The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams

by Palmer, Jacob

  “I wonder if you can eat those flowers.”

  Abram didn’t respond but drank awkwardly, being careful not to get his lips too near the dried gore covering the bottle, but also careful to get every last drop into his parched mouth.

  “I wonder if we’re anywhere near the road,” Kenner said, crouching and drinking. “I still don’t un-derstand how you drove all this way last night in your sleep. How you didn’t hit a cactus or something.”

  “Well, I must’ve run over something to flatten all the tires. Sorry I flattened your tires, by the way.”

  “I hate that I just left my truck out there. I wish I had some weed,” Kenner said, coughing.

  “I don’t think weed would help our current situation.”

  “I need it because I’m getting a migraine. I left my sunglasses in the truck . . . Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “That buzzing? I heard a high-pitched buzzing. I can’t hear it now, though.”

  “I think you should drink some more water.”

  “I think my eyeballs are getting sunburned. Isn’t it weird that humans can’t look at the sun direct-ly without going blind? Three and a half billion years of evolution under the same sun, and we somehow never evolved a way to look directly at it. An alien light too powerful to be seen.”

  They continued wearily on. Long hours passed. Abram felt his scalp burning, so he balanced the gold bar on top of his head as he walked.

  “This sucks,” Kenner said finally. “I’m starving. I’d eat anything. I wish we had tried eating those cactus flowers earlier.”

  “We couldn’t reach them. They were probably poisonous anyway,” Abram said, wiping the gold bar on his shirt. It was now thoroughly cleaned of blood and gleaming from the sweat-soaked journey.

  “I’m getting so hungry,” Kenner said. “I’m about to start licking the dried blood off of these water bottles.”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “I wonder if we’re anywhere near the road. We gotta be, right?” Kenner said, panic creeping into his voice.

  “Sure, but even if we make it to a road, that doesn’t mean we’re saved. How are you doing on wa-ter?”

  “I’m okay. Two and a half bottles left. I’m not that thirsty, but if I see a bug or a lizard, I’m eating it.”

  20

  The night arrived with no road. Abram and Kenner were nearly out of water, and their leg muscles had turned rigid and numb. No moon, and the desert black rained an infinitude of stars from the milky way. Abram and Kenner had privately grappled with the onset of panic throughout the day, and both gradually settled into quiet, exhausted resignation. A desperate, slow-motion trudge.

  “Are we going to die out here?” Abram asked himself.

  “No,” Kenner said, now wearing the puke T-shirt, which had stretched out beyond recognition, become a rag. “We have to be near a road by now. We have to. Maybe we should stop and rest for a little bit.”

  “If we lie down, we’re dead. We can curl up like two little mice and die, and maybe a scanning satellite will find our bones someday.”

  “You hear that buzzing again, man? I hear it again. You can’t hear it?” Kenner said.

  They both stopped and stood silent in the starlit dust.

  “I don’t hear anything. It’s getting cold, though. Maybe we should make a fire. I don’t suppose you actually brought your lighter with you?”

  “Shit . . . Wait. No way. It’s in my pocket!” Kenner said, holding it reverently in the air.

  “Alright, let’s find something. Will a cactus catch fire?” Abram said, squinting into the darkness.

  “I don’t think so. Maybe?”

  “We passed a few gnarled old trees we could’ve lit. Let’s just keep walking, and we’ll probably hit another one.”

  “We better. I’m fucking freezing.”

  They walked on for an hour and came upon a stump-like, seemingly vegetal object jutting from the soil and attempted to light it without success. They found a large tuft of dry grass, and it flashed and burned away in an instant. They continued, both shivering violently.

  “You feel that?” Kenner said through chattering teeth.

  “Feel what?”

  “The air feels different all of a sudden. Like heavier, thicker.”

  “What are you talking about? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fucking cold, man. I don’t know.”

  “Let’s just keep walking. I thi—”

  Kenner fell, grabbing Abram’s leg, and they slid, the loose gravel making icy cuts into their tender palms, skidding to a stop in a cloud of white dust, hearts pounding.

