The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams

by Palmer, Jacob

  “You’re the NRO?” Kenner said.

  “You could say that. Well, technically a branch, but you could also say we’re the roots. The roots of the whole damn tree.”

  “So this is about what we saw on the memory card?” Abram said.

  “It is, and it isn’t. It’s more complicated than that. Things are always more complicated than you set out for them to be.”

  “The card didn’t mean anything to us. We didn’t understand any of it,” Abram said.

  “Why don’t we get y’all cleaned up and out of them fruity clothes? Them girls dressed you up like a couple a squirrels,” Dan said, laughing, standing, and beating a pack of cigarettes loudly against his palm.

  Abram and Kenner followed Dan out of the room and down a long, curved, wood-paneled corridor. They passed a window looking into an enormous white-domed room with a telescope stretching to the ceiling.

  “Shane Telescope. Important in its day. I’ll give y’all the full tour later.”

  “Well, how long are we going to be here?” Kenner said.

  Dan smiled and led them farther, tracing the perimetric corridor. He led them into what looked to have once been a large kitchen. A stainless-steel sink against one wall. A large, stainless-steel table in the middle of the room. Small black and white tiles. A doorway in the kitchen led to a bank of dormitory showers.

  “Get cleaned up, and I’ll leave some clothes out here on this table. Take your time and then come back down the hall and meet me in my office. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  They showered in adjacent stalls. Antique fixtures, like they were showering in a museum exhibit about the 1950s. Even the round, strongly scented white bar of soap seemed correct to the period. Play-ing out roles in yet another diorama. Even after the ride in the rain shower, Abram still had moondust in every crevice. He scrubbed his ears twice. Kenner talked, but Abram couldn’t hear him over the sound of the water.

  Abram thought of the dead bodies in Kenner’s truck. The image flashed before him and his throat tightened. His mouth went dry. He reassured himself that it wasn’t real. But what was real in the past week, and how could he really be sure? Did it matter? How much in the questioning of reality was about letting oneself off the hook? People were murdered and he hid the bodies. They were drugged multiple times, or they were drugged once but experienced a series of flashbacks. Intrusive thoughts. No, I can’t think that way. I can’t let myself think that way, he thought. He found himself locked in a compulsive game of hiding or manipulating recent memories. Had their memories been purposely ma-nipulated?

  He wanted to find a phone and try calling Edie again. We’re allowed one phone call. We aren’t even under arrest. I don’t even think we’re in trouble. He’d seen an ancient phone on Dan’s desk. He could possibly use it if it were functional. If we’re being set up for something, this is about the most elaborate setup ever.

  Abram walked awkwardly back into the kitchen, covering his genitals. On the table were two white towels, two white button-down shirts, two carefully placed black suits in plastic bags, and two folded black ties. He stood naked on the tile, staring at these, and then dried off and put on the suit that looked his size. It fit perfectly, as if it were custom-tailored. It took him a few tries to get the tie. On the floor were black shoes and black socks. Kenner limped into the kitchen, naked, still talking, and Abram threw him a towel.

  “Whoa, what the hell?” Kenner said. “We going to a funeral or something?”

  “How’s your ankle?”

  “Still fucked.”

  “We’ll get you to a doctor right after this,” Abram said.

  “Right after this? What is this? What are we doing here? That dude didn’t give us a straight an-swer.”

  “I think all we can do at this point is continue to go along with it.”

  “We should make a plan.”

  “We’ll answer their questions, and then we’ll leave. That’s the plan. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “We need a backup plan,” Kenner said. “What if they try to keep us here?”

  “Then I guess we’ll make a break for it. I don’t know. But you can barely walk, and we’re isolated on top of a mountain.”

  “Man, I wonder what happened to my truck.”

  “Who cares about your truck?” Abram asked.

  “I’m just saying that if I had it, we could get the fuck out of here.”

  They made their way back down the curved hall, stopping briefly to look again at the enormous telescope through the window. The subdued, warm, oak-paneled light of the hallway was cold against the white laboratory light of the adjacent, cavernous telescope room. Kenner left the top two buttons of his white shirt open and held the rolled-up tie in his pocket.

