The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams

by Palmer, Jacob

  Edie made her way back to the apartment. Passing the church, she saw Octavia playing with two other children.

  “What is that, Miss Edie? You have a bunny rabbit?” Octavia said, running over.

  “That’s right. Careful. Be gentle petting it.”

  “I don’t have to be too gentle. It’s just a robot rabbit anyway.”

  “How could you tell?” Edie asked.

  “The Blue Lady said you’d be coming back today with a rabbit. A robot rabbit.”

  Edie squatted to look Octavia eye to eye, forcing a smile. “Octavia, you wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

  “No, Miss Edie.”

  “Now tell me the truth. Did you really talk to the Blue Lady?”

  “I talk to her all the time.”

  “When do you play the Blue Lady game?”

  “That game is for grownups.”

  “Then how do you talk to the Blue Lady?”

  “I told you last time but you didn’t listen,” Octavia said. “She talks to me when I’m sleeping. When I’m dreaming. She told me about your man. You didn’t never tell me you got a man, Miss Edie. She said your man is out in the desert, though. She’s trying to help him, but she can’t help him that much. She’s stuck, like, inside a mirror.”

  “Okay . . . Let’s go for a walk, Octavia. Tell Florida we’re going to go play at Alamo Square Park.”

  Edie walked blindly up the hill, just barely stopping herself from walking into the intersection. An autonomous semi slid past like a white eel. Octavia had one hand on the rabbit’s head, which poked out of Edie’s purse, petting it with a child’s intense compulsion. The light changed, and they crossed and descended, passing a string of burnt-out and boarded-up Victorian mansions, broken wrought-iron gates hanging off their hinges. Flapping caution tape. They arrived at Alamo Square Park and sat in the dead grass. Edie coughed and habitually put on the respirator mask that hung around her neck, then took it off again. She nervously joined Octavia in the preoccupied petting of the rabbit.

  “You know what, Miss Edie? I like this rabbit.”

  Edie stared out at the yellow-brown haze over the far-off view of downtown, her mind racing. “Did the Blue Lady tell you anything else, Octavia?”

  “She tells me lots of things. She told me about the three devils. She told me once she has a big house on the moon that she goes to sometimes.”

  A little girl ran over from the playground. The same girl with curly red hair Edie had seen exiting her building. “Can I pet your rabbit?”

  “Sure, just be gentle.”

  Edie watched both children, at a loss for what to do or say, paralyzed.

  Two women appeared and stood over Edie and the little girls.

  “Looks like you made a friend, Aila,” the younger, more severe woman said.

  “I don’t want to leave yet,” Aila said. “Can’t we stay five more minutes?”

  “You said that five minutes ago. Come on, it’s time to go,” the older of the two women said.

  “But the smoke is bad for the rabbit. Can we give my friends a ride?” the little girl said.

  The slightly older woman crouched and extended her immaculately manicured hand to Edie. “My name is Betty, by the way, and this is my sister Laura. I apologize for my daughter. She’s one of those kids that’s just obsessed with animals.”

  “No, she’s fine. It’s not a real rabbit.”

  “That’s okay. She’s not a real kid,” Betty said, laughing. “I’m just kidding. Do you two need a ride anywhere? I just read that the air quality today is the worst it’s been all year.”

  The two women intimidated Edie. They looked like luxury real estate agent yoga instructors, prime examples of the metagaudy, Trumpwave, “baroque capitalist” aesthetic. Both women were blonde, as pale as marble, hair shaved back to the middle of their heads, no eyebrows. Vintage-obsessed Edie looked like a woman out of time next to them. She felt as if she were on her way to a cheap costume party. Edie detested the women on principle, the basic satirical-professional look. Ironic sex doll. She rarely interacted with people of their apparent socioeconomic bracket. Didn’t know what to say to them. The classes mixed far less than they had even a decade before.

  “No, I think we’re okay. We can walk.”

  “Are you sure? It would really be no trouble,” Betty said.

