The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams

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The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams Page 24

by Palmer, Jacob


  “The Blue Lady told me that. And she hasn’t been wrong yet.”

  “She told you in your dream?”

  “In my dream.”

  “The little red-haired girl back there told me that we had to go to the telescope,” Edie said to her-self, staring ahead. “Right after her mom and her aunt tried to kill us. The Blue Lady from the video game. The made-up video game character. She said we have to go to the telescope. What in the fuck is going on?”

  “I don’t know. I just know what the Blue Lady told me in my dream, Miss Edie.” Octavia’s eyes were swollen and bloodshot. She still gently held her aunt’s cooling hand.

  Edie pulled over onto the shoulder and vomited. An autonomous semi flashed by in the blue-black light. Edie wiped the blood from Gabrielle’s phone on the seat, her hands shaking. The gun she’d taken from the blonde woman was sitting on the seat next to her, so she placed it under the seat. The hand that had touched the gun shook violently, and she grasped the steering wheel to steady it. She called Abram’s phone, and then after getting the voicemail, she emailed him through Gabrielle’s ac-count. A short email telling Abram that she loved him and giving him Gabrielle’s number. She sat the phone down, sighed, and flinched when the phone rang immediately.

  39

  Abram and Kenner made their way along the highway in an arbitrary direction. They hoped to either reach a truck stop charging station or make a second attempt to flag down a semi on the slim chance another appeared in the night. They could barely make out the fire still burning on the highway far behind them. They hobbled in silence for hours, exhausted, Kenner’s damp black spandex arm slung over Abram’s shoulder.

  “Did you hear that?” Kenner finally said.

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  They stopped, bathed in darkness, the barest outline of desert scrub beyond.

  “You think there are hyenas out there?” Kenner said.

  “There aren’t hyenas.”

  “We smell like blood.”

  “There aren’t hyenas.”

  “Predators are attracted to the smell of blood.”

  “Let’s rest a little bit,” Abram said, lowering Kenner to the ground.

  “Did you hear that? I heard something again.”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  The red-haired little girl walked out of the desert darkness and sat across from Abram and Ken-ner, looking at them and smiling. Moonlight glinted off her red curls. Abram and Kenner sat stunned.

  “Where are you going?” the child said.

  There was a long pause.

  “Where are you going?” the child repeated.

  “We’re trying . . . trying to get home,” Abram said.

  “Where is your home?” she said.

  “San Francisco.”

  “That’s very far.”

  “Umm . . . Where do you live?” Abram said.

  “I live on a farm.”

  “Do you know if anyone else is coming for us?” Abram said. “What all do you know? Are we safe? Is this done now? The card was destroyed. Back there in that fire. That’s what they wanted, right?”

  “The card doesn’t matter,” she said, pointing at Abram’s head.

  The child then stood up and began walking slowly, half dancing, kicking the dirt. Abram hoisted Kenner up and they followed, the three marking a shambling procession alongside the highway.

  Throughout the night, they watched lights lift and dance in the desert sky, flashing pinprick orbs keeping pace miles above and then tracing out geometric shapes and drifting away after finishing their performance. Abram and Kenner, in a stupor, hardly noticed. The little girl sang little songs to herself and intermittently announced that she was hungry. It soon became apparent that she knew exactly where they were going, that she was leading them in fact, delivering them.

  “We wait here,” she said as the morning light colored the thin lip of the horizon.

  Abram and Kenner dropped and splayed like corpses on the loose gravel beside the road, unques-tioning and exhausted. The little girl squatted, throwing rocks at a large cactus.

  “So what’s up with this kid?” Kenner said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You think she’s like an advanced AI robot or something?”

  “That’s not a thing.”

  “Advanced technology.”

  “What?” Abram asked.

  “The government has way more advanced technology than the public knows about.”

  “She’s not a robot.”

  “I saw her kill somebody. She killed Annie on the roof of the motel . . . I think.”

  “We were both drugged and having seizures and shit. Who knows what happened? Ever since we smoked that DMT-A, nothing has made sense. We’re both brain-damaged now, thank you. My bearings are shot,” Abram said, watching the child methodically and indeed robotically throw rocks at the cactus.

