The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams

by Palmer, Jacob

  “Oh, she’s tall for her age. Where does she get this beautiful red hair?”

  “Do you have candy behind the counter?” the little girl interrupted.

  “How did you know I had candy back there? You can have candy if Mommy says it’s alright.”

  The two women had returned to their work and didn’t look up.

  “I finished my sandwich. Now I can have a candy.” The little girl smiled and wiped the crumbs from her face with her T-shirt. The shirt was pink, with a purple cartoon octopus looking through a tele-scope.

  The old woman paused with concern and looked at the two busy women and then out at the emp-ty parking lot. It was dark now. “Well, okay. Come around back here, and I’ll let you choose a piece.”

  They walked behind the glass display case counter. The old woman pulled out a plastic tub below the antique cash register. It was filled with small, packaged candy.

  “What kind of candy do you like? Do you like Merry Hunga Poppers? Do you like Apricot Dream Moles? How about Quitterbread Bars?”

  “Make it a surprise.” The little girl closed her eyes tight.

  The old woman dropped a Quitterbread Bar into the little girl’s small, cupped hands.

  The little girl opened her eyes and smiled. “This is the one I wanted.”

  “I could tell it was. Every little girl loves a Quitterbread Bar,” the old woman said, singing the commercial jingle.

  “Now you close your eyes,” the little girl said.

  “Are you going to give me a surprise now?” The old woman crouched shakily, holding the display counter for support, and then held out her wrinkled, cupped hand, smiling, eyes closed.

  The little girl reached into the back pocket of her yellow corduroy pants and withdrew a small sy-ringe-like object and uncapped it. With the precision and grace of an animal strike, she rammed the ob-ject into the old woman’s wrinkled neck, withdrew it, and stepped away, an expectant but otherwise unemotional expression on her soft, child’s face. The old woman grabbed frantically at the air above, wild-eyed as if drowning, and then fell on her side with a gurgle and rasp. She had dropped the plastic tub of candy, and the little girl moved tentatively closer and began picking through, putting pieces in her small pockets.

  18

  “Open the fucking door!”

  “Who are you yelling at?” Kenner said, slumped against the corridor wall.

  “I don’t know. Help me push this door.”

  “I can’t walk that good, man.”

  “No, no, no, no, no. Open your eyes, open your eyes.” Abram reached down and pushed Kenner’s eyes open with sweaty, trembling hands.

  The door sprung open, the keypad squawking and malfunctioning. Abram jumped back and then peered warily into the dark, adjoining passage. He clumsily hurled the blood-smeared gold bar through the door and into the dark with a deafening clang.

  “Are you in there? Hey? Are you in there?” Abram yelled and waited.

  “Okay, let’s go. Get up, Kenner. We have to go.”

  Kenner didn’t answer. His eyes were closed; he was breathing hard and drooling. Abram crouched down and roughly shoved him through the doorway, rolling him like a sack. He stopped and slapped Kenner hard.

  “Wake up, goddammit. I can’t carry you.”

  Kenner opened his eyes. They rolled back in his head, then righted themselves, then focused. Abram again hauled Kenner to his feet and they stumbled and crashed down the dark tunnel. Abram stepped on the gold bar, recognized it, and picked it up. A high-pitched, dissonant whining filled the corridor, a broken alarm through a blown-out speaker. They reached another door. Abram opened the door and helped Kenner through. They were outside in the still, desert night behind the defunct gas station. The air smelled like motor oil. Both of their ears rang in the otherworldly evening silence, so silent it felt as if they had gone underwater.

  “Please, God in heaven, tell me you have your keys.”

  Kenner lamely felt his pockets and looked at Abram, saying nothing, his eyes closing again.

  Abram, desperately flailing, patted himself down and found the key in his own back pocket. “Why do I have your keys?”

  They teetered, breaking a swarm of moths circling a lone light at the side of the building. Abram unlocked the passenger door and helped Kenner in, nervously looking behind him and momentarily setting the heavy gold bar on the still, warm asphalt. He picked up the gold bar—it felt good and solid in his hand—and went around to the driver’s side, climbing in.

