Edie and Abram were an unusual couple in that they weren’t addicted to VR. A healthy addiction, studies had concluded. The most effective way to escape “climate dread” without medication. Neverthe-less, Edie and Abram were contrarians that had found one another. They eked out an existence through art and distracted one another from existential dread the old-fashioned way. Edie still played gory VR shooters when she was alone in the apartment and too stoned to do anything else. Abram occasionally lost a few hours in a puzzle game and felt guilty about it afterward if he forgot to make dinner.
Edie put an old record on a very old record player: John and Yoko Double Fantasy. She awkwardly hefted down an unnecessarily large luxury toaster from a high shelf and made toast while frying an egg.
“What is this, mouse shit?” she said, examining small black specks on the counter. “Guess I’ll go get more mouse traps today, too. Little fuckers . . .”
She continued talking to herself, eating, occasionally singing along to the record. She read the news on her phone. Another article about psychedelic VR religious cults, a woman who murdered her mother, a man who cut off his penis. The article took the centrist position that outside of these isolated incidents, VR religions were perfectly fine—healthy, even—so long as nobody ended up hurt. Edie wrote a few notes, ideas, with a pen and pad of paper from a resort in the Cayman Islands. They had matching towels also, all looted. Edie thought of the day’s outfit. Everyone needs a look. Since it isn’t possible to exist in any true sense in an artificial, numbed-out world, the best you can do is present an image, a performance that isn’t concerned with being or authenticity, pure hollow presentation to no one and for no one.
She turned the music down so as not to disturb the neighbors. This was, after all, not technically her apartment, but Abram’s. Edie was not on the lease, and the landlord would jump at any chance to evict Abram, who had inhabited the apartment for the past twelve years under rent control. The bulk of the tech industry had drifted away, but because of its relatively cool climate, San Francisco was still a very desirable and expensive place to live for the very few with means, mostly in new luxury high-rises at the city’s margins. The neighborhood was old. Most of the buildings were well over one hundred years, gray, sooty smoke grime at their edges nearly obscuring the intricate antique details, peeling paint, rusty pipes. Victorian, Italianate, Stick—a faded, trampled San Francisco postcard. Charming ru-ins.
While on the toilet, Edie read about a NASA proposal to have a hundred people living on the moon by 2040. Living within the moon, really. Teams of scientists living in caves at the bot-tom of craters at the lunar poles.
A silver mylar balloon scraped and scratched and rounded the corner, following Edie out of the bathroom. It dropped, facing her, a few inches from her nose, forcing her reflection as she put on her shoes until she swatted it away. The balloons had been on the ceiling for a month and began to drift and fall and sail the air currents of the apartment with a kind of sentience, or the illusion of sentience, like the movements of a Ouija board. She wanted to pop them all; they regularly woke her up at night when they got caught loudly in the intake of the air purifier. She thought Abram would be upset if she popped them; they were his balloons, after all, and the helium was expensive. The helium of the world had nearly run out and thereby became the caviar of purchasable gases.
She had a headache, possibly from the smoke creeping in from outside, infiltrating cracks in the 110-year-old building—one of the newer buildings on the block. She took two ibuprofen and grabbed her N95 ventilator mask. Leaving the apartment, she heard a dog barking from the apartment across the hall. You’re not allowed to have dogs in this building. If they have a dog, maybe we could sneak in a little dog. Could I talk Abram into it? A baby substitute?
The last thought tumbled out and left a pit in her stomach, and she reflexively took a consoling hit from the pipe she carried in her pocket before putting on her mask. She was sterile, as were most of the people she knew, the casualties of an airborne, weaponized virus that rendered eighty-five to ninety percent of those who contracted it infertile. Created by a bioterrorist cell, it hit urbanized areas the hardest and San Francisco particularly hard, affecting nearly the entire population. It was nearly three years to the day that her tests came back positive, Abram’s a week later. Abram seemed unconcerned, as he seemed unconcerned about most things, but Edie struggled with the revelation, reminded by dai-ly videos and articles dissecting the situation and new hopes for a cure. She would wake Abram, crying, and he would attempt to console her with the same argument: So what? We’re all infertile. Every-body. It just means we have to live on through the things we do. Which was no comfort at all. Live on for who, exactly? A dwindling, faceless horde of no consequence? Maybe it was for the best. She saw on the sidewalk yesterday someone had written in chalk HUMANS ARE A CANCER ON THE WORLD. She couldn’t argue with that.
The sky was yellow, but less yellow than the day before. Edie could see the unremarkable squat church at the end of her block. A blue neon cross above the door. The apartment was close enough that Abram and Edie often awoke to families leaving the shelter at daybreak. Thrown out with the sun. Par-ents yelling, spitting, and cursing. Children crying or playing. Although the idea of documenting the mythologies of homeless children had incubated in her head for at least ten years, it was since her infer-tility diagnosis that she found herself on the brink of obsession with the mere act of interacting with children. This was important work, as these were perhaps some of the last children.
