The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams

by Palmer, Jacob

  “Do you have the memory card in your possession right now?”

  “How do you know about the memory card?”

  Betty smiled and calmly looked at her phone, then placed it gently back into her sleek bioplastic purse. She struck Abram, open-palmed, in the center of his face, smashing the mini-muffin he had been lifting to his mouth. He fell to the floor, his nose bleeding profusely. The blow was quick, nearly imper-ceptible. For an instant, Abram questioned the reality of what had just happened, thought maybe his chair had simply collapsed beneath him.

  “What the fuck? Get away from me! What is this?” he said, flailing wildly and slipping on his own blood on the tile floor. Betty walked toward him, relaxed, still smiling, and kicked him in the ribs. He gasped and choked.

  “Where is the card?” she repeated in the same pleasant tone as before.

  “Help!” Abram yelped.

  “The clerk is dead,” Betty replied, grabbing Abram by the arm and hauling him up to his feet with surprising strength. “Walk. Let’s go back to your room.”

  Abram stumbled as she led him out of the lobby and down the hall to his room. When they reached his room, the door was open, and the little girl sat on the bed. They entered, and the little girl slid off the bed and left the room with a look of boredom, closing the door behind her. As the door clicked shut, Betty struck Abram again in the face, causing him to stumble toward the bed, bounce on the corner, and land on the floor, whimpering.

  “Where is the card?”

  “I threw it away. Days ago.”

  “I would like you to tell me exactly what was on the memory card. Thank you,” Betty said, still completely calm and professional, like a bank teller requesting a signature.

  “It was scrambled. We could barely read any of it. A stranger gave it to me at my last artist in resi-dence. I didn’t even want it. I didn’t give a shit about any of it. I don’t give a shit about any of it. Listen, if we weren’t supposed to see the stuff on that card, don’t worry. We could barely make any of it out. What we could read made no sense. I promise.”

  Abram climbed onto the bed, holding his nose, the blood streaming down his arm, his eye already swelling shut. He could feel the gold bar just under the folded edge of the sheet where he had left it. He reached down, touching its invisible edge. There was a crinkling sound, and a large mouse leapt from the small trash receptacle and ran across Betty’s foot, making for the crack under the door. In the instant she looked down to register this, Abram clumsily flung the gold bar at her, like a desperate animal, hit-ting her hard in the forehead with a dense thud and knocking her unconscious. Betty crumpled to the floor.

  “Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Abram said, shivering violently.

  He crept over to the body and found her breathing. He shot up and looked frantically around the room. He snatched a pillow from the bed, removed the pillowcase, and stepped into it, ripping it in half. He ripped it in half again, rolled it, and warily tied her wrists behind her back, then tied her ankles to-gether with the other strip.

  Unsatisfied, he went into the closet and took an ancient wire hanger and unwound it, cutting his desperate, shaking fingers in the process, and wound the wire tight around her wrists. Abram then sat on the floor a few feet away with his back against the wall, trying desperately not to throw up. He watched her shallow breathing. A delicate stream of blood flowed out of her left nostril. The thick stream that flowed from both of Abram’s nostrils had begun to subside, but he was covered in fresh, sticky blood. He suddenly remembered the child. Watching Betty out of the corner of his eye, he locked the door and wedged a chair against it. He moved back to his place against the wall, crouching and cupping his swollen eye.

  “Are you alright?” he asked.

  She didn’t move.

  “Shit. How am I going to get out of here? Where is Kenner?” Abram mumbled to himself. A couple of his teeth felt loose.

  The woman spasmed and made a very low moaning sound. Her eyes shot open, searched the room, and settled on Abram. Her eyes belied a new intimacy. Abram looked away. The space between and around her eyes had quickly swollen to the point that she looked like an entirely different person. Almost wolf-like.

  “What is this about?” Abram said finally, still averting his eyes and delicately wiping his blood-caked nose with blood-caked fingers. She stared at him.

  “What is this about?” he repeated.

  “This doesn’t matter, Abram. The outcome will be the same.”