  “I know who you are,” Octavia said, standing, holding the purse and rabbit. “The Blue Lady told me. You’re the three devils that come to get us. Run, Miss Edie!”

  Edie opened her eyes and found herself sitting in a luxury autonomous vehicle, like a small room in motion, her head pounding and her arm sore. The rabbit sat huddled against her, and the red-haired little girl sat on the floor with her head on the seat, petting and looking at the rabbit. Octavia sat across from Edie, staring out of the deeply tinted window with dazed terror in her eyes, her small, trembling hands on her knees.

  The younger blonde woman sat on the same side as Edie, looking through Edie’s purse. Edie watched out of the corner of her eye, frozen. Her stomach knotted, and sweat gathered in the small of her back. The car pulled up in front of Edie’s building, passing the church at the corner with children still playing outside. The women expertly, fluidly moved Edie and Octavia out of the car and rushed them into the building, the younger woman’s hand deftly covering Octavia’s mouth as she stared plead-ingly at the church. Edie felt drugged, heavy. She had trouble lifting her feet up the few steps. The same steps she had bounded down barely an hour before.

  They entered the apartment across the hall from Edie’s. Clear bioplastic sheeting covered all of the furniture. In the middle of the floor, like a cocoon, lay a nude man, dead, wrapped in the same plas-tic sheeting. Edie could just make out the distorted face. The short, heavyset man who lived in the apartment. She’d never talked to him but had seen him coming and going through the peephole. The word CORN appeared everywhere, emblazoned in large square letters on the bioplastic sheeting, presumably what it was made of.

  It felt unreal to Edie, dreamlike. It wasn’t real. She blinked. She was awake in the strange apart-ment. Her apartment was just across the hall. She sat on the couch and stared at the floor, rubbing her eyes. The drugged confusion gave way to a sense of immediate animal purpose. I have to get out of here. I have to get Octavia and get out of here. Octavia looked at the corpse, her expression un-readable, not quite fear. The red-haired girl played with the rabbit, chasing it as it hopped loudly on the bioplastic-covered wooden floor. The two women sat in chairs opposite Edie, legs crossed, scrolling si-lently on their expensive phones. Edie stood up.

  “Sit down, please,” said the older woman, not looking up from her phone.

  Edie sat down and looked around the room for something, a weapon, anything. She wondered if she should scream, if anyone in the building would hear her or care. Maybe there was no one in the building. She hadn’t seen or heard anyone coming or going in a week, aside from these two women and their red-haired child. Maybe everyone in the building had been murdered like the naked man on the floor.

  The slightly older woman, Betty, walked over and sat next to Edie on the couch.

  “We work for the CIA, Edie. We’re investigating a very serious incident involving Abram.”

  “Okay . . . Why is there a dead body on the floor?”

  “He had a heart attack during our initial interview.” Betty shrugged. “The coroner’s department has been notified, of course.”

  “So what did Abram do?”

  “We know that he told you about a memory card. Did he attempt to read the information on that card? If so, did he tell you anything he learned from the card?”

  “No. He brought a card home from his artist-in-residence at the satellite company. Said a person there randomly gave it to him. I never heard anything else about it after that.”

  “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  The woman smiled politely, walked back to her chair, and p
ulled a comically large handgun out of a pink-striped shopping bag. It took a few moments for the gun to register as a gun to Edie. She’d never seen a gun in real life. To her, it looked like a cartoon, comical, a prop. Betty walked back to Edie, still smiling, and pressed the gun against Edie’s forehead.

  “Has Abram contacted you recently?”

  Edie hesitated and then answered, voice pinched and shaky. “Yeah, he called me the night before last. He hasn’t done anything wrong. He didn’t see anything on the card. You can have the memory card back. It’s probably somewhere in our apartment.”

  “It’s not in the apartment,” Betty said, still smiling.

  Octavia sat on the floor near the man’s wrapped corpse, staring up at the gun held at Edie’s head, teary-eyed. Behind them, the slightly younger blonde woman, Laura, stretched and disrobed, crouching naked while rummaging through a black backpack. She dressed in neon spandex yoga clothes and rolled out a mat, then ran through a series of poses.

