Black Moon (34 page)

“But,” they said, “every dream is about his wife. It has nothing to do with us.”

“That’s how it may seem,” Lee said. “But believe me, it has held us in place. Without these recitals, you, Warren, would have already grown antlers. You would be trapped inside a coat of fur.

“And, you, Fran, you would have gills and large unblinking eyes on opposite sides of your flattened face.

“And Porter, he would be brooding from under his cobra’s hood.”

MORALES
waited for him to catch up in the corridor. He said, “You probably thought I was joking about what I said before. But you know what, bro? You don’t know what it’s like. When your head doesn’t work right, when it stops telling you stories. It’s like there’s just a hole there. You throw stuff in it and nothing comes back. You can even hear that shit hit the bottom. It’s just falling forever into nothing. You don’t think that will drive a person insane? I got to have something of what I had.”

Biggs heard a waver in his voice and glanced over as they walked. There, under his eye, a shining trail.

Biggs liked Morales. He was the first person from the center that Biggs had encountered. What he desires, Biggs thought, is desire.

THEY
moved him from his bunk in the common room to Felicia’s room and shaved his head. From the bed, he could see an arrangement of mementos Felicia had set up on a narrow metal desk in the corner. There was a small stack of books—mostly trade paperback novels, but also psychology and physiology textbooks fringed with sticky notes. Small brass figurines of a pig, an owl, and a squirrel sat inside a tangled ring of necklaces made from amber and polished stones. A small jar filled with tin Mexican milagros. An older couple posed in a small, ornately carved gold frame. No doubt those are her parents. The ones she went to rescue, he concluded.

He had heard some members of their little community refer to Felicia as a dreamer. One note stuck to the door said, Follow that dream. He assumed, as he looked around the smart room, which was still occupied by her possessions, that they meant it figuratively. That it was her nature to have aspirations, that she wouldn’t simply settle for the circumstances she had been given.

She was pretty, he noted, studying the pictures she had stuck to her mirror. They revealed her dark Latin looks—smooth hood of black hair, red mouth, proud nose. Her bright smile and shining eyes, a kindness there, something hopeful. He was happy to study it, though his own dour image, which loomed behind her snapshots, kept distracting him. How white his exposed scalp looked. How he, without hair, seemed to have aged. He had lost nearly forty pounds when he was on the streets, and though he shoveled as much lunchroom pasta into his system as possible, he had only gained back about ten.

A skeleton is looking back at me. A dreaming skeleton.

THERE
was a hood of sensors that he was to wear at night. It would measure his brain activity and, immediately after a dream ended, ring the phone at his bedside. He would wake, the dream still fresh in his mind, and write it down.

“It’s like the poet who held a spoon in his hand as he drifted off,” Porter said as Warren, a tech, fitted him with the hood. “When the spoon dropped, the sound of it ringing against the floor would wake him and he would write what he had seen.”

Biggs rubbed at the stubble on his head, felt at the hardness of his skull.

When he was alone with Lee, he asked, “Am I a prisoner?”

“The opposite. But I can’t let you go,” Lee said. “You are an amazing gift to all of us. It would be wrong to put you in danger.”

“Don’t you think going back and seeing what there is to see will bring closure? Don’t you think it could clear the way for different subjects?”

“Yes, I’ve thought about that. I know that’s what you are
seeking. Matt, along those lines, I’ve been doing some research and I found this.”

He handed Biggs a piece of paper, a page torn from a medical journal. Biggs quickly read the description of a
delayed miscarriage
—when the fetus dies of natural causes in the womb during early stages of pregnancy. When this happens, the clipping told him, the
products of conception
must be either surgically or medically removed. Both can result in complications that cause prolonged pain and bleeding.

Biggs looked up at Dr. Lee, not sure what to make of the information.

“Didn’t you say she titled the film you found
Missed
?”

“Yes,” he said. “The file anyway. I’m still not following.”

“Well, another name for a delayed miscarriage is ‘missed.’ A
missed
miscarriage.”

Biggs sat with this information.

“I don’t think she did it,” Lee said. “You see where I’m going with this, right?”

Biggs said nothing.

Lee stood. At the door, he turned back.

“Tell you what. I’ll send out Morales,” he said.

HE
told them, “We drove up the coast, right on the beach. On the hard sand at the edge of the water. Morales knew the streets of the city. He got us there. We went up the stairwell and kicked open the door. A cold wind pushed through. We were standing on a meadow that spread out on the top of a mountain. There were purple flowers and giant rocks jutting out of the grass. A figure stood in the distance. I called out to it, called her name. The figure was either wearing a cape or had wings. We moved
toward it but couldn’t close the distance. We started running but then tumbled into a hole with steep sides. We couldn’t climb out. We could only shout for help and watch the sky cloud over. There was nowhere to go but into the walls of dirt.”

HE
told Morales, “The room was pitch black. The couple—the man and the woman there—had no sense of time or space. They had passed through sleep into a nothingness that formed along the shape of their bodies. There was only their bodies. He felt the heat of her skin, smelled her hair, the sweet sweat of sleep. Her mouth was a soft wet circle of heat that moved over his skin.”

