The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams

by Palmer, Jacob

  He could see down into the parking lot, a white van with its front window and tire shot out, two people behind the van with guns. The two corpses he and Abram hid in the desert, the corpses they had dinner with the very next night—there they were, placed like toys in a parking lot shootout diorama.

  In the motel lobby, he could see Laura and Betty, both with guns, crouching below the window. Laura stood and fired a shot that took paint off the back edge of the white van with a ping and a white puff. Kenner could see Laura so well. Her mouth was open slightly. He could even see her artificial freckles, her artificial blue eyes, her shaved blonde hairline. Why was he drawn so reliably toward death? Pulled toward gambling and loan sharks, pulled away from the city and into small-town Walmart parking lots at 3:00 a.m. Laura was a brutal part of it all, an invisible witness from above, as he was now, or did they know that he could see him? Was this an elaborate performance for his benefit?

  His truck was parked directly below, a two-story drop. He watched Abram enter the diorama, stumbling as if very drunk, tracing a crooked line toward Kenner’s truck. Abram opened the driver’s side door and fell in as both sides of the parking lot firefight looked on, confused. Kenner watched the entire-ty of the scene, paralyzed, Abram directly below. The two living corpses behind the white van talked to one another, adjusting their plans and reloading. The woman he loved more than life, the woman who was death, spoke in quick, hushed phrases to the sad-eyed doll on the floor in the office.

  “Hey, there’s a kid up here,” Kenner heard from behind. He turned to see Annie standing a few feet away and pointing at a silver air-conditioning unit. The little girl poked her head around the screaming machine. The little girl wasn’t a little girl; she was something else entirely, an animal. Not even an animal, a force. Emptiness. Infinite.

  Kenner called Annie back, but the machines drew closer and louder and encircled them. The little girl smiled at Annie. She held something in her hand and descended. Terrifying precision. Annie lay on her side as if sleeping. The child walked toward Kenner, smiling, playful. Kenner examined the night-mare, turned, his eyes struggling to focus. Sweat or blood or milk poured into his eyes. He was dream-ing. This was a dream; of course it was.

  He stood at the edge of the roof and jumped to fly, flapping his arms like an impotent, featherless bird, and landed in the back of his truck, his ankle crumpling beneath him. He looked up through a blinding liquid light and saw the little girl looking down from the roof, expressionless. Kenner crawled from the back of the truck, attempted to stand on his shattered ankle, crumpled to the ground, and blacked out momentarily from the dense, indigestible pain.

  He pulled himself into the open door of the truck. C’mon, buddy. We’re going . . . We’re go-ing. He pushed Abram’s unconscious form gently into an upright passenger position. Kenner turned, looking down a white, throbbing tunnel, and caught eyes with Laura through the broken glass of the motel lobby. She watched him coolly, empty. A gunshot rang out, and she flung back in a spray of blood, leaving an empty window of broken blue glass reflecting thin desert clouds.

  Kenner started the truck and backed out of the space violently. He smashed the rear of the truck into the parked white van of the Blue Lady cult, ripping off its front bumper and spraying plastic onto the parking lot, and stalled out. The two corpses took their chance. Ash struck Kenner in the face through the half-lowered window with the butt of his rifle and yanked the door open, pulling Kenner and his useless ankle and busted lip onto the hot black pavement. Luci ducked around, diving into the passenger side, shoving Abram’s unconscious body into the small back seat space, which was covered in tiny square shards of tinted glass. They peeled out of the parking lot, tires screeching, leaving Kenner writhing on the ground. A gunshot buckled from the motel office, taking out a taillight as they fishtailed onto the highway.

  32

  On the white roof, Abram crawled toward Kenner, who lay in a fetal position, twitching in seizure. The roof pebbles lifted into the air, froze, and fell back down. Two air-conditioning units popped, hissed, and began to smoke. The pain in Abram’s head morphed and found a focus just behind his eyes. He shook Kenner and called his name.

  Abram was beginning to black out, to give in, when the hatch beside them bumped and lifted, ris-ing with the cinder block sliding off. Abram could make out eyes, glasses. Annie lifted the door, looking at Kenner without concern, and then at Abram.