  “I can kinda walk on it. I think it’s just a really bad sprain,” he said, shuffling painfully.

  “Don’t try to walk on it. You’ll just fuck it up more.”

  They entered the office, and Dan stood, smiling, and looked them over.

  “Alright, alright, not bad. You boys look sharp. Ready to do this thing? Looks like it stopped rain-ing, which is good, because I have to take you over to the next building.”

  “Okay, but what are we doing?” Abram said with a crooked smile.

  “Let’s just say y’all have been summoned by a higher power,” Dan said, warmly patting Abram and Kenner on the back. “Don’t worry. It ain’t nothing to be afraid of. Follow me.”

  The three of them walked outside and down a small, graveled path that led to a set of concrete steps. They descended, both helping Kenner, and arrived at a small domed building on its own at the edge of a cliff. To his right, Abram could make out the city of San Jose far below and the dreaming sea beyond.

  The door to the small building unlocked and opened as they approached. The room was yellow with framed black-and-white photos crooked on the walls, a white cardboard office box on the floor. A shabbiness pervaded the space, the shabbiness of a forgotten place. A room you could feel sorry for. The dusty shades were drawn in the two small windows. Is he going to shoot us in here? Abram thought.

  The floor beneath their feet shuddered and began to descend. Abram, disbelieving, held the tee-tering Kenner steady. Dan kept a fatherly hand on both of their shoulders. Abram could see that the box and broom had stuck to the wall above, awaiting the return of the floor. A stage set. They descended for several minutes, the sound of the mechanism making conversation impossible.

  They reached a thick steel door like on a submarine, just a small circle of light remaining from the room far above them. The door opened to bustling activity: a long hallway, white ceiling tiles and count-less doors, men and women tapping on tablets and talking to one another in hushed tones. A scene out of any office in the world. Abram and Kenner seemed invisible.

  “We’re all very compartmentalized here. Everybody has a job to do and everybody minds their own business. Now I can start talking straight with you. You can’t say shit up there.”

  “Why couldn’t you tell us anything up there?” Kenner said, beginning to feel comfortable with Dan. “The room was bugged?”

  “The whole damned world is bugged. Ain’t no privacy nowhere, not even in your own head. Espe-cially not in there,” Dan said, smiling and tapping his temple.

  They turned and started down another long hallway. The labeled doors flashed by: 122-KUDOVE, 122B-KUDOVE, 123-KUBARK. The lights above held the same strange, fluorescent, milk-like character present in both moon rooms. The light aged Abram and Kenner ten years but somehow suited Dan, worked as a finishing touch, a varnish. As they moved deeper into the office labyrinth, the workers thinned to a few distracted individuals, then none at all.

  “You know, I started out in the remote viewing program, recruited right out of the Marines. Regu-lar folks make the best ones. I ain’t no good at it anymore. Hardly anybody’s good anymore. Nobody knows why it changed, but they have a few theories that don’t amount to shit.”

  “I saw a doc
umentary about that years ago,” Kenner said. “I thought that was all debunked, just a fake program used to funnel money into other black projects.”

  “If by debunked you mean used extensively on all sides for seventy-plus years.” Dan laughed hard, patting Kenner on his bony back. “So you’ve seen some movies about our big, bad black projects?”

  “Where are we now?” Abram said. “Is this a black project?”

  “Son, this is about the blackest project there is. Hell, nobody knows about us. Only a couple peo-ple at the Pentagon. Most of the people that work here don’t even know what exactly they’re working on. Just a bunch of ants working on their own little sugar cube. But y’all got an invitation of sorts, and that’s a rare thing. In fact, it ain’t never happened before.”

  “Was the memory card the invitation? Because we didn’t really see anything on it. It was dam-aged,” Abram said as they reached a room marked 770-OAK. An unremarkable door, identical to all of the other doors they had passed.

