Amnesia Moon

by Jonathan Lethem

  “Okay.”

  Chaos started the car, pulled it onto the highway, and settled in for another patch of driving. Melinda threw the empty can out her window and put the opener in the glove compartment.

  “Too bad, though,” she said after a while.

  “What?”

  “I wanted to go there. I liked it.”

  Me too, thought Chaos impulsively, but didn’t say it. Then he remembered the rest of the dream, the sense of loneliness, and thought: She doesn’t know the whole story. All she saw was the car and the lake and the forest. Like some paradise, to her. But it wasn’t a dream of paradise. There were some real problems with that place. He felt this profoundly.

  So why did he want to get back there so badly?

  They drove through the morning, until the sun was high. Ahead, the desert was turning into mountains. He let a series of towns pass, ignoring the signs, ignoring the exits. Melinda sniffed at the air and squinted at the far-off buildings, but Chaos mostly didn’t even look. They never left the highway. When they had to eat, they pulled over and plundered the trunk, and when the gas got low. Chaos emptied Kellogg’s spare can into the tank. Chaos peed against the side of a billboard strut; Melinda crossed the highway and squatted in the sand. They passed abandoned cars, but never any on the road. The last sure sign of human life had been back in Little America.

  “We’re going to run out of gas,” he said.

  “You threw my siphon away,” she said.

  “Kellogg’s got one in the trunk.”

  The next car they came to, they stopped and drained its tank. By sundown they’d halved their distance to the mountains. The fog ahead looked green, and the wind over the foothills was cold. Chaos stopped the car behind a padlocked shed just off the highway and built a small fire while Melinda gathered a dinner of cans and water from the trunk, but when night came, they slept in the car again, he in the back seat, she in the front.

  He dreamed again of the house by the lake, but this time he left the computer alone. He wasn’t ready to hear what it had to say, to sort through its theories; it was too much like listening to Kellogg again. When he woke, the sun was already up and the girl wasn’t in the front seat. He got out of the car, promising himself not to mention the dream.

  She wasn’t anywhere in sight. She’d either crossed the highway or wandered out into the desert, over the low brushy hills to the north. He rinsed his mouth with water and spat it out onto the sand, then walked over to pee on the side of the shed. His urine rattled against the aluminum, and he didn’t hear her voice until the stream fell away.

  “Cut it out,” she said from inside the shed. “It’s leakin’ in.”

  He circled the shed and found the curled-away strip of aluminum she’d used as an entrance.

  “Lookit this,” she said, poking her head through the gap. “You gotta see this. Come on.”

  He pulled at the aluminum, careful not to cut his hands, until he’d widened the entrance enough to crawl through.

  “Look. The cars.”

  The shed was a floorless shell built on posts buried in the sand, just big enough to house the two cars. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw the cause of her excitement: they were like the car from his dream. Short, stubby, made of some kind ol lightweight plastic, with solar panels. And fingerprint plates instead of keyholes. Both were new, their surfaces gleaming in the dim light of the shed.

  Melinda smiled at him smugly. “Watch.” She pressed her hand to the plate, and the door opened, the engine purring into life.

  “Turn it off,” he said.

  She put her hand on the door again, and the car sealed up and shut off. “Why does it work in the dark?” she asked.

  “Maybe it has some kind of start-up battery or something,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  “We could drive in it,” she said hopefully.

  “No.”

  “Where’d they come from?”

  “I don’t know,” he said angrily. “I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s get out of here.”

  He squeezed back through the gap in the aluminum, and she followed. They shared another can in silence, then he kicked apart the remains of the fire and pitched their garbage as far as he could out into the desert. They got into Kellogg’s car and drove off. He kept himself from looking back at the shed.

  They were in the foothills by mid-morning, and as they climbed towards the mountains, they rose into a fog. When they stopped by a creek for lunch, the cloud was still translucent: greenish wisps that seemed to cling to the rocks and trees and even the asphalt, hovering like ghosts. Halfway through the afternoon, it was opaque, masking the road, lacing the sky with green banners that admitted less and less blue. As the green thickened around them, he slowed the car to a crawl, checking his location on the road by occasional glimpses of the pavement or the railing. The mountains were invisible now, the layers of green woven together impenetrably. As they moved forward, the shreds of daylight grew fewer and fewer.

  “Roll up your window,” he told Melinda, who hadn’t spoken since lunch. She nodded and obeyed the command.

  He advanced in tiny, halting jumps now, as the drifting fog revealed hints of the road. The nose of the car was barely visible ahead of them. Even the air between the windshield and his face seemed dim.

  “You can’t hardly drive,” said Melinda.

  “No,” he said. “Good thing we aren’t in one of those solar cars, huh? No sunlight coming through this fog.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “You can’t hardly drive either way.”

