The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams

by Palmer, Jacob

  “Okay. We’re all done here. If you wouldn’t mind also giving me your phone, Kenner? Thank you.”

  Kenner handed the man his phone with a look of pained disgust.

  “You know, this is bullshit. I was planning on paying you guys while I was out here.”

  “No you weren’t,” the man said, peering around Kenner’s bowed head to examine the back seat. “You have anything good back there?”

  “No. Some clothes. My shitty old laptop.”

  “The two of you can exit the vehicle now. Thank you. Remember, don’t look at us, or we’ll shoot you in the face,” the man said. “Just start walking out into the desert. We’re going to leave now with your truck. You’re a lucky man, Kenner. You’re both lucky. It could’ve gone much worse. Bye.”

  Heads down, Abram and Kenner trudged off the shoulder and into the desert scrub, the sound of both vehicles driving away. When they were nearly twenty feet from the road, Kenner turned to Abram.

  “I should’ve fucking known. I forgot to turn my phone off when we crossed into Arizona. Collection agents. They fucking found me with a ping from a data-tracking company.”

  “They took my money,” Abram said blankly, staring out at nothing, rubbing the sweat from his eyes.

  “They took my truck,” Kenner said. “We’ll get everything back, though. I promise. I have a plan.”

  After making a wide circle, they crossed back onto the side of the highway exactly where they had started. They walked the highway in silence, the heat pressing on them from above and below. Not a vehicle or sign of life to either horizon. A sullen hour passed, and the sun set behind them as they walked.

  “Okay . . . So what’s your plan?”

  “I know a girl that lives out this way. I was planning on hitting her up on the way back to Califor-nia anyway. She knows people out here. She has major connections. She might be able to help us.”

  “She’s going to get my money back?”

  “I’ll get your money back. This is going to sound crazy, but I’m going to borrow a little money from Annie—her name’s Annie—and double it, quadruple it. I swear to God.”

  “You’re going to make my money back at a casino? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. What is this? This all has to be a joke.”

  “I can do it, man. I’ve gotten so good. It’s unreal. I’ve been basically living off poker for the past year!”

  “Oh yeah, you’ve really been living it up this past year. Okay, okay . . . So who just took your truck? Who was that? People you borrowed money from. Why? To play poker. You lost their money, and they took my money. Now here we are, middle of nowhere, and you’re talking about borrowing more money? You have a problem. Drugs have turned your brains to shit. Do you realize that?”

  “Okay, I lost their money, but that was an unhealthy situation to begin with, and that was years ago when I was just starting out, before I had skills. I haven’t been back to Arizona since.”

  “I just want to go home, Kenner. I want to call Edie and have her wire me money for a plane tick-et, and I want to go home. I’m done. I don’t give a shit what you do. Fuck, they took my camera. They took my camera,” Abram said, his voice cracking as he walked quickly down the highway, away from Kenner.

  “They took my new truck, remember?” Kenner yelled. “I’m fucked, too, but we have to stay posi-tive.”

  Abram didn’t respond.

  Kenner ran to catch up and then followed quietly a few paces behind.

  Hours passed without a word. The sun set and the cool desert air clung to their sunburned skin, turning their daytime perspiration into goosebumps. The sky, a writhing mass of stars, threatened to reach down and carry the two hapless human beings into it. Abram wondered what time it was. He thought about time—where he was a year ago, where he was a week ago. What events brought him to this point, and the precise ordering of those events. He found comfort in running through the narrative.

  He looked at the stars above his head, brighter than any he had ever seen, and thought about the incomprehensible time and distance traveled by the photons of light, like a steady white dust falling, and how it didn’t matter. He didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

  Abram thought he could make out the glow of civilization on the horizon, a city of light. Eighty percent of humanity lived in cities, but cities covered only three percent of the Earth. Each one was a tiny beacon sending photons back into space, toward stars and their planets, some with sufficient tech-nology to detect this human whisper, Abram assumed. He felt a pang of longing for the familiarity of San Francisco.