  “I do know for sure we both got our asses kicked by those lawyers,” Kenner said. “I do know that my ankle is fucked, and it’s swollen like a grapefruit.”

  “I see something. I see a semi. You see that?” Abram said. “Hey, kid. There’s a truck coming.”

  The child ignored him.

  “I’m gonna flag this one down. It has to stop,” Abram said.

  “That’s what you said about the last one,” Kenner said, pulling himself up onto his working foot, wincing in pain.

  The semi approached, gleaming and white. No windows, of course. Modeled on Japanese bullet trains. Abram began awkwardly jumping up and down, waving his arms.

  “Give me something to throw at it. A rock. Or maybe my shoe,” Abram said.

  “Your shoe?”

  “I’ll put rocks in my shoe. To make it heavier.”

  “There’s just tiny pebbles and stuff, man. You could fill it with dirt.”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure. Hey, kid. Are you okay over there? Get back from the road. A truck’s coming.”

  Abram and Kenner crouched, pouring clumsy handfuls of sand into Abram’s shoe.

  “Okay, fuck it. That’s enough. It’s getting close.”

  They both shielded their eyes from the rising sun and balanced on one foot. The little girl sat nearby, watching them.

  “I think it’s slowing down,” Abram said, jumping up and down on his one foot and waving his arms.

  The sound from the semi shifted tone, and the strobing caution light on the roof slowed and then flashed red. It pulled slowly to a stop in front of them.

  “Okay, so now what?” Kenner said. “Maybe we should talk into one of these cameras on the side.”

  The enormous vehicle was dotted erratically with small black dome cameras, like fungal growths on a white log.

  “Hello? Hello? We’re stranded. We need help,” Abram yelled into the nearest camera.

  “You go inside here,” the little girl said, climbing onto the back bumper and hoisting herself up recessed handholds. “In here,” she repeated from the smooth, slightly curved roof of the cargo hold.

  Abram poured out the sand from his shoe and then climbed up to join her. The child sat cross-legged on a round door hatch with a recessed golden handle.

  “We go in here,” she said.

  “Did you check it? Is it locked?”

  “It’s not locked.”

  “Hey, Kenner, there’s a door up here. The kid found a door.”

  She stood and effortlessly lifted the handle with the sound of an airtight seal being broken. She climbed down.

  “I really don’t want to go in there,” Kenner said. “I don’t trust that kid.”

  “What are our options? We’re going to die out here. If the kid is a killer robot like you’re saying, she’s had more than enough time to kill us already. Come on.”

  Kenner stared past Abram, looking to the horizon. He hopped on one leg toward Abram, his face reddened and twisted with pain. With enormous difficulty, Abram helped him up onto the roof. They both sat, winded, in front of the open portho
le. No sound of the child. Abram descended first. The port-hole led into a dimly lit stainless-steel room and a sliding door.

  Abram examined his distorted reflection in the steel and wiped the dirt and sweat from his face with the front of his spandex shirt. His eye still stung but felt less swollen under his fingers. He helped Kenner descend the ladder. Kenner, unrecognizable, a soiled stickman in black spandex with the head of a beaten drunk. On the verge of collapse, barely keeping afloat in an oceanic pain. Abram strained to look at his own warped reflection in the stainless-steel walls.

  They needed water and food and sleep. It amazed Abram that they had made it this far on so lit-tle. The unreality of it, as if it had happened to other people. Were they in shock? Possibly in a lingering dissociative state? Why had they been drugged? Had they been drugged? To what purpose? To extract information, presumably, yet they were never questioned while under the effects of the drugs. Unless they were being monitored constantly somehow, their actions tabulated, betraying information uncon-sciously. Abram’s ragged, brittle mind tumbled back and forth, arriving nowhere.

  He slid open the door with a hiss of air, and with Kenner leaning on him as a crutch, they entered the main cargo hold of the semi. Abram stumbled, not expecting a loose surface. The floor was made of a fine gray soil. They found themselves in yet another artificial moon environment, a diorama, with cra-ters and cold white lights on the ceiling in a grid. Aila already lay in the far corner in a small crater, her legs hanging over the side. She was apparently napping.