  Finally he had to stop completely. When he turned to look at Melinda, the space between them held a banner of green. She waved at it with her hand, only partially dispersing it.

  “It’s coming in here,” she said.

  “A car’s not really airtight, even with the windows up.”

  “Maybe one of those solar cars would of been.”

  He laughed. “Maybe.”

  He got out and stood beside the car. There was no depth to the green; it was like staring at a sheet of paper. He raised his hands in front of his face and couldn’t see them. As the wind blew the fog down from the mountain, the last patches of visibility were blotted out.

  Melinda felt her way around the car and took his hand. “Maybe we should turn around.”

  “Let’s walk a little,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  Holding her hand, he left the car behind and found the band of gravel that marked the edge of the road. Keeping the gravel underfoot, they set out up the road, through the blinding green.

  Moon clutched his daughter’s hand tightly as they sat in the green of the waiting room at White Walnut. Someone was rustling papers at the desk, but it had been more than an hour since Moon first made contact with the receptionist, and she’d sent him to this seat. His daughter’s moist hand squeezed back at his, and they went on waiting. Moon could hear the hum of the generators that maintained the huge facility, and he was so close that he imagined he could smell the rare and valuable translucent air.

  It was years since Moon had seen anything but the green. Only the White Walnut laboratory had the technology that made sight possible again, and Moon had never before got even this far into the facility. His daughter didn’t remember sight at all. That was the point of his efforts: to get her inside. To get her enrolled in the White Walnut school, where talented children were allowed to study in the light. That was his plan. But if it failed, then he just wanted to get her inside, for a week or a day or an hour. Just to see, just once. So she would know.

  White Walnut, however, seemed organized to resist his attempt. This office, where citizens could come to petition or complain, was kept in green, denying Moon and his daughter even a glimpse of the sighted world beyond the airtight doors. And the staffers were stonewalling so far, meeting his questions with silence.

  “Mr. Moon,” the woman finally called out. He took his daughter’s hand and felt his way up to the desk.
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  “Follow me.” She held his shoulder and guided him past the desk, through a set of doors in the back of the room. The sound of their footsteps told him they’d entered a narrower space, a corridor possibly, and he felt new hope that he and his daughter would be ushered into the light.

  The receptionist slipped away, back through the door they’d entered, and rough hands seized Moon by the shoulders and wrists and separated him from his daughter.

  “Linda!” he called out.

  “Daddy!”

  “Quiet,” said a voice close to Moon’s ear. The hands yanked him down into a seat. “Sit still.” Moon could make out the sounds of three or four different people moving around him and his daughter.

  “What?” said Moon.

  “Your eyes. Sit still.”

  “Daddy?”

  “It’s okay, Linda. They won’t hurt you.”

  There was the sound of tearing tape. Hands tilted Moon’s head back and brushed his hair from his forehead. A wet, stinging cloth swabbed his eyelids. Hydrogen peroxide. Then a dry towel, and then something sharp and cold was taped across his eyes. Moon didn’t understand: why blindfold them in the green?

  He heard Linda gasp as they pushed her out of her seat, towards the far end of the room, and then the hands took his shoulders and pushed him in the same direction. Men stood close on either side of him. Ahead came the sound of a rubber seal breaking, and then a rush of air. The men pushed him forward, through the airlock, and then Moon understood that the darkness across his eyes wasn’t a blindfold but a tinted plastic lens, to protect his atrophied eyes from the light.

  He could see again. But just barely. He could make out the shapes of his daughter and her two escorts ahead of him, and he could see the bright lights on the corridor ceiling. When he turned his head, he could nearly make out the features of the men directly beside him.

  They rushed him through the corridor and into an elevator. It plummeted and opened again, and two of the men took Linda forward, and out. Moon moved to follow, but the remaining two held his arms, and the elevator doors closed.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Where—”

  “Relax. We need to talk to you alone. She’ll be fine.”

  “What—”

  “You want her in the school, she has to take some tests, right?” The grip on his arm tightened painfully.

  Moon thought: this isn’t fair. I wanted to be with her when she first found out what it was to see. I wanted to share that moment with her. But this wasn’t what he’d meant anyway, this shielded gloom. He’d wanted to amaze her with the light.

  The elevator dropped another level and opened, and they rushed Moon through another hallway and into an unfurnished office. He struggled to make out the details of their faces or clothing through the plastic lens, but nothing was visible except in smoky silhouette. Chairs were brought in; Moon was given a seat in the middle of the room, his back to the door.

  “Moon,” said one of the men. “You gave the name Moon.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “But we’ve never heard of you. You go under some other name.”

  Moon reached up, reflexively, to pull at the tape across his nose. He wanted to see who he was talking to.

  “Take your hand away from your face. Now. That’s good, keep your hands in your lap. Tell us your real name.”

  “Moon,” he said.