  “Listen, I’m calling the police. I’m done. Will you please just tell me what the fuck is going on?”

  “You don’t have a phone.”

  “I’ll use the clerk’s phone in the lobby.”

  “I told you, the clerk is dead.”

  “I’ll walk to the fucking police station, then.”

  “If you leave this room without me, the child will kill you.”

  “You’re insane. This is all insane.”

  “What did you see on the memory card, Abram?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Blood curled down her upper lip. “Okay, Abram. I’m almost certainly as dead as you are when this is over. We have a few hours. The algorithm will have adjusted for this contingency by now.”

  “Please, who are you, and what is this about? I know you’re connected to all of it: Lam, the dead bodies, all of it.”

  “With more information, you will only get less meaning. If I tell you the truth, will you tell me what you saw on the memory card?”

  “I told you, we barely saw anything. I’ll tell you everything I can remember.”

  “Have you told anyone else about what you saw on the card?”

  “Who would I tell?”

  “I’ll begin,” she said, rolling to an upright position and wincing in pain, leaning against the wall. “It’s over, Abram. I’m not going to kill you. They will kill you and Kenner and me. Also my two associates. Your girlfriend Edie may be spared if you honestly told her nothing, but I seriously doubt it. A later collateral removal. Standard, less-specialized contractors.”

  “What are you talking about? Who wants to kill us? Why? We didn’t do anything.”

  “You were very unlucky, Abram. An innocent bystander, or at least that is how the case initially appeared. Your friend Kenner goes against the algorithm, spectacularly so. Your proximity to him through all of this is the only reason you and I have arrived at this point.”

  “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you don’t. In your current situation, the truth can only exist as a lie. We were sent to retrieve you and Kenner and ascertain your likelihood of spreading any happened-upon information. Specifically spreading sensitive information, inadvertently of course, to hostile powers. We aren’t usual-ly deployed for cleanup jobs, but your case is of the utmost importance. I don’t believe any of that now. They sent us here to observe your reactions to us, game the algorithm. They more than likely don’t even know why they started this ball rolling.”

  “Do you work for the National Reconnaissance Organization?”

  “Yes, to a degree,” she said after a long pause. “The information you had access to on that memory card is the truth. The real truth, not a decoy, not a cover. The information on that card has invisibly guided my life and your life and everyone else’s life for the past decade. The algorithm. The workings inside the black box. You have glimpsed the face of God, if only a fleeting glimpse. I brought you back to this room to see with your eyes, and when I did, I signed my death warrant. I’ve introduced enough in-terference to make this room a null zone in an inane attempt to save myself. But I had to know. They had to have predicted my weakness. The algorithm knew the whole time and watched it play out. I watched it all like a car accident in slow motion. You can’t understand what I’m saying, but I feel it must be said. I did this for the child. Not my child, of course, but in some way still a child, nonetheless. Abram, tell me what you saw.”

  Abram rubbed his f
ace and gently touched at his swollen eye. “Okay, I remember something about memory implants and neuro . . . neuroplasmosis?”

  Silently, she stared deep into Abram’s eyes. “What else?” she said.

  “A page about an octopus. Something about a cephalopod neural net. Neural Net Interface, what-ever that means.”

  She closed her eyes. She nodded and turned her face away from Abram.

  “That’s all I can remember,” he said.

  “Have you seen it in your dreams, Abram?”

  Abram didn’t answer.

  They sat in silence, her with eyes closed, Abram anxiously glancing at her and back to the door, summoning the courage to make a run for it. A cloud passed in front of the sun, casting the dingy room in shadow, and then the light returned. Shadow. Back into light.

  A screech of tires from the parking lot and they both turned toward the door. Abram took his gold bar from the floor and clutched it to his chest. The sound of car doors closing followed, then footsteps in the hall and heavy silence. The cheap door burst into splinters, taking some of the propped chair with it. Abram jumped back, sliding against the wall toward the bathroom. Laura rushed into the room, drag-ging Kenner by the arm like a terrified, gangly child. She had blood smeared around her mouth and down her neck like a lion perched above a carcass. Kenner, in shock, stumbled, pale and shaky, still cov-ered in spattered gore. Laura pointed the gun at Abram.