  “What the fuck was that? Are you okay?” Abram said, spitting dirt.

  “I slipped. I . . . I think this is a trail. Look, is that a sign over there?”

  They both crawled a few feet to a rebar pole holding a small white sign: Barringer Meteor Crater: Thelema Trail—Watch Your Step.

  “You think this is the same crater we found before?” Kenner said.

  “How many giant meteor craters can there be out here?”

  “It looks like there’s a building down at the bottom. You see that?” Kenner said. “Maybe a gift shop. We can break in and get warm.”

  They warily made their way, slipping on the loose gravel in the dark. They discerned the outline of a very large horned owl watching them from a post, and it flew away as they approached.

  “Seeing an owl is a good omen, I think,” Kenner said, watching the dark shape drift down and merge into the darkness.

  “I read that all owls are endangered now,” Abram said.

  “I’ll miss them when they’re gone. I’ve already got owl nostalgia.”

  “People can just load a virtual owl,” Abram said, “or buy an artificial owl. After we’ve mapped the owl genome, decoded it in every way, what does it matter if we don’t have real owls anymore?”

  “That’s true. I’d rather live in a world with real owls, though.”

  “Yeah, but most people don’t care. The simulation may as well be the real thing.”

  “You don’t think that, though.”

  “I don’t know. I’m tired and delirious. Thinking of a future art project, I guess. You know, I’m hon-estly surprised we’re both still alive out here.”

  “Who knows what morning will bring?” Kenner said. “But if I don’t get warm soon, I’m done. I can feel death creeping up. We’ve showed up right on time to see the world end.”

  “Okay, okay, let’s grab some stuff to burn in case we can’t break into that building.”

  Around them on the crater floor were wisps of dry grass strewn with sun-bleached garbage. Abram and Kenner collected cardboard and paper to burn as they shambled toward the crater’s center. They found large, scattered, and rusted industrial drilling equipment and a toppled chain-link fence. What had appeared to be a building from the crater’s rim now presented itself as a large, built-out open-ing to a mine shaft, partially barricaded with a sheet metal door and padlock. Abram and Kenner piled all of their collected cardboard against the steel door and lit it. After standing and warming themselves, eyes watering, silent and exhausted, they gathered more nearby refuse and tossed it into the fire: hand-fuls of dry grass, plastic bottles, a half-rotted white sneaker. The toxic black smoke carried up in a straight line, like a ladder into the night. The air was stone-still inside the crater, and the sheet metal door creaked and groaned from the heat. Abram and Kenner sat in the dirt and stared into the fire.

  “Can you believe this?” Abram said. “It all seems unbelievable.”

  “What does?”

  “This. Right now. Everything that’s happened to us the past few days. It doesn’t seem real.”

  “Well, real ain’t what it used to be. The dots are connecting now in strange ways or not at all.”

  “The more you look for strange synchronicities, the more you notice them. It’s like a religion for you.”

  “Sure, but when events line up, it’s
like a prayer in reverse: you haven’t asked for anything, but in the aftermath of ridiculous, fucked-up, weird events, you see something meaningful. Maybe I’m not ex-plaining it right,” Kenner said, eyes closed. “It’s like a thumbprint left by some higher power by accident that shows you it’s all connected, you know?”

  “Are you falling asleep?”

  “No, I’m too hungry.”

  “I wonder what they were mining for down here,” Abram said, throwing a pebble at the mine shaft door.

  “Maybe pieces of the meteor that made this crater.”

  “Seems like a lot of trouble just to dig up some meteor pieces.”

  “Dude, meteorites are big business,” Kenner said, bloodshot eyes widening. “They sell for hun-dreds of thousands of dollars at auction. You read about that meteorite they found in Kazakhstan? They broke it open, and it was full of fossils of microbes and stuff. Alien life.”

  “Yeah right, where did you read that?”

  “It was a big deal. It was big news for a day, and now you can’t find anything about it. They decid-ed to cover it up.”

  “Who decided?”

  “The government.”

