Black Moon (23 page)

HE
felt sleep trying to arrive in his body. It was like watching a wave rolling forward, advancing on the shore, but never actually crashing. Just rolling in place, endlessly. Frustration welled inside him. This is how it had been ever since the drugs stopped working. This is how it was for the entire world—sleep hovering over, feeling as if it would drop down over you any minute but never falling. It seemed to tease, playing little presleep movies, flashes of visions, yet the full show failed to unfurl. It was like realizing that some vital part of you had been lost. Like waking up in a hospital bed without your legs, or knowing your face has been forever altered by fire or violence. You were grotesquely diminished without it. You would die without it.

He sat up, sobbing mechanically. The night intimidated him. His fearful mind conjured up the usual scenarios—people coming along, bad things happening. He had always been like that, his thoughts running dark at night. Worst-case scenarios playing out in his mind, an endless reel. His anxieties blooming.
Now that no one was sleeping, he thought, there’s no need for night.

He remembered how Felicia worked the late shift, waitressing at a coffee shop. He couldn’t bear the thought of her driving home alone and insisted on picking her up at three
A.M
. every night. He couldn’t sleep knowing she was out there. He started carrying a knife in those days, when he first fell in love. For the first time in his life, he knew he could drive a blade into someone’s chest. He fingered it in his pocket as he watched strangers attempt to flirt with her at the counter. She found it in his glove compartment while searching for a map and threw it away—literally tossed it out the window as they drove through the desert, traveling to her family reunion.

He sat on the hood of the truck, missing her. Maybe not even the real her, but the dream version of her. In waking life, it was too complicated. He was hit with flashes of scenes—their bodies moving together, that fitted connection, the heat of her. That’s the only place—inside a booth of sleep—where he could fully act upon his desire for her. He obeyed an urge to address the always-aroused part of himself, there on the hood of the trunk. The wader squeaked against the metal as he rolled it down to his knees and spat into his hand.

He finished quickly, though no resolution phase followed. His readiness persisted. It was as though he had told his cock an incredible story and it had laughed and cried, then turned to him and said, “Then what?”

LATER
he checked on the sheep and found them sleeping. The sight of them crushed together, a huddle of gray mounds in the darkness, angered him. He pounded on the side of the truck and shouted, “Wake up!”

Again, the echo.

“Fuck you!” he yelled to the other him.

It yelled back,
“You will sleep if you kill those sheep!”

He thought, “Maybe it’s Jordan messing with me.”

The animals bounded to their feet and scrambled, some trying to escape by leaping up at the racks. Kill them? No way. What they needed was a shake-up. He jumped behind the wheel and tore down the road, bouncing the sheep around the bed. They screamed like teenagers on a roller coaster, slamming against the racks, sliding face-first into the rear window when he abruptly braked. The tub flew into their thin legs, bowling them over.

He had cooled off by the time he reached the main highway, the tires quieting to a soft thrum, the ride smooth. The cries of injured and rattled animals chased him down the road. After a mile or two, he was sobbing an apology into the rearview mirror. “It’s because I can’t sleep,” he told them. “It’s because no one can sleep.”

He caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview. His jittery face, the heavy rings around his bloodshot eyes. He felt himself becoming one of the many sleepless he had encountered over the last few weeks. His outburst at the sleeping sheep was the most blatant symptom so far. He would be babbling incoherently soon, stumbling around the landscape. It was hard to say how long it would be, since he and Jordan had slept more than most, leveraging their drug stash. But rather than extend the timeline of demise, it seemed to now rush at him with a vengeance.

There was something in the road. A dark form darting from the shoulder.

He slammed on the brakes and the truck skidded and started to spin. The sheep hit the cab, a lumpy wave of heavy flesh. They moaned hoarsely. He peered into the darkness around the truck, but saw nothing.

