Amnesia Moon (6 page)

Moon worked to recall, but it remained elusive. Here? Of course—
but where was here?
All he could remember, all he knew, was the green.

Wait. He remembered the afternoon when everything changed; that much, anyway, was vivid. He'd groped his way home from work and sat by the radio, waiting for updates, smoking what he didn't know then would be his last cigarettes.
Biochemical trauma
, the radio called it at first.
Earth's atmosphere opaqued.
Then, for a short time, they called it
the bloom.
As though the sky itself had grown moldy. But soon everyone called it what most had called it at the very beginning: the green. As to the duration of the catastrophe, well, the experts differed. Of course.

“Yes,” he said, barely hearing himself. “I lived here.”

“Not under the name Moon you didn't,” said the man stubbornly. “After the disaster White Walnut registered the name, address, and skills of every man, woman, and child in this sector, and there wasn't any computer programmer named Moon, and there wasn't any little girl either. Farm assignments come from us, Moon. Everything comes from us. We track lives—only you don't have one.”

Moon didn't answer. He couldn't.

“Let's take another tack,” said the second man. “What brought you up here? What changed?”

“What do you mean?”

The man sighed. “Do you associate your little pilgrimage up the hill this morning with any sort of sign or portent? A little voice in your head? Or what?”

“I don't know.”

“I'm thinking specifically of a dream. Did you dream last night? Was it the same as always?”

He tried to remember. He had nothing to hide from them. But nothing came. All he could think of was the green.

“Do you dream at all? What are your dreams normally like?”

The questions were baffling. They sent him further and further into the mists of his own memory, and he was lost there. He sat, his mouth silently working, unable to speak.

The man sighed again and said, “Okay, relax. You don't dream. Here.” Moon watched as the man stepped towards him. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Three.” Moon felt grateful for a question he could answer.

“Your eyes hurt?”

“No.”

“Okay. Close your eyes.” The man reached out and stripped the plastic lens from Moon's face. The tape seared the skin around his eyes and tore hair out of his eyebrows. Moon raised his hands to his eyes and squinted through them, then let them fall.

The two men sat watching him from chairs a few feet apart. They were dressed in nearly identical gray suits, and they wore identical expressions of exhaustion and boredom. They looked the way they acted—like police. The room was otherwise empty. There was a green gloom over everything, a haze which Moon tried to blink away but couldn't.

“Your eyes hurt?”

“No. It's still green, though.”

“That's why it's called translucent air, Moon. It never goes completely away. Hell, if the machines we've got pumping at the stuff go down, it goes opaque
in here
within the space of a few hours.”

Moon waved his hand in front of his eyes, as if to disperse the mist. It had no effect. “But then . . . they'll never fix the world.”

The men shrugged, and one said, “Probably not.”

Moon put his hand down. “Why did you take my daughter away?” he said. “What did I do wrong?”

“We've got a problem, Moon. Something very strange happened last night. Something that's got people here very upset. And no one knows what it means, no one knows why it happened. And then you show up with your girl and your name that doesn't register. It's weird, I'd say. Wouldn't you? It's disturbing. It suggests connections. Now, if you started answering some questions, maybe we'd find out it's nothing but a coincidence. That would be nice. In that case all you did wrong was show up here on the wrong morning. We'd owe you an apology. But until we can make that determination, well, you're looking to us like part and parcel of our new problem.”

There was a knock at the door behind Moon's back. One of the men called out, “Come in.”

The door opened, and another man in a gray suit pushed in an elderly woman slumped in a wheelchair. At least Moon thought she was a woman. She was dressed in jeans and sneakers and a plaid shirt, the cuffs rolled back to expose twiglike wrists. Her large, wrinkled head leaned to one side, resting on the back of the wheelchair. Her white hair was cut very short. He became sure it was a woman when she spoke.

“Are you Moon?” she said.

He nodded.

“I just met your girl. What's her name?”

