Black Moon (6 page)

MAYBE
it was the hurricane upsetting a sealed storehouse of voodoo, Dr. Ferrell considered as his daughter hovered over them.

He distracted himself with his ongoing mantra of maybes.

Maybe it was the toxic dust from fallen towers, the ash creeping into our lungs. Maybe it was some ancient spore released by the melting ice. Maybe it was the earthquakes and the tsunamis they summoned. Maybe it was the hole in the ozone, the collapse of the upper atmosphere. Maybe it was the betrayal by the banks. Maybe it was the dead surpassing the living. Maybe it was the ground choking on garbage and waste. Maybe it was the oil blasting freely into the ocean, or the methane thawing at the bottom of the sea. Maybe it was the overload of information, the swarms of data generated by every human gesture. Maybe it was the networking craze, the resurrection of dead friendships and memories meant to be lost, now resurfacing like rusted shipwrecks to reclaim our attention and scramble our sense of time.

WHEN
they first arrived, Lila and her mother talked about all the pretending going on. Everyone was pretending they weren’t living in a desert where no humans are supposed to live. It’s one thing for Marines to train out here, so they can be ready for those faraway deserts where the fight is sputtering on, but regular humans? They had a little joke about it. They would go to the store and every time they encountered another person, they would turn to each other and say, conspiratorially,
Pretending
. Or when
they drove past the new rows of identical houses, with their feeble parkway trees:
Pretending
. At the brand-new bank, Mrs. Ferrell pointed to the little strip of lawn that lined the smoldering path. “Look how it pretends there on the ground,” she said.

Lila got in on the action, pointing to a playground that jutted from the side of a fast-food restaurant. The brightly colored plastic playthings about to melt in the white heat. “Pretending,” she said.

Her mother looked sad. “Maybe more than anything,” she said.

Everyone was still sleeping then.

MAYBE
it was the death of an artist at the hands of a zealot. Maybe it was the preachers howling on the subways, or the political lies that hit us like the vibrating hand, killing us years later. Maybe it was the particles made to collide. Maybe it was the return of slavery. Maybe, like the nuts say, it was the chemtrails scarring the sky, the black helicopters, the UFOs hovering over sacred sites. Maybe it was the rewiring of our minds. Maybe the mapping of the genome. Maybe the blowing up of Buddhas. Maybe it was the death scream of dolphins ringing in our ears. Maybe it was the clash of gods, the tug-of-war over our souls, not one of them refusing to let go, instead opting to see us sliced in two by Solomon’s sword.

HER
father sat down heavily on her bed. She was online at the time, her avatar dancing on an iceberg with some penguins. “Look, kiddo,” he said, “we know you can sleep. You don’t have to hide it from us. Well, you do, but unless we see you, nothing’s going to happen. We’ll make sure you do it in a safe place.”

She turned from the screen. “So it’s true that you can’t. Both of you.”

He looked at her, then slowly nodded.

“Why can’t you take something for it?”

“We have. It doesn’t work anymore. Makes it worse, actually.”

Her eyes welled. She blinked against it. “What’s going to happen?”

The doctor slumped, rubbed slowly at his face as if trying to locate a strand of spider web he had walked into. “I don’t know,” he said. He kept his knowledge to himself: how they would start to lose their minds, how their bodies would begin to fall apart, their immune systems collapsing. How they would seek relief at any cost, as some of his Marines had done. She and the dwindling numbers of those like her were rapidly becoming the only reassurance, the only hope, they had. Maybe they were immune. Maybe just late to the party.

“Daddy,” she said, reaching out and squeezing his wrist.

He looked at her hand, configured with fear.

“We knew you were okay when you came in the room the other night,” he said.

“When you guys were faking it.”

“You didn’t go ballistic, so we knew.”

SHE
saw it happening like the stars going out, one by one. Her online friends dropping off and never showing up again. If it wasn’t summer, she bet school would have been canceled by now. Everything was shutting down, going dark.

HER
parents had taken to handcuffing themselves to the piano and giving Lila the key, telling her to sleep in the master bedroom
because the door could be locked from the inside. She could hear them talking, sometimes arguing about whether he had betrayed his beliefs by working for the military, or whether they—Lila and her mother—should have moved out here to be with him. Maybe they should have given him more time and he would have walked away from the job.

THEY
all sat down at the kitchen table. Lila’s mother took her hand, squeezed it. The best thing was sometimes the hardest thing, they told her. They needed to protect her from the inevitable chaos, but also from themselves. More and more people were roaming the streets, trapped in visions. In other places, where they were further gone, they were tearing people apart. And yet Lila slept.

“I have been hearing about another base where people are gathering,” her father said. “People like you, who seem immune to all this. You’ll be safe there.”

Lila started shaking her head. “I’m not leaving. I’m not.”

“I’ve talked to someone—a sleeper, too. He’ll take you with him.”

“Listen,” Mrs. Ferrell said, “you’ll be safe there. Things are only going to get worse here over the next few weeks. You won’t even be able to trust us. Baby, you have to go as soon as we can arrange it. Just until things get—”

“I’m not leaving!”
Lila shouted.

YOU
could tell something was going on just by looking at the comments people were posting. Under one video, which showed a toddler sleeping on the floor, curled up next to the family dog, thousands had viciously called for the child’s death, describing in
shocking detail the outrageous acts of violence they felt the child deserved for sleeping. Another video featured a man passed out on a moving train, a subway, maybe. His friends had filmed him, taking turns scrawling obscenities on his forehead and arms with a felt pen. Again, the enraged comments numbered in the tens of thousands.

HIS SLEEPERS THROAT IS TO BE CUTTED!!!

