Black Moon (33 page)

HIS
audience listened with their usual indifference. Distracted. Studying their hands or staring out the window as seagulls floated, held in place by the wind blasting up the bluff from the ocean. Some stared off at an abandoned aircraft carrier, sitting out in the blue expanse. It drifted in the current like a skyscraper on its side. Some looked bored enough to doze off. But of course they couldn’t do that. Not until exactly ten at night, when the switch was flipped in their dreamless heads.

AFTER
the recital, when the survivors had shuffled off to their chores, he approached Dr. Lee. He said, “I need a car and some guys. I want to check if she’s there.”

“It was only a dream,” Lee said.

Biggs laughed. For Lee to say this. He who had built a cathedral to dreams. Lately, Lee was only sometimes Lee.

He told him, “Once I woke up and her feet were dangling from the ceiling, black with roof tar. I had forgotten all about that.”

“We can’t put you or the guys at risk,”

Lee said. “Just give me Morales.”

Lee shook his head. “The city is a long way away.”

HE
told them that it wasn’t his child. That’s why she had expelled it from her body. She had explained everything. She had been attacked by a creature that was half man, half bear. Only, she explained, the bear was the outside half and the man was the inside half. The creature had lured her into an underground laboratory where it was conducting experiments. She watched as it put the dream of a cat into a chicken. The chicken fell forward, dead. Then it put the dream of an eel into a hamster. The outcome was the same for the hamster, though it stood up on its hind legs before dropping. The only way for an animal dream to live inside a human, it explained, was to grow an entire dreaming animal inside a human. The dream needed the animal container as a kind of filter of flesh. The beast held her down and put the animal inside her womb with a few quick thrusts. As soon as she was able, she cast it out, along with its tiny bladder of toxic dreams.

ONLY
Morales, the security muscle, spoke to him at first. Biggs had encountered him one night smoking on the deck and staring out at the dark field of ocean. He was moving past the security
man, seeking his own solitude, when Morales spoke without looking at him. “So, bro, do you take requests? What I’d like to hear,” he said, “is a seriously nasty sex dream. I’m talking quadruple X. I know you have them. Don’t hold out on us, dude.”

DR. LEE
approached Biggs in the lunchroom later, standing at his table as Biggs slowly turned pasta on his fork. Lee said, “I feel like there’s too much interpretation happening. Maybe too much crafting.”

“It’s impossible not to,” Biggs said. “I have to speak them, not somehow broadcast them into their minds.”

Lee sat down and Biggs winced as the chair chirped loudly against the concrete. The tabletops were blazing with light coming in through the windows.

“They’re just so tightly fitted to your situation,” the researcher said. “I’m hoping for something more universal, so that they can see something of themselves in them.”

They watched a gull just beyond the window, hanging in the air.

“Could Carolyn really be all that you dream about?”

“Maybe not,” Biggs said. “But they are the only dreams I remember.”

Lee laid it all out again, patiently explaining the purpose of the recitals. “You are the dreamer. What we’re doing is exposing the community to the texture and fabric of the dream world. Without it they won’t stay human for long. We are the only species whose dreams are interchangeable. We can live inside the dreams of others, we can breathe there. That says something about the human family, and the true smoothness of our faces, our odorless souls. You’re dreaming for all of us now,” he said. “You can’t get in the way of whatever’s coming through.”

So many words. This was not at all like Lee, Biggs thought. I may be dreaming right now.

BIGGS
volunteered for a scavenging mission. The task at hand was an equipment and supply run that would take a team outside the compound and into the nearby hospital, which they looted regularly. Most of the residents dreaded the idea of leaving the security of the center. But it was much less dangerous now, since it was rare to encounter the sleepless, yet common to stumble over a body. Other than the security team, no one would volunteer. By stepping forward before Lee followed through on his threat of randomly selecting people, Biggs hoped to win points with Lee and the community.

They passed through the desolate university campus in two vans, skirting the edge of the campus, cutting through vast parking lots, rolling past the International Studies Center, the woolly, unkempt clover playing fields, the abandoned supercomputer and boxy student apartment complexes. The elephant-gray dorm towers jutted above the brittle eucalyptus fringe, and the school’s famous glass library, like a crystal hive perched on concrete pilings, flashed through the trees. When they took the narrow access road along the base of the structure, they found themselves fording a lumpy moraine of books that seemed to have been deposited by the receding glacial library.

The caravan rode on, arriving at the loading docks for the hospital. They waited in the vans for the security team to check things out. Dr. Porter went over the long list of things they were after and distributed surgical masks. He paired them into teams, partnering Biggs with Warren, who had been a graduate student at the lab when the crisis hit. Their assignment was to find paper for EEG printers.

“Paper?” Warren asked through his surgical mask. “That’s it?”

They followed a hand-drawn map that Porter gave them, with a final directive to use their flashlights sparingly. They passed through the lobby and up two dark flights of stairs, their lights probing feebly before them. On the fifth floor they found themselves in the intensive care unit—a series of patient rooms ringing the semicircular cluster of the nurses’ station. Sunlight poured in from the skylight but seemed reluctant to venture too far into the rooms.

Biggs said, “There’s probably a supply closet around here.”

“Did you dream that?” the young man asked.

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” Biggs said crisply. Then, realizing it was an earnest question, he softened his response. “I didn’t dream it, but it makes sense, right?”

Both of them were avoiding the dark patient rooms, but when they failed to find any surplus of paper, they knew they had to at least check the bedside machines. “You start at that end, and I’ll work toward you,” Biggs suggested.

Warren shuddered, then made his way across the floor. Biggs had managed two rooms, finding neither paper nor bodies, when he heard Warren come up behind him, whispering, “Pretty sure there’s someone in there.”