He couldn’t continue.

A long silence passed.

Morales said, “Bro, it’s cool.” Morales squeezed his shoulder. “It’s all right, seriously. I’ll take you.”

THEY
drove up the coast on the glassy sand, but not for long. Cliffs rising out of the water stood in their way. The waves beat against them and fell away defeated, reduced to a wash of foam. They turned inland. Morales drove along an estuary, flushing a flock of snowy egrets, and onto the highway, where they began their negotiations with an array of obstructions, including bodies from overpasses.

“Lee will have my fucking balls when we get back,” Morales said.

“Maybe. But maybe this will be good for everyone.”

“I’m telling you now to not get your hopes up, my friend. The only thing out here is bad news.”

He looked at Biggs. It was clear that he wanted to say something.

“What?”

“These search missions he sends me on? They’re bogus.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that we aren’t looking for Felicia anymore. You hear what I’m saying?”

Biggs studied his face. He saw that they had found her.

“You don’t want to know,” Morales said.

He drove on but after a few miles, he said, “Someone went after the implant, dug it right out of her head. Tried to pound it into his own skull with a rock. Bashed his fucking brains out. We think it was her boyfriend.”

“How long ago was this?”

“That we found her? Weeks ago, bro. Like right after we found you. Lee’s just pretending that she could still be alive. He says he’s doing it for them, but I think he’s doing it for himself.”

THEY
had to stop once for Morales’s three-hour sleep shift. Like all security team members, his schedule was split into shorter shifts that overlapped with the other men’s. Biggs stood under a tree, waiting for downtime to end. With his eyes he followed a column of ants up the trunk, then squinted at the sun pouring through the leaves. In the distance, he saw a billboard and recalled how he woke to find himself alive, the front of his shirt soaked with vomit and the pattern of the floor grille pressed into his cheek. He remembered how, in his confusion, he thought she had been there with him. And how the ground below was littered with bodies. Like the man who cornered him in the cage, they must have ruptured with rage at seeing him unconscious.

His sleep, he noted, could kill.

After exactly three hours had passed, Morales woke with a start. Biggs watched as he looked around, then beeped the horn.

It took the entire day to reach the shattered drugstore, the small park where he had once stolen naps in the shrubbery. The building stood where he had left it.

He climbed the stairs, Morales right there behind him.

He pushed open the door.

IT WAS
like visiting home in a dream. This is because, Biggs thought, I had decided to die. I had tried to die but I lived. Everything from before should be gone, but it’s here.

Here was their bed, their clothing hanging in the closets. Their books lined the shelves, a wall of stories receding into the past. He studied their pictures on the wall looking for discrepancies, changes. The great expanse between himself and his memories confused him. There was something more than time in the way. This may be me protecting myself, he thought. I wish I wouldn’t do that. Just break if you’re going to break.

“No one’s here,” Morales said. He turned to see that Morales was holding one of Carolyn’s stop-motion puppets. He had checked the studio.

“How can we get up there?” Biggs asked, pointing up to the skylight, which indeed was open. Had they left it that way? The hook pole hung down. It wouldn’t support either of them, even if they were nimble enough to climb it.

They brought a stepladder out from the studio and put it on the dining table, which they pulled under the opening in the ceiling. Biggs went up, pushing the bubble window wide and pulling himself through. The sun was going down, but the heat still rose from the tar. He sat in the opening as she once had, his feet dangling. Below him, Morales waited for him to report what he was seeing, but he said nothing.

There were her footprints in the dust. There was no way to know if they had been pressed there a year ago, when she first went up, or recently—if that is, in fact, how she had found her way out. He put his hand in one of the prints, aligned his fingers with her toes. His palm came away blackened by dust. He slowly stood and took in the surroundings—the elevator housing, vents, and stovepipes. A low brick wall crowned the roof. He looked beyond it, holding his hand against the low sun, and scanned buildings, the city flaring with sunlight and, far away, the low ridge of the hills to the west.

The footprints marked a path along the circumference of the rooftop. She had walked along the edge numerous times, the footprints overlapping and obscuring the form of her feet. He walked alongside the prints and, feeling very certain that he was being watched, glanced back at the skylight opening, expecting to see Morales’s head jutting through. But no, he was still below.

At the far end of the roof, there was a shed. Yes, she had investigated it herself. Her footprints disappeared into the doorway. Biggs approached it and peered in, dreading what he might find there. Stacked against the walls were buckets of tar, rolls of tarpaper. The shed’s roof angled upward and beams formed a narrow shelf. He was startled to see a large owl there looking down at him. Its eyes gleamed as it calmly observed him, saw all of him, he felt, every vision that had passed through his head. For a moment he braced himself, expecting the bird to fly at his head. But instead it leapt over him and, with two silent wing beats, drifted over the side of the building. Biggs accepted an unspoken invitation. He stood on a bucket and saw the eggs there, sitting among the loose twigs and dried bits of fur and bone.

BY
the time he returned to the loft, Morales was eating the food they had brought along from the center—pasta sandwiches and raw squash from the graduate housing gardens. He helped him down from the ladder and put a sandwich in his hand.