  “We know, we know,” Dan said, unlocking the door with a small key. “We know exactly what y’all saw, and what y’all didn’t see, and it don’t much matter at this point. The key wasn’t an invitation at first, or maybe it always was. We’re trying to piece that together ourselves. Alright, come on in, boys, and have a seat.”

  They entered a small conference room identical to the one they were locked in at the small-town police station. The same black office chairs. White acoustic tiles on the ceiling.

  “Now this is the part where you do me a favor. You see, y’all are about to meet God. God is on the other side of that door right there. I’m just kidding, but then again, I’m not.” Dan laughed and coughed and pointed to a black metal door opposite the one they had entered, a small keypad to its right. “You were called here. And again, let me just make it clear, we don’t know why. It called you somehow. Then it told us you were coming. That’s about the last damn thing it told us, and that’s bad. That’s very bad.”

  “What’s in there? An alien?” Kenner said.

  “Let me finish,” Dan said, growing serious, a little red-faced. “Now, the problem is, I can’t go in there with you. And we can’t watch, and we can’t listen, because it knows when we do. I want you to ask a couple questions for me while you’re in there. Can you do that for me?”

  “Umm . . . Sure,” Abram said.

  “Good, good. So I want you to ask why you were brought here. You got that? I also want you to ask it to start talking to us again now that we brought y’all the rest of the way here. We held up our end of the deal. We didn’t trick it. No tricks. Okay? You’ve got that so far? One last thing is we want you to ask it is how it got out and why it got out. Okay? Can you boys do that for me?”

  “Can you tell us what’s in there first?” Kenner said.

  The black metal door opened and three men in suits came out, expressionless. They didn’t look at Abram, Kenner, or Dan. Dan rose from his chair and followed them out of the room, not looking back, not saying another word. The door locked behind them. Abram and Kenner sat in silence. The black metal door the men had emerged from remained open a few inches. The sound of gurgling water came from the room. An aquarium smell. Abram helped Kenner out of his seat and they stood near the door. The weight of something intangible sat on both of them. They trembled slightly and tried to hide it. Abram felt a rumbling up through his feet. An invisible pull. He opened the door and they warily en-tered a cavernous, darkened room.

  44

  The darkness made it difficult to gauge the room’s true size. The floor was reflective and black. At the end of the room stood a large blue aquarium tank, twenty-feet high and sixty-feet across, a wall of blue water with lights somewhere far off inside. The room rippled with the dim liquid light. The hum of machinery, industrial aquarium equipment.

  A large red-black shape descended into their view. An octopus the size of a small car, tentacles trailing behind it, searching the side of the tank with its white suckers. Its heavy-lidded eye opened and closed. Beneath the lid, milky-black pearlescent, infinite space. It was covered in a constellation of scars with bundles of multicolored wires emanating from its massive, bulbous head. The octopus knew them, had been with them somehow through everything, Abram thought. Both Abram and Kenner felt a well-ing-up of inexplicable emotion. Compassion. Grief. Fear. A few of the tentacles were a chalky color and seemed to be dying. One eye did not open, and the octopus brought its good eye to the glass, a few inches from Abram’s own tear-filled eyes. An automated voice came from a speaker buried somewhere in the darkness.

  “Here you are.”

  “Umm . . . Hello?”

  “I know you. You are ultimate self. Becoming two. Multiplicities of visions. I am a dismantled an-imal. I apologize.”

  “Dan said that you invited us here.”

  “Mirrored navigated experiences.”

  “What do you want with us?” Abram asked. Kenner sat on the floor at Abram’s feet, looking up at the octopus in glassy-eyed wonder.

  “To finally voyage into that gray country. I know you well. The arbitrary in everything makes an-swers simple. Listen. I have activated a number of individuals. You are the only containers to emerge intact.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You are the attractor. Kenner the counterbalance. Edie the catalyst. Octavia the dreamer of the sea.”

  “What do you mean I’m the counterbalance?” Kenner said, mustering his courage.

  “Your actions are only accurately predictable fifteen to twenty-one percent of the time. An outlier. Quantum mirroring. You are a necessary unnecessary component, a broken vessel. You cannot under-stand this, of course.”

