Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  He imagines grabbing the Incompetent by the ear and using it as a handle as he peeled away a long ribbon of skin. He imagines what his blood would taste like. Like cherry cough syrup. His tongue runs along the ridgeline of his teeth. He can’t help it. He has learned to stop hating himself, hating what he has become. It would be like hating the whorl of his fingerprint, hating the sun and the moon’s rotation in the sky. Some things are the way they are and there’s no changing them.

  Buffalo is leaning against the desk with his arms crossed over his belly. “Did you read those foreign policy books I gave you?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You either did or didn’t.”

  “Why do I need to read what I’ve already been briefed on by the policy wonks? I read some, skipped some. Books. Jeez. I just wish they were all as good as that Freakonomics. There’s a guy who can tell a story out of one side of his mouth, give a lesson out the other.”

  “I am not trying to entertain you. I am trying to educate you.”

  Chase swivels his chair in a slow circle. When he comes to a stop, Buffalo uses his middle finger to push his glasses farther up his nose. “You know you can’t control these debates the way you can control a town hall meeting. You know you’re coming across as cocksure but empty-headed, a single-issue candidate. You know you’re too complicated right now as an Independent, neither fish nor fowl, seeming to agree and disagree with everyone on everything. It confuses people. We need something that distinguishes you. Cowboy and war hero will only get you so far.”

  “You got my candy?”

  Buffalo studies him for a few seconds and then reaches into his suit coat and tosses Chase the bottle of Volpexx. His body pulses at the sight of it and he feels an immediate ache, a need as basic as thirst. He catches it with a rattle and shakes out on the desk a few pills. The container is a mix of Volpexx and Adderall, white moons and blue jellybeans that will at once dull him and sharpen him. He uses a coffee mug to mash them up and a credit card to cut the powder into lines and a dollar bill to snort.

  He is lost for a moment in a weird gray buzz. Then he feels Buffalo’s hands. Fitting the earpiece into him until it is invisible. Lifting his coattails and clipping the belt pack to the small of his back. He remains hunched over the desk, his eyes closed, until Buffalo pats him on the shoulder and tells him he’s all set.

  After the bombing, his left ear recovered immediately, but the ringing persisted in the other for two weeks. He wondered what he would hear, if anything, when it faded. Not much, it turns out. High voices are better than low, all sounds registering as if run through a cotton filter. “Did I get the right one?” Augustus asks and Chase says, “Yes,” and touches his damaged ear.

  The bombing of the courthouse square secured his run for the presidency. Three days after the event, after he had been discharged from the hospital with a concussion, third-degree burns, and a ruptured eardrum, Buffalo arranged for an AP photographer to visit the governor’s mansion and shoot him bruised and bandaged, but very much alive, sitting at a desk with pen poised over paper and a phone pressed to his ear, unstoppable. He became the victim as well as the aggressor, someone people could sympathize with and rally around. He met with the president and provost and board of regents at the University of Oregon. Soon thereafter the Center for Lobos Studies became a reality, and for the first time since the mid-twentieth century, vaccination became a possibility. Within a week, dozens of lawsuits had been filed and he was on the cover of Time magazine in military dress and with half his face cast in shadow. The donors soon followed. Among them Alliance Energy, given his support of nuclear energy and the continued occupation of the Republic.

  Buffalo has arranged the rest, including his running mate, a bright-eyed NRA-endorsed fundamentalist constitutionalist senator from Arkansas named Pinckney Arnold. They don’t know each other really—they hardly see or talk to each other outside campaign events—but Pinckney is a fine choice, soft-spoken and articulate and humble and God-fearing, a nice counterweight to Chase and his swinging-dick persona. So says Buffalo.

  Chase swigs again at the Monster Energy Drink. It tastes chalky. He heard somewhere that all energy drinks include that chalky flavor, not because it’s an active ingredient, but because people expect it. They expect anything high-octane to taste a little bad. Maybe that has something to do with why people tolerate his behavior, why he so suddenly emerged as the dark-horse contender of the election. He doesn’t try to come across as puritan like the rest of these chumps. Onstage, he scoffs, rolls his eyes, and once stormed off in annoyance. He interrupts and calls bullshit. He curses so much that the networks televise with a thirty-second delay. He hurries to tell an off-color story—the reason no one should stand behind a sneezing cow, the time he got frostbite on his doohickey during a pee break on a subzero patrol—and folks believe in him because of that. “He’s like us,” they say. “He’s ordinary people.”

  There is a knock and the door cracks and a young man with sideburns and a clipboard says, “Ten minutes.”

  Buffalo thanks him and tells Chase to stand up and makes a twirling gesture with his hand. “Let me look at you.”

  Chase does as he’s told and Buffalo picks away lint and smooths wrinkles and says, “You’re going to be listening to me, right?” He taps his ear. “Right?”

  “Always am. Always listening.”

  “Good. Hear me out now. We’re going to surprise people tonight. You’re going to announce a visit to the Republic. Two weeks from now, right before the election. Tour the bases and the mines, meet with the troops and hear their concerns. Four years and the president hasn’t been there once.”