  Humans spent two hundred thousand years living in tall grass or desert, hunting and gathering, forming huts from mud. Cities were evolutionarily unnatural. New and foreign. Rounded, undulating shapes replaced by cement and ninety-degree corners. Sirens, glass, and streetlights hijacking the senses. Humans in an alien world. Circadian rhythms chronically disrupted. The circadian rhythm in-fluenced hormone production, body-temperature regulation, blood pressure, and other key bodily func-tions. Plants, animals, cyanobacteria, and fungi all had similar rhythms that were their own evolution-ary adaptations to the rising and setting of the sun. Leaves turned to face the sun and dropped in the fall, petals opened and closed daily, animals rested. Abram thought these things, delirious, suddenly aware of the sound of his and Kenner’s synchronized trudging. He held up his hand and could just make out its shape traced in starlight.

  It had to be near dawn, but they had no way of knowing. Two trucks had roared past in the night, both driverless cargo-haulers. They were profoundly alone. Abram imagined that they weren’t walking along a dark highway but floating in an infinite, featureless black sea, completely still, completely calm. An invisible sea.

  “When all the stars were ready to be placed in the sky, First Woman said, ‘I will write the laws that govern mankind forever. These laws can’t be written on the water because it’s always changing form. They can’t be written in the sand because the wind will erase them. But if they’re written in the stars, they can be read and remembered forever,’” Kenner croaked from behind Abram, much closer than Abram had assumed. “It’s the Navajo creation story. This is Navajo country. I can see how living out here would make you pretty intimate with the stars. I feel like I can reach up and touch them. Trip-py.”

  “Yeah. Maybe we should stop walking for a while. Wait . . . did you hear that?”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “It was almost like a thump. Like a car door closing. You didn’t hear it?”

  “I read once that if you replaced the vacuum of outer space with air, the sound of the sun would be deafening. Like a rhythmic bass pounding. Imagine the sound of all these stars raining down on us. Like the ultimate chakra-cleansing sound bath.”

  Abram stopped. “Do you see that?” he said hoarsely.

  “See what?”

  “Something on the side of the road ahead.”

  “Oh yeah. What is that?”

  They proceeded warily, walking on the blacktop to silence their approach.

  “Is that your truck?” Abram whispered.

  “No way.”

  Kenner straightened and no longer attempted to disguise his approach.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. Remember, they have guns,” Abram whispered, grabbing Kenner’s arm.

  “Fuck that! That’s my truck. I’ll beat his skinny ass this time.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. Get over here. Come on,” Abram said, pulling Kenner directly behind the silent vehicle.

  “Do you hear anything?” Abram whispered, and they crouched, only the sound of their breathing and their hearts beating in their ears.

  “Okay,” Kenner said. “What if we go hide over there in the dark and toss a few pebbles at the windshield? Either the truck is empty or—”

  “What? Or they come out and shoot us?”

  “Wait, what if I just walk up to the truck and knock on the window? They probably won’t shoot me or else they would
’ve done it before,” Kenner said, standing up.

  Abram pulled him back down. “But what if you scare them and they shoot you?”

  “I’ll make noise so they know I’m coming. I’ll sing or whistle or something, and if it seems like they’re going to shoot me, you can pelt them with rocks.”

  “I’m not sure I’m that good at throwing rocks.”

  “Shit.”

  “Okay, let’s do it, then.” Abrams said, “You just go up to the window. I’ll be back here with rocks.”

  “Give me a second. Don’t rush me. Let me think about this.”

  They crouched in silence, staring intermittently at the night sky and then down at the dust.

  “Okay, fuck it. I’m doing it. You ready?” Kenner asked.

  “Be careful. Act nonchalant,” Abram said, nervously adjusting his stance.

  Kenner walked straight out onto the dark highway, lit only by the milky way, and then began shuffling nervously toward the driver’s side door, whistling tunelessly.

  He reached the door and lightly knocked on the tinted window. Abram accidentally dropped a rock, and Kenner flinched and fell to the ground.

  “Fuck!”

  “Sorry.”

  Kenner rose again shakily and knocked on the window.

