Black Moon (31 page)

“Sometimes it’s like that,” she had told Lila. “Just warning you.”

Lila couldn’t help trying to wake her, to see if all this was true. First she tickled Felicia’s feet. Nothing happened and it was kind of creepy, like tickling a dead person. So Lila stepped up her efforts and pinched Felicia on her bare thigh. When there was no response, Lila remembered that the best place to pinch someone is on the back of the arms, especially toward the top. That’s where that total idiot Dylan used to pinch her during class, so that she would scream right in the middle of a quiz. But it did nothing for Felicia, who remained firmly unconscious.

Lila picked up her arm, lifting it high, then dropped it, and the arm actually bounced on the mattress: boing boing. She did it again, then picked up Felicia’s hand and cradled it in hers. It was warm and clean. They had both washed up before bed. Lila studied it under her light. It was the cleanest hand Lila had seen in a long time. No dirt under the nails and such soft palms. Her lifeline was long. When Lila curled it up into a fist to produce love lines, she could see that Felicia would have one true love.

Lila opened Felicia’s hand and lightly tickled the palm, watching Felicia’s smooth eyelids for any sign. “Tickle tickle tickle,” she said softly. Nothing.

She held the hand in her lap and suddenly very strongly wanted to feel it against her face, but to do that she would have to take off her mask. This gave her pause. She had been wearing
the owl’s head for almost a month now, only removing it when she was alone, maybe when sleeping in the dark tunnels of the flood control channels, but sometimes keeping it on even then, thinking there could be rats that would try to nest in her hair or eat her tongue.

She slowly lifted the mask off her head, vowing not to fall asleep before putting it back on, just in case. It was always hot in the mask and feeling cooler air on her face was one of Lila’s few remaining pleasures. It was like standing by the doors of a mall in the desert. With the mask on the floor at her side, she combed the sweat-damp hair off her forehead, tucking her long bangs behind her ears. The wound on her scalp had mostly healed but she now avoided touching the area out of habit.

She scooped up Felicia’s hand as if it were a small pet, a kitten maybe, and brought it to her face. She put her cheek against the back of it, then turned it over and rested her chin in the warm palm. This, the light touch of another, caused a wave of warmth inside. Her throat tightened with emotion. Lila buried her face in the open palm, inhaling deeply, and closed her eyes as she moved the hand against her cheek, then bowed her head as she used it to stroke her hair. She felt it as a caress even though she was acting as the gesture’s puppeteer. She performed a tenderness that she had assumed no longer existed in the world. Her chin quivered and her eyes stung so she squeezed them tightly shut. “No tears now,” she told herself.

She brought Felicia’s hand to her lips and kissed, pressing hard. The last person to kiss her had been her mother, desperately begging for Lila’s forgiveness. Both of them a mess, their tears mixed together as her mother covered her face with kisses. The memory stabbed at Lila, triggering charged images: her mother and father chaining themselves to the piano, her father grabbing for her under the car, spitting threats. She pressed her
lips harder into Felicia’s hand and tried to think back to earlier times, when they had no clue about what was coming.

The memories scrolled before her eyes. Lying in the backseat of the car as they traveled into the mountains, the sun signaling to her through the trees. The three of them in bed on Saturday morning, listening to her father’s stories about all the weird stuff he saw during his residency—the man who thought his own hand wanted to kill him; the boy who couldn’t feel pain. Now, sitting in the darkness, she imitated the way her mother whispered at cats. She listened, hoping to hear her mother playing the piano downstairs or her father singing in the shower. In the morning, they would go to the coffee place in the bookstore, where they would read entire books and she would steal sips of espresso and chai lattes from her dad’s blue cup and gnaw on biscotti. They would have lunch in the diner, playing old songs on the jukebox.

These scenes had the power to both comfort and sadden her. It all depended on her state of mind. At the moment she was feeling hopeful, so the memories brightened her. Felicia, appearing out of nowhere, had brought that hope. Felicia could sleep, more or less, and there were others who could do it too. There was some kind of hospital—a center, she called it—where they lived at a university overlooking the ocean. All of them with implants that put them to sleep at night and woke them in the mornings.