  “So I make him look like a total chickenshit.”

  The dimples rise in Buffalo’s cheeks again. “Doesn’t matter what else you screw up on tonight—that’s what people are going to remember. That’s what’s going to distinguish you.”

  “I like it,” Chase says, when in fact he feels chilled and unsteady, as if he has stepped out onto a frozen lake and watched the ice crack beneath him and the water rise like sudden black creeks. The Republic. He talks about his time there often enough, but it’s been more than ten years, and now it’s become less a place and more a story. And he can’t help but feel repulsed at the idea of moving among the crowds of soldiers, who will smile at him hopefully and grab hold of his hand not knowing it is a paw.

  There comes another knock at the door and Chase feels something warm on his upper lip.

  Buffalo’s face creases with concern. “Here,” he says. “Let me get that.” He pulls out a silk handkerchief and dabs Chase’s nose with it before returning it, spotted with blood, to his breast pocket. “Perfect.”

  Chapter 37

  OUTSIDE THE FITNESS CENTER, a massive concrete block of a building, the line of students stretches through the propped-open double doors and trails along the sidewalk. They are not here for a basketball game or volleyball match. There is no sports program at William Archer, except for intramurals, since lycans are not permitted to play in any collegiate or professional division, the hazards of blood and adrenaline and litigation too great.

  In the gymnasium, after showing their IDs and filling out a form, the students are led to one of a dozen nurse’s stations, where they sit on a folding chair next to a table topped with plastic sheeting. The nurse, wearing a long-sleeve apron tucked into latex gloves, asks how the student is doing and the student says fine, thank you, and then the student’s thumb is pricked and squeezed, a blood sample collected. The nurse then hands over a bottle of Volpexx along with the student’s choice of a Tootsie Roll or a Dum Dum sucker. This is how it is the second Friday of every month.

  The gymnasium is crowded with students, whose sneakers squeak against the hardwood basketball courts and whose voices rise to the rafters to flutter and die—it sounds like game day—and that’s a little what it feels like to Claire, a game.

  Her family asked her to never tell anyone—anyone, not ever, not unless she want
ed to see them all in prison—about the doctor who falsely reported their monthly tests, and she didn’t realize how lucky she was until she stole a pill from her friend Stacey’s bathroom, taking it with a glass of water later that evening and feeling so knock-kneed and woozy that she couldn’t keep her eyes open through American Idol.

  Volpexx, like alcohol, affects everyone differently. Some walk around in a fog. Some counter the meds with high doses of caffeine or Adderall or Dexedrine. Some develop a tolerance over time, and some avoid it altogether by way of bribery or family connections.

  She supposes it is an improvement over the way things used to be. She has heard stories about lobotomies, the long steel spikes driven into the brain to sever and deaden what the doctors referred to as the aberrant circuitry of the lycan’s mind. Lobos, which means wolf and which means the lobes of the brain. And tomos, which means to cut. Cut the wolf, kill the wolf, and make the patient once again human. Beginning in the 1930s, the psychosurgery was largely successful and widely prescribed, not only among criminal lycans but for those suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Among the psychiatric community, lobos was discussed as a mental illness, an unchained id with physiological symptoms. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the procedure was discontinued—replaced by quaaludes—less out of humanitarian concern and more for the rising number of incapables that became wards of the state and a burden to taxpayers.

  She doesn’t have the luxury of a sympathizer doctor anymore. Miriam arranged through some black market a collection of blister packs—the blood within them O positive, same as Claire’s, and laced with Volpexx. They are flesh colored and about as big as a quarter and after she affixes them with spirit gum they are nearly invisible. Still, she always comes to the gymnasium late in the day, after the nurses are glassy-eyed from so many students, so much blood.

  She thanks the nurse and takes a Dum Dum sucker and by the time she returns to her dorm sucks it down to the stick.

  The room is hers. Andrea is gone for the afternoon, working at the Victoria’s Secret at the mall, where she seems to spend half her paycheck, coming home always with a new top, new eyeliner, new heels. Most of the shorts she wears say PINK across the butt.

  Claire spends the next four hours at her desk, reading her way through a pile of books. It’s difficult to concentrate—with the video images of Miriam spinning through her mind—but midterms are approaching, so she forces down the sentences. Her mind wanders to Patrick.

  Their emails range from favorite movies and books to guessing the lines to songs to ranting about the best fast-food hamburgers to issues of greater seriousness, the loss of parents, the occupation of the Republic. Sometimes their messages are feverish, sent every minute or two over the course of three hours, and sometimes they settle down, not because they don’t have anything to say, but because they don’t need to say anything, like some couple drinking iced tea on a back porch, watching the stars, comfortable with the silence and the feeling of warm nearness between them.

  She takes off her glasses and rubs them mindlessly between thumb and forefinger, cleaning them of spots that aren’t there. She needs to stop. Stop thinking about him. He takes her out of the moment. She can’t live in two worlds at once. She needs to focus on the present. Focus. She drops the blinds and bends over her work and bleeds her highlighter through so many pages.