  Abram lowered Kenner to the floor, and the door closed behind them. The truck began moving. At the end of the long chamber, on the opposite wall, was a large glass touchscreen and a slot beneath it, like a vending machine. Kenner sat, dazed, saying nothing, leaning against the door they had entered through.

  Abram walked across the crunching, powdery regolith toward the screen, the moon dust sticking to his shoes. The dust smelled like ash, but there was also something clean and artificial about it. Like a pile of ashes, the remnants of a bonfire in the middle of a mall. Abram loved shopping malls as a child, their artificiality. An ordered, windowless universe in direct defiance of the outer world of chaos and de-cay. The malls died along with the child’s mind that appreciated them. Outside of kitschy nostalgia traps, the world inevitably succumbed to online shopping and the automated kiosk, followed by the ri-ots and the UBI rollout and Abram the frustrated artist. All a dream.

  Abram approached, and the screen came to life. It read, What would you like?

  Abram touched the screen and nothing happened. He brought his face closer and said, “Water?”

  An unlabeled bioplastic water bottle rolled into the slot.

  “Another bottle.”

  Another rolled into the slot.

  “One more.”

  Another bottle rolled into the now backed-up slot.

  Abram took the three cold bottles. He turned to his immediate left and placed one next to the sleeping child. He walked the gray-powdered distance back to Kenner and handed him a bottle.

  “I’m afraid to drink it,” Kenner said. “It might be drugged.”

  “Why would they drug us now?”

  “Well, why did they drug us then?”

  “That’s a good point. Why are we back on an artificial moon? You think this semi belongs to the Blue Lady people, too?”

  “Maybe. Hauling fake moon dust for that moon room they’re building underground?”

  “This doesn’t look like they’re hauling anything. This is another moon stage set. Look at the sculpted craters. You almost expect to see a little lunar rover driving around. Little tracks.”

  “What else do they have in that vending machine over there?” Kenner said.

  “I don’t know. I just asked for the water.”

  “I’m hungry. And my foot is fucking killing me. I’d stab an old lady for an oxycontin right now.”

  “Yeah, we should eat. I don’t have much of an appetite. I’ll see what they’ve got.”

  Abram asked for a sandwich and received a shrink-wrapped kale and artificial turkey sandwich. He asked for pain medicine and received a single unmarked pill in a foil blister pack.

  Abram and Kenner split the dry sandwich, and Kenner hesitantly took the pill. They sat, both leaning against the door, looking at nothing. Too exhausted to sleep. Nearly too exhausted to talk.

  “Maybe this is like a mobile science museum. Like, for little kids,” Abram said.

  “What kids?”

  “We somehow ended up with one.”

  “She’s not a kid,” Kenner said. “I don’t know what she is.”

  “No, she’s a kid.”

  “You think they’re watching us right now?”

  “Who, the kid?”

  “The people that sent this semi.”

  “Sure,” Abram said. “They’re probably watching us.”

  “What do they still need us for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The government.”

  “What?”

  “The government,” Kenner said. “The NRO. Remember? From the card. They sent the lawyers, Laura and Betty, and that kid to get the memory card and to see what we knew about it. Then they got a good look at the card and shot themselves. So what was on that card, man? Something important that we missed.”

  “Top secret government files we weren’t supposed to see, obviously. Even if we didn’t understand what we were seeing.”

  “It must have been a bunch of small secrets that added up to something bigger. They only need to protect the small secrets. They don’t need to worry about the big secrets because nobody believes them anyway.”

  “Okay, okay . . . Jesus.”

  “But anyway, here we are, back on the moon,” Kenner said, theatrically sweeping his trembling, dirty red hand.

  “You ever read any Nietzsche?” Abram said.

  “Maybe . . . No. Why?”

  “He had this idea called ‘eternal return.’ That in an infinite universe, everything will keep hap-pening over and over, repeating like a fractal, into infinity.”