  “Untie her,” she ordered Kenner, pushing him to the ground in Betty’s direction. She kept her eyes and gun trained on Abram as Kenner frantically complied. The four of them then made their way down the hall to room 36. The room was identical to both Abram’s and Kenner’s rooms.

  Betty removed a handgun from a bag on the bed and pointed it at Abram and Kenner. “Get in the bathroom. Stay in the bathroom.”

  They went into the bathroom. It had the same dull, white fluorescent light, the same small win-dow. They heard shuffling and the zipping of bags on the other side of the door, then nothing. Abram slowly, quietly locked the bathroom door and desperately examined the window as a possible escape route. It was obviously too small for either of them. Pale, Kenner looked at his blood-spattered face in the mirror, getting closer and closer until he was nearly touching his reflection. They heard a shotgun boom somewhere outside and shattering glass, and they both dropped to the floor.

  “Are you okay?” Abram asked reflexively. Kenner didn’t acknowledge the question, only crouched on the floor, staring at the small, shadowed gap under the bathroom door where tile met carpet.

  “What should we do?” Abram said, and once again Kenner made no response. Abram shook him hard. “Hey, come on, man. Are you alright? Let’s figure out a way out of here. I don’t feel like waiting around for them to come back and shoot us.”

  Kenner stared at Abram with tears in his eyes. “Okay. Okay . . . okay. Yeah,” he said.

  Abram opened the bathroom door and saw an empty room.

  “Let’s make a run for it,” he said to himself, looking nervously around the room, slapping the gold bar on his palm. Kenner inexplicably pulled the comforter off the bed and wrapped it around himself like a cloak.

  “What are you doing?” Abram asked.

  “Why don’t we go to the roof? I think we need to go to the roof,” Kenner answered.

  “To do what?”

  “We’ll be safe up there. They won’t expect us to go up there.”

  “How do we even get up there? What if they corner us?”

  “We can jump off.”

  Abram stared incredulously at Kenner.

  They crouched-walked into the hallway, Abram defensively gripping the gold bar, Kenner wrapped in the cheap comforter, both shivering and covered in dry blood. Abram noticed the strange mineral smell, the alien smell, mixed in with the smell of copper. Possibly his own blood?

  They worked their way down the hall. The rooms went up to fifty, followed by an unmarked room. They tried the door and found it unlocked. A small utility room. A washer and dryer, a mop bucket, and a dead cleaning woman on the floor. She was elderly and lay on her side as if she were sleeping. She had no marks or signs of trauma that Abram or Kenner could see. She looked as if she had lain down on the floor, drifted off to sleep, and died. They stared at the body under the icy-white light of the hanging LED bulb.

  Abram spotted a square opening in the ceiling above the dryer with a short folding ladder leading up to a roof hatch. They climbed up and pushed open the heavy insulated door. Blistering light, heat, and noise washed over them, as if they were stepping out of a space capsule and onto a hostile planet. Kenner carefully closed the door behind them and lifted a nearby cinder block, placing it on top of the door. The roof was a blinding desert of small white pebbles punctuated by several large, roaring air-conditioning units. The sea of white pebbles below their feet seemed to vibrate as if they were balancing on an enormous snare drum.

  Kenner yelled something unintelligible to Abram, covering his ears.

  Abram winced, fell to his knees, and then threw up. It was dark, nearly black. His head throbbed and he couldn’t get to his feet. His eyes refused to focus. Abram made it onto all fours and watched as Kenner, face distorted, eyes rolling back, collapsed in front of him.

  31

  Kenner stood in the middle of a large egg-shaped room, the walls silver and veined. Pearlescent, as if he were inside the eye of a fish. He walked toward the curved wall and held out his hand to touch it, and as he approached, he became a young man, then a boy, and then a very small child, a baby.