  Without breaking eye contact, Betty removed the gun from Edie’s head and pointed it at Octavia. “When do you expect Abram to return?” she asked Edie.

  “I don’t know. Probably tomorrow. Maybe the next day.”

  Betty studied Edie, a hint of confusion in her eyes.

  The sound of yelling, a fight, came from outside. A woman screaming, “That bitch took my baby girl! Where is she? Which way?”

  “That’s my momma over at the church, looking for me,” Octavia said.

  The little red-haired girl came into the room, carrying the rabbit under one arm. She took Octavia by the hand and led her into the back of the apartment, toward the kitchen, past the woman doing yoga.

  There was a loud smack on the window. Betty and Laura froze and turned. Edie imagined it was Octavia’s mother throwing something at the window from the sidewalk, although how could she possi-bly know that her little girl was inside this apartment?

  Betty yanked open the curtain just as the window exploded; a surveillance drone orb, the size of a basketball, entered the apartment, wobbling, clearly damaged and malfunctioning from the impact. Betty shot the drone with an echoing ping and then stomped one of its small rotors under her red high heel as it dipped near the floor. Three more drones appeared, hovering in the deep red sunset light out-side the window, one with police lights and a siren blaring.

  In the deafening cacophony, Edie stood and took her purse, moving quickly to the back of the apartment. She found the rabbit and the two little girls near the door. Scooping up the rabbit, she pushed Aila out of the way. Aila held a small syringe-like object in her small fist and swung it with fluid, mechanical precision at Octavia’s throat. The rabbit slid from Edie’s arm, falling between them and tak-ing the brunt of the small blow. Edie wildly smacked the child away, sending her spilling to the floor. Edie, and Octavia holding the rabbit, ran out into the hallway, tripped down the stairs, and burst through the front door and the security gate and spilled onto the sidewalk.

  “Let’s go back to the church. My momma’s lookin’ for me.”

  “It’s too close. We have to get far away from here, Octavia.”

  “I wanna see my momma.”

  Edie yanked Octavia violently by the arm as they ran down the street. A small crowd gathered outside the apartment behind them, and more police drones arrived and entered through the shattered window. The alien sound of gunshots mixed with women and children screaming in a mob outside the church.

  26

  Abram thought he heard a muffled gunshot. Kenner didn’t hear anything. They stared at the door, and both flinched at a gentle knock. A woman entered, blonde hair, dressed in a more profes-sional manner than either Kenner or Abram had seen in some time. She carried herself with an air of gentle administrative authority. She had no eyebrows, and her lips were pale, matching the rest of her milky skin.

  “Hello, my name is Betty Sapp. I’ll be representing you as your lawyer.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to need a lawyer,” Kenner said. “I think you’ve made some kind of mistake.”

  “I’ve been sent here as part of a legal defense fund for wrongfully accused dark web traffickers. Ac-tually, Mr. Panicles, your partner Edie brought your case to our attention.”

  “How did Edie even know we were here?” Abram said. “They haven’t let us make a phone call yet.”

  “The authorities contacted her earlier today, and then she contacted us.”

  “I didn’t give them Edie’s number. That’s really weird.”

  “Well, regardless, the good news is we found you, and we’re getting you out of here,” she said, smiling and reaching down for both of their hands.

  Though perplexed, Abram and Kenner also smiled and followed the woman out into the hallway.

  “Uh, where is everybody?” Kenner asked.

  “They went home for the evening. It’s later than you must realize. These small-town police forces don’t have the funding to keep people on duty here at the station 24/7. They’ve released the two of you into my care until we can get this all thoroughly squared away tomorrow.”

  They followed the woman past the empty cubicles and toward the front desk. Down a hallway, Abram thought he made out what looked like a fresh blood stain, like something bloody had been dragged on the carpet leading into a darkened room. He second-guessed this, as the carpets were gen-erally filthy, and it was probably an old stain. As they approached the exit, following close behind the woman, Abram saw the gold bar sitting directly in the middle of the front desk, and he quickly grabbed it and carried it behind his back. The door of the empty police station swung closed behind him as they followed the woman across the parking lot to a waiting high-end black autonomous vehicle and climbed in.

