The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams
Copyright © 2021 Jacob Daniel Palmer
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trade-mark owners of various products, bands, and/or restaurants referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
About the Author
For Bonga
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
― Jean Baudrillard
1
The October moon drifted into place above Abram’s sleeping body. The refrigerator hummed, and beneath the weight of the moon and the humming, a brown mouse slipped silently under the door, out into the shared beige apartment building hallway and into the 3:00 a.m. stillness. Two black, half-globe eyes reflected a cheap chandelier and a moth circling. The mouse watched the moth. The mouse thought about the moth in a manner inscrutable to a human mind or even a moth mind.
Abram stood at the edge of a moon crater, looking down into it. It looked like nothing, like death. Abram stood naked on the moon but was alive somehow. He turned his back to the crater and made his way down a pink motel hallway. An ornate golden room service cart parked against the wall started roll-ing. He felt the hallway moving, a fake hallway, a stage set within a moving vehicle—a ship or an air-plane or a boat. A large semi-truck, he decided. Abram watched himself walking down the hallway on a small antique television resting on his naked lap.
He opened his eyes to a shape in the shifting darkness. Spectral, slowly solidifying, a mechanism, a robotic arm, pieced-together fragments, wire, rotating, floating, and spinning toward him. Abram sat up, raising his hands in anticipation. He spoke, but his words came out as a jumble of half sounds.
“Wake up,” Edie said, rubbing Abram’s back. “You’re having a nightmare.”
Abram sat on the edge of the bed, weak hands grasping at the dark. “I have to pee,” he said, con-fused but suddenly present, and stumbled to the bathroom, tripping over the plastic oscillating fan on the floor and cursing.
Returning from the bathroom, he found Edie on her phone, a square of icy blue light illuminating her face, her eyes puffy and squinting.
“I’m going to close the window,” she said. “I know it’s hot, but I can’t take the smoke tonight.”
“I’ll do it,” Abram said, crawling over her and the mass of twisted sheets.
“The EPA website says the air quality is unhealthy for sensitive groups,” Edie said, putting her phone away, shoving it under a stuffed animal.
“That’s not so bad. Better than it was yesterday. It’s that fire up north.”
“What were you having a nightmare about?”
“It wasn’t really a nightmare. It was one of my half-awake hallucination things. Hypnagogia. My eyes were wide open.”
“What did you see? I’m afraid to even ask.”
“Nothing, I guess. I don’t know. It was like a complicated spinning machine. Like a walking ma-chine made out of spindly little parts. I can’t really remember. Over by the closet, and then moving to-ward me.”
“It’s been a while since you’ve had a hallucination. Are you stressed about anything?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’d tell you if I was.”
“One of these days I’m going to wake up to you having a sleep hallucination and strangling me.”
“That probably won’t ever happen . . . Well, anyway, goodnight.”
Edie laughed and rolled over facing the window. “Love you. Goodnight,” she said dreamily.
“Are you eating something?” Abram said.
“Umm, yes.”
“Are you eating chips in bed? It’s three in the morning. You wake up and eat chips?”
“I left that little bag of chips on the windowsill next to my water.” Edie laughed. “I get hungry at night.”
“You are too much,” Abram said, then kissed Edie on the forehead and rolled over. “If you get crumbs on my side of the bed, I swear to God . . .”
Edie laughed again and rolled over, their naked backs pressed together. Abram thought of a pair of conjoined piglets he saw floating in a jar when he was in college.
After hearing Edie softly snoring—How does she always fall asleep so fast?—Abram shifted onto his back and stared at the ceiling in the dark. He watched the silver chrome shape of a half-deflated mylar balloon directly over his head. The ceiling was littered with bobbing metallic mylar bal-loons in varying states of death, remnants of his recent vacant-shop window art installation downtown. A large plastic landscaping boulder from one of Edie’s art installations hung from the ceiling, and most of the balloons congregated at its base, swaying, dragging, and lightly scraping in clusters carried by the languid apartment air currents, insect jetstreams. Edie said that the balloons must terrify the daddy-long-legs spiders that had taken up residence in the ceiling corners. She hoped they were terrified, any-way, and would leave the apartment of their own volition.
Abram could see the moon, a crystalline cross-section, peeking through a crack in the blackout curtain. He remembered as a boy reading an interview with an astronaut. The astronaut told a story of a dream he’d had while on the surface of the moon, tucked into the aluminum capsule. He ventured out in the lunar rover and toward the moon’s sharp horizon. He happened upon a set of tire tracks, and after the go-ahead from mission control, he followed them. At the bottom of a large crater, he arrived at an-other rover with an astronaut standing next to it. Through the dark amber sun visor, he could see that the man in the other space suit was his double. Mirror image, mirror rover. Two sets of tracks converg-ing. His double told him
that he had been waiting on the moon for ten thousand years. When the astro-naut awoke and carried out his mission, surveying the lunar surface, he secretly looked for the second set of rover tracks from his dream.
