Black Moon (26 page)

The disarray said something about Carolyn’s chaotic process. No time to organize things. Not with her breakneck pacing and laser-guided focus when she was in the zone. It occurred to Biggs that her last project, the one she came here to work on, was probably one of these files on the desktop. He swiped his finger along the touchpad and, with a point-and-click, rearranged the icons by date. The most recent file was indeed a video. A file named
Missed
.

He doubled-clicked the icon.

At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. The image was very grainy, an array of black-and-white pixels. The camera eased back, revealing the full image, and Biggs understood that he was looking at an ultrasound of a womb, a snapshot. The
camera locked in and focused, with the small, amphibian-like shape held in the center of the frame—a tiny blur of prehuman creature floating in the dark oval of uterus, anchored by the umbilical tether. The picture was slowly rotated, but the contents remained motionless until an aquatic sound faded up. There was a ripple of movement as the ocean sound—now the pounding of waves—peaked, then gave way to the two-step beat of a heart. The pixels swam, clenching and loosening. A flutter appeared in the torso area of the tiny embryo, a hand-drawn pulsing of concentric lines, and the large eye moved faintly under the translucent lid. The stillness undone.

The life, Biggs understood, restored by Carolyn’s invisible hand.

He watched the animated heart beating for nearly five minutes, expecting a cut, a new scene to start. But nothing of the sort happened. The rhythm continued, the beat played on, until, about seven minutes in, the screen went blank. The battery had finally expired. He tried a few times to reboot but there wasn’t enough juice to get past the start-up, then it stopped responding altogether. That was it. A vault of memories—a kind of mind—forever closed.

Unless there was a spare battery around.

He searched the closet, then raked through the clutter of the bedroom floor with his feet. What was that little film about? There had to be more to it. It couldn’t just be that single shot—the animated embryo, heart pulsing in a flurry of static. Maybe it was just a looping sequence that she nested in some other scene.

Biggs didn’t yet wonder where she got the image—the scanned ultrasound. She was always appropriating images from all kinds of sources. It didn’t occur to him that the image was actually a snapshot of her womb until, in his search for a battery, he came across a plastic jar of pills—brown-tinted bottle, white
childproof top. Not placebos this time. The prescription details, under her name, were taped to the side. Painkillers: codeine. Take one capsule every four to six hours until pain subsides. Prescribed just over a year ago, when she had retreated to this room for her six-week remove from the city.

From him.

HE
thought he understood the meaning of the film. It was a kind of wish fulfillment exercise—the authoring of an alternative ending. She had done it before. Here, in this room, where they stayed together as her mother was dying and produced a computer-animated remake of The Dream. She insisted it was therapeutic. That it was a creative way of coping. It was also something they could do together, since he was the dreamer of The Dream. They had been together for only a few months at that point. “It will make us tighter,” she had suggested.

“How can it bring us together when all I’m doing is telling you the same dream over and over?” he once asked, frustrated with her need to hear him tell it for what seemed like the hundredth time.

“You learn a lot about a person when you make stuff together,” she said.

The repetition seemed to work. The Dream’s place in the world transferred from his head to the shared space of reality. The telling of it, he observed, became its own thing: a script of sorts, scrawled by her hand on a yellow pad, then typed neatly on the laptop. It was a real thing, birthed from his head. Yet she insisted that he storyboard out the flow as well. While she was sitting at her mother’s side with her father and sister, he was in her room, struggling with his limited drawing skills to recall the
angles, the positioning of the characters—the
blocking
, as she called it.

She would return to the room emotionally drained, hollowed out by watching her mother suffer through her final stages. Let’s go out, he would offer. Get some air, though he really meant perspective. He wanted her to see that the world rolled on. As foretold, she seemed to be purposely drowning herself in grief. He was here, he had to point out, to help her from slipping too far into it. The Dream, he reminded her.

But something had shifted in her. The remaking of The Dream, not his guiding presence in her life, seemed to be her salvation. He pointed this out and she smiled wearily. “Don’t you see they are the same thing?”

In her exhausted state, she refused sleep, insisting on making progress with the film. She studied his sketches and re-created them, using stand-in avatars in a 3-D environment on her computer, which she said would look more realistic than a stop-motion approach with dolls. She showed him how the program’s virtual cameras could be positioned anywhere along the x, y, and z axes. And how, though The Dream was witnessed from his perspective, the film would show him in the scenes. “Otherwise, if it’s shot entirely from your POV,” she explained, “it will be harder for us to understand your role in the action.”

“Okay. But that’s not how it looked in my head,” he said cautiously.

“It’s a re-creation, not a replica.”

“The difference is pretty subtle.”

“Maybe in the words, but not in the thing.”

The next step was shooting the reference videos. Biggs liked this step because they had to do it together. It wasn’t something she could leave him to do alone while she sat in a tormented state
down the hallway, holding her mother’s hand. She pushed all the furniture to one side of her room and hung a green screen from ceiling to floor. “It’s a magic window,” she said, allowing just a flash of whimsy. “Stand in front of it and we can go anywhere.”

She insisted that they be naked for these shoots. “We have to see how the muscles move,” she said. Not a problem for him. Their bodies were well acquainted at this point. They had been voraciously intimate from the start. Her sexual needs seemed to stand apart from everything else happening in her life, he had initially observed. He finally realized, as they came to endure her mother’s decline, that her hunger for release had everything to do with her growing sadness and anxiety.

