Black Moon (18 page)

Some were subtle, but telling, mix-ups, such as when Porter addressed her as Felina. In his confusion, a tech named Miles called her Terry—the name of his sister, she knew. She gently corrected him as she nursed a cut on his nose, after he had walked into one of the glass doors. He peered into her face as if trying to make sense of the details.

When her friend Francine emerged naked from her room, Felicia took her by the arm and reversed her course. Francine called her Mommy as she helped her step into a skirt. They both laughed about it, before Francine collapsed into sobs.

She had taken to cooking the food after Claudio, their cook, nearly burned down the center after attempting to cook a pot of rags, which he believed to be salted cod fillets. By helming each meal, providing the small crowd of delusional diners with plates of pasta and hunks of bread, or salads made from whatever vegetables were foraged from the grad student apartment gardens, she secured her place as the small community’s mothering presence. An odd position given that she was, in fact, the youngest resident.

They were drawn to her not only because she was still mentally sound, at least comparatively, but also because many assumed she had the inside scoop on the doctors, particularly Lee. Even before the phenomenon, many believed that she and Dr. Lee were having an affair, regardless of her vigorous denials. Yes, there was some small measure of smoke, but no fire. She was a student, after all, and Lee carried himself with a relentlessly uptight professionalism. If he had been harboring any interest, let alone something resembling desire, she had seen little evidence. Maybe a lingering gaze, a hint of uncharacteristic warmth, but nothing more. Her friends claimed he treated her differently.

Whether or not they were intimate, they insisted, surely she must know what the doctors were up to, since she was around them so much. Assisting with their procedures and lab work, privy to their schemes. They can sleep, some insisted. “They cooked up a cure that they’re keeping to themselves,” Davis, a security officer, proclaimed. “They’re just letting the rest of us fall apart so they can study what happens to us. Pretty soon they’ll
start giving us God-knows-what and say it’s a cure and we’ll grow fucking asparagus out of our foreheads.”

With increasing frequency, she felt compelled to defend the doctors. “Look at them. They’re suffering just like us,” she told them. “They want a cure just as badly as everyone else.” It wasn’t hard to quell their suspicions, since sleeplessness had made her fellow residents unusually open to suggestion. The fact that she was already held in high regard, mostly due to her ongoing attempts to care for them as they unraveled, gave more weight to her appeal for reason.

“They’re trying to fix this,” she would tell them.

And, at least for now, they would believe her.

THOUGH
she no longer slept, she retreated to bed out of habit. She was fortunate to have her own room, assigned when Kitov urged everyone—those who hadn’t already fled to their families—to stay. It was his promise of a cure that held her. She could very well be in the right place at the right time, she told her parents during their last phone call. She would come for them when it was clear they could be helped. But that moment had yet to arrive, and she could feel the margin of possibility rapidly narrowing. The tide of sleeplessness was advancing, consuming all the sand castles of coherency and logic as it crept forward. Even now, sitting on her bed, she sensed dark figures standing in the periphery of her vision. They seemed to be watchers from another dimension, now somehow visible due to a tear in the veil. Always present unless looked at directly, pressing in on her.

She quickly turned her head, hoping to catch a glimpse of her observers before they slipped behind the blind of dark matter, and was startled to find Dr. Lee standing in her room instead.
He looked terrible, with heavy bags under his eyes, a washed-out complexion. His cheeks and chin were peppered with stubble and his black hair was uncharacteristically tousled. He persisted in wearing his white smock, though it was unbuttoned to reveal a T-shirt and olive cargo pants. He was falling apart just like everyone else, yet he continued to make his self-imposed rounds.

“Hanging in there?” he asked.

She stared at him, her heavy eyelids slowly dropping, then snapping wide open. She nodded, afraid to speak, not wanting to reveal the distance she had descended by providing a sample of eroded language.

“Do this,” he said. He performed a minor feat with his fingers, a roadside sobriety test that he had asked her to do before. Counting one through four and back again as he touched each finger to his thumb. He had no trouble with it. Maybe the others are right, she considered. Maybe the doctors had come up with an effective cocktail of serotonin and glycerin and they were keeping it for themselves. A part of her hoped this was true. Maybe they were just testing it before going public.

She did as he asked, running through the drill, fingertips to thumb. She was relieved to see—as if watching from outside herself—that she did it well despite her burden of exhaustion. Lee was pleased too, faintly nodding encouragement. He took her by the wrist and she felt the spark of his touch. She couldn’t tell if he was taking her pulse or finally making some kind of pass at her.

Now he was looking intently into her eyes, leaning forward.

Here it comes—the kiss that she had been told was inevitable. Or had she? She suspected she was having a false memory. Remembering a dream, maybe, as though it were real.

“Settle down. He’s just checking your eyes,” Chase said. “The dilation.”

She turned her head to the right, where her former boyfriend’s voice hung in the air. But Dr. Lee reached up and gently nudged her chin so that she was looking at him again. He pushed in close, his breath on her lips. She waited. Nothing. It appeared that he was indeed checking her eyes, the dilation.

“You’re not so bad,” Lee said. “Probably still of all them the best.”

There it was. The messed-up syntax.

He quickly corrected himself: “The best of all of them, I meant.”

As if he had heard her thoughts.

“We’re going to need your help,” he said.

“What with?” she dared to say, when he stood back and stared for a long silent moment, blinking and swaying slightly on his feet.

“The procedure. With Kitov. He is insisting on it for the implant. That it’s him.”