2
The smoky, yellow morning light hung above the grimy sidewalk. There, above Abram, be-yond the haze and empty space, the nuclear furnace of the sun roared, tumbling through space at 450,000 miles an hour, orbiting the galactic center of the Milky Way and dragging along its dancing, insignificant planetoid brood, the solar wind creating aberrations in the electronics of innumerable sat-ellites and microsatellites in Earth orbit. Inserting variables. Abram pulled the plastic identification badge out of his gray wool blazer and flashed it at the thin security guard arguing loudly on the phone, his back turned. The microsatellite-manufacturing company inhabited a nondescript former auto gar-age, windows blacked out. Rows of people tapped away at laptops at communal redwood tables, some wearing N95 masks. No one looked up. How small I am, how invisible. Anxiety permeated the space, the smell of rot, a dead mouse in the wall, maybe. Abram arrived at his designated area, de-marcated by blue gaffer’s tape labeled Artist in Residence on the polished concrete floor. He found two young interns, gangly pale limbs in polo shirts, gathering his photography equipment into a box.
“Hey, hey, hey!” Abram said, visibly annoyed. “I can do that. I don’t need any help packing up.”
“They told us to do it,” the intern said. “They’ll mail this stuff to you.”
“I understand that. I read the email on my way over here. Just give me a few minutes to grab my stuff. It’s pointless to mail it. I live twenty minutes away, and I’m here right now.”
“You have to leave, Mr. Panicles. I’ve called security,” another intern said, severe, a hint of panic in her cracking voice.
“They’re all going to be out here,” one intern said to the other. “They are going to kill us.”
“Listen, I’m here now. I’m taking my shit. That’s a four-thousand-dollar camera,” Abram said, throat tightening like a child on the verge of tears.
A heavy security guard appeared, uncomfortable and rubbing his pockmarked face.
“I’m sorry. You have to vacate the premises now, sir. We’ll mail your things to you like everybody else. I’ll walk you over to check with HR on the way out to make sure they have your correct address.”
“Okay, sure. Whatever. But I’m taking my camera,” Abram said, reaching into the box.
Abram strode to the HR desk, the security guard following a few steps behind. A buzzing, indig-nant anger rose in his chest. He felt as if he were quietly losing himself somehow, out of character. He found the young woman at the HR desk crying. Embarrassing, uncontrollable, heaving sobs. Standing near her were three men, older, all with gray or graying hair. Like politicians, he thought. Black suits. They seemed not to notice Abram or the crying woman and were locked in a whispered discussion.
“So I, um . . . You’re mailing my stuff to me. I mean, I’m supposed to make sure you have my info. So . . .” Abram said, standing nervously, collecting himself, idly fidgeting with his large camera. The se-curity guard behind him, apparently satisfied, sauntered back toward the entrance.
“Sure, okay.” The young woman sniffed, clumsily reopening her laptop only a second after closing it. She looked at her own trembling hands.
She stopped and held eye contact with Abram, makeup running down her cheeks.
Abram gave his name and temporary company ID number with as sympathetic a tone as he could muster, assuming maybe she had just been fired as unceremoniously as he had.
Abram felt a pressure on his toe and looked down. Her trembling foot, and under the tip of her shoe, a small black memory card. The woman stared at Abram with tear-blinded intensity. Abram had trouble swallowing. He had lost his footing momentarily before, lost himself. Now a path presented it-self, a nonsensical path. What is this? She pressed again, then pushed a pen off the edge of her desk, maintaining eye contact. Abram reached down to retrieve the pen and palmed the small memory card from beneath her shoe.
“Okay, it looks like we’re good here. Expect your things in a day or two,” she said, sniffing and rubbing her wet, red face and looking away from him.
The three men in suits stopped talking and looked at Abram. Less looking at than looking through with a disinterested malice. Disgust. Their faces like masks. Abram felt his guts spasm, felt his life somehow inexplicably in danger, silly. He turned, coughing nervously, and made his way to the door. Another security guard appeared and trailed him.
“Sir, I need to check your—”
Abram broke into a run at the sight of the opening door and awkwardly wedged himself past a group entering the building, more distinguished old men in heated conversation.