  Reprobus has assigned a seven- to ten-page midterm paper due the next class period. She has decided to write about her father. His legacy in the battle for equal rights. She knows this is dangerous. Looking backward. When most people think about their history, she expects, they have a sense of the vertical, like a ladder pushing upward, through the clouds, some of the rungs rotten and unpainted, but otherwise substantial enough to bear their weight. But for her, there is only the rung she hangs from, the clouds below her dark, jagged with lightning.

  On her laptop she scrolls through an article, downloaded as a PDF and originally published in the Chicago Tribune, about the Struggle, about the Days of Rage. There is the familiar photo of her father. Standing on the steps of the federal courthouse. Throwing back his head in a howl. Clutching an American flag half-blackened with a tail of flame. Rather than reading more, she lingers for a long time on the photo, double-clicks to maximize it. She tries to put herself there, to step through the screen and into the past, and for the first time she notices other details about the image. The three stone archways yawning in the background. The sun slanting down and making every reflective surface shine as bright as the flaming flag. The windowed entry revealing a muddled reflection of hundreds gathered in the street. The mustached policeman, with one arm outstretched and the other on his holster, moving toward her father. And then, in the foreground, an out-of-focus body, shot from behind, only some of him visible, an upraised fist and two long Willie Nelson braids.

  She scrolls down and pauses at another image, and then another, and then another. Dead bodies in the street with rubble all around them, the aftermath of a bombing. A woman who could be pleading or could be fighting with the paramedics who try to help her, her naked torso reddened with what appear to be bites. Close-ups of protest signs, two fingers raised to the sky in a V, claw marks, a gunshot chest, a mug shot of her father defiantly jutting his chin and staring directly into the camera.

  On each of them she lingers. In the photo of the dead bodies on the street, she notices the high heel blown off a thick-ankled woman, the way her panty hose melted in places like a rotten spiderweb. She notices the ambulance turning down the street. She notices the man on the curb holding a handkerchief to his bleeding forehead. She notices the mailbox on the corner and the pigeon perched atop it and the man standing nearby, observing the chaos in the street, a man with long braids.

  The man with long braids. She scrolls back and squints at the earlier photo of the protest. No doubt many wore their hair long then, but the length appears the same, as does his stocky build.

  She returns to some of the other articles—other demonstrations, other cities, other times—and finds him in a few more, this man with the braids, never the focus of the shot, always appearing in the back or foreground of the picture like a chair or tree, something half-glimpsed.

  “Who are you?” she says.

  She decides to clear her head with a walk around campus. Outside the sky is the same golden hue as the leaves that spin from the trees on the central quad. One of them catches in the hair of a girl who sits on a nearby bench. She doesn’t notice, too caught up in the taste of her boyfriend, their eyes closed, their mouths mashed together.

  “What do you think about chemistry?” That’s what she wrote Patrick in an email not long ago.

  His response read, “I think, every now and then, you meet somebody. And everything clicks. Everything feels right. You know? Like you’ve plugged into some current. It’s like electricity.”

  “I don’t understand electricity,” she wrote back.

  The pathways are messy with leaves and she can hear footsteps crunching behind her. She doesn’t like the feeling of being followed and slows so the person will pass her. The footsteps slow to match hers. For a minute she allows herself to be paced—and then spins around.

  Matthew catches himself midstride and stutter-steps. He holds up his hands as if she might strike him. It is the closest they have been.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey yourself.”

  She starts walking again and he jogs up next to her. He is a whole head taller than she is. He has changed since this morning, out of his TA uniform and into scuffed Dr. Martens, frayed jeans, a pullover fleece. “Where are you going?”

  “Home.” She has never thought of her dorm that way, but she supposes it’s the right word, for now the only home she has.

  They walk in silence. She tries to focus her attention on anything but him. A gray squirrel worries over a pinecone. A leaf blower whines in the distance. A football spins through the pale blue sky and drops into some boy’s outstretched hands. A
nd on the asphalt trail they follow, Matthew’s shadow falls across hers.

  “Don’t ask me about anything related to lycan history,” she says.

  “I won’t.”

  “Good. I’m sick of it.”

  Through the cluster of pine trees up ahead she can see her dorm. She quickens her pace and Matthew falls behind and she feels she has shrugged off an invisible leash. Then his voice calls out to her, “Hey, are you in some kind of trouble?”

  She stops in the shadow of a pine. Browned needles rain around her. She turns and tries to read his expression—eyebrows raised, lower lip tucked beneath his teeth. “What does that mean?”

  He peers around as if afraid someone might overhear him. “I was at the registrar yesterday. Signing up for my spring courses. There was a man there. Some suit. Everybody behind the desk seemed nervous about him. He had a list of names he was cross-checking. You were one of them.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either. I just thought I’d let you know.”

  Her dorm room is unlocked. She holds the knob in her hand and looks both ways down the hall. Empty. A bad lightbulb sizzles in and out of shadow. Several doors are propped open and music filters from them. She reaches a hand into her pocket to grip the knife there. Slowly she pushes open the door. A rusted hinge screeches.