  “I don’t think they’re in there. I’m going to open the door.”

  “No, no, wait,” Abram whispered, shuffling and dropping more rocks.

  When they opened the door, the cab light came on, blinding both Abram and Kenner momentari-ly. As their eyes adjusted, the sound of a slump and a thick thud hit the gravel, followed by a pungent smell unlike anything either had ever experienced.

  “Whoawhoawhoawhoa shit!”

  Abram heard Kenner scraping in the gravel in the dark but couldn’t make anything out, his eyes adjusting.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Abram yelled and haphazardly tossed a stone in the direction of the noise.

  “Ow, fuck! Stop! You hit me!”

  “Sorry. What’s going on? What is that?”

  “The dude is dead, man. He fell out on me. Oh God, I think I got blood all over me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He’s dead for sure.”

  Abram made his way toward Kenner’s voice and tripped, falling hard onto the gravel.

  “Fuck, man, are you alright?” Kenner asked.

  “I tripped on the dead guy, I think.”

  Kenner helped Abram to his feet, and they stood on either side of the body, looking into the light-ed truck cab. The seats were covered in red-black gore, and a moist, sickly sweet, coppery smell made its way into the cool air. On the passenger side slumped the Native American woman, her throat brutal-ly gashed and purple. Abram’s gas station snack wrappers were still on the floor, smeared in a black pool of blood. Time stopped. Abram stared at the wrappers with the feeling they were artifacts from a life lived one thousand years ago. This isn’t real. He stood straddling the torso on the ground, his pounding heart racing in his ears, his vision going dark around the edges. His body jerked as if he’d been sleeping, and he turned to the sound of Kenner violently vomiting in the dark.

  10

  “Well, we have to do something,” Abram said after a pause that seemed like hours. Kenner and Abram sat on the shoulder on the opposite side of the road from the parked vehicle, dome light like a dim campfire. Kenner stared into the night.

  “Kenner, come on. The sun will be up soon, I think. We need to decide what we’re going to do.”

  “Who killed them? Why?” Kenner said weakly.

  “I don’t know. I mean, they robbed us at gunpoint yesterday, right? I assume this kind of shit happens to people like that. Bounty hunters.”

  “The police are going to think we did it.”

  “We had nothing to do with it, and the police aren’t going to think anything. We’re going to drag those bodies out of the truck and into the desert. We’re going to drive away. We’re never going to talk about any of this ever again,” Abram said, his own words surprising him.

  “I can’t do it, man,” Kenner said, on the verge of tears.

  Abram stood up, walked over to the truck, and then walked back to Kenner. “Get up . . . You got me into this shit. I can’t do this by myself.”

  Abram walked back to the truck and Kenner slowly rose, sat back down, and then rose again and joined him.

  They started with the thin man. Abram took his wrists and Kenner took his ankles, and they stag-gered, awkwardly swinging the corpse back and forth as they made their way off the gravel shoulder and into the low, scraggly desert brush. The man’s long, stringy hair, blood-soaked, lightly swept the dirt like a paintbrush. They stopped twice while Kenner gagged and vomited. Abram was possessed with an uncharacteristically cold resolve. He hypothesized that the high-powered hallucinogen still lingered in his brain stem. A horrific simulation. All unreal, a dream. He stared into the black distance.

  The Big Bang created matter through processes humans had yet to fully understand. Most of it—around eighty-four percent by mass—was a form of matter that did not interact with or emit light. Dark matter. Abram looked up at the stars, his eyes again adjusting, holding the dead man’s cold, bony wrists. Because dark matter didn’t interact with light, it was unaffected by the same radiation that smoothed out ordinary matter. It remained a sticky, coagulated curd. Halos of dark matter formed and merged with other halos, dragging ordinary matter along with it, the mundane matter of the heavy ele-ments, stars and their planets. Abram smelled the blood, the smell of iron, iron atoms in the blood.