He ran down the sidewalk, the camera around his neck beating against his chest with each foot-fall, laughing uncontrollably, surprising himself. He felt stoned. What just happened? This is ridic-ulous. Why am I running? I didn’t do anything. I have my camera. The stuff they’re mailing me isn’t even that important: a cheap ring light, some stands. I have my camera. After four blocks, he stood panting at a crosswalk. A black autonomous vehicle with tinted windows sped through the intersection, narrowly avoiding an oblivious woman talking to herself and gesticulating wildly in the bike lane. She pushed a rattling cart. Abram flinched at the woman’s words, which rang out like gunshots as she passed.
“If God lived on Earth today, you would break her windows!” the woman shouted to no one, her red eyes darting back and forth. “Initial conditions. There are patterns, loops, self-organization. So you have a question?” the woman asked, her voice suddenly flat. “It’s a good question. Why are you helping me? Are you here to save me, or are you here to get revenge? Because all of those things sound like your problem. The way you do the same things over and over and over, over and over again. We’re all in on the lie. I’m telling you, we’re not all out here to escape the truth. We’re all out here to keep the lie.”
Abram barely registered these words and then let them fall away, like anything else he encoun-tered in the city. The sky was a featureless golden dome. Abram coughed, then unfolded and put on the ragged, dirty paper N95 mask from his back pocket.
The light changed, and he walked briskly, looking intermittently behind him and rubbing the small, smooth memory card between his index finger and thumb like a good luck charm.
3
Kenner sat on the couch, bleary-eyed, his hair a tangled argument of salt and pepper curls. A lanky northern California faded hippie archetype with loose-fitting black cargo pants that cinched at the ankles and a gray Jimi Hendrix T-shirt. His dirty bare feet rested on a coffee table shrine of weed-smoking paraphernalia. Next to a comically large orange bong sat a vintage plastic film canister contain-ing twelve grams of DMT-A, and beneath it a spiral notebook, stained and burned, labeled SONGS. Kenner had a boyish but also weathered and world-weary face, like a child war ref-ugee. He balanced an ancient laptop loosely on his thighs, watching muted poker strategy videos with subtitles. Cacophonous music blared from the other room.
“Whoever plays deep must necessarily lose his money or his character. Lord Chesterfield,” he mumbled to himself.
An elderly, lint-covered black cat jumped onto the couch, and he pet it without looking at it.
“Chaos is the law of nature. Order is the dream of man. Henry Adams,” he recited to the cat while still watching the poker video.
He looked up and out through dirty yellow curtains at the dirty yellow sky. The music in the other room grew louder. Chugging, screaming, distorted brass samples looping. A framed yellowed photo of a bank engulfed in flames began rattling on the wall.
“I’m going into the city. Want a ride?” Kenner yelled blankly, as if to no one, and received no re-sponse.
He closed the laptop and slid it, along with everything else on the table, haphazardly into his backpack, knocking the bong onto the floor and cursing.
&
nbsp; Kenner pulled up outside Abram’s small, rundown Lower Haight apartment building. The build-ing and sky were the same color. Countless small black caterpillars with red markings greedily munched at dying vines growing on the gated entrance.
“Brother? You up there?” he yelled up to the soot-streaked window above the garage.
Edie’s small, round face appeared, eyes half open. She had clearly just awoken, laboring to lift the large old window.
“Abram isn’t here. I think he’s on his way home, though. Want to come up?” she said hesitantly.
“If that’s cool. I mean, I understand if you’re trying to take a na—”
“Just come up, Kenner,” Edie said and closed the window.
Kenner sat, a gangly, awkward mass, on a small stepladder chair at the tiny fold-out kitchen ta-ble. In the small kitchen, he looked as if he were sitting in a child’s playhouse. Edie dressed like a child playing tea party in the 1700s. All frills and large buttons, pantaloons, a large, pleated ruffle collar, and a turquoise velvet riding jacket.
“Do you want some tea?” Edie said.
“That’d be chill. You have yerba maté?”
“No.”
“Turmeric?”
“No.”
“I was reading this thing yesterday about how caffeine totally throws off your PH, except yerba maté has an extra m—”
“Okay. You want water?”
“Is it filtered?”
“No. We need to order a new one. I think there’s a bottle of water in the fridge, though.”
“I hate to ask, but is it a plastic bottle? I don’t drink out of plastic bottles anymore. You know we ingest about two credit cards a week on average? Microplastics in the air and water, man. Corporations have known about it for years and covered it up. They’re actually suing the scientists that blew the whis-tle. The government wants to give people cancer. It’s like their business plan.”
“I know, Kenner. I know. Everybody knows corporations do evil shit, and you love telling me about it every time you come over. You forget I’m Puerto Rican? Coca-Cola had those union leaders killed in San Juan and that was only like ten years ago. It’s capitalism.”
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