Kenneth Calhoun: Black Moon

BIGGS RAN IN BURSTS DOWN THE STREET, wanting to move quickly but without attracting attention. These dark blocks between their building and the ransacked drugstore were sketchy. He moved through the cold corridor of shade, relieved to find the streets empty, except for a few figures, stumbling in the distance like drunks. At the intersection, abandoned cars were stalled in a mad jumble and he had to squeeze through the gaps, pressed against the cool barriers of automotive gloss.

Shops were shuttered. Many had been looted—windows smashed, the shelves inside empty. The sidewalk was gritty with glass shards and spotted with ancient stains of chewing gum. A great splatter of DNA, blackened with urban grime.

He could hear distant wailing and the occasional shout or scream from the offices and apartments above. Protruding from one window five floors up, he saw an elderly man leaning far out over the street, teetering on the brink, his thin arms extended toward the sky. Beyond him, a few floors higher, someone was throwing fistfuls of paper from an open window. The sheets drifted and turned like leaves in the air funneling between the buildings.

Biggs crossed to the other side to avoid a stoop where, earlier, he had seen dogs tearing at an unidentifiable carcass—white bone shining through the marbled meat. He ducked down an alley. At the far end, a large woman in a Lakers jersey paced while shouting into her cell phone. “A lawsuit isn’t wanted by you at all believe me very fucking much,” she warned, jowls quivering.

When Biggs neared, he could see that she wasn’t holding a phone. Even if she had one in hand, a phone call was an impossible feat. The sky was now without signals, the web of fibers dead in the earth. Networks expiring without sound human minds needed to maintain them.

The woman tracked Biggs with her bleary eyes as he shuffled past. “Wait one,” she said into her palm. “Some asshole here like a rat.”

Half a block ahead, a flat-screen TV exploded on the pavement—tossed from several stories up. It fell like an obsidian slate, a tile of nighttime sky. He felt the impact in his teeth, the shatter in his chest.

A storm was gathering behind dark windows and closed doors. It could spill out into the streets at any moment. He jogged two blocks, keeping to the middle of the street, before slowing to a walk.

He could see the ruins of the drugstore now, on the other side of the park.

HIS WIFE, Carolyn, was in bad shape. What was it now, six days? Almost a week without even a nod, her head always pedaling in place. She radiated exhaustion: a dying star. Soon what—a black hole?

Biggs had to take some kind of action but, before he did anything, he needed to clear his own head. In the effort to convince her that he too had succumbed to sleeplessness, he had deprived himself of any significant downtime. He had a plan that involved pills and some showmanship, but first some quick sleep out of view was necessary. He went into the park and looked around before pushing into the shrubbery. They used to picnic here, blanket spread on the lawn. Carolyn rolling up her sleeves to get some sun on her shoulders. In the thicket, he found the place where, only two days earlier, he had created a nest of twigs and grass. Curling up inside, it wasn’t long before his thoughts took on the lawlessness of sleep. Images and ideas now drifted, unmoored by reason. A heavier sleep soon fell over him like a rug and he saw nothing.

Two hours later, he had a dream: Carolyn shining light into his eyes from clusters of crystalline fractals she cradled in her hands. He returned to the slowly imploding world, blinking at shards of the sun through the weave of saplings.

He sat up, both astonished and relieved. Something inside him continued to hold firm. I still sleep. And dream.

BIGGS believed that Carolyn, and perhaps millions of others, were responding to the epidemic psychosomatically. He held a desperate hope to cure her with a good story and nothing more than some aspirin, or maybe even some kind of generic-looking vitamin. Whatever. As long as Carolyn couldn’t identify it. The pill had to be an empty vessel that she could fill with the medicine of her mind.

He was banking on the climate of heightened susceptibility. The sleepless, in their total exhaustion, quickly lost their ability to distinguish fact from fiction. The unguarded gate in their heads was now propped wide open to suggestion and persuasion. It was a great time for storytellers, he thought, for magicians and, of course, advertisers—his abandoned trade. It was the ideal era for placebos: well-intended, white lies that produce truth in spite of themselves.

He made his way into the pharmacy. Only ten days earlier, a mob had formed in front of it demanding sleeping pills. They broke in, heaving a motorcycle through the window, and overpowered the few unfortunate employees that had reported for duty. They looted until the police arrived, some naked and others bristling with guns and knives. They chased off the mob. Then it was this tribe of cops themselves who shot out the surveillance cameras and aisle mirrors before snorting crushed pills off the floor and chugging cough syrups.

Biggs stepped through the jagged window frame into the dim cavern of ransacked space. The hall, stripped of its commercial order, was chilling in its silence and disarray. Pills and glass crunched underfoot. There were others there in the poor lighting, picking through the shelves, throwing unwanted items on the floor. He could hear them mumbling, an occasional cough. He avoided them, negotiating the aisles like a maze. In the darkness, he almost tripped over an elderly woman crawling on the cluttered tiles. She grabbed at his pants suddenly, startling him.

He swore and jerked himself free.

“I’m looking and needing for tea,” she said from the floor. “Can you point me to the tea in the packets?”

“It’s all gone,” Biggs said, annoyed.

“They threw it in the harbor is that what they did to gone it?”

“Yeah, that’s what they did to gone it,” Biggs said, stepping around her like a snake in the path.

He continued toward the back of the store. He had been here many times before, for the usual items and, at least five times, for pregnancy tests. The shelves were empty but the floor was littered with capsules and tablets. He picked through the empty plastic jars and smashed boxes. The ground was fluffy with the cotton stuffing, remnants of snowfall in the dimness. He knelt and picked out a handful of pills. They sat in his palm like baby teeth. He carried them outside and quickly crossed to the sunny side of the street, like a kid who just made a grab in a candy store. Opening his fist, he saw that the pills were a variety of shapes and colors.

Some say this is what started it, he noted. All these drugs we take. These could be the seeds to our apocalypse. In his agency days, he had worked on a few pharmaceutical accounts, where the notions of truth and fact were never more elastic. Studies show. Ha.

God only knows what’s in this stuff.

He picked out five simple white pills—generic aspirin with no discernible branding—and put them in his left pocket. He shoved the rest into his right, thinking they could come in handy. You never know.