  “I don’t think either one of us should be driving.”

  Kenner looked at him glassy-eyed.

  “Are you going to throw up?” Abram said.

  “No.”

  Kenner threw up.

  “Shiiiit,” Kenner mumbled, removing his shirt with difficulty. Abram looked on in dazed horror.

  “I haven’t driven a car in ten years. Why did you disable the autonomous mode? Goddammit, Kenner. Is there any way we can reinstall it?”

  “Just drive.” Kenner laughed, eyes closed, coughed, and then spit into what he incorrectly as-sumed to be an open window.

  Abram started the truck and began driving out of the gravel parking lot and onto the dark high-way. “Are we going the right way?”

  “What does that even mean?” Kenner said, rubbing his red eyes furiously.

  Abram lowered the windows to let in the desert air and let out the pungent smell of vomit and dried blood.

  “What is that? Parrots?” Kenner yelled.

  “What? What are you talking about? You are fucked. I am fucked. I shouldn’t be driving. How fast are we going? I can’t read the speedometer. Were we poisoned?”

  “I think we’re alright. I think I just needed to throw up.”

  “Well, I don’t feel alright. I think you should drive. I can’t even tell where the road is.”

  “We’re on the road, man. Just follow the yellow line.”

  “What happened back there, Kenner? Seriously? Never mind, I don’t even want to know. I just want to forget all of it. I want to go home. What happened back there?”

  “You know as much as I do.”

  “If I hurt anybody, it’s not my fault. If they drugged me, it’s not my fault. It’s theirs.”

  “Can we roll the windows back up? I’m freezing,” Kenner said, hugging himself and shivering.

  “If we roll the windows up, I’m going to throw up from the smell. Throw that shirt out the window. It’s covered in puke.”

  “This is my lucky shirt. My poker shirt.”

  “Throw it in the back of the truck, then, for fuck’s sake!”

  “It’ll blow out.”

  “Can you drive now? Let’s pull over.”

  “I don’t think I can drive. I can barely move my legs and arms. They’re getting better, though. They feel like . . . stumps?” Kenner said, laughing and examining his numb hands.

  Abram leaned over the steering wheel, sweating and squinting at the dark road, periodically shooting Kenner a confused, angry glance. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “How long have we been driving? It feels like hours,” Kenner said.

  “I don’t know. Twenty minutes, maybe? Two hours? I can’t read the clock. I need some water. Do we have any more bottled water? I feel speedy. I’m sweating my ass off.”

  Kenner slumped onto his side, spilling a mouthful of saliva, craning his neck into the space be-hind the seats.

  “Uh, yeah. The case of bottled water is still back there. There’s blood and brains and shit all over it.”

  “Okay . . . that’s not very good. That’s not good.”

  Kenner attempted, with a heavy, unsteady hand, to pick up the gold bar resting on the seat. “You got this in the moon room? I was in the moon room. That’s where I woke up. I remember now.”

  “Yeah, I got it in the moon room,” Abram said, cutting Kenner off, his jaw muscles flaring. “I was in the shower. Well, first Annie showed us our room, and you and Annie were sitting on the bed, talki
ng. Do you remember that? I went in the bathroom and got in the shower. Then I started feeling light-headed. All the water droplets in the shower turned into . . . prisms. I can’t describe it. Then I saw a shadow on the other side of the shower curtain, and I looked out and it was . . . it was that gray alien hal-lucination again from the desert, from my DMT-A trip. Just standing there. Then, next thing I know, I wake up on the floor of the moon room, and my head is spinning, and the light was so bright and white, like milk almost, like I was floating in milk. You could touch the light. The alien was standing above me. It scared me, and I freaked out and hit it with the gold bar. I woke up and the gold bar was in my hand and that alien was standing over me and I hit it. The alien fell down, and when I got up, it wasn’t an al-ien anymore. It was a person. I don’t know who it was. I couldn’t see. It was so bright in there. Whoever it was, I fucked them up. I remember blood. Blood in the milk. There’s blood on the gold bar. I was still in my same clothes, though. Now I’m thinking maybe I never even got in the shower. I don’t know . . .” Abram was drenched in sweat, his arms trembling intermittently as he gripped the wheel, his knuckles shiny and white.

