Black Moon (10 page)

“Do what?” they asked in the darkness.

“All the things you’re supposed to do.” He listed his fears involving relationships, having kids, a career.

His father was first to respond after a long silence. “You’re thinking too much,” he said. “It works out.”

“Of course you can’t imagine it now,” his mother said. “You’re a kid. That’s why kids shouldn’t do all those things. You’re not meant to be ready.”

To help him get ready, they sent him to a psychiatrist once a week during his junior year. The doctor told him, on the topic of relationships, that what usually occurs is you start loving someone and a kind of alchemy happens, and all these fears, which are just fears of the unknown, turn into a desire to be brave or, even better, to move through your days, months, years, without giving all those dicey moments we all face too much weight. Sure enough, that’s what had happened. Almost. He had almost reached that place with Felicia.

He stood up and stepped out of the sleeping bag that gathered at his ankles.

“Watch this,” he said.

Chase pressed himself against the cool wall, remembering
the image underneath against the measuring stick of his body, the span of his arms. For one entire high school summer, he had worked on the mural every afternoon. It was another kind of therapy. He still knew the wall intimately, because of the spatial demands it had placed on him. So much so that he was able to measure out a distance from the center, crab-walking his hands, until he came to a spot of interest. He scraped at the wallpaper there, eventually pulling away a strip to reveal two green eyes, the size and color of limes, smoldering with predatory intensity.

It was a good trick. Jordan actually smiled.

He stood and came over to the wall. With his fingernail, he worked up a tiny flap just below one of the eyes and pulled at it. A strip came away, revealing the side of the tiger’s nose. A stripe of tooth and tongue.

Within minutes they were tearing furiously at the wall, uncovering the tiger’s face, the piercing gaze and tensed mouth. The rich orange of the animal’s fur blazed out at them. They revealed the heavy paws and muscled shoulders of an animal regally posed in the heart of its reclaimed dominion: the crumbled buildings overtaken with vines, the entire scene lushly framed by the glossy, wide fronds and the curling tendrils of ferns. Over the beast’s shoulder, partially hidden by vines, was the dark mouth of a cave—the tiger’s lair.

Standing back, it looked as if someone had thrown a chair through a window, punching through to an alternate world. Chase saw his work with fresh eyes, thinking it would embarrass him. But it wasn’t bad. He had always been a good painter. He had a way with images. But the subject seemed to him laughably childish. Hopefully Jordan saw it that way too, and recognized that he had now embraced the same common and trite fantasy in his world without sleep.

“Pretty lame, right?” Chase had finally said.

Jordan looked at the wall, then turned and put his back against it. “Actually, I think it’s pretty fucking cool.
Come, Armageddon, come
,” he sang.

And though he had leaned away, it seemed to Chase that he had closed the distance between them, smiling the way he was, showing some hint of warmth.

“You know what else I think?” Jordan had asked.

“No idea,” Chase said. He had started raking up the shredded strips of wallpaper with his feet.

“I think I should kiss you. I think that would be the best thing for you.”

Chase looked up. “What?”

“I said I think I should kiss you.”

“I don’t get it,” Chase said. “What? You think I’m gay?”

“No one isn’t,” Jordan said.

“So you’re into guys now? Is this what you’re saying?”

“It’s not even a thing,” Jordan said. “It’s one of the things we’ll lose when we stop sleeping.”

Chase put it together. He must have given details about the problems he had with Felicia. Jordan had come to an obvious conclusion. It didn’t exactly surprise Chase. After all, Felicia had suggested the same thing. But it wasn’t true. If it was true, what about the dreams? To this Felicia had said maybe he was just suppressing it all. People are good at denial, she told him. It sounded implausible to Chase. Just something she had picked up from her psych classes. Or maybe something Dr. Dreamy had told her. The thought that she had maybe discussed their situation with a stranger horrified him.

Chase didn’t want to talk about it then or now, with anyone. But what was Jordan telling him about himself? He immediately
thought back through Jordan’s history, looking for clues. There were plenty of girls. Was this openness part of Jordan’s new end-of-the-world outlook somehow?

Jordan stood.

“Get the fuck away,” Chase said, his fear spiking and urgent.

Jordan raised his hands and sat back down in the window. “Whoa.”

“Why do you have to say such weird shit?”

A long silent pause passed.

Finally Jordan spoke. “What I’m saying is you have to get down to the truth of things, and pretty soon that’s all we’re going to have, so you might as well get ready. Those pills you want are just lies. A lot of pills are just that—shiny little lies that we choose to swallow. They won’t help you. Pretty dumb, or desperate, to think they will, don’t you think?”

Chase looked at Jordan in the window frame. Behind him the air was unusually clear, blown west by a mild Santa Ana. He could actually see the jagged, moon-colored mountains that rose up like storm clouds over the valley. They looked muscular, dense, convoluted. Orange light from the descending sun colored the peaks. Jordan followed his gaze, turning to look out the window. The mountains were like a massive fist hanging over them. Somewhere along the way, living in the foothills of these often shrouded peaks, Chase had picked up the belief that truth was conditional and subject to change. Sometimes it was as real as a mountain range. Other times it was just a blank space in the sky. “Look,” Chase finally said, glancing up from the floor. “I don’t believe in your stupid insomnia thing and I’m still helping you.”

Chase recalled how Jordan hadn’t looked his way. He seemed to mull things over, then nodded slowly out the window. It was as if he was signaling someone on the mountain to let time keep rolling forward, if only to see how it went.