  “Where is the card?” she yelled through her hand, over the noise, her other hand holding the door above her.

  Abram weakly threw a handful of gravel, and Annie dropped the door. He made his way to his feet and stumbled away, clutching the gold bar to his chest. He worked his way along the roof, resting and leaning behind thunderous air-conditioning units. He blacked out momentarily and dropped the gold bar, stooped to pick it up, and awkwardly broke into a run toward the edge of the building, the pain in his head building to a crescendo. He scrambled to a stop just short of the edge, kicking gravel to the ground below.

  “Tell us where the card is and we won’t hurt you,” Annie said from somewhere vaguely behind him.

  Abram lay on his stomach with one of his spandexed legs dangling artlessly over the edge, as if he were going to climb down somehow.

  “That’s our gold bar you’re holding,” Annie said, moving closer. “You stole it from us. The Blue La-dy predicted you would. Eternal return. She told us the gold would serve as the anchor. Kenner is the constant variable, but you are the mouse, and the gold is the trap. We just need to know where you hid the card. We need to destroy the card. Be careful. We can’t have you falling off the roof. You can’t die yet. The Blue Lady said that you wouldn’t die, that you would lead us to the card first. Abram, our uni-verse doesn’t just have a single state, but a complex collection of states, one of which is the universe itself. The Blue Lady says—”

  “Kenner is having a seizure. He needs help,” Abram said, gripping the gold bar with one hand and his throbbing head with the other.

  “Fuck Kenner. We want the card. Take my hand.”

  Abram squeezed his eyes shut and slid over the edge.

  He opened his eyes, gasping and groping at the ground around him. The gold bar lay a few feet away near a large bag of potting soil leaning against the motel. He scrambled to his feet, grabbed the gold bar, and broke into an ungainly run, aiming for the large dirt field behind the motel. Above him, he could see a silver shape in the sky. Another drone?

  Abram heard Edie’s voice and he stopped. He looked frantically around him and called out to her. He could see his kitchen. He could see Edie typing at her computer at the kitchen table, eating toast, looking up and smiling and putting her hand out, pushing the silver balloon away, pushing him away. Abram threw up. Inside his skull, his brain became a creature writhing to escape. He wondered if it was an aneurysm. We must have been slipped drugs again. When could that have happened?

  A raven landed a few yards away. Abram realized that he was repeating Edie’s name, like a man-tra. Would he die out here, in some nameless town, for no reason? He wanted a hospital; he wanted the police to arrive. Where were the police? Abram thought of Kenner’s truck, of driving back to San Francis-co, as if nothing had happened. I have to get help. I need help. Kenner is probably still on the roof, having some kind of seizure.

  Abram walked toward the sound of gunshots. Sporadic and staccato, they sounded clumsy and horrible. As ridiculous as any of it. He walked, his legs wobbling and buckling beneath his now-enormous head. It felt as if it had swelled into a grotesque Carnival papier-mâché head. He had to hold out his arms to steady himself.

  He saw the truck in the parking lot and walked toward it. He couldn’t hear the shots anymore. Maybe they were all dead. He hoped they were all dead. Not Kenner, though. He had to get help for Kenner. He would get to the truck and drive to get help. The first house he found, the first phone. He could see the truck growing larger. Everything in his periphery shifted into television static. Black
ing out.

  He arrived at the truck, and the door opened easily as if it weren’t closed completely, as if it had been set for him. He crawled inside and his head immediately felt as if the balloon within it had been deflated. He could see again. His breathing slowed, returned to normal. A wave of warm relief came over him and he was afraid he might have pissed himself. The sudden relief terrified him. Had he suc-cumbed to the aneurysm? Had he died? He had to sit up now; the worst was over. He closed his eyes, and a cottony sweet wave of sleep descended. Dreams.

  33

  Laura ran out of the motel lobby, her rifle pointed toward the sky. Betty followed close be-hind with the child. Betty spoke into her phone, swiped at the screen, and their autonomous vehicle pulled up from behind the motel. Betty stood over Kenner, who lay semi-conscious on the pavement like a dazed and wounded animal. She stood only a few inches from him, but she didn’t look at him. He was in shock. He couldn’t even feel his shattered ankle.