  Time passed and they said nothing, each in their bubble of stoned silence, struggling to piece to-gether thin shards of memory. The desert air cut past them.

  “Blue Lady Death Cult . . . I talked to the Blue Lady in person,” Kenner said, breaking the thick si-lence.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Annie took me into a room. Honestly, I started feeling weird the second you and I rolled up. They slipped us something. When, though? Maybe the fish? I do think it was DMT-A. Some weird form of it, anyway. It probably would have hit us way harder if we hadn’t just smoked some the other day. It was DMT-A for sure. I heard they slip it to people to trick them into joining their cult and working for free.”

  “Wait? You heard they slip people drugs, and you took us there anyway?”

  “Well, I never would’ve thought they’d try it with us. Annie knows I’d never fall for that shit. We go way back. Anyway, she took me to a room and left me and turned on some AR sim. I was tripping hard, though, man. Like, I saw my life pass before my eyes. The Blue Lady told me . . . She told me that they know about the memory card. Said they want to know what we saw and how it made us feel or some shit. She said all kinds of weird stuff. Kept calling me a container. I told her we didn’t know any-thing, but she didn’t believe me. How would they know about the memory card?”

  “You probably hallucinated all of that. How could they know anything about the memory card? We didn’t mention it to Annie. At least I never mentioned it.”

  “What about those two dead people? We left their bodies in the desert. Fuck, man. Why were they back there with Annie? Alive? We had dinner with them, right? Or did I hallucinate that shit, too?” Kenner stared gravely at the narrow, dusty pool of light in front of the vehicle, in defiance of the heavy darkness.

  “They were there. Or at least people that looked like them. I don’t know. None of it makes sense. We’ve taken too many psychedelics the past few days.”

  “No way. I took DMT-A every day for two weeks when my buddy Shorty got a stockpile. Some heads take it every day with their VR corporate-religion bullshit. Like drinking coffee in the morning. The Blue Lady cult is the same thing—some made-up shit to trick people into giving all their money or get people to work for free. Annie told me once they have thousands of weed grows and psychedelics labs hidden all over, and everyone works for free.”

  “Maybe none of what we think happened actually happened. Maybe we both hallucinated it somehow. Maybe those were just fake dead bodies we hid in the desert. The first stage of a complex cult-recruitment scheme. Like a ritual. I don’t know.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe it did happen but out of order. Maybe it hasn’t happened yet.” Kenner slumped down to avoid the wind and closed his eyes. “You know, there are more permutations of a standard deck of fifty-two cards than there are seconds since the Big Bang.”

  Abram watched the yellow line. His grip on the wheel relaxed, and he noticed the chill of the sweat-soaked shirt against his back, the fever broken. He looked at the clock on the dash, and although he squinted and moved close, the characters jittered and danced and were senseless.

  19

  Abram opened his eyes in the lunar module. The noises of the environmental control sys-tem chirped and droned, and a brutal crystalline light streamed through the small window. Abram’s sleep-wake cycle was disrupted. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, San Francisco time. Abram turned painfully to find Kenner curled up in a semi-fetal position on the floor—neither could properly stretch out in the tiny spacecraft. They slept in their bulky spacesuits; this was NASA’s attempt to keep them from inhaling any moon dust they tracked inside. The glycol water pump whirred. Abram’s suit was cold, even with the cooling system disconnected. The sound of distant voices, like singing, and then nothing.

  “Kenner? Did you hear that?”

  “Hell yes I heard that,” Kenner whispered.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “Kenner?”

  “What?”

  “Why the hell are we whispering?”

  From 1969 to 1972, twelve people landed on the moon. Nearly a hundred bags of human feces had been left on the lunar surface. Abram and Kenner had touched down on some of the moon’s most valua-ble real estate, one of the small number of sites at the north and south poles of the moon, which were in almost permanent sunlight—the Peaks of Eternal Light. These places allowed for continuous solar pow-er and meant fewer temperature fluctuations, requiring less thermal management. The Peaks of Eternal Light occurred only along the rims of craters and so tended to be long and thin, just a few meters wide and a few hundred meters long. While the rim was in perpetual sunlight, the accompanying crater was in eternal darkness and sheltered valuable water ice from leftover cometary debris.