At the church, Edie knocked on the side door and then pounded violently. No sound from inside. She walked around to the front of the church but found the doors inaccessible behind a retractable met-al grating. She’d made an appointment, emailed the project coordinator, but this had happened before. The administration of most city social programs was incompetent, and in the past few years, they had also grown vacant, willfully careless. Edie imagined this was because people had given up hope in the material world. Now they wandered, disconnected and distracted, until forced by urgent bodily need to get offline and into the surreal reality of urban decomposition. At some point, there had been a shift away from facing cruel realities.
Edie sat on the church steps for a few minutes, shrugged, and walked down the hill toward the hardware store to buy mouse traps, then weed and a few groceries on the return trip. An autonomous semi crested the hill and passed silently behind her like a shining white eel. A police drone descended ahead of her, flashed a quick red light, parsed the face recognition data, and then, satisfied, lifted off again. A common occurrence when leaving the apartment or even standing in front of a window, it al-ways annoyed Edie and was the most stereotypically dystopian aspect of her day-to-day. The period of public outcry quickly fizzled and now study after study, and innumerable watchdog groups, assured the public that surveillance drones were benign—just searching for outstanding warrants, keeping an eye on things. Indeed, crime out of doors was now next to nonexistent. People still died inside tents on the sidewalk, but it was a mostly quiet affair, a new, strange dignity, junkies spending their UBI as they saw fit. At the hardware store, she purchased her mousetraps—an ingenious killing apparatus whose design hadn’t changed in 150 years—and watched an employee behind the glass counter opening a large box and laughing while other employees gathered around.
“What is that?” she asked the bored teenage female cashier in a red vest.
“Oh, that’s the new Usagi4. Everyone’s freaking out about it. I’m like, whatever, it’s okay, I guess. I mean, what does it even do? It just sits there.”
“What is it?”
“You haven’t heard of it? That’s crazy. People are obsessed with them. It’s from Japan.”
The clerk took a box and sat it on the counter in front of Edie. A photo of a rabbit nibbling a carrot. Most of the text in Japanese.
“How much are they?”
The clerk didn’t answer and opened the box, removing by th
e scruff of its neck what looked to be a sleeping brown rabbit, remarkably lifelike. Edie was overwhelmed with emotion.
“Can I buy this one?”
“Well, these are all like special order . . . so . . . I . . . I mean, I guess I could sell you this one since I opened the box. I’ll just say they shorted us. Do you have cash?” the girl whispered, sneaking a quick glance at her fellow employees chattering and unpacking behind her.
Edie paid the girl, who slid the rabbit back into the box, slid the folded bills into her own pocket, and theatrically printed and handed over a blank receipt.
Edie rushed straight home without buying groceries after realizing she had just recklessly spent all the money she had for the week. This also meant no weed, which hurt much more than the groceries. She would have normally beat herself up for this irrational behavior, but as she was alone in the apart-ment for at least the next week, she had the luxury of dealing with the consequences in private.
She opened the box and sat the rabbit on the bed. It flopped back and forth in her hands, and the machinery under its loose skin indeed felt like small, delicate bones. A pristine, bloodless, dead rabbit on the bed. She read the broken English instructions and then placed the rabbit on its charging mat. A red light blinked deep somewhere in the rabbit’s black, partially opened eyes. Edie impatiently watched for a few minutes and then got up and put on a record. Double Fantasy again, but this time turned down, barely audible, so as not to disturb the robotic rabbit’s restorative sleep. She set about placing the mousetraps, now careful to put them in locations the rabbit presumably couldn’t fit into.
She texted a few friends in hopes of them getting her stoned and maybe buying her dinner. Abram was the cook. Edie had things she could make in the kitchen, but she hated to cook and couldn’t bring herself to do it, especially when she was alone.
In her single days when she had first met Abram, she lived off Taco Bell and forties, but she was also twenty pounds underweight and racked with IBS. A trade-off. She had lived with her friend Akeem, who now lived in LA with his boyfriend. She wondered how he was. The air was worse down there, and it was unbearably hot most of the year. Cheaper, though. She texted him a picture of the rabbit.
She looked in the refrigerator again. A prescription pill bottle rolled out of the fridge door and fell onto the floor. She remembered that Kenner had asked Abram if he could keep it in there while they were gone, because he didn’t want to bring it all with him. The DMT-A. She had never done DMT-A, but she had read countless articles. The bottle felt dirty to her; everything connected to Kenner felt tainted, ruined, and unlucky, except for Abram. They were probably smoking this stuff and having a great time out in the desert right now while she was bored and lonely and out of weed. She sat the pill bottle on the table and ate the remaining frozen mango cubes as she stared at it.
“Okay . . . fuck it.”
She watched an instructional video on her phone and then fashioned a small pipe out of alumi-num foil. She checked on the still lifeless rabbit and then downloaded the free demo version of the Blue Lady game to the VR.
“They better not have ripped me off with that rabbit.”
She sat on the floor near the rabbit with the VR and the loaded pipe in her slightly trembling hand. The game began with soothing music and the sound of water bubbling like an aquarium. She blindly pet the still rabbit at her side, then lit the pipe and took a large hit, coughed, and took another large hit before carefully setting the pipe on the wood floor beside her. She was surrounded by blue, an infinite blue in every direction. The soothing music continued. She talked to herself, to the emptiness.