  “The government of Kazakhstan?” Abram asked.

  “The people that run that government and all the other governments.”

  “You sure you didn’t just dream this news story?”

  “Listen, meteors and comets aren’t natural phenomena.”

  “Okay, you’ve lost your mind.”

  “Meteors are extraterrestrial technology,” Kenner said. “Like probes or beacons or something. They just seem like space rocks to us because we can’t understand them. It’s like a caveman finding a quantum computer. They’d think it was just a weird tree stump or shell or something. Aliens send these things out, things we think are just space rocks. They send them out to get life started on other planets. It’s like a form of insurance. Get life started in other places just in case they blow up their own planet. It’s a continuation.”

  “So if aliens jump-started life on Earth with their own microbes, we must look just like the aliens, then?”

  “No, it’s all shaped by the environment of the planet the meteor lands on. Just the basic starting chemicals are the same.”

  “I love how you’re saying all this with such authority,” Abram said. He drank the last of his water and tossed the bioplastic bottle into the fire, embers lifting and vanishing.

  “We should be sending out biological seeding probes from Earth,” Kenner said. “We’ve pretty much wrecked this planet. We have to branch out, pass the torch or whatever. When China puts that research station on Mars next year, that’ll be a start. Then we can get started wrecking Mars.”

  “Look, you can see Mars right above us,” Abram said, lying back on the sand. “See that reddish one? That’s Mars, I’m pretty sure.”

  “I don’t know if it’s just these toxic garbage fumes, but I’m starting to get a little sleepy. I’m just going to rest my eyes for a second,” Kenner said, crawling near the fire and curling into a fetal position.

  “Remember when we found this crater a few nights ago?” Abram said. “There was an all-night Subway sandwich kiosk right before we turned off. Maybe once we’ve warmed up enough, we can start walking that way. It can’t be that far.”

  “I don’t know, man. What if we just sleep for a couple hours?” Kenner mumbled. “I’m sure the sun is going to rise soon. That way, we won’t get lost again in the dark trying to find the road.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  The heat, reflecting and radiating off the sheet metal, surrounded them, filling the small, sandy depression in the center of the giant meteor crater with a soft warmth, an artificial womb. As they slept, the light from their hasty camp blinked faintly, a beacon, mirroring the countless stars above. The horned owl watched silently from a fencepost at the crater’s rim.

  21

  Abram could see a face. Dark eyes pulling at him, moving thoughts into his head, shifting thoughts like physical material. Abram sat in the dirt, and the being named Lam stood in front of him, no breathing movement, although the being had two very small slits for nostrils. It looked to be sculpt-ed of a gray wax. It seemed to be a dead thing animated, or at least not alive in any way Abram under-stood. Abram wasn’t alarmed, felt a vague comfort, the recognition of a pattern emerging, a forgotten appointment being kept. Abram knew it was a dream, had even assumed he would see the being when he slept in his hungry half sleep near the trash fire in the center of the crater. He knew he would see the being because he had the thought, just as he was drifting off, that he did not want to see the being in his dream; he wanted to see Edie, to return to Edie. His dreams seemed always to follow this maxim of op-posite desires.

  “When were you born?” Abram asked, looking away from the being, into the night sky.

  “A long time ago.”

  “We were abandoned here,” Abram said.

  “Who abandoned you?”

  “God. Or ourselves, I guess.”

  “Cleanse the mirror, and you will see God. The memory card?”

  “What about it? It’s still in my pocket.”

  “Your god is a chaos demon. Without it, decay cannot bring forth mathematical life.”

  “I want to go home. I want to get back to Edie.”

  “This landscape—deserts are the birthplace of amnesia. If you do not make it empty, how will you fill it up again?”

  “Kenner and I ended up back here at this crater. We must have gone in a big circle.”

  “Never a choice.”

  “We made our decisions,” Abram said. “We could have made different decisions. We could have reacted differently.”

  “Decisions. Particles will exert forces on one another, changing their motions.”

  “Do you know what will happen to us?”

  “Forces beyond perception determine the variables.”