“Linda.”

“Linda. Yes. A very special child, Mr. Moon. I'm very glad you brought her to us. A very special child. Do you know what makes her special?”

“What do you mean?”

“There's something very special about Linda, and I was just wondering if you would please say what it is.”

“I don't know . . .”

“Linda is covered with fur, Mr. Moon. Don't you think that's rather special?”

“Yes,” said Moon quietly. He didn't know why he hadn't said anything about her fur—her hair. He preferred to think of it as hair, and he wondered if he should correct them about that. He decided not to.

“Why is that?” said the woman. “Why is she like that?”

“She was born that way,” said Moon.

“I see,” said the woman. “Mr. Moon, if you don't mind, would you tell me what you dreamed last night?”

“We asked him that,” said one of the men sourly. “He doesn't remember.”

“Let me tell you about my dream, Mr. Moon. It wasn't the green, for the first time since the disaster. Instead I was in the desert, with a little girl just like your daughter. Covered with fur. We walked up to a man sitting in a big wooden chair, like a homemade throne. He was a big fat man, with a horrible leer on his face, and he was eating dog food out of a can with the blade of a knife. He wasn't anyone I know, Mr. Moon. Nor is he an acquaintance of any of these gentlemen”—she gestured at the men in gray—“though each of them dreamed of him last night, as did everyone I've spoken with so far today. Except you. But you've done something far better than dreaming of this man, or the girl—you brought her here. Which I think is extraordinary.”

The old woman seemed genuinely pleased, and Moon, in his confusion, smiled at her, thinking she would rescue him from the menacing, cynical men in the gray suits. But she didn't return the smile. He felt instantly crushed, as though winning the favor of this woman was the most important thing in the world.

“Do you know my name?” she asked.

“No.”

“You should. My voice isn't familiar in the least?”

“Uh, no.”

She rolled towards him in her wheelchair, under her own power. Before Moon could protect himself, she reached out and cuffed him across the mouth with an open hand. He jerked his head backwards and lifted his arms, but she was finished.

She glared at him. “Who are you?”

“Moon,” he said again, though he was beginning to have his doubts.

“Moon, whoever you are, I want you to understand something: I'm in charge of the dreams around here. Who's the fat man?”

“Kellogg,” he said. He didn't know how he knew. The name was just sitting there, waiting to be said. In fact, he had some dim sense that Kellogg, whoever he was, was to blame for all of this.

“Did Kellogg send you here?”

“No, no. I came on my own. My daughter—”

“You want to get her into our school.”

“Yes,” he almost sobbed.

“Where's Kellogg?”

“In . . . another place. You don't understand—”

“The girl: she isn't meant as some kind of message to me. As far as you know.”

“No, no.”

“And Kellogg, he's in this other place. The desert?”

“I don't know.” He was exhausted by the questions. “I didn't dream about him. You did.” As he spoke these words, he suddenly remembered his own dream of the night before. There was a small house by some trees and a lake. But that was useless, it had nothing to do with their questions. He pushed it out of his mind.

“So if I gave you a message for this Kellogg, you wouldn't know how to get it to him?” The old woman's green eyes sparkled, but her lips were trembling.

“No.”

“I don't want to dream of him again,” she said ominously. “Do you understand?”

“I'm not responsible for your dreams. Give me back my daughter and let us get out of here.”

“Maybe,” said the old woman, turning her wheelchair to face the door. He felt the movement of her attention away from him vividly, almost physically. Her voice was suddenly distracted, her thoughts elsewhere. The man who'd guided her in came and took the handles of the wheelchair again. “But not yet.”

 

 

 

 

They brought him a meal of sandwiches and water, led him once to the bathroom, then took away the tray and brought in a small cot, turning the little room into a prison cell. When the last of the men in the gray suits left the room, he got up and tried the door. It was locked. He went back and lay on the cot, gazing up at the green haze that filled the empty room.