  “Let’s take the rover out again. We aren’t sleeping anyway,” Abram said, straining to right him-self.

  Abram opened his eyes; the truck rolled slowly, bumping and bobbing through open desert. The sunrise sky streaked orange and red. Abram again began to drift off, then shot awake, slamming his foot hard on the brake. The truck lurched to a creaking stop. Kenner roused, having slept the night crouched on the floorboard with his head on the seat near Abram like a monk who had spent the night praying in a monastery cell, the bloody gold bar as a pillow.

  “Whoa, what’s going on?” Kenner said, grimacing and rubbing his eyes.

  “I was asleep.”

  “What? No you weren’t. You were driving.”

  “I was dreaming. I was asleep for . . . I don’t know how long,” Abram said in bleary-eyed disbelief. “I just opened my eyes and we’re off the road. I ran off the road. I don’t even see the road anywhere.”

  “No way,” Kenner said, yawning, opening the door to assess the situation. “Shit, you weren’t kid-ding. Where are we? The tires are all flat, too. We’re basically riding on rims.”

  “We’re lucky to be alive. The road can’t be too far off.”

  “Yeah, we can just follow the tire tracks back the way we came. What the fuck happened last night?” Kenner said, laughing.

  “How are you laughing?”

  “I mean, can you believe that Blue Lady shit? Wild that Annie would drug us like that. You and I really are on a psychedelic vision quest.”

  “I’m done, Kenner. No more. I just want to go home. From this point on, we’re doing the exact op-posite of whatever erroneous, dangerous bullshit your gut is telling us to do. Okay? We’re going to find a town and get bus tickets.”

  “And we’ll get your money back and your camera. I’ll pay you back if we don’t. That’s a promise.”

  “How? You’re as broke as I am. I have this gold bar at least, but what the fuck do you do with a gold bar? Go to a pawn shop? Plus, it’s stolen anyway, and after last night, it might be
a murder weapon. I shouldn’t have come out here. I shouldn’t have asked you to go with me. We’re both too old to do shit like this anymore. It’s stupid. My money is gone. The camera I use to make my money and my art is gone.”

  “I have a plan.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  They stood outside the truck, scanning the horizon and the minuscule set of tracks leading off into it. Then they climbed back into the truck, Kenner driving, and U-turned, heading back at a crawl, the loose rubber of the tires flopping wildly on the rims. They continued in silence until a creeping panic overtook them simultaneously as the tire tracks disappeared into blank desert.

  “Where are the tracks? Where’s the road? How the hell did you drive out this far?” Kenner asked.

  “There’s not much out here to run into. We’re just lucky I didn’t stay on the road and run us head-on into a semi or off of an overpass.”

  The truck rolled to a stop.

  “Why are you stopping?”

  “The truck just died,” Kenner said, hitting the dash. “The battery was at forty percent charge, and now it’s dead.”

  “You’re kidding me?”

  They exited and peered impotently under the hood for several minutes. A small wisp of cloud shadowed the sun and a vulture swooped and landed behind a distant cactus.

  “I think we should keep heading in the direction the tracks were leading us, find the road and maybe flag a semi, get to the nearest town. While it’s still early and the sun is low. It can’t be that far,” Abram said, grimacing at the horizon.

  “I don’t want to leave my truck.”

  “You want to die out here with your truck?”

  Kenner tied his vomit-soaked T-shirt around his head to protect him from the sun. Abram squint-ed and walked ahead, feet heavy, shading his eyes and face with the heavy gold bar. They carried the gore-covered water bottles tucked into their waistbands, and the bottles crunched and crinkled rhyth-mically with their steps. They walked for hours, saying nothing. They came upon an unusually large oco-tillo cactus topped in bright red blooms, and Kenner begged that they stop and rest in the dappled shade.