AS
the sun rose, he found himself driving through a vast prairie. He passed two abandoned checkpoints, where hulking military vehicles crowded the gravel median. He sped through, fearing they would confiscate his animals, but there were no personnel in sight. Far to his right, he could see the tawny pattern of a pronghorn herd, speckling the broad canvas of yellowing grass. It occurred to him that this would be a good place to let the sheep graze. He could see them for miles, should they wander off. But he would try to keep them close. They’d probably just stand around in a frightened cluster, chewing on the grass. That’s what sheep do, right?

The bed needed to be cleaned out, he knew. They were probably up to their ankles in shit by now. They are shit machines.

He drove on, hoping to see a pond or creek, looking for the ideal setting. Like a homesteader, he thought. Looking for a place to put down my roots.

But the land offered no ideal spot for settlement. He decided to pull off and drive the truck onto the prairie itself, away from the highway. It was a bumpy ride but he did it very slowly. Still, the sheep complained. He winced every time the truck was rocked by the terrain and shouted an apology through the back window. “Sorry, guys! Hang in there. Just a little bit more and we’ll park.”

He kept his word, pulling to a stop at the peak of a gentle rise. It was early morning and the truck cast a long shadow. He could see the low blue wall of craggy mountains in the side mirror, far to the north. Ahead, the prairie extended to the horizon. Fat clouds floated overhead and their shadows were like dark shifting continents on the flat parchment map of land. He stepped out onto the withering grass and stood blinking in his built-in
rubber boots. The air was still and cool, carrying a hint of fall—the end of the summer without sleep. Maybe winter will freeze it out, he thought distractedly. He thought it again. Maybe winter will freeze it out.

Time to let them out.

He went to the tailgate and peered in. The animals were in bad shape. Roughed up and battered, more tightly huddled than before. In fact, he could now see, they were transformed. The many traumas of the road had caused them to collide and fuse together—a broad-backed woolly spider, conjoined torsos with many legs and heads, rib cages interlaced, spines intertwined. Some noses were bloodied, some eyes swollen shut. A few legs protruded unnaturally from the cluster. He was horrified at the sight of them as he lifted out the rear racks, then dropped the gate and backed away. My sheep, he thought tearfully. My ruined sheep!

The hatchet, he thought. I can separate them.

The sheep came forward, a globbed-together mass rushing out of the truck in a stampeding clatter, their stiltlike hooves hammering through the layer of dung. They dropped to the ground, grunting on impact, then ran off—a small, low-flying cloud. He started after them, calling, “You’ll die out here! Surviving won’t be allowed out here!”

His echo shouted back,
“See, dickhead? Now you have nothing to offer! Catch them!”

It was impossible to run in the waders. They were too heavy and stiff to allow his legs to really churn. It was like running through tar. His movements were further slowed by the dry weave of grass that clung to his ankles. A hundred yards or so into the landscape, he fell to his knees, chest heaving. The sheep ran on, down into the basin of the plain, toward the faraway
antelope. He watched them go, grasping at his hair. His face warped. His sheep gone.

They were swallowed by distance. He watched the place where they disappeared, waiting for them to reemerge.

The sun moved over him. The day passed.

At one point he yelled up at the sky, “God damn it!”

“I’m watching you,”
his echo said.
“I never sleep. My eye is always wide open.”

“So?”

“So I know.”

Eventually he stood. It was nearly dark again. His legs were sore from kneeling. He studied the distance for the sheep, but they had disappeared long ago. So he stood as the sun dropped toward the edge of the world, warming one side of his face with an orange light.

When he went to close the gate of the truck, he found that they hadn’t all abandoned him. There was one left, lying on its side on the floor. Its body was heaving, and when he leaned in, causing the bed to dip, the animal looked up at him. Two trickles of blood ran from its nose. “My sheep,” he said. “You are my sheep. My last sheep you are just one. The only sheep of the sheep of mine.”