Felicia had promised to take her there.

As soon as she found her own parents she could take them to the center, too. That was Felicia’s goal.

Lila looked at her new companion with pity. Even though she was probably five years younger than Felicia, she felt smarter about what was out here in these dark, hollow houses. Felicia, she knew, would only find bad things in her parents’ home or nothing at all. Her own home was waiting in the desert with
horrors inside. She would never go there, never open that door again. But sometimes, when her mood was darkened by hunger and fear, she couldn’t help imagining it. They would be in bed, she believed. Her mother and her father. They would look like they were sleeping—sleeping! But they wouldn’t be jolting to life at seven in the morning or any hour to come. They had fixed themselves forever.

She curled up against Felicia and hugged her warm body. She told her, “It’ll be okay. I mean, look at me. I’m fine. It hasn’t stopped me and it won’t stop you, I can tell. Everyone is an orphan now.”

As she reached around Felicia to pull her even closer, she felt something hard near Felicia’s armpit. The hint of machine. She drew back. Slowly her hand returned to the spot. She pressed at the area, determining that the thing there—like a battery cover on a toy animal—was about two inches in diameter. She wanted to see it but didn’t think she should. It would mean opening Felicia’s shirt.

Fifteen minutes ticked by as they lay side by side in the dark, Lila’s curiosity growing. It’s not a big deal, she decided. They were practically family, even though they had only known each other for a day—sisters in sleep.

She sat up abruptly, aiming the light as she undid the buttons and peeled back Felicia’s shirt. Then she moved to Felicia’s other side. She aimed the light at the place where the pulse generator sat under Felicia’s skin. There was nothing much to see. Just a raised area, as though a disk had been slid under there. She reached out and felt it, her fingers circling the ridge along the device’s edge. Then she pressed her palm over it. She was sure she felt a very faint vibration, an almost feathery buzz.

She returned Felicia’s body to its original pose and retreated to her own mattress by the wall. She studied the scene, shining
the light around the room. Everything looked right except for the giant owl head sitting on the ground, eyes staring back at her. Eyes always open. She crawled to the edge of her mattress and leaned over Felicia’s legs to grab it. Like a deep-sea diver suiting up for a submersion, she lowered the mask over her head. The mesh texture of the eyeholes came down between her and the world, breaking it up into a mosaic of tiles.

She snapped off the light and lay back, the smell of her own sweat and mildew crowding in as she looked on, waiting for sleep.

She was tired. But sleep stayed away.

An hour later, her mind churned inside the globe of fake feathers, trying to understand why she was still awake. When she shut her eyes, she saw a rapid pulsing against her eyelids. A dizzying strobe that beat faster than her heart and seemed to be fueled by some incessant whirring, like the blades of a fan spinning before a shaft of sunlight. She found it more comfortable to keep her eyes open. She watched the moon sail slowly across the frame of window and began marking off its progress against the rooftops of neighboring houses. The olive tree branches wavered in the wind that had arrived from the high desert—a Santa Ana. She sighted up the thin trunk, declaring it the finish line. By the time the moon crosses it, I’ll be deep asleep.

When it did, and she was still staring into the darkness, she moved on to the next landmark: a darkened lamppost.

She tried to put herself in a receptive state, tamping down her worries by telling herself that she was just excited. She had been found, rescued! That’s what has gotten her so hyper. Just quiet down inside and it will happen like it always happens. A drowsiness creeping in, then flashes of images, little scenes that are like bursts of speed down a runway, trying to lift off the ground. Just let that happen. Think about something on purpose until the thinking continues on its own. She thought about flying a kite.

Hey, she realized, it’s working. I’m not thinking about sleep.

Then, of course, she was.

Daring a glance out the window, she could see that the moon had passed the lamppost. Oh, man. This isn’t good.

She sat up and felt the first jolt of panic, a terror freeze. Why? Why would it happen now? It wasn’t because she had broken her routine or abandoned a good sleeping place. This was the most comfortable setting she had chosen for sleep in weeks. It was a bedroom, after all. A place for sleeping. So much better for slumber than the drainage tunnel, webbed in with trip wires. She was actually lying on a mattress, not cardboard or a pile of dead people’s clothes. So what was the problem?