  Laura was the first to enter the vehicle, her shirt soaked and black with blood near her left shoul-der. Betty lifted Kenner under his arms and pulled him into the vehicle, the child smiling, helping lift his legs inside as if it were a game. Laura and the child sat on one side of the small, dark room of the ve-hicle, Laura tending to her wound with forceps, an open metal first-aid kit in her lap. She wore a sheen of sweat, but her hands were steady.

  The child sat beside her and watched with a childlike curiosity that seemed performative. Betty furiously typed into her phone as Kenner writhed on the floor. An ache began, tumbling into fiery mad-ness, terminating in a dull thudding numbness in the vicinity of his left ankle. He moaned low like an animal. Betty looked down at him momentarily through swollen purple eye sockets and returned to her phone.

  “They’re working on neutralizing the targets. Probability continuation around thirty percent. The sat link apparently ran into interference,” Betty said across the cabin to Laura and the child.

  “Are they sending an edited position?” Laura said, not looking up from her work. “The link seemed to be working on the two of them, barring the usual depth errors.” She motioned with her chin to Kenner on the floor.

  “I’m only getting fragments. They’re working on things from their end. Algorithm dropped from ninety-five percent to forty-five percent. I’ve never seen anything like it. Neither have they, I’m sure. I think this idiot emanates expurgation signals somehow. Maybe something else, something closer,” Bet-ty said, looking down at Kenner as if she were seeing straight through him.

  Betty slipped her phone carefully into a silver sleeve and placed it into a lined compartment in her purse. Laura stopped working and watched her.

  They stared at one another. The child was on her hands and knees, watching Kenner tremble and quietly weep on the floor.

  “I had confirmation from Abram,” Betty said in a hushed voice.

  “All?” Laura said.

  “Neural net, plasmosis.”

  “Then it knows. It knows that we know. What does that mean for us?” Laura said, a hint of emo-tion in her voice.

  “You know what that means. The fresco simulacra model. The coherence study of time in water. Darkness dissolved.”

  “The soul is an empty assumption in that model.”

  “That may be so. I’d like second confirmation.”

  34

  Abram felt a soft hand touch his chest. He felt Edie’s body next to him in bed, the morning tangle of sheets, smoky orange light through the blackout curtains. He touched her hand.

  “Hey, wake up. Wake up,” a woman’s voice shouted, not Edie’s. It seemed very far away.

  The hand on his chest pulled him up by his shirt, slapped his numb face. He fell below the water. It was as if he were underwater, as if he was in a bathtub, but he could breathe under the water and above.

  “Where is the card?” a woman’s muffled voice asked. She sounded upset. Why not? Why not just tell her? he thought.

  “Parsons Field. I buried it by the hangar,” Abram mumbled through blistered, sleeping lips. He wondered if he had actually said the words or had just meant to say them. He heard a distant conversa-tion between a man and a woman. He felt a sharp buzzing in his skull, a searching that drifted and set-tled and stopped. He heard the voice of Lam.

  “Wake up. It is time.”

  Abram opened his eyes in Kenner’s truck. He lay crumpled on the floor behind the seats and sat up slowly, wincing, his head pounding in a bed of broken glass. He could hear the wind slapping past the windows. He remembered a stranger on the sidewalk in San Francisco. He’d handed Abram paper sunglasses and pointed up at the eclipse. Abram was drunk and had forgotten it was happening, the entire reason he had left his apartment, to see the eclipse. The light outside the truck had the same sticky silver quality of a solar eclipse.

  Abram watched himself as a child, staring down at his dirty shoes, one of his toes just poking through. He had returned home from school early. He heard sounds coming from his bedroom. His mother was making love to a strange man. A man that was not his father. A father whose unfaithfulness to his mother had somehow never moved him. He took down a long screwdriver from the top of the re-frigerator and stood, shaking. He put it back and took it down again and walked to the door of his bed-room, stood outside, holding the screwdriver. He would open the door and kill his mother and the man with the screwdriver. Stab them in their soft red throats.