But the reference videos weren’t a kind of foreplay, he soon realized. They were short clips that would inform how she moved the 3-D models in each of the scenes. Carolyn positioned his body or the tripod with the same professional coolness. In this mode, she did not seem to see his body as the flesh-and-blood incarnation of her lover, but rather as a life-sized puppet for her to control. She asked him to repeat his movements over and over as she stood back watching the monitor. Her directions were precise: “Now walk forward as if you are seeing me in the waves. Now raise your arms, cup your hands in front of your mouth, and call to me. Now run in place like you ran to the water. Wait, start that over,” she directed. “Remember, you’re hitting the waves about five steps in, so you want to show a reaction to it. It’s cold water, remember? It’s like ice.”

She pressed on, sometimes glazing over, zoning out, at the computer. Or wiping away tears as she adjusted the lights, her hands in oversized heat-retardant gloves. She would join him in bed when he couldn’t put off sleep any longer. They would make love—fiercely, but silent. He would try to keep her there for the night. “Give yourself a break, baby,” he would say, embracing her.

But she would shake her head and gently push away. “I need to keep working,” she would say, leaving the bed. “She’s so close.”

He realized she was trying to complete the film before her mother passed. Why? To show it to her? Would she even know what she was seeing? It seemed to Biggs that she was already too far gone. She was unconscious most of the time, and when awake, delirious. Hallucinating wildly, even confusing Carolyn with her own mother.

“Everything gets mixed together as you go,” she observed. “The past and present, dreams and memories.”

It seemed to him that Carolyn’s opportunity to share the film with her mother had long passed. Of course, he would never say this to Carolyn. Let her do what she has to do, he told himself. Everyone copes a different way.

They were still in school then. Still two semesters away from master’s degrees, less than a year from being married. As summer ended and Carolyn’s mother held on into fall, Biggs had to leave Carolyn and return to campus. She remained, continuing to spend her days at her mother’s side and her nights at her computer, doing the time-consuming work of animating the virtual models. She no longer needed him in the process. All that was left was the grind of production.

It was only two weeks into the semester when the day of her mother’s passing arrived. He returned and found Carolyn coping better than he had imagined. He had braced for a total collapse. Instead, she was exhausted and, yes, slow and pale with sadness, but also strong for her father and sister, taking the lead in organizing the funeral and wake. “What can I do?” he asked.

“Just be here,” she whispered, hugging him tight.

The night before the funeral, she led him into her room, where she had hung a screen above the bed. “Lie down,” she insisted, “and look up.” The projector was propped between them,
shooting straight overhead. He watched her version of his dream flash on the ceiling. He understood that he was supposed to be redreaming The Dream. It played out as they had scripted it, very much like The Dream, but different in that he could see himself in it, as she said he would.

Yes, there was the rowboat tossing in the waves. Yes, there was the body wrapped in white, rising and falling, and the girl fighting the crash of the waves. There he was, running out to her, pulling her by the hair toward shore, holding her.

He looked over at her, but she indicated with a nod of her head to keep watching.

The story continued.

It went beyond what they had scripted, what he had dreamed. He watched as the girl broke away and charged back into the water. His figure stands helpless, watching her go. The girl swims out past the waves and climbs into the boat, curls down next to the body and continues to tightly embrace it as the boat disappears beyond the horizon and the screen goes black.

“I don’t understand,” he said as they lay in the dark.

She was quiet for several moments. “That version has to be in the world too,” she eventually said.

He asked, “Are you going to show it at the funeral?”

“No,” she said, turning to him. “No one else will ever see it. Just us. Really, it’s only important that you see it, since you are the one who dreamed it. I made it for you.”

She claimed, soon after, that she had erased it and purged all the files from her drives. “What matters is how it lives on in your head,” she had explained.

He had to concede, years later, that he sometimes didn’t know if he was recalling The Dream or the re-creation. She clapped her hands lightly when he told her this, then kissed him on top of his head.

THE CAR PASSED THROUGH DARK WASHLAND
, skirting the occasional dead warehouse complex and looted strip mall. The front of the car was dented in, the hood slightly crumpled, from when she had crashed through the gate.

Felicia glanced at the clock, her face blue-lit by the dash. It was getting late.

The moon was full, so she could see the dim outline of the mountains towering over the flatness of the wide valley. My mountains, she thought. The familiar ridges served as a measuring stick. If she imagined a line extending down from one distinct notch, she knew it would bisect her childhood home. Humans are messed up inside and out, but the landscape is still true.

When she was a little girl, she believed the peak with the flat top was a dormant volcano. When would it wake up, she had often wondered, and send a thick soup of lava into this maze of tract homes?

Dogs trotted across the road ahead and she sighted them, using a speck on the windshield as crosshairs, like playing one of Chase’s video games. When she drove over snakes, they felt like thick ropes of wet clay under the tires. The dull sensation made her cringe.

Again she checked the clock. I’m running out of time.

If it was accurate, then she had only about ten minutes before her sleep shift started. We’ll see if the implant’s even going to
work out here, she thought. I don’t know why it wouldn’t. It’s not a transmitter. The stimulator controls the schedule.

She took a hand off the wheel and felt for the pulse generator near her armpit—a hard, raised disk under the skin. She was convinced she could feel the wire running under her skin, up her neck and into her skull, where it connected to the electrode embedded in her brain. Not just the wire, but also the signal as it traveled through it—a warm buzz telling her brain to switch modes.