Black Moon (30 page)

He had his locks in his cargo pants pockets. They were banging hard against his legs as he ran. Something else, too, a plastic rattle. The bottle of pills, he recalled, stuffed in his pocket the night before.

They were painkillers, right? He had taken a couple, to numb him to a terrible notion. An idea that had gotten into his head that he could not shake.

Oh, Carolyn. What?

There were a couple of ways to interpret the clues, but both scenarios made him feel very far from knowing her. She had, it seemed, for a few weeks at least, carried life inside her. But it had ended, either by her choice or naturally. And she had said nothing to him about it. Not a word. She had escaped to the cave of her childhood room, had attempted to heal there, or at least to paint over the damage.

The drugs caused him to carelessly fall asleep. There, in the exposed bed, an inciting diorama behind the glass doors. Now the remaining pills rattled with every stride as he gradually outpaced his pursuers.

The sound, a dry muted clatter like fragments of bone, followed him as he scrambled up the ladder onto the billboard. The sea loomed flat and frozen behind him. His tagline hung overhead:
INSERT TOES HERE
.

This was it, finally. Trapped in the open.

He pulled the ladder up and paced the catwalk as the sleepless straggled in below, urged forward by a grotesque mutation of resentment. They looked up at him, some of them reaching into the air. They screamed and it set off more screaming in the distance, like car alarms triggering one another. Others appeared and moved toward the group, passing through the car lot maze in winding routes.

Maybe if he somehow sat out of view, they would eventually wander off. Some already had—a man in a blue jumpsuit, a naked woman, and a couple of kids—but others, those maybe not as far along, displayed the same unshakable focus as the man who had cornered him in the cage. Biggs lowered himself and sat on the narrow catwalk, his back to the sign. He could see the sleepless through the grillwork and studied them vacantly, blinking down at them. The drugs were still in his system. Soon, as the adrenaline rush passed, grogginess settled in.

He was thinking: Maybe there was someone else. Maybe it wasn’t mine.

His mind shuffled through the possibilities. She had few friends, male or female, since she worked at home and for the most part alone. There were a couple of assistants for projects with decent grants, but they were college girls. He worried about her being so isolated. But she said she preferred it, after being drawn into the Whitneys’ lives and suffering through the heartache the situation ultimately brought her.

“I’m talking about meeting people our age,” he told her. “People with similar interests.”

“Hang out with filmmakers? I don’t know about that.” She had expressed before that artists should work away from the influence of others, and study only the work of the dead. At the time, he was grateful that she didn’t judge him for his profession’s total engagement with the here and now, and how it shamelessly fed off itself. Still, he thought she could use some time away from her work, out with others. Once, in bed, he suggested a book club. Maybe some kind of volunteer work.

“Baby,” she said, “you seem to be forgetting that I have someone to talk to, and I don’t really need anyone else.” She pressed in close, squeezed his wrist. She did that every now and then, without comment. Did she think he couldn’t tell that she was checking his pulse? Like her sniff test, when she inhaled deeply while kissing his cheek, these were little tests she ran to check… what? If he was actually there at all?

No, he really couldn’t imagine that she had had some kind of affair. She was too cautious about entanglements, too resistant to make room for other people’s stories in her own narrative. She had allowed him in, and had made space for the plot point of a child—their child—on their arc. Though more recently, she seemed to have abandoned it. They hadn’t surrendered completely, however. They still enjoyed the occasional erotic outburst. One of those sweaty encounters could have sparked into a tiny flame. But what had happened to snuff it? And why had she said nothing of it?

He couldn’t think this through with the shrieks from below.
“Shut the fuck up!”
he yelled.

This only triggered a deafening response. He saw that there were more now, a gathering at the foot of the billboard. Their
rage seemed to infect him as he dug into his pocket for one of the locks and whipped it at the sleepless people below. It struck a man near the collarbone, bringing a new color of anguish into the cacophony.

Biggs pulled another lock from his pocket. I’ll kill one of these fuckers and the rest will take off, he thought.

He targeted a man standing a bit taller than the others and fastballed the lock in his direction. The lock somehow managed to miss everyone below and clattered against the pavement. “Shit,” Biggs said.

He had one more lock and, sighting up his target, let it fly. The lock struck the man in the face, but he did not go down. He howled, hands over his face, slamming into those around him. But soon he resumed screaming up at Biggs from behind a badly broken nose. Biggs dug in his pocket again and extracted the only remaining item. He sat and studied the prescription label on the tubelike bottle. He recognized the address of the pharmacy, since it was only one number off from the address of their first apartment.

THE
idea did not come to him immediately. It crept up, over a couple of sleepless days and nights trapped on the billboard. It was like a pill, rather than a pea, felt through a stack of mattresses. A vague discomfort at first, and then like a jagged boulder pressing at his spine. He used every trick he had acquired to stay awake—pulling out his hair, slapping himself, twisting his flesh. He could trigger a surge of adrenaline by leaning far out over the edge of the catwalk, tipping slowly forward until he caught himself.

If he were to fall asleep here, in full view of the cluster of insomniacs below, he feared it would only reset their single-minded
determination to tear him apart. Though some had wandered off, the two men and the kids who had originally seen him would not abandon rage. They pissed and shit where they stood, hoarsely screaming up at him. They would not forget. They knew he had sleep inside him. They wanted to pull it from him and smear it over the pavement with their own waste.