  The man sighed. “If Moon’s your real name, then we want the name you used before. There’s no Moon anywhere.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “No,” said the man. “Uh-uh. Why are you doing this? Coming up here with this fake name and this fake daughter and trying so hard all of a sudden to get inside. You’re a fake, Moon. We want to know where you come from. Your clothes smell, you know that? You smell like you’ve been in the woods. Why’s that, Moon?”

  Moon strained to focus on the two men sitting opposite him. They both moved, crossing and recrossing their legs, tilting their heads, and he wasn’t even sure which of the two was doing the talking. He wanted desperately to tear the plastic away from his eyes.

  “I had to get out of the green,” he said slowly. “I was going crazy. I couldn’t think of anything else. I . . . I started to think it was coming from me, that it was something that was only wrong with me, that everyone else could see, except me and my daughter. That my craziness had made her blind too. I had to find out, I had to show her—”

  “Okay, Moon. Enough of the sob story. Everybody thinks he’s the only one. Everybody wants out. That’s why we have locks on our doors. But why now? What brought you out of your hole to come up here scrabbling at our doors with your fake name and your poor little match girl?”

  “What?” Moon was deeply confused.

  “Let’s keep it simple,” said a different voice. “Three questions: What’s your name? Where’d you come from? And what do you want?”

  He grew uncertain. “I live here,” he said. “In the green. It’s my right to try to get Linda into your school.”

  “You live here. What do you do?”

  “I—”

  “Yes?”

  What was the matter with him? Was he suffering some form of amnesia? He felt desperate, baffled. He smelled of the forest, they’d said. “I work on a farm,” he blurted out. It was a guess, but the more he thought, the righter it sounded. He knew there were farms, he knew everything about this place and how it was organized. It was only his own history that was a blank.

  “All I do is grow the food you eat,” he said. “Just as important as what you do up here. Insult me for my smell if you like.” As he grew more confident of the memories, he grew more indignant. “We have to feel our way through the fields by guide wires; you should try it sometime. I’m not just some dumb hick whose arm you can twist, you know; before the disaster I was a very important person . . .” He stopped again and struggled to resolve the image. “I lived in San Francisco. So I should be up here with you, in fact. It’s certainly my right, in any case, to try to get Linda—”

  “So you’re not from around here,” noted the voice. “You weren’t living here at the time of the disaster.”

  Moon worked to recall, but it remained elusive. Here? Of course—but where was here? All he could remember, all he knew, was the green.

  Wait. He remembered the afternoon when everything changed; that much, anyway, was vivid. He’d groped his way home from work and sat by the radio, waiting for updates, smoking what he didn’t know then would be his last cigarettes. Biochemical trauma, the radio called it at first. Earth’s atmosphere opaqued. Then, for a short time, they called it the bloom. As though the sky itself had grown moldy. But soon everyone called it what most had called it at the very beginning: the green. As to the duration of the catastrophe, well, the experts differed. Of course.

  “Yes,” he said, barely hearing himself. “I lived here.”

  “Not under the name Moon you didn’t,” said the man stubbornly. “After the disaster White Walnut registered the name, address, and skills of every man, woman, and child in this sector, and there wasn’t any computer programmer named Moon, and there wasn’t any little girl either. Farm assignments come from us, Moon. Everything comes from us. We track lives—only you don’t have one.”

  Moon didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

  “Let’s take another tack,” said the second man. “What brought you up here? What changed?”

  “What do you mean?”

  The man sighed. “Do you associate your little pilgrimage up the hill this morning with any sort of sign or portent? A little voice in your head? Or what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m thinking specifically of a dream. Did you dream last night? Was it the same as always?”

  He tried to remember. He had nothing to hide from them. But nothing came. All he could think of was the green.

  “Do you dream at all? What are your dreams normally like?”

  The questions were baffling. They sent him f
urther and further into the mists of his own memory, and he was lost there. He sat, his mouth silently working, unable to speak.

  The man sighed again and said, “Okay, relax. You don’t dream. Here.” Moon watched as the man stepped towards him. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Three.” Moon felt grateful for a question he could answer.

  “Your eyes hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Close your eyes.” The man reached out and stripped the plastic lens from Moon’s face. The tape seared the skin around his eyes and tore hair out of his eyebrows. Moon raised his hands to his eyes and squinted through them, then let them fall.

  The two men sat watching him from chairs a few feet apart. They were dressed in nearly identical gray suits, and they wore identical expressions of exhaustion and boredom. They looked the way they acted—like police. The room was otherwise empty. There was a green gloom over everything, a haze which Moon tried to blink away but couldn’t.

  “Your eyes hurt?”

  “No. It’s still green, though.”

  “That’s why it’s called translucent air, Moon. It never goes completely away. Hell, if the machines we’ve got pumping at the stuff go down, it goes opaque in here within the space