Biggs could see that Warren was spooked behind the mask. Warren leaned in close and said that he had seen someone moving in one of the patient rooms and thought he heard something. A moan, a whimper. Biggs started cautiously toward it.

“Why don’t we just leave?” Warren asked, grabbing his arm.

“Because it could be someone,” Biggs told him.

Warren took this in, then looked up, eyes wide. “You think maybe it’s Felicia?”

“Felicia?” Biggs knew the name, knew the story. She was
the student worker who had fled the compound, stealing a car, with a plan to rescue her parents. She was also the first person to volunteer for the implant, he had been told, after the principal investigator, Kitov, died in the operating chair. They all talked about her like some kind of guardian angel, still setting a place for her during meals and taping notes to the door of her room imploring her to come back. He was indebted to her as well. After all, she was the reason he had been found. When Lee had sent out security people to look for her, they found him instead. Warren’s hopeful eyes, his desperate assumption, both moved Biggs and revealed possibilities. There was much to consider, but not now.

“Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s check it out. Just stay behind me.”

Warren loosened his grip and fell in behind Biggs as he crossed the floor and slowly pulled back the curtain. He snapped on his light and peered into the room. At first, yes, he thought it was a person, somehow crouched in the corner. The ground was smeared with blood. Viscera flecked the nest of blackened sheets on the bed and the smell of rot cut through his mask. The ape—a chimp, it seemed—snarled, showing long yellow fangs. Before Biggs let the curtain drop, he caught a glimpse of metal ring mounted to the animal’s hairless head, posts disappearing into the skull. A crown of empty wire ports. Biggs backed away, pulling Warren, as the animal bounded through the curtain, tearing it off its rings. They retreated to the nurses’ station as it fought to throw off the cloying material, then trotted past them and onward, down the corridor, its feet and hands padding against the tiles, crowned head darting left and right, ducking under shafts of light. Trailing handprints of browned blood.

HE
told them, “She told me the news over the phone and I drove straight home from somewhere. I brought three roses, one for each of us. When I gave them to her they had changed into orange rinds. She showed me the ultrasound and we were astonished. Something was moving. We went to breathing classes and had regular checkups. Carolyn had morning sickness for the first three months, but no weird cravings. We did another ultrasound and we could see that it was going to be a girl. But another showed that we had a boy on the way. This kept changing every time we looked away then looked back. This person hasn’t decided yet, the technician said. Carolyn ballooned and her tiny frame looked absolutely hijacked by this new bulk. Her belly gleamed and sometimes rang like a bell at night from the kicks inside. We had to induce because our doctor was going to be away on a ski trip on our delivery date and Carolyn really wanted her to do the delivery because the doctor had vowed to take special measures. We drove to the hospital without panic. They put us in a delivery room and we listened to Daniel Lanois’s first album, the one with ‘The Maker.’ She tried to deal with the contractions but after a while it made no sense to go forward without the epidural. They brought in a shaved cat and gave it the epidural. At first the anesthesiologist couldn’t find the right spot on the cat’s spine. Then it didn’t seem to work and I realized I was standing on the thin tube that carried the medicine into the cat. Carolyn started trembling violently and I ran out to get someone. They came in and made some adjustments to the cat and this stopped the trembling. When it was time, the doctor came in and told me to hold Carolyn’s left leg. It was just the three of us until the baby emerged and then there were four of us in the room. When I cut the cord it seemed to me that the cord was just a strand of gelatin, incapable of carrying nutrients and
waste, or messages of any kind. Yet here was a baby being drawn into Carolyn’s arms as if they had already been introduced.”

THE
move and monitoring of his sleep that followed could not be seen as anything other than a punishment. It was a reprimand from Lee, Biggs believed, for failing to convey the dreams with sufficient purity and verisimilitude—too much plot, too much spin, really. Too much Carolyn. This was what he suspected, in spite of Lee’s denials. The plan was to put him in the smart room, which was wired for dream research.

The community of survivors didn’t like this idea, but their opposition was not in defense of their dreamer, Biggs. The smart room had been where Felicia lived before she made her rescue attempt. They confronted Lee about the issue at a morning meeting, after Biggs had recited yet another dream about returning home and finding Carolyn alive and well in the loft.

“We all love Felicia,” Lee said, “and we all want her to return safely. And I’m confident she will. We’re still looking for her, as you all know. Whenever we can spare the guys, they go out and they do their best to track her. One of these days, they will bring her back. I really believe that.”

Biggs heard the quiver in Lee’s voice, a coating of gloss.

“Will you leave her things there?” Fran asked, voice trembling. “Because we think it’s important that she knows her place is waiting for her.”

Lee nodded reassuringly.

Lee said, “Her things are in their true place and we wouldn’t want to undo that. We just need the equipment that’s in that room. There are dreams moving under the dreams we’re hearing about, and we need to get down to them. To stay human, yes,
but also because there may be answers there, about how we can all return to our natural state.”

THEY
didn’t understand the whole point of the dream recitals.

Lee told them, “There is a constant pressure, a tide of animal energy. It has surged and eroded away the walls we have erected over the millennia by migrating the contents of our dreams into this world. Everything around us, the remnants of our world, was birthed in a dream, brought forth and hardened under the sun: the roads, buildings, the institutions of thought and knowledge, the urgings of the heart, the fuel of desire. Sleep is the bridge over which these fantastic constructions have been passed, piece by piece, particle by particle. You see us from a distance like ants carrying a shiny white brick of future in our thorny mandibles. Sometimes that white speck is a bone from a beast, evidence of their own elaborate infrastructure—the only hard thing about them. We carry it across the bridge too. Now that bridge has been brought down, except for one silken strand. This is what our dreamer provides—a way to carry the contents across.”