clearly begging him to stop. But he doesn’t and the tree starts leaning, then falls with a loud cracking and moan, shuddering on impact with the ground. The woman comes down with it but the camera can’t find her on the ground, in the branches of the fallen tree. Someone titled the video: Insomniacs Kill Woman Sleeping in Tree .