“Okay, nothing. I don’t feel anything. I don’t think I feel anything. I thought this was supposed to kick in right away. Maybe it’s fake. Kenner got ripped off, of course. And what kind of game is this, any-way? Okay? You can start any minute now. Where’s the start menu? Let’s go.”
The rabbit beside her opened its dark eyes and turned to look at Edie, blindly immersed in the VR. The mylar balloons dropped from the ceiling and hovered in a circle around Edie. A balloon ap-proached the rabbit, and the rabbit took in its reflection for the first time. It sat working its nose, ears back, and turned, hopping silently toward the kitchen.
Edie drifted slowly onto her back as if underwater, her mouth open. The balloons drifted out, giv-ing her room, and then moved in close, circling slowly.
The rabbit sat watching with dark, inscrutable eyes from the edge of the kitchen, curious but keeping a safe distance, presumably. The mouse sat watching the artificial rabbit from the opening of the hole under the counter. It sensed a new smell. Bait. A mousetrap placed somewhere nearby. It was wise enough to know that its life was now in imminent danger. Above, 238,900 miles away, light shifted and crawled across a crater on the moon. Two women and a child sat in an autonomous black luxury car across the street, staring up at the apartment window behind Edie, awaiting instructions. And 369.7 miles above the apartment, an unregistered satellite passed silently, gathering invisible threads. The artificial rabbit turned and looked at the mouse. A high-pitched rising tone came from the bedroom, gripping the mouse, pressing it to the floor, a communication made manifest in branching waves be-tween its seventy-five million neurons, imprinted pictures and patterns, distant memories of events yet to happen.
7
After forty-five minutes without another vehicle on the road from horizon to horizon, Abram and Kenner arrived at a pullout and a rusty cattle gate. They exited into the midday heat and stared at the gate and the dirt road beyond.
“No keep-out sign,” Kenner said, jumping onto the gate and shaking it violently.
“There’s a padlock, though.”
“I can cut it.”
“Okay,” Abram said, looking around nervously at no one and nothing for miles.
“Relax,” Kenner said. “We came all this way. What are we going to do? Turn around? Let me dig out my bolt cutters from under the seat.”
They drove down the buckled road. Small tufts of desert grass and an occasional cactus dotted the path, signs of the desert languidly taking back what it had loaned. As the road vanished and they made their way into the mouth of the wild desert proper, they bore the weight of time immeasurable, its cal-lous indifference, and were hushed. They crested a short rise, spotting a building ahead and, before it, the reappearance of the broken road from the sand. They found the rusty and rotting tin airplane hang-ar, one piece in a small compound of structures, some tin sheeting, some cinder block or poured con-crete, all in varying states of decomposition.
“This is pretty badass. Somebody should make a movie here,” Kenner said as they parked at the yawning entrance of the large hangar.
“Well, we kind of are, I guess,” Abram said, hanging his camera on his neck and checking the bat-tery and settings. “Let’s walk around and check it out. Watch out for rattlesnakes.”
The buildings were mostly full of sand and broken glass, anything of conceivable value ransacked decades ago. Small remnants of long-ago campfires here and there. A dumped black plastic garbage bag, its candy wrapper contents sun-bleached beyond recognition. Abram took a few pictures of the apocalyptic, desiccated spaces. It appealed to him, the sterile, barren emptiness of desert ruins. The relentlessness of sand and time. The forced cosmogonic perspective. It made him feel nonexistent, re-moved from himself, outside of time and human concerns.
The sun slowly and sweetly sank, and a rapturous golden hour fell on the broken-down encamp-ment. Abram took pictures as Kenner poked and swept through the sand and rocks with a bent section of rebar, searching for any buried artifact of interest. At nightfall, Abram retrieved a few miniature, high-powered LED lights from a bag in the truck and kept shooting while Kenner attempted a small fire on the concrete floor of the airplane hangar.
Abram joined Kenner at the fire and slowly reviewed the photos. After a time, “Pavane pour une infante défunte” repeating on his phone, Abram looked up from the camera screen, bleary
-eyed as if waking, and sat blinking at the fire and its small sparks as they lifted to the vaulted ceiling to disappear.
“You down to camp here tonight, or should we head back into town and stay at the motel?” Abram said. Through the flames, he could see Kenner lying on the other side of the fire, using his backpack as a pillow and reading a tattered vintage paperback copy of Stranger in a Strange Land.
“I’m down to stay here if you are. We have plenty of water and food. I found a busted-up old chair for firewood. I’ve got a little firewood in the back of the truck, too, that would last us through the night.”
“You find anything else of interest today, aside from a chair? Like any pentagrams or children’s bones?” Abram said, laughing.
“Not really, but I can definitely feel vibes off of this place. Like, weird shit went down here for sure.”
“To be honest, I’ve had a weird feeling since we pulled up, too. Kinda like déjà vu. Not really, though. It’s hard to explain. Like I had a dream about this place as a kid or something and forgot about it until now.”
“People think more about the meaning of their dreams than about the shit they see when they’re awake. Until those two worlds overlap. There’s no distinction, really. It just seems like it.”
The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams Page 5