FORTY
miles down the road, he passed a sign for a rest stop. This was funny to him. He laughed hysterically, his spittle flecking the windshield. Rest! So ha-ha-ha! He called the sign to the attention of his sheep, though it lay curled below his limited sight line in the back of the truck. “It doesn’t happen anymore for us humans,” he tried to explain over his shoulder, his laughter dissolving into a dry coughing fit. The sight of so many vehicles
gleaming in the parking lot surprised him. Maybe they really were, he thought. Maybe it was where rest was really happening of all places on the planet.

He took the rest stop exit and rolled into the heart of an insomniac carnival. The scene was charged with manic energy: cars, trucks, and buses crowded tightly together, people roaming among the picnic areas and restroom structures, shouting, gesticulating insanely. Intoxicated by exhaustion or maybe something else: there were many semi trucks in the crammed lot that had clearly been looted, and at least one bore the logo of a beer manufacturer. Wide-open trailer doors revealed empty cargo holds, the ground littered with loose pallets and flattened cardboard. Colorful shreds of product packaging tumbled by, carried along by a steady wind. All of it the larval stages of a landfill.

The rest stop was ringed by a wide lawn, where the prairie had been routinely mowed close. People had already dug in, setting up a shantytown of makeshift lean-tos and campsites. Some had tents and canopies, while others had fashioned structures out of boxes and other items apparently from the looted trucks, including office furniture and inflatable rafts. Beyond this improvised residential zone, the prairie extended across the broad plain. Chase could see faraway figures wandering the expanse.

The lot was congested, cars closing off all but a narrow artery of pavement that unevenly parted the jumble of parked vehicles. As he struggled in his sleepless state to navigate through, the truck lurching and stopping, a couple of men who had been standing off to one side began to follow him. Slack-jawed, with heavy-lidded eyes, they kept pace, staring into the bed. He sped up and found himself facing another barricade. This time, his way was blocked by the many cars that had been driven down this narrow passage before him into a dead end and abandoned.
All a trap! He threw the truck into reverse, badly grinding the gears.

Driving backward, however, proved to be beyond his present capabilities. His foot was too heavy on the pedal, his hand-eye coordination out of sync. He smacked into a parked car, the back end of the truck biting into the hood. The impact whipped his head back and left the truck sitting on an angle in the tight lane, wedged in on both sides and stalled. The sheep was silent, but he felt its distress and went to it, leaping out the door and climbing into the befouled bed. His foot hung up on the rack and he fell forward, face grinding into the piss and droppings that gathered in the grooved floor of the truck bed. The animal, crammed on its side in the corner of the bed, did not raise its head. It watched with heavy-lidded eyes as Chase sat up on his knees in the waders, spitting frantically, wiping at his face. He edged toward the creature, which appeared to be paralyzed, and pressed his hand into its warm back. Still, it did not lift its head or scramble to its feet. He patted the sheep and dust rose out of the fleece.

“Looks like you got something to give for all this wrecking you did,” someone said. There were several people now, gathered around the truck. They looked through the bars of the side racks: Chase caged, along with his sheep.

“Get away,” Chase said.

“That’s pretty good those kinds of animals once you take the fur off,” someone said, “if you can find the zipper.” It was one of the men, Chase could see, who had followed the truck as he drove in. He glared at the onlookers. All of them sleepless.

“And cook it with some fire, you have to do that to it,” someone said.

A large woman, who reached in with her heavy arm, said, “You give us that animal because it’s the way it works around
here especially after you crashed up this person’s car so now its all crunked up.”

“Not going to happen,” Chase said, throwing himself over the sheep. He kicked at the woman’s arm and held the sheep tightly under him, but rose when he heard them fumbling with the gate. He scooped up the filth from the bed with both hands and flung it in their direction. He did it again, splattering those pushing in for a look. They backed away in disgust, cursing at him. “You don’t want this sheep,” he yelled. “This sheep is toxic! You can see that this sheep is toxic!”