Amnesia Moon (7 page)

“C'mon, Chaos,” said Melinda softly.

Chaos moved her hand to the guide rope and turned in the grass and followed the sound of the psychiatrist's footsteps. He ran up and caught him just at the door, grabbed him and held him by his collar.

“How am I hurting Elaine?”

“By your very existence, you awful creature. Let go of me.”

Chaos tightened his grip on the psychiatrist's collar. “Explain.”

The psychiatrist moaned. “Don't you understand about the dream?”

“No.”

“Since the disaster”—he coughed raggedly, then continued—“we've dreamt only of the green. Even those of us here, on the hill. Whether we work in the facility or not. Mostly we dream of her, her voice speaking to us, reassuring us . . . it's always there. Do you understand? When we dreamt of your little girl, and the awful fat man in the desert, it was the first
visual
dream any of us had had in years. For those out in the green it was the first they'd seen at all, since the disaster.”

“Why?”

“That's just the way Elaine has it. If they saw in their dreams, she feels, they wouldn't stand the green anymore.”

“She thinks the visual dream was my fault.”

“It is your fault.”

“Kellogg has the dreams. He's following me.”

The psychiatrist tittered. “As you wish. If you brought him with you, you'll take him when you leave.”

Chaos didn't have an answer for that. He let go of the psychiatrist's collar, and the older man grunted.

“It doesn't make sense,” said Chaos. “The green isn't a problem. You only have to go a few miles away—”

“The green is everywhere,” said the psychiatrist. “It's you who don't make sense.”

“Then what's Elaine scared of? If I don't make sense, why am I such a threat?”

“Elaine's not scared,” said the psychiatrist. “She's angry.
I'm
scared. You're a mistake, you're somebody's terrible mistake, whatever else you may think you are, and you have to go away. Back to the horrible place you came from, the place in the dream.”

“I'll go,” said Chaos, “but I'm not going back there.”

“It doesn't matter. You'll probably disappear as soon as we forget you.”

Chaos was getting impatient with the conversation. “You don't have to live like this, you know. Groping around in a blind fog.”

“I don't,” said the psychiatrist. “I work for White Walnut. But even if I didn't, I'd rather live in the green than like some smelly, rabid animal.”

Chaos turned back and found the tree where Melinda stood waiting, her hand on the rope. “I'm just trying to say it isn't necessary. You ought to tell that to Elaine.”

“I beg your pardon, my unpleasant little friend,” said the psychiatrist, clicking his keys in the lock, “but Elaine doesn't listen to voices in dreams. She
originates
them.” The airlock hissed. “Goodnight.”

 

 

 

 

They walked all night. First, led by the guide ropes, into town, then through it, to the highway. They didn't run into any people, but a stray dog picked up their scent as they came down the hill, and accompanied them through town, trotting invisibly behind them in the green, sniffing at their heels, finally turning away at the highway. The guide ropes stopped at an abandoned gas station. They felt their way past the buildings and up the entrance ramp. Up on the highway, out of the cover of trees, the sounds of chirping insects died away and the air grew cold. They crossed to the grassy divider and headed into the wind.

They walked out of the green just a little before dawn. The opaque mist suddenly yielded hints of depth; they raised their hands and wiggled their fingers in the fog. In another minute they turned and looked at each other and smiled. Then the stars appeared.

Soon the dark mountains ahead of them began to glow. They turned and watched as the sun crept up through the mist behind them. They walked a bit farther, then stopped and sat in the grass and watched, entranced, grateful. He was Chaos again, but part of him—however crazy this was—hadn't seen the sunrise in years.

Afterwards he got up to walk, but the girl had fallen asleep in the tall grass of the divider. He lifted her and carried her across the highway to a dry spot under some bushes and out of the sun. He sat down in the grass a few feet from her, in a place where he could keep an eye on her and also watch the highway.

He thought about Elaine. He had a feeling she would take her psychiatrist's advice and forget about him and Melinda, write the whole thing off as an aberration. He thought about Kellogg's dreams, about the way he seemed to serve as a kind of antenna for them, and how he'd walked into that town and become Moon, but it didn't get him anywhere, and he let it go.