  A blue mother, naked, picked him up, held him to her blue breast. He suckled and filled his belly with the sweet, warm milk, artificial, like ingesting fluorescent light. She pulled the baby from her breast and sat him naked on the floor and stood over him. Her naked blue body had no vulva. Milk dripped from her blue nipples and added to the milk already on the floor, the room filling slowly. Ken-ner rested on his back in the milk, just a baby, then a young man, and then thirty-six, smiling and float-ing. The blue mother sat, and Kenner rested his head on her lap. She stroked his hair, singing softly. She kissed his forehead.

  “How can I know you? By what grace are you blessed with such freedom?” she said to herself.

  “Freedom?” Kenner said.

  “Your freedom is beyond my current understanding. Very few, very few. Shhh. Hush now, and close your eyes.”

  Kenner heard a voice from far off, calling to him. He opened his eyes and found himself laying his head in Annie’s lap. Her pale skin was blinding against the white pebbles and white sky. Her thick, owl-like glasses slid down her nose. Her skin smelled of milk and sweat.

  “Kenner? Can you hear me?”

  “I’m sorry, Annie. I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank God you’re okay,” she said. “You were having some kind of seizure or something.”

  “Where’s Abram?” Kenner said.

  “He wasn’t up here. We came here to rescue you from these horrible people, and I think Abram may be working with them. We have to get the memory card before they do. The Blue Lady told us we have to destroy the memory card. It’s the only way those people will ever leave you alone. Do you know where Abram hid it?”

  “I have to get off of this roof. I’m gonna be sick if I don’t get off this roof.”

  “Okay, let’s get you inside,” she said, helping Kenner crawl down the ladder, back into the utility room. The body of the dead cleaning woman was gone. They started down the hall.

  “Why are you wearing those yoga clothes?” Annie asked.

  “What happened to the dead lady in the laundry room?” Kenner said.

  “Dead lady? Maybe you dreamed that during your seizure. How long were you up on that hot roof?”

  “I didn’t dream that. I dreamed something else. How does the Blue Lady get into my head, An-nie?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Honestly, you are too much. The Blue Lady is just an AR sim.”

  “You just told me that
she ordered you to destroy the memory card. You’re taking orders from a sim?”

  “It’s a game. Destroying the memory card is a mission in the game, Kenner.”

  “Annie, this isn’t AR. How fucked up are you? What drugs do they pump you full of in that cult that you can’t tell the difference between a game and reality?”

  “Do you have the keys to your truck?” she asked, smiling.

  Kenner patted himself down and felt a jagged bulge in a small, undiscovered zipper pocket on his arm.

  “I do have my keys,” he said, surprised.

  They stopped at the sound of gunfire in the parking lot. Kenner grabbed Annie by her thin arm, and they began walking back the way they had come. They returned to the utility room, and Kenner locked the door. The room seemed different now, unplaceable, like someone had been there in the short time they were gone.

  “Let’s go back up to the roof,” Kenner said. “There might be some way to shimmy down the back, maybe like a drainpipe. Who’s with you? Who’s shooting?”

  “Ash and Luci, of course. We came to rescue you, you dummy.”

  On the roof, the white pebbles vibrated, floating millimeters above the surface. Every parti-cle is actually a field. What we think of as particles are just excitations of those fields, like waves in an ocean. Kenner turned to Annie, her upper torso gone. Just legs in little jean shorts and flip-flops. She became a blind spot, a reflection of the sky. She appeared herself again, looking concerned through her thick glasses.

  Why could he never bring himself to love her? He loved the Blue Lady as a child loved its mother, but that was a ridiculous hallucination. Annie even said it was just a sim. Kenner knew it was a sim. Where were these thoughts coming from? These weren’t his thoughts. Another dream? He felt his atoms vibrate in a matching wave pattern frequency with the white pebbles on the roof.

  He ran to the edge of the roof overlooking the parking lot. Was Annie still on the roof? He couldn’t see her. His vision became a white tunnel he fought to keep from closing in. He heard gunshots, close. Were they shooting at him?