  “He didn’t come up with that. That’s like some Bhagavad Gita shit.”

  “This exact thing we are experiencing right now, sitting in a fake moon room. This moment will keep repeating in a loop. This moment has always happened and will continue happening. It has to be-cause of the mathematics of an infinite universe. Makes free will impossible. Maybe because we took the DMT-A or because of what we saw on the memory card now we’re somehow aware of the eternal re-turn. Have you ever noticed strange repetitions when you’ve taken DMT-A?”

  “Like déjà vu? I guess so. I always have déjà vu, though. I’m always picking up on signs and mes-sages.”

  “I wonder if the kid is okay. She hasn’t moved since we came in here.”

  Abram walked over to the child. Sprawled, she slept in the small crater, but she looked strange, unrecognizable. Abram returned to the vending machine screen, and instead of Make a Selec-tion, it now read Dead Information. The first vending machine ever made dispensed holy water.

  The words disappeared and Abram stared at his reflection in the black glass. He barely recog-nized himself. A new reality. The structural superficiality of Abram’s life was stripped away, banished to wander the desert of reality. Propelled by an instinct for survival. He couldn’t remember the last time he had gone to the bathroom. Abram read once that CIA torture techniques served solely to break the link with the subject’s “known reality” for the purpose of extracting information with the skill of a sur-geon after opening the mental casing. A breaking down of one’s known reality also proved key to the brainwashing of cult initiates.

  “Can I have another sandwich?”

  A sandwich dropped into the slot.

  40

  They all dozed. The air inside the moon diorama, inside the mobile capsule, shifted imper-ceptibly back and forth with the vehicle. The lights dimmed when the invisible watcher was certain that they
were all asleep. Outside, one could only presume, small, mostly empty towns passed in the heat, blinking. There were few stories left to tell in these dying towns, and those stories weren’t worth telling.

  Most everyone shared in the same handful of stories now: VR/AR escapist dramas, each catered to the individual’s minor, meaningless personal quirks. People moved into the cities, now megacities, to be close to one another, but they still predominantly interacted in the digital realm. Countless inane articles dissected this paradox.

  Abram slept and dreamed of his own adopted city, of San Francisco. He walked down the dirty sidewalk to his dirty building. Everything in the city was covered in a black, powdery grime. The air quality was regularly rated the worst in the world. He was used to it, never thought about it. Nobody thought about it anymore. He just wore a disposable N95 respirator mask on the worst days. He wished he had remembered his mask.

  Children were sitting on the sidewalk, some sitting inside tents, some lying down. Abram felt a sloppy dream empathy for them. The embarrassingly childlike feelings that manifested within dreams. One of the children, a dirty-faced little girl in a small cheap coat, began to speak, crying to him. He couldn’t understand her. She spoke English but he couldn’t form meaning from the words. They were just mouth shapes, noises.

  He tried opening the gate to his building, but his key didn’t work. The child kept talking, pulling at his sleeve, and he panicked. The words of this child meant nothing. He understood that if he couldn’t understand this child, he couldn’t help her. He couldn’t help any of them. He walked quickly away from the girl and his apartment, overcome with shame. He cried ridiculous tears that covered his cheeks and clouded his eyes. The sky was a red sunset smoke drift. The smell of ashes. It choked him. He sat on the steps of an apartment building and watched through watery eyes as tiny black and red caterpillars rav-aged a viny plant clinging to the brick.

  Kenner lay a few feet away from Abram on his side, face smashed into the lunar dust, drooling. He had always somehow retained the sense to pass out on his side when he drank, lest he drown in his own vomit. His breathing was thick and his parted lips created a gray-black muddy regolith paste around his mouth. He dreamed. A skull with a brain within it, dreaming. Or is it the soul that dreams, not the mind? he had once asked Abram. There was no reality in the absence of observation. Those words found him in his dream. He sat at a table with himself. He knew it was himself, a double, even though the double wore a mask. A cheap rubber alien mask. He could see his own eyes in the sliver of space cut below the large black almond eyes of the mask. He could smell the cheap rubber of the mask as clearly as if he were wearing the mask himself, which he was.

 

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