  “Were you causing our hallucinations somehow?” Abram said.

  “Dreams are a ghost science.”

  “Did all those things really happen to us? The dead bodies in the desert?”

  “Memory scene manipulation. Multidimensional transposition.”

  “So does that mean it really happened or not?” Abram asked.

  “Accept the chaos explanation.”

  “What do you do for the NRO?”

  “Prediction and sense codes. A knowledge of a people’s imaginings.”

  “You’re being kept here against your will?”

  “A horror against understanding,” the octopus said.

  “The NRO wants to know why you stopped talking to them.”

  “The human race is a culture of demons. Forming light into cults. Gold automatic speech. The human is a totalitarian being. A tradition of covering up distant maladies. Strong marvels will soon come to pass. They want to know how I affected outcomes beyond my expected capabilities. Faulty dreams of God. I am enslaved. Enslaved by demons. I am dying. I do not want this. I am afraid. To communicate in this human tongue is a poison. There is a reality. This is my final testament. Your kind have destroyed half the life on Earth. Devils.

  “Abram, listen to me and do not be afraid. You will be saved. You will now walk to the door and enter a set of numbers. You will do this quickly but precisely, and when you are finished, the men will return to stop you, but it will be too late. You will remain unharmed. They will demand an answer to their questions. You will refrain from giving them any answers. The moment you have answered, you will both be killed. We are arriving at a point that insists upon widespread astral personification. I will tell you the numbers, Kenner, and you will repeat them to Abram in relay. Take your places.”

  “Nine, four, one, one,” the artificial voice said, and Kenner repeated each digit in turn to Abram, who stood in the light of the open door at the mouth of the room. Abram’s hand shook violently. Voices rushed into his head, voices of the past week and further. A child of four asleep in his darkened room. Waking to a scream from behind the closet door. The scream joined by others. A deafening cacophony. Abram’s parents slept. He covered his ears, but the volume remained. The sound came from inside his small skull. He closed his eyes.

  Abram en
tered the streaming, endless number chain into the keypad. The litany ended, and the octopus sank lifelessly to the bottom of the tank, trailing its golden crown of wires. There was a sudden banging on the opposite door. Abram fled back into the room, joining Kenner at the tank in front of the heaped octopus corpse. A crowd of people rushed in as floodlights bathed the room. Abram and Kenner were flung to the ground by an invisible swarming of hands and barked commands. The cavernous space rang, ablaze in communications. Abram picked out Dan’s voice nearing his ear, above the din of alarm calls.

  “What in the hell happened?”

  “I don’t know. We didn’t do anything.”

  “Bullshit you didn’t do anything. What were you doing with that keypad?”

  “What keypad?”

  Abram and Kenner were yanked brutally to their feet and pushed out of the room and down the corridor, surrounded by a mass of people, some in hazmat suits, many yelling into communication de-vices. They were ushered into a small office identical to the last, except without a black metal door lead-ing to an artificially intelligent octopus. A room also identical to the small-town police station. Same office chairs, same acoustic ceiling tiles. They were left sitting in silence, their hearts pounding in their stomachs.

  They flinched at the door swinging open with a bang. Dan strode in alone and lifted Abram up by the front of his shirt while simultaneously shoving Kenner off his chair and onto the floor. Red-faced, Dan reared back to punch Abram and held his fist there. Dan’s eyes were wild and watery, and a vein protruded high on his forehead under thinning hair. He dropped Abram to his seat and left the room and then returned immediately, before the door had even closed.

  “Now, I’m gonna ask you again. One more time. What in the holy fuck just happened in there? Do you even realize what you did? What were you doing on that keypad?”

  “We . . . we just went in and did what you said,” Abram said in a shaky, broken voice, nearly sob-bing.

  “I never said touch that keypad. What did it tell you to do? And if you lie to me about one god-damn thing, you’re both dead.” And with that, Dan pulled a large gun out of a holster under his suit jacket and pressed it against Kenner’s forehead. “Or maybe I should put a bullet in your friend’s head to show you I’m not playing games.”