  There was a slight drop, a shallow dry wash, about fifty feet from the highway, and they sat the body gently in the dirt. Both immediately began walking wordlessly back to the truck, the illuminated cab a blinding beacon. The young woman’s legs and wrists were slippery with blood, and their hands were too sweaty to maintain a firm grip. They dropped her several times but finally made it to the same wash and placed her next to the other body. Kenner stopped and began to speak softly, a delirious eulo-gy, but Abram walked back to the truck. He felt like a machine. A machine whose grim work was now over and had been performed adequately. Now he would be a forgetting machine. The sun crept over the horizon. Abram took a loose white T-shirt from the back seat and began wiping up the gore. He shoved the blood-soaked shirt into a bioplastic shopping bag and sprinted back to the wash, passing a returning Kenner, who looked pale and confused. Abram placed the shopping bag between the two bod-ies without looking directly at them.

  Abram returned to the truck to find Kenner kicking at the gravel in a vain attempt to cover the small blood puddles. They both turned when they heard a faint whirring. A vehicle on the horizon.

  “What should we do?” Kenner said.

  “It might not be driverless. We should get the hell out of here. We don’t want anyone stopping. It could even be a cop,” Abram said, pushing Kenner into the driver’s seat.

  “What if they see the blood on the ground?”

  Kenner found the keys in the ignition. Abram imagined a universe where the keys were in the pocket of one of the dead bodies or were missing altogether somewhere in the desert. It made him dizzy and sick.

  “Just drive. Go!”

  They peeled onto the blacktop, the vehicle still just a luminous speck in the rearview.

  “We didn’t leave anything, right? Did you leave anything?” Abram said, delicately searching his area of the vehicle, fingers splayed, as if he didn’t want to leave fingerprints on a crime scene.

  “I-I don’t think so. That was fucking gnarly, man. That was real bad,” Kenner said, letting out an uncontrolled nervous laugh.

  “I think we’re okay. I think we’re okay. You know? Right? We didn’t do anything. We didn’t kill those two people,” Abram said, keeping his eyes trained on the rearview mirror. “It looks like it drove past where we were. We need to stay way ahead of it, though. We don’t want anyone to ever know we were out here if someone finds those bodies later.�
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  “Whatever, man,” Kenner said, “both our phones have been pinging data since we passed into Ar-izona. Everyone knows we’re out here. That’s how those two bounty hunters found us in the first place.”

  “Speaking of our phones, I wonder if they’re here in the truck. They weren’t on the bodies,” Abram said, climbing over his seat and reaching into the small space behind. “I don’t think they’re here. Maybe whoever killed those people took our phones. That’s fucking great.”

  Kenner said nothing. He was pale and his gray shirt clung to his sweaty torso. Abram was sudden-ly gripped with physical exhaustion, could barely keep his eyes open. There were no dead bodies. Just a hallucination. Drugs and augmented reality. It was all a test to gauge our reactions. Abram decided to stay quiet for a while, leave Kenner to sort through his trauma. DMT-A residue in our blood. Just get home. If this is real or unreal, doesn’t matter. Just get back to San Francisco, and every-thing will be like it was.

  “White Cone!” Kenner yelled. “That ex-girlfriend of mine I told you about, Annie, the one that lives out here, she lives in White Cone. We just passed a sign for it.”

  “So? What do you want to do, visit her? We need to get the fuck out of here.”

  “She knows the people I originally borrowed the money from. I mean, she isn’t friends with them, but she knows them. She could help us get your money back.”

  “I don’t care about the money anymore, Kenner. And people were murdered, remember? I just want to go home.”

  “Those people were just collection agents. They probably didn’t even know who they were collect-ing for. Annie has a phone we could use. You could call Edie. Plus, we could clean the truck up proper and rest a minute. We’ve been up for like forty-eight hours. I seriously can’t spend another minute in this truck until we bleach it or something. How are you not gagging from the smell?”

  “I knew you would get us into some horrible bullshit, Kenner. I had a bad feeling from the start. I feel like this is all a horrible dream I can’t wake up from. I’m not telling Edie. We have to forget every-thing that happened. The alien from my DMT-A trip said, ‘This is a system built of dreams.’ That’s all I remember. I keep thinking about it. I need some water.”