He remembered now that his name was Chaos. But he also knew, with the conviction he'd displayed under interrogation, that his name was Moon. He felt the distinct flavor of both lives in him. Both sets of memories seemed to recede to the same distant point, too, a vague sense of a life before disaster, and a dream of a house by a lake.

Moon and Chaos shared that, just as they evidently shared a body.

When a man brought his daughter to him, though, he quickly reverted to Moon. Chaos, after all, didn't have a daughter. This man wasn't like the others; he was older, less brutally confident, more remote and distraught. His hair was white, and his eyes looked worn, as though he'd been peering through the green murk at endless rows of tiny print for a long time. He slipped into Moon's room, holding a finger to his lips, and the girl ran in past him, to Moon's cot.

Linda hugged him. She apparently agreed that he was Moon. She cried against him, her head tucked into his chest, and he held her and stroked her hair, some instinct commanding that he whisper, “It's okay, it's okay,” though he didn't for the life of him know whether it was.

“Chaos,” she said, “let's go back. This place sucks.”

“Linda—”

“Melinda,” she said. “C'mon, Chaos. This guy will get us out of here.”

“The girl remembers,” said the man, “even if you don't.”

“Who are you?”

“Who I am is tired,” said the man. “I have a very hard job to do and you've just made it so much harder. I want you to go away. Please.”

The white-haired man rubbed at his nose fussily and then offered a replica of a smile. He even nodded at Moon, as though he'd explained more than enough.

“What did I do wrong?” said Moon.

“You're hurting her. I've really had my hands full, you can't imagine. When you hurt her you hurt everyone. And of course they'll kill you for it in the end.”

“What? Hurting who?”

“Elaine,” said the man, his lips drawn back. “It's miserable that you don't even know her name. Did you imagine you could just slip in here without knowing her name?”

“The old woman?”

“Yes,” said the man admonishingly. “Elaine
is
an old woman.”

Moon looked away from the man, to his daughter. Tears had stained the silky, fox-colored hair on her cheeks. He was seeing his daughter's face for the first time in years, but it didn't seem strange at all.

He looked back to the man. “Tell me who you are,” he said.

The man emitted a long, high-pitched sigh, as though he were in great pain. “I'm a psychiatrist,” he said. “Do you even know what that is, you grubby little man? It's my job to keep Elaine from having nightmares like you.” He sighed again, this time ending in a self-pitying chuckle. “So here I am,” he said with false brightness. “Doing my job.”

Moon didn't say anything.

“Melinda told me about your escape from ‘Little America,'” said the man. “And about your difficulties with dreams. I simply can't have you here. You're very bad for her, and what's bad for her—” The psychiatrist didn't finish, but tugged at his collar and rolled his eyes, like he was gasping for air.

Linda—Melinda—tugged at Moon's hand.

“Okay,” he said. Anything, even the green, was better than the room with the cot. He held on to the girl's hand, and together they followed the psychiatrist out of the room.

Moon could see the hallway now, but there wasn't much to see: a fire extinguisher and a row of empty glass cases. He caught sight of his own reflection in the glass and was startled by his unshaven, wild-haired look. That was Chaos, he supposed.

The psychiatrist led them through a series of doors. The last was an airlock, which opened with a hiss, and when they stepped through, the green fog formed around them again, before Moon had a last chance to look at his daughter.

The psychiatrist led them outside, onto soft, wet grass. The green was filled with the sound of crickets chirping. The psychiatrist gripped Moon's shoulder. “Here.” He brought them to a waist-high guide rope attached to a tree. “Follow this path through town. It's just before midnight; you'll be back on the highway before morning. Please.”

Moon's clothes were damp with sweat, and when the wind hit him, he started shivering. He remembered the highway, and the car he'd left behind to walk into town through the fog, the car with its trunk full of canned food and water, and then he remembered that the girl who held his hand wasn't his daughter.