THEY
pulled the piano over one night. It crashed to the floor with an explosion of sound in the still night. Of course it woke her.

She unlocked the door and peered out. Had they been crushed?

There they were, still handcuffed but staring back at her, their eyes red, lifeless.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

“Oh, did we wake you?” Mrs. Ferrell said bitterly.

“Oops,” Dr. Ferrell mouthed, his eyes hooded under his angry brow.

They glared at her until she shut the door.

THEY
say you start to hear things, voices. Mrs. Ferrell considered this. She sat back, pressing against the leg of the piano. Shadowy people appear in the corner of your eye, at the edge of your field of vision. Eric tells me about his patients—Marines who haven’t slept in weeks. He has a front row seat in how this all works, what it does to a person’s mind. They start speaking strangely, he has seen. Mixing their words up, scrambling the order. But he claims it’s somehow poetic, even endearing. I remember his mother, lost in a haze of Parkinson’s, talking about a
zero flying under the bridge, a war putting too much light in the sky. Going to the Grand Canyon, she told us, because they have a great coffee shop out there. It was chilling and, yes, she could see how the ramblings of insomniacs could have a certain incidental lyricism. But there’s the violence too. The murderous rage they feel when seeing others sleep.

“
WE
have to get Lila out of here while our sentences are still straight,” she said.

“I’m making the arrangements. I told you that.”

“For what, though? This place you’ve heard about? This rumor?”

“I’m trying to confirm it.”

“Where is it, this supposed sanctuary?”

He leaned close, and said in a whisper, though there was no one else around to hear them, “Somewhere near San Diego. I think it’s Miramar. The air station there. I think they are flying people out of there.”

“To where?”

“I’m not sure. Somewhere else.”

THE
water in the aqueduct didn’t look very realistic. Lila had seen better water in virtual worlds online. Still, she dreamed about floating down it on a raft, through the desert, then through the city, and all the way to the beach.

SHE
was sleeping under the car, not in it, when they found her. Her father rammed his head against the side of the vehicle trying to reach her. She woke to his garbled threats. “You will never
close them again no,” he told her, peering in at her. There was blood seeping down from his brow into his eye.

“I will break open your head,” he said. “I will bite out your fucking eyes.”

She screamed and kicked at his hand, edging away. Trying to roll, but not enough space, so squirming up toward the engine.

Her mother shrieked from the other side, releasing a piercing, inhuman sound. Lila could see her feet as she kicked at the car, bashing her shins over and over. Then she saw her mother back away and the car started to rock. Her mother groaning, possessed, as she tried to push it over.

“Stop it! I’m awake,”
Lila yelled.
“Stop!”

WHAT
she ended up doing was taking a rubber raft her father stored in the garage with the camping gear. She pumped it up, then carried it to the aqueduct at dusk. She plopped it in the water and rode the silent current, paddling out into the middle, then grabbed the rusted post. She tied onto it and felt the water pulling at the raft as it swung around and aligned itself with the current. She lay down on her back, head resting against the inflated bow.

Recalling the apologies had made her cry. The raft shook with her sobs and slapped at the water moving under her. She had never seen her parents so devastated, both of them tortured, begging for forgiveness. It was almost as though they had actually killed her. It was not them, they were not them. She wasn’t convinced either by new precautions they had taken. Her father bolting rings to the floor, chaining both of them to it. Leaving just enough slack to reach the bathroom, the kitchen. Dogs panting on a leash. The piano had collapsed. They had pulled the
legs out from under it trying to get at her. The keys littered the floor like giant broken teeth.

The water moved under her, a black flow of melted glass. She heard the coyotes yipping their wounded lullabies. The thick electric wash of cricketsong, swarming particles of noise. Soon the desert stars seemed to blaze just beyond her reach. Her face was smudged, painted with dusty tears. She hugged herself, curling up, and was able to quickly drop off, exhausted by terror.

Just before dawn, she was woken again by an angry shriek. She looked up in time to see someone in the dim light flying out toward her from the bank, but falling short into the dark water with a heavy splash. Lila peered into the gray light, seeing only a flailing arm, a kick of leg, swallowed by the glossy water. Then, seconds later, the gargled coughs of someone drowning—a man.

SHE
came crashing through the door and there they were, sitting shackled to the iron rings in the floor. Her mother looked at her with alarm, misreading Lila’s anguish.

“Oh no,” she said.

Her father was afraid to ask, but put a sentence together: “You sleep?”

MAYBE
it was food becoming a prop for food, the rise of corn and its many guises maybe it was the fluoride in the water maybe the author of us all decided to see what would happen maybe it was a distant comet dusting us with its tail of poisoned ice the moon was having its revenge someone uttering a combination of syllables that should never be uttered maybe it was the kids who weren’t given a chance maybe it was the fingerfucking of the
priests the rise of autotune the piracy the orgy of infringement all the bad books and movies the shift to decentralization the emergence of collective intelligence the flattening of the world. Maybe it was the turtle on whose back we all live slowly shifting its feet the Sasquatch sending out vibes sharks swimming far upstream the game we inhabit had a glitch.

Maybe the angel’s horn had finally been blown.

WHEN BIGGS FIRST ENTERED THE MAIN
room of the loft and found her gone, he froze as his mind took in the evidence—the overturned chair, the rope and bungee cords loosely nested on the floor, the socks he had used to pad the bindings, the open window. He rushed to it, shouting her name, sending it echoing through the alley. There was no sign of Carolyn below. As he checked the bathroom and the closets, he tried to see her fate as ambiguous, sidestepping the obvious: the only way out was down.