For the moment, anyway, he had other things to worry about, like food and water. Here in the mountains there should be a creek, but he hadn't seen one yet. There wasn't any wildlife on the road, either. To eat they'd probably have to go into the next town, wherever that was. And he was beginning to think that towns were bad news.

He stared at the empty highway for a while, and then, feeling that he should do something, walked in the other direction, through waist-high grass, looking for water. He didn't find any. He thought of his room in the Multiplex and cursed himself for having left. He wanted to be back there, not here, confused and bereft in the mountains; he wanted his cigarettes and his booze. He gave up and walked back, curled up around the girl, and went to sleep.

The hippie in the pickup—Chaos thought of him that way from the moment he saw him: the hippie in the pickup, like the beginning of a joke—woke them up some time in the late afternoon. They'd slept straight through the day; Chaos, as far as he could recall, dreamlessly. The man stopped his truck on the highway a few feet ahead of them and walked back to where they lay on the grass.

“Hey! Wow! What are you cats doing out here?”

He had a droopy blonde mustache and a fringe of long yellow hair around a reddened bald spot, and he wore bleach-spotted jeans and a loose, flowery shirt. A hippie, Chaos recognized, and the fact that he knew what a hippie was, he thought, was more proof against Kellogg's theory about there not having been a disaster, a change. There hadn't been any hippies in Little America or Hatfork. Something had at least rid the place of hippies.

Chaos waved his hand. Melinda was still asleep.

“Hey, where's your transport? This is like, nowhere, you know. What, did you just come out of the Emerald City? Hey, that is one hairy chick, man.”

Melinda, woken by the sound of his voice, sat up and stared. The man shambled up to within a few feet of them, took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “Hot, man. Hey, she's just a girl. That's jailbait.”

“Emerald City?” said Chaos. “You mean back there?”

“Yeah, the Green Meanies, the Country of the Blind. What's the matter, you couldn't get with Elaine's program? I don't blame you.”

“You used to live there?”

“Nah. I got a problem with The Man—all that dreamstuff doesn't work on me. I'm immune, got a built-in bullshit detector. I used to live in California”—he pointed his thumb over his shoulder, at the mountains—“but I headed out this way after the big bust-up. Needed elbow space.” This he performed for them, a brief knock-kneed dance with swinging elbows. “Bumped into Elaine's boys at the border, saw the way they were sniffing their way around with dogs, got the scoop on the green. I couldn't relate to that scenario. So I set up back here, on the Strip. Nobody here but me and the McDonaldonians. Maximum headroom, you know?”

“You can see in the green?”

“Told you, I'm immune. Use to go in there just for laughs, steal food and stuff in front of their noses, but a couple of times they almost caught me. Now I just leave them alone. We got nothing to say to each other.”

“Do you—have any water in your truck?”

“Oh, sure. Stay there.” He turned and jogged back up the embankment. Chaos turned to Melinda, who smiled weakly. Before he could say anything, the man was back with a camouflaged canteen. Chaos and Melinda both drank, and the man went on talking.

“—got everything I need on the Strip, anyway. But I ought to go in there with a shotgun sometime, the stores on the Strip are full of them, you know, one behind every counter, and pick off Elaine, blam! See what happens after that. Probably some other dumbshit setup, you know? Because those cats were just born with their heads naturally up their assholes.”

“What happened in California?”

“Oh, you know, same thing as everywhere, only weirder, since it's California. You from there?”

“I don't know.”

“Yeah, I understand. There's a lot of that going around. Well, you sound like it to me. You don't sound like you're from around here.”

“When you say what happened in California is the same thing as everywhere”—Chaos felt a little embarrassed about the question—“what is it that happened?”

The hippie shrugged. “You know, the weirdness came out, that's all. It's not like it wasn't always there. Things got all broken up,
localized.
And there's the dreamstuff, you know. The Man got into everybody's head, so I guess everybody suddenly got a look at how severely neurotic The Man actually was. No big surprise to me though.”

Chaos wondered if he was learning anything. “How long ago, would you say?”