  The vehicle was of the newer carriage configuration with two rows of seats facing each other and a holographic AR entertainment space in the middle. A small, darkened glass room on wheels. Everything black, bioplastic, shiny, and new. The windows were tinted to the degree that they were nearly opaque. Abram and Kenner sat next to Betty, and on the other side sat a slightly younger woman and a little red-haired girl. Abram and Kenner sat in awkward silence for a short moment until the little girl spoke.

  “What is that in your hand? Is it a candy? Is it a Quitterbread Bar?”

  Abram flinched as the little girl quickly approached him with an unexpected litheness and touched his knee.

  “Umm, it’s . . . it’s . . . a gold bar. It’s gold. It’s not candy,” he said.

  “Can I see it?” the little girl asked.

  “Aila, get back in your seat. Stop bothering Abram,” the slightly younger woman said. She had no eyebrows, and her head was shaved bald halfway back. Her remaining hair was dyed purple with tur-quoise streaks. She wore contacts that made her eyes featureless black pools and drank a green smooth-ie out of a thick, frosted glass mug with a long metal straw. An infrasound frequency seemed to emanate from her, making Abram feel anxious. He didn’t want to look at her.

  “Hey, I’m Kenner. What’s your name?” Kenner said, addressing the little red-haired girl as she begrudgingly climbed back into her seat.

  “We know your name is Kenner. My name is Laura. Her name is Aila,” the slightly younger blonde woman said, pointing to the little girl. “We were sent here to get you out of jail.” She had a raspy smok-er’s voice and a thick New York accent. Kenner, having almost always the opposite gut instinct from Abram, found Laura instantly captivating.

  “Laura is my sister, and she helps me look after my daughter Aila when I have these more inten-sive out-of-town jobs,” Betty said, smiling and crossing her legs toward Abram, who sat next to her on the long seat. Her shoes were incredibly red. They looked like liquid, blood. Like blood poured into clear shoes. Abram thought of the inordinate amount of blood he had witnessed over the past few days. He instantly became lightheaded at the sight of his own blood but now realized that the blood of others had no such effect on him. He had never been placed in a situation to lea
rn this about himself.

  “I don’t understand why our case would be considered intensive,” Abram said. “We didn’t really do anything. I mean, I guess we trespassed and lit a fire with some trash, but we were lost and freezing. And this gold bar is mine. Those cops were trying to sell it online.”

  “Also, where’s my truck?” Kenner added.

  “We’ll sort out the details tomorrow,” Betty said. “I’m sure the two of you must be hungry and ex-hausted.”

  With those words, like a spell descending, Abram realized that he was in fact deliriously hungry and exhausted. He hadn’t had anything to eat or drink in at least twenty-four hours. He marveled at the body’s ability to prioritize during a crisis. He worried that if he began eating now, he wouldn’t be able to stop. If he let himself sleep, he’d never wake up.

  He rubbed his face and smiled at the ridiculous situation he had let himself get dragged into and the fact that the situation would now surely be drawing to a close. The lawyer would sort things out to-morrow, and they would be on their way back to San Francisco. He felt he had finally returned to his body, could take a deep breath, and now he wanted only to call Edie and tell her about the whole nightmarish ridiculous thing. Done.

  They arrived at a motel a short drive from the police station in the desolate town. Abram and Kenner followed Betty into the lobby and stood awkwardly as she checked them in. Something about this process embarrassed Abram, as if he and Kenner were her two shy, delinquent sons.

  “Do you two want to get cleaned up before dinner?” Betty asked.

  “Sure, I guess we should,” Abram said, toying with his frayed sleeve. “We don’t have any clothes to change into, though.”

  “Is there a place nearby where we could purchase clothes at this hour?” Betty asked the elderly night clerk, who was barely listening and languidly playing an AR puzzle game, drawing hash marks in the air with a crooked arthritic finger.