  “I feel like you’ve been watching us this whole time. Where are you? Are you inside my head?”

  “Nonobservance is impossible.”

  “Is Edie okay?”

  22

  In the morning, Edie mopped the flavor of death from the kitchen floor while she drank a cup of black coffee. A cleansing, a small exorcism. She wondered if mice had souls. She had to set the trap to kill the mouse, of course. What was the alternative? The thought left a small pit the size of the mouse in Edie’s stomach. Thinking about souls brought her mind back to the Blue Lady game and its questions. Not really a game, she decided, so much as a mediated drug trip, and when you took the drugs out of the equation, it was just a boring, glitchy VR. Retro. It mentioned Abram. I mean, did it even say that? I could barely hear it. You’ll hear voices and messages in any kind of random noise if you want to hear them.

  Edie had once read an old, yellowed book she’d found on the street. It was written by Konstantin Raudive. He believed he could communicate with ghosts by asking questions, sometimes in a sound-proof room, and recording the silence. He would then examine the tape, speed it up or slow it down, and hear answers to his questions. The book was mostly a collection of these decoded, cryptic, ghostly utter-ances. Edie hoped the mouse was still existent in some form, just not a form that could shit on her kitchen counter.

  Months before, Abram awoke around four in the morning, claiming that a black cat was in the apartment. Another of his hypnagogic hallucinations. A week later, he ran into the couple that lived in the apartment that shared the lightwell, and they told him that they were mourning the death of their cat, a black cat, who had died on the same night he had the hallucination. He didn’t tell them about his interaction with their cat’s ghost, of course. Everyone had a few stories like that.

  Edie sat at the kitchen table, drinking her coffee and watching the rabbit sitting at the door as if it wanted to go out for a walk. The guilt she felt for killing the mouse transformed into sympathy for the artificial rabbit.

  “Maybe I’ll bring you with me
today. Are you fully charged? I’ll bring your mat just in case. I think I have a purse you’ll fit in.”

  The rabbit stared back at Edie, its blank black eyes showing her reflection.

  Edie ate her toast and read the news on her phone. She read that the NIMH had officially deemed DMT-A, coupled with VR therapy, a safe and effective treatment for depression and anxiety. Well, I sure as hell didn’t get anything out of it. Article didn’t even mention the Blue Lady game. Maybe I should download a different one. No, that’s stupid. I’m fine. I’m happy. I’m just lonely. I’ve been alone in this apartment for too long. I’ll go to the park today, get some sun.

  Edie skimmed an article about transient lunar phenomena: the relatively frequent, unexplained appearance of lights, colors, and fog observed on the surface of the moon by astronomers. Most events took place near the Aristarchus meteor crater at the lunar north pole. Theories ranged from outgassing to micro-meteorite impacts to dirty telescopes. The article ultimately surmised secret alien moon bases, and Edie rolled her eyes, putting her phone down.

  As she washed her plate, she heard and felt a jolt that she misinterpreted as the beginning of an earthquake. Another jolt. Something very heavy being dropped on the old wooden floor of one of the other apartments in the building. Edie looked through the peephole to the apartment door across the hall. Silence. A brief shadow passed the space under the door. She went back to her phone. Another preposterous article, this one claiming humans weren’t at fault for the current climate crisis. Another article: “Capitalism? It’s Making a Comeback.” Within the climate crisis, the main priority of the global ruling elite and its political servants was to lie low and prepare for catastrophe while publicly telling young people not to worry about the future, stay the course, and maintain the status quo. Behind the scenes, however—in the cabinet offices, boardrooms, mansions, and military high commands—they planned for a future in which they could maintain their power and privilege amid the chaos and destruc-tion of the burning world.

  Nothing means anything anymore. Capitalist propaganda. You have to look in an old book to get information that isn’t sensationalized clickbait garbage written by an AI. Why do I even read the news anymore? I guess there’s still a seed of truth to all of it. I can at least glean a little of what’s really going on. I need to get out of this apartment. I’m turning into a crazy person.