NOW
here they were, three states north, the heist behind them. Jordan had somehow managed to pick up a girl without leaving the room. The girl tried to entice him to join them by describing a local attraction: two graves side by side in the graveyard, one inscribed
WERE
, the other
WOLF
.

“It makes for an awesome profile picture,” she insisted.

“I’m really tired,” Chase said. This was true, but he had another motive for staying behind.

As soon as he was alone, he went to the car and began his excavation of the trunk.

THE SUN WOULD STOP IT FROM HAPPENING
. There were no working streetlights anymore, no power in the lines. Drivers couldn’t see in the dark—sleepless people who shouldn’t be driving anyway. But it was coming, the sun, a dumb but faithful beast of fire, as though no one had told it everything had changed.

Lila could see the sky lightening behind the craggy mountains, a peach-colored hue slowly seeping into the pale canvas, bringing some definition to her surroundings. It was such a relief to see. The night had taken forever, and, though it was receding, the crashes continued. Over her shoulder, on a winding concrete overpass suspended high overhead, she heard the shriek of tires and the crunch of metal and glass as another speeding car joined the long chain of collisions. She winced, then lightly touched her swollen face. She was pretty sure the Marine driver was dead, if not from their crash, then from the eight or so crashes that had followed in the darkness. The car—which her father had given to the Marine for his willingness to drive her—had probably been gradually crushed in a vise of impact.

“The sun will stop it,” she said aloud.

Daylight revealed that she was standing in the basin of a wide, arid valley. They had lived in the area for a while, though many miles from here, when she was small. She only vaguely remembered it—a date tree in the yard, the elderly neighbors splashing
in their pool behind the oleander hedge, coyotes close to the fence at night, a fire on the ridgeline and ashes snowing down.

The freeway cut through the valley and the loop of overpass, from which she had staggered down, swung close to a neighborhood. She could see that it was a development of identical tract homes, painted in gradients of beige and roofed with pink Spanish tiles. It was very similar to Lila’s own neighborhood out in the desert, behind the treeless, moon-colored mountains that loomed in the background. The trees along the parkway were little more than frail saplings tethered to posts for support. She knew from watching neighborhoods sprout in the desert how it had evolved from skeletal two-by-four frames mounted on concrete slabs to stuccoed and shingled homes. How the lawns had been rolled on like carpet, how the crosswalks and yellow lines were spray-painted from a slow-moving truck. As she entered the closest cul-de-sac, she could see that the sidewalks were flat, unbroken by roots or earthquakes, and the gutters were dry and free of moss. Under the chaotic clutter of junk on the lawns and driveways, and a heap of ashes in the middle of the street, it was all brand-new.

As the sun inched upward, she felt wobbly in the legs and sat on a curb. What now, what next? How would she get home? Where was it, exactly? She was overwhelmed by a sudden sense of her smallness, her solitude. Crying into her hands, she was careful not to press too hard on her battered face. They had betrayed her by sending her away, her parents. For her own good, they kept saying, her own safety, to protect her. They hadn’t been themselves for a couple of weeks now, alternating between fits of delirious rage and apologetic promises to have her taken somewhere safe. A base near the coast where her father had contacts. They have others over there, they told her. People like you who
can still sleep. But where? The Marine driver would say nothing about it, though she had pressed relentlessly from the backseat.

God, this is so messed up.

She pulled off her left sock, which was soaked with blood from a gash in her thigh, and dropped it in the dry gutter. It looked gruesome, like an organ torn from a body. There must be a cut somewhere on her head too, because every time she pressed her hand to her temple, it came away daubed with red. Her entire scalp and swollen jaw pulsed with pain. Her lip was still bleeding; she could taste the blood. What frightened her was seeing part of her own face out of the corner of her eye.

A number of vultures were circling the overpass, like trash bags in a dust devil. Lila had counted more than two dozen when a woman came out of the house across the street and noticed her sitting there trying to decide what to do. She crossed the street, her oversized flip-flops clapping against her heels. Judging by the woman’s frazzled appearance and darting eyes, Lila figured that she had been sleepless for some time. She was stout, wearing a simple denim skirt and a man’s pinstriped dress shirt that was buttoned wrong. Her wide bulldog face looked sunburned and her lips were cracked.

The woman said, “Why is it you that is sitting out here with these bloody socks in the middle of everything? Come home away from here!”

Lila allowed herself to be led into a nearby house, pulled along by the woman’s grip on her arm. Not the one from which the woman had emerged, but the house immediately behind Lila. There, the woman sat her at the kitchen counter. The sink was filled with broken dishes. There were blackened pots and pans on the floor and what looked like shards of dried pasta everywhere, as well as dark soupy splotches. Lila wanted to plug her nose. Something was rotten somewhere close. On the windowsill,
a dark avocado seed was suspended over a jar by toothpicks, like a dried and shrunken heart. There was no water in the jar, Lila noted, just a filmy residue. Maybe someone drank it. She wished she had water now, and food.

On the counter, there were several bowls of uneaten cereal. Someone, perhaps this woman, had placed one before each barstool. The woman glanced around. She opened the refrigerator to reveal its emptiness. Like the inside of a spaceship in the future, Lila thought, looking past the woman into the white plastic void. She picked out a cornflake from the bowl in front of her and put it on her tongue. It was soft and stale. She didn’t care. It had been weeks since she had had cereal and almost two days since she had eaten anything at all.