Black Moon (14 page)

“You need more rest,” she said.

He laughed, but this time there was nothing cynical about it.

They sat, staring at each other.

“So it really is a song that you sing?” Biggs asked.

Maria nodded.

“When did you discover what it could do, this song of yours?”

“Right when I learned it. I could make my father sleep, before he hurt my mother. That’s why she taught me the song—to protect us.”

“Oh,” Biggs said. He looked at Maria and saw that a dark memory now moved through her. She looked through him at some ghostly scene.

“I want to hear it,” Biggs said. “Please sing it.”

His voice brought her back. Her eyes focused on him. “But you can already sleep.”

Biggs smiled. “Hey, I paid for it.”

“You should get your money back.”

“If this really works, you could be the key to stopping this whole thing.”

She moved toward him, gently pushing him back until his head found the pillow. “You could be too.”

Biggs thought about this, looking up at her. “The difference is that I can’t help others. It’s contained inside me. It—”

He was cut off by a voice at the door calling for Maria. “Hey, let’s go. People are fucking waiting,” the voice rasped. It was the Indian with the pistol, Biggs could tell.

“Are you a prisoner here?” he asked.

“No.”

“So you can leave?”

“Where would I go?”

“Anywhere you want,” Biggs told her. “If this thing works, you should be the one calling the shots.”

She shook her head and shushed him. He could see that she was fearful, that she hadn’t allowed herself to go down that path.

Then her hand was warm on his forehead. She slowly brought
it down over his eyes as she leaned in, so close that he could feel her breath on his cheek. Then she began to sing. Biggs braced himself, trying to open himself to suggestion. It had to work like hypnosis, he figured. Or some kind of frequency thing.

The words she sang were not English. He was not even sure they were words. They were soft sounds, smooth vowels, candle-melt. Eroded stone. The consonants were like footsteps in the snow, hands tunneling in wet sand. The melody was weirdly complicated and difficult. Not exactly appealing, because it didn’t seem to follow any musical rules, like key or count. But she eased it gently into his ear, pushing it with a warm wind. He felt the warmth move into him and spread over his mind, bringing slow pulses of color—purple and blue washes, undulating streaks of cool neon dancing under his eyelids like an aurora.

Then he woke up and got to his feet.

Then he was untying Carolyn from the chair. She slumped into his arms. He lifted her and carried her to their bed. He could feel the weight of the sleep in her, like a soaked sponge. She was so heavy with it he feared the bed would break and she would crash through the floor and continue falling, onward into a glowing abyss. But he was able to lower her onto the mattress, which she sank comfortably into, nestled. He put a comforter over her and lifted her head for a pillow. The movement caused her to slowly open her eyes.

“Go back,” he told her.

She focused on him and smiled. “You’re tired,” she said.

He nodded and they studied each other. He worried she would notice the missing ring. It was better, he decided, to show her rather than try to hide it. He held up his hand, only to discover that the battered ring was there. He looked at it, confused.

She smiled knowingly.

“I’m glad you never had it repaired,” she said. “It was made more perfect by damage.”

He struggled to make sense of the ring’s return. “Did you do this,” he asked, “between the frames?”

“If you say so, my love. You’re the dreamer.”

THEN JORIE WAS STANDING IN THE DOORWAY
holding the baby, bouncing him lightly on her shoulder, trying to get him to sleep. She was wearing her fuzzy pink robe and athletic socks and her hair burst forth in every direction. The old floor creaked under her feet. Adam was watching from the musty nursing chair by the window. The baby was murmuring into his wife’s terry cloth shoulder. He heard the baby say, “Don’t answer that. It’s undoubtedly those telemarketers again.”

This struck Adam as a very odd thing to say since the phone wasn’t ringing.

THEN
Jorie was in bed next to Adam causing a commotion. Adam had his back to her. He must have had microsleep. That’s the term they had learned on the radio. Experts said it would happen. Jorie was pushing and kneeing at his back. Was she trying to change the sheets without asking him to leave the bed? He felt he would never leave the bed. It was difficult to even imagine standing, walking about. The bed was now their white place of perpetual torment, a starchy pressure at their backs.

“Baby,” he said calmly, “you’ll never get to sleep going at it that way.” She hadn’t slept for five days. When she didn’t respond, only whimpered, he sat up to find her frantically searching the blankets. He assumed that she had lost her wedding
ring. He said, “Do you remember when it was our thinking that we had lost it up at that rest stop in the redwoods and we drove back down the map half a day’s distance to dig through the trash with our hands and no gloves on them? We gave up and went on in our car up and up into the north and then it dropped in your lap from the map when you unfolded it to see what was that lake.”

“The baby,” she said, turning on him savagely. “I can’t find the baby that is ours!”

THEN
Adam was on the couch with the baby like a dense beanbag on his chest. There was pale light coming in through the window. His hand rested lightly on the baby’s warm back, patting lightly on the little drum of tiny human torso. He was ashamed to find himself praying now, after all those years of silence. It’s not like I’m asking to have anything done for me, he insisted to no one.

THEN
she was pregnant with the baby again. She knew that he was sitting right in the booster seat of her belly. How odd to know his face and fingers and toes, his tiny little fleshy hinges of wrists and ankles, and the feel of his hot little mouth pulling at her breast. All this before he is born again. She could not see over the mountain of her belly where Adam was holding the baby in the nursing chair. She could not move with the baby like a boulder in her middle. She felt confused and grounded at the same time. That was why, she recognized. Because everything is happening now
at the same time
. The mechanism that puts one minute after another has broken so that now it’s just forever in all directions at once.