Maybe it was the power bars. Some of them were energy bars. Or maybe it was just eating so much. Usually she was hungry at night. Maybe her body just wasn’t used to
not
feeling hungry. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was the mattress, since she wasn’t used to such a soft place to sleep, but maybe it was the power bars. Who knows what they put in them to give you energy. She recalled her mother saying, as they first started hearing about the crisis, that it was all those energy drinks and energy bars and energy pills people were taking. “Everyone is so goddamn energized,” she had said, and they all laughed, because no one thought that everything would happen the way it did.

She lay awake trying to control her thinking, focusing on her surroundings as she searched for a clue, still certain that sleep would eventually come. She thought, Maybe I should try to make myself throw up those power bars. But maybe it was too late, and maybe it wasn’t them anyway. Maybe it was the air in the room. It was pretty stuffy. She was hot in the mask, so maybe she should take it off. But it would be strange at this point not to sleep with the mask on. She had gotten so used to it. Maybe it was the season changing, from summer to fall. Maybe it was
the air in the room. Maybe it was the excitement about finding Felicia. Maybe it was just having a new friend. A friend, period. Someone like a sister. Maybe I’m asleep now, she thought.

She heard the tinkling of a wind chime.

Not the one she had hung on the doorknob as an alarm, but farther away, turning in the wind. A clear, sparkling sound. Metal chimes, not glass, not bamboo. Lately, she had started collecting them for her bag of noisy things. She sat up, listening to the chimes as they sang out in the darkness, coaxed into raucous arias by sudden gusts.

She needed it, she decided. If they were going to walk out of here, maybe all the way to the coast, they would need all the bells and whistles they could find. Outside, the wind was building in strength, pushing against the house, causing it to creak. The shingles clattered on the roof. She heard the chimes again. They sounded close, but the wind was playing tricks with distance. It carried the sound forward, then drew it back. The chimes were in the neighborhood, she was certain. She would just go grab them and come right back. Maybe getting out, getting some air, would help with the sleeping too.

Minutes later, she was picking through the elaborate array of trip wires she had woven across the staircase earlier. The twine, pulled tight and weighted with bells and empty cans, formed an ornamented cat’s cradle that even she, with her careful movements and knowledge of the pattern, couldn’t negotiate without triggering a rattle of empties. It’s not like Felicia would be bothered by it, dead to the world up in the room with the wind shaking the window glass. But that’s no reason to tear it down and then have to redo it all when she came back, she figured.

The wind was roaming the neighborhood, shaking the trees and herding the loose trash down the street, pinning papers against fences and garage doors. It came in blasts, tugging at
the owl mask on her head. It seemed determined to expose her. She held the mask down with one hand, the other clasping the flashlight. Through the mesh she could see the moon, now much lower in the sky. There were no clouds and the stars blazed. They hung low in the smogless sky. Close enough, Lila thought, to be blown out like birthday candles. This was the wind that had inspired area founders to plant rows of eucalyptus trees along the edge of their citrus groves—windbreaks to protect the crop. This was the wind that had knocked her ailing grandmother down one Christmas as she exited her old Cadillac, unsteady from the chemo, like a kite in her big coat. The wind tried to carry her away.

She studied the dark street for movement without turning on her light. The many For Sale signs swayed and turned in the wind. Storms of litter blew through, making it hard to see. People wandered the streets at all hours now, no longer following the pattern dictated by the sun and the moon and the turning of the earth. Yet other than those objects—trees, bushes, loose debris—animated by the wind, there was no sign of life up and down the street. She moved into it, twisting her entire body left to right in order to see out the mesh openings in the mask. The chimes rang out when the wind rushed through, allowing her to slowly zero in on the sound.

Trash churned around her, sticking to her mask, as the wind led her down the street and through the yards of two back-to-back houses, so that she emerged on the neighboring street. The houses were identical to those on the street she had just left—a mix of single- and two-story ranch-style homes. Steep driveways and two-car garages. Once-landscaped yards now cluttered with junk, the gutters bone dry.