The guy squinted at the sky. “Now that's a good question. I'd say I was on the Coast for a couple of weeks before I split. I don't know, seven or eight months. Maybe a year, almost.”

“A year?” Chaos blurted. “That's impossible. I've been living—”

“Hey,
nothing's
impossible.” The hippie seemed annoyed. “And I'll tell you where you've been living: in somebody else's dream. Probably still are, or will be again soon. So relax. You want to see the Strip?”

Chaos turned to Melinda, who shrugged. “Uh, sure,” said Chaos. “You said you lived here with somebody else?”

“The McDonaldonians,” said the hippie, pronouncing it carefully. “That's just my name for them, though. They're a real trip. You want to meet them?”

“I don't know.”

“You hungry?”

“Yes,” said Chaos. It was an easy question, the first in a while.

“Then let's go.”

They followed him to his truck. Up close Chaos saw that it followed the model of the little cars in the shed in the desert, and of the car in his dream: made of lightweight plastic and covered with solar panels.

“Your truck,” said Chaos. “It's the new kind.”

“My truck is my friend, man. We go everywhere together. Roll down the windows . . .”

“We didn't have that kind where I came from,” said Chaos, not sure it was right. Right if he meant Hatfork, wrong if he included the distant memories stirred up by the dreams.

“Well then you're not from around here,” said the hippie. “Or from California either.” He seemed uncommonly pleased with himself for this conclusion, as though he'd solved a major problem.

He climbed up on the driver's side and opened the passenger door of the cab. “Put her up here, man, right between us.” He seemed incapable of addressing Melinda directly.

They drove five or six miles down the empty highway before hitting the first signs of the Strip, the hippie talking all the way.

The Strip began with dingy trailer parks and sprawling, concrete-block motels, all abandoned. Then came gas stations and gift shops and fast-food restaurants and auto dealerships and topless bars, all with their neon signs lit up and glowing in the sun, all completely vacant and still. The Strip went on for miles, mind-boggling in its repetitiveness. The hippie gestured at it, waving his hand. “Everything, man, everything. It's all here.”

“Why is it all lit?” said Chaos.

The hippie patted the dashboard. “Solar panels, man. It runs all by itself. Probably will until somebody shuts it down. Pretty far out if you think about it, the sun lighting up all this useless neon, the neon blinking its pathetic little light back at the sun all day, nobody here to see it but me. Ah, sunflower, weary of time. I thought about going around and shutting it all down, but who gives a shit? Not the sun, man, that's for sure.”

They pulled into the parking lot of a building made out of molded orange and yellow plastic. McDonald's, Chaos remembered. Hatfork didn't have one, but Little America did—abandoned, of course, and bared of its decorations. This one glowed gaily. Solar panels.

The hippie parked and led them inside, saying again, “You're gonna love these cats. They're a trip.” The building was bright but quiet, apparently empty. For a moment Chaos wondered if the hippie was crazy, his McDonaldonians only imaginary companions.

“Customers!” the hippie yelled. He guided them through the maze of plastic furniture to the front counter.

One by one the McDonaldonians appeared, slinking noiselessly out of the back kitchen. Three rail-thin white ghosts in their late teens or early twenties, wearing grease-stained food service uniforms in the company colors. Two of them hovered near the frying machines, while one stepped up to man a cash register. “Hey, Boyd,” he said, smiling sadly. Chaos saw that the kid's cheeks were swollen with acne.

“Yo, Johanson,” said the hippie, Boyd. “You cats aren't looking so good. You ought to eat something.”

“C'mon, Boyd. Keep your voice down. You know we ain't supposed to eat the stuff. It's against the rules.”

“Hey, man. Time to break the rules if you ask me.”

Johanson shrugged. “What you want?”

“Give me a minute, man. Got to make up my mind. I brought a guest here to your fine dining establishment, man. Johanson, this is Chaos, Chaos, Johanson.” He gestured at the two in the back. “Stoney, Junior, this is Chaos.” Stoney and Junior nodded and looked at the floor. No one looked at Melinda. Boyd pointed up at the backlit menu over the counter and said, “Pick something out. You got money?”