THEN
Jorie found the baby on the floor, between the sofa and the armchair, alive with battery-operated movement and a clear plastic mask on its face.

THEN
she went into the nursery to check on the baby. The nightlight projected an aquatic glow over the walls. She peered into the crib, careful not to wake her sleeping son. She did not know if other newborns could sleep at this point, nor would she let it be known that their baby was still doing it several times a day. The insomnia epidemic had made people hungry for sleep and, in their starved state, capable of anything. They were always standing in the corner of her eye, until she looked at them directly and they vanished. She believed they would consume any vessel in which sleep was found, hoping to absorb the ability. Yes, she believed they would eat her baby.

The baby heard her think this and started to cry.

THEN
Adam came out of the bathroom empty-handed, with the toilet gurgling behind him. She asked him, “Is the baby something you have?” He went back in and came out with the baby wriggling and squawking in his hands. “Oh my god, Adam,” she shouted. “That you cannot be doing!”

He wept and said, “Forgive this from me because my deficit is red.”

THEN
sometimes she had the baby or knew where the baby was and sometimes he had the baby or knew where the baby was.
Then the baby was sometimes perched on them, driving them like oxen, using a hard yoke of emotion. Then, sometimes, more and more often, neither of them had the baby or knew where the baby was.

THEN
the baby turned up in Adam’s sock drawer. It had learned how to meow. Adam closed the drawer, but not all the way. It occurred to him that it was better to hide the baby from the two of them, since he now realized he would trade the baby for sleep without much hesitation.

Would he trade the baby for a year of sleep? Yes. Would he trade it for a week? Yes. Would he trade it for a day? Maybe, after all, he did not know the baby all that well. They had only met a few weeks ago. It’s not like they went way back. And babies didn’t have the value they did before. Just a month ago, they were so treasured. People would go to great lengths to get one. Look at Matt and Carolyn. They were desperate. Poor Carolyn. A complicated person, Jorie once said about her.

Something must be complicated about her because the way to get a baby was not at all complicated since all he and Jorie did was fuck a few times and they got one. Carolyn’s insides must be a labyrinth. Put two bodies next to each other and it practically happens on its own. Cock rises and plunges. Stuff comes out. They could make another one anytime they wanted, even in the shower or the car or the kitchen. “We could give the baby to Matt and Carolyn and live off the ground six floors up for a trade,” he said to Jorie when she may or may not have been in the room. Some shadow was there.

The city is where help will come, they believed. And it was less dangerous because the law dries up away from cities first like
a puddle evaporating along its edges. The law was almost vapor just a few miles out at this point.

But Matt had said no, it’s too dangerous.

“It’s because the baby will upset Carolyn,” Jorie had said sadly, when Adam got off the phone with his brother. “And when this ends and our lives come loping back like a lost dog we tried to ditch in the woods she won’t talk to us.”

THEN
Jorie wanted to know what the officers had brought that would turn off their heads for a while, knock them out and let the aching in their bones move one way or another off an unreachable place.

The police couple was sorry but they had brought nothing. “That’s because there is nothing,” they said.

Adam stood up, the chair falling back behind him, and snapped into a rage. He fell to the ground and bit at the table legs. “You have sleeping in you, the way you talk and your eyes are telling me so fucking obviously so!”

THEN
the baby told Adam a bedtime story into his chest. The words went through the sieve of skin and bone, leaving behind a pool of drool. The baby said, “Even though you had heard reports of the giant sparrow, you brought me to a certain park in the carriage. You and mother had a picnic when the bird came down from the black trees and landed on the handlebar of the stroller. Its weight—because it was the size of a dodo—caused the stroller to spill forward and I flew into the bird’s beak. I was wailing into the sparrow’s dry tongue, which smelled like fresh mud. The beak was locked down on me, solid as furniture,
and in a tumble and roll, with flapping like an umbrella opening again and again, we were aloft. Your shouts and Mother’s screams were muffled and growing distant but not gone. It took me up into the trees where it perched and tipped back its head, working me into the tight suitcase of its gullet. It was like being born into darkness. You and Mother hunted for us in the trees with your eyes, but the bird had roosted in the girding under a bridge, tucking its head under a wing. I was inside, refusing to be digested. I knew what to do since the bird, on the inside, was not unlike Mother. I introduced a maddening nursery rhyme into the bird’s tiny brain, preventing it from sleeping. Deprived of food and sleep, the bird became very susceptible and it was then that I began a campaign of unreasonable suggestions. When the bird was weakened and the belts and tethers of its dark interior had gone slack, I assumed the role of pilot and puppeteer. I pulled sinews from the weave of the fleshy fabric and, using nubs of bone from digested animals as spools, built an array of pulleys that controlled the bird’s every move, even after it had died. At the time, you knew nothing of this. The police couple that came to investigate were outraged by your claims. You were alternately persons of interest, then suspects. They separated you and lied about what the other had said. But you and Mother held firm, when not quaking with grief. You were with the police in the park with their cadaver dogs when the bird appeared above you, flying with the jerky movement of a marionette. I landed it in the grass with a tumble. The skin, which was now as dry as paper, tore upon impact and I tumbled out, little fists curled around the bone handles and levers I had devised. Mother scooped me up and attacked the remains of the bird with her boots, until I made it clear to her that the animal had died a long time ago.”