She understood. The old man was going to go under the knife—or actually the drill—first. There had been talk of this. Some thought it was a brave and noble thing to do, given that it was untested. Others thought it was like the captain of a sinking liner being first into the lifeboat. It was hard to tell how Kitov saw it. He seemed capable of both motivations, possibly at the same time.

“When?”

“Tomorrow at eleven. Get some rest.”

She could not tell if this was meant to be a joke.

SHE
had gotten in the habit of watching the sunrise from the deck. Though, looking west, what she saw was the flat plain of the leaden ocean slowly separate from the sky as it took on color.
The sun rose behind her, behind the compound on the bluff and the university towers above. In the evening, it lowered itself slowly into the Pacific without a sound, igniting both sea and sky with pink and orange.

When they first arrived at the university, she and Chase had become participants in a daily ritual, sometimes driving down from the school and joining others who parked along the coastal roads at dusk. It delighted these two inland kids—refugees from the smoggy suburbs—that the locals would do this: gather at the edge of the earth, go still and quiet to watch the sun die its daily death. They would witness it together, everyone sitting in the padded pews of their cars. Then, as if a service had ended, turn their ignitions, check their rearviews, and drive off into their lives.

“It
is
religious,” she had once said.

“It’s better,” Chase responded, though minutes later, after driving in silence back up the bluff and into the dorm parking lot. She recalled sensing his growing disdain for the place. It had killed her that she was partly responsible for his increasing detachment at school. But there were forces, like the shifting plates of the earth, pulling them apart, however typical and predictable: his need for insulation and control, her desire to have new experiences, to live beyond their plastic past. There were other problems. His—she didn’t know what to call it—sexual hang-ups? She could so easily recall the dark weight of him in the bed next to her, sinking deeper into shame as his body failed him yet again. “You don’t understand,” he said in the darkness, “how much I want you in here.” She heard the thud of his fist against his bare chest.

Where is he now? she wondered, as the sparrows in the coral trees began their dawn chorus. Last she heard from him was a voice message from Idaho. He was on his way up to Montana
with Jordan, their friend from high school, insisting that she see him on her birthday, back at her parents’ house. She had agreed, but wondered if she should have. Maybe it was best to make a clean break. Or maybe he was changing, as he said. These are the kinds of things she used to worry about. That was only a week or so before the insomnia story became the only story, before she learned that her dad hadn’t been sleeping. Before survival became everyone’s occupation.

She stood at the railing and looked down the bluff at the rocky beach below. Her eyes scanned the water’s edge and she realized she was looking for the body of an administrator—a Swede named Annika—who had thrown herself over the edge a week earlier. A refugee from the main campus, she had become increasingly distressed at being away from her homeland as the crisis escalated. As sleeplessness overwhelmed her, she began insisting that she was being held in America against her will. Her leap, Felicia assumed, was her idea of an escape.

The body had been spotted on the rocks far below. Kitov had sent out members of the security team to retrieve it. But somehow, between sealing the corpse in a body bag and returning to the center, they had lost it. Their rambling and conflicting explanations could not be sorted out, and Franklin, the security chief, refused to risk sending anyone down to search for it, fearing they wouldn’t be capable of finding their way back.

Felicia kept the black body bag in mind as she studied the shoreline. Would she, in her state of mind, be able to distinguish the bagged administrator from the seals sunning on the rocks? She became absorbed in scrutinizing the dark formations below.

BY
the time she made it to the meeting, Kitov had already announced that he would be first to have the electrodes implanted.
The procedure would take place within hours. Only a dozen people had been clearheaded enough to remember the meeting time and place. They were alternately slumped over with apathy or aggressively challenging the plan.

“Why Kitov?”

“Because the research that he is researching must be going on,” Lee explained.

Felicia winced at his delivery.

“But why take the risk of being first? Isn’t it dangerous?”

“Is not dangerous. We have planned very much,” Kitov answered.

“Why not just try it out on someone else’s brain first?” Phil, a lab tech, wanted to know. The bags under his eyes like wasp stings. “Someone more expendable why not?”

At this Kitov’s face reddened. “Who is this, this expendable someone? You would like that we just grab one of you and tie you to table and open your head?”

“Not us,” Phil said. “Someone we find. Out there.”

Kitov cast an angry glare at the tech. Only weeks ago, such a withering look would have cut like a laser through flesh and bone and triggered the tendering of resignations. Now it was met with the blank stares of people too exhausted to fear.

Porter filled the silence, saying, “There’s no time for that. Every day we wait we lose the faculty to do this kind of procedure because, in case you haven’t noticed, we’re losing our goddamn minds.”

“I am not a Mengele,” Kitov finally said, reminding everyone present that he had seen the end of the world before—that everything he knew as home had been burned to the ground when he was a boy, or stood against a wall and shot. Yet here he was, attempting to stare down yet another Armageddon.

TO
gear up for the procedure, they had been looting equipment from the university’s abandoned hospital, cobbling together an operating room in the main lab of the research facility. They were concerned about electricity, even though all the research facilities were powered by an experimental system that tapped wave movement and riptides. The turbines, which sat just under the surface among the kelp beds, were revealed every day by the receding tide. The elegant electromagnetic system had earned its inventor a Nobel Prize, even though it had never been adopted as a viable alternative energy solution anywhere beyond the research wing of the campus. Kitov had very publicly despised the late Frenchman who created the wave-powered plant and had abused his famous colleague at every opportunity. Now, as they shaved the back of his head, he joked that the plant would fail during the procedure. “This bastard Cloutier will have last laugh,” he grumbled, his words slurred.