A day passed, then a cold night, morning drizzle. His pursuers remained below, focused on his every move, and the idea grew in persistence. The next afternoon was blazingly hot. There was nowhere to hide on the platform. The shadows of the palm trees on the beach behind him offered no relief from the sun, nor did the flat field of blue dots that read as water below. He took no comfort from the tagline that had once won his firm a much-needed account. He could see his arms reddening from sunburn, and the heat made him lightheaded. Or maybe it was the lack of food and water. Other than a peppermint that he found deep in a thigh pocket, he had nothing to eat or drink.

As this standoff wore on, his mind increasingly wandered. He found himself attempting to recall the conflicts in front of the clinic next door. The lines of protesters who had sometimes locked wrists and blocked the entrance, who were righteous and defiant during their arrest and carted off in the police van. The women attempting to pass through were from every walk of life, every age and race. Sometimes boyfriends or husbands or fathers would be at their side, or out in front, pushing their way through like linebackers. But most of the time the women were alone or with other women. He tried to imagine Carolyn arriving by herself. Maybe there were no protesters, or maybe just that one woman, the one who showed up with a sign and did a single pass on the sidewalk. She and Carolyn exchanging a knowing look. Carolyn stepping past her as the woman lowered her sign. But why? What excuse did she have? What hardship? Wasn’t
it all that she had wanted? Wasn’t it she who had once said she could never do it? That she didn’t blame or judge those who did, because she did not know their story, their reality, but she, within hers, would never do it. He recalled then, with startling clarity, one comment of hers, made late in the night—almost an utterance from her dreams. As always, he had been sleeping at her side as the machinery of her mind churned into the night. She must have nudged him before speaking. He surfaced long enough to take in the line like a gulp of consciousness. She said, “What could maybe be unbearable is knowing that something was dreaming inside you.”

HE
waited another day, staring out over the endless echo of rooftops as his thoughts darkened and despair settled in. The mountains beyond like gnarled and kinked muscle. He ignored the ragged people below waiting to kill him. He had tuned them out as his grasp of the world became increasingly loose. The dark blur in the corner of his eye remained, he realized. It was Carolyn, hiding there. “Come out,” he urged her. “You owe me an explanation. We need to talk.” But it was only the tip of a black shroud that blew inward. It wrapped around his mind and soaked up his memories. It weighed down his head so that his chin cut into his chest. He saw that there was no way out of this. The idea, reinforced by the decimated world around him, by the fad of extinction and the sheer unpopularity of carrying on, filled the few hopeful spaces inside him with a dense blackness. When it came to erasing herself from her worlds, she had always embraced the tedium of it. There was something of duty in her resigned approach to removal. He suddenly understood that now.

An hour before sunrise on his third night, his body wilted and his mind scrambled, he ate all the pills in the bottle.

LATER
he would tell them, “I had taken the pills and I was just waiting, lying faceup on the billboard landing. I could hear them below, screaming up at me. There was no other way out. I thought I saw a bird land on the top of the billboard, but when the shape of it dropped down over me I saw that it was her. I said, I’m almost there, and she said, You can’t. She turned me on my side and put her fingers in my throat. They tasted like clay. Everything inside me came up, except the dreams yet to be dreamed. The pills fell in clots through the metal grille. She positioned me, curling me up, my face staring at the beach scene on the billboard. Then she seemed to drop away, and one by one I heard the shrieking from the sleepless people go silent.”

Because he was the dreamer, they did not know if what he was telling them was a dream or not.

When they asked, Dr. Lee would say, “It doesn’t matter.”

SHE WASN’T SLEEPING, THOUGH IT MUST
have been past midnight. This was unlike her. Lila was a sleeper—a natural sleeper.

Don’t freak out, she told herself. I mean, being up this late isn’t the usual, but it’s probably just because today wasn’t the usual.

Today she had met another sleeper, the first she had encountered in weeks. A pretty college girl with cropped hair: Felicia, now sleeping at her feet in the dark room. From where she sat in her owl mask, Lila could see the moon through the high window, floating beyond the branches of an olive tree. It was just a sickle of light, hanging in the sky among a wild spray of stars. All that cosmic luminance, traveling for millions of years, amounted to nothing more than a pale patch on the carpet.

Lila clicked on the flashlight they had found earlier and studied her new companion, who was lying on her back, hands lightly clasped over her flat stomach, ankles crossed. She had conked out exactly at ten o’clock, just like she promised she would. It wasn’t natural the way it happened, Lila had observed. There was no drifting off, no yawning or heavy eyelids slowly drooping. One minute she was lying on the mattress watching Lila rub her feet together, and the next she was asleep. Like a thing switched off. Eyes closed, mouth slightly open, looking even prettier than when she was awake.

“You won’t be able to wake me once I’m out,” Felicia had
told her. She explained how the implant worked as they ate their power bars and night filled the room, wind gusting outside. She described how she would stay like that no matter what, even if the house was burning down or someone was slapping her face with a dead fish, until exactly seven o’clock in the morning, when she would wake all of a sudden and maybe jump up, gasping as if she had been held under water.