  In the front seat, Abram watched himself talking to Kenner, who was driving. Out of his body, a camera. Eclipse light outside. He crouched in the back seat, watching himself and Kenner talking. He couldn’t hear their conversation over the roaring wind outside. They both had long black eyes. Their skin was stretched thin and veiny around their large eyes. The eyes didn’t fit in their skulls. Abram could see himself reflected in them. He could see his face in the back seat. They were repulsive, unreal. He would kill them. Stab them in their throats.

  Abram awoke face-up on the side of the road, the sun setting and projecting the last of its sepia light, softening everything. He sneezed and rubbed his nose, which was encrusted with dried blood. The headaches and hallucinations had passed, and now his head rang hollow like a white bone bell. The inside of his mouth stuck to his dry teeth; he wanted water, food. He couldn’t remember the last time he had either. Had he been drugged again? He remembered pain and panic and lost dreaming.

  He sat up to see Kenner’s truck parked on the side of the road in front of him. The gold bar sat in his hand, covered in fresh blood. Abram instinctually tossed it away in disgust and then stumbled over to retrieve it. He remembered being on the roof of the motel. He had the image of Kenner crumpling in seizure.

  The desert was quiet, without wind or insect sounds. He could hear his own breathing and his heartbeat. He could see the busted-out back window of the truck. He looked into the driver’s side win-dow. The body of Ash lay dead, mouth open, eyes open, head tilted back. A half dozen black holes in his neck wept. The seats were covered in red-black gore, and a moist, sickly sweet copper smell hung in the air. On the passenger side slumped Luci in a torn black shirt and cut-off shorts, her throat brutally punc-tured and purple. He was afraid to look into the space behind the seats. Afraid he would find himself sleeping.

  “It isn’t real,” Abram said.

  He ran out in front of the vehicle, turned to look back for a moment, as if the vehicle would spring to life and give chase, and then he continued running, the truck becoming smaller behind him and then nothing. He ran, animal-like, empty, unthinking, escaping. The highway dropped like a loose black rib-bon onto an evening desert spread out in every direction. Abram ran until he couldn’t run, his muscles and bones screaming, loped for a bit, and then continued running. He ran all night, his legs atrophied stumps, thinking of nothing.

  He stumbled, collapsing into a heap on the side of the road and threw up—nothing but a few black flecks of blood and bile—and continued on. He cradled the bloody gold bar in his arms like it was a ba
by. In the first light of dawn, he reached a metal cattle gate with a cut padlock, the pieces of the pad-lock lying on the ground. He picked up the pieces and examined them. They were cold and razor sharp at the cut. He barely recognized his swollen, brown, blood-stained fingers. He pushed open the creaking gate and began slowly down the broken road under the pale domed sky.

  35

  Abram stood outside the ruined airplane hangar, dazed yet crystalline, cleansed. The fever broken. He rubbed his face and stared into the large open hangar door. Wind picked up grains of sand, and he heard each one tap against the rusted sides of the ancient building. In this dense morning light, blue sky vault balanced directly above, the hangar became a temple. Abram was hesitant to enter, felt like he wasn’t alone. Or just missed someone.

  He searched and found no tracks. He took stock of his situation. His mouth was a dry wound. His eye was still swollen but no longer sore. His legs were inoperative meat. His black spandex yoga outfit was covered in dried blood. His nostrils were caked and closed with blood, his nose probably broken. He had the gold bar.

  “All decisions lead to death,” he said to himself.

  Abram hobbled into the hangar. The sound of creaking aluminum from wind over the roof startled him. The hangar was empty, and the center of the cracked concrete floor still bore the black char of the enormous fire from the beginning of his journey. The empty wine bottle, label burned off.

  “Hello?” Abram yelled in a pitiful rasp.

  Nothing.

  Will they come for me here? The Blue Lady Death Cult, Betty, Laura, and the kid, the drugged police, Lam, Kenner, Edie?

  “I just want to go home,” he said to himself, sobbing, embarrassed at his grief as if he were in front of an audience. He covered his face and wept and then became dizzy and stumbled to the ground.

  “I don’t want to die. Edie, I love you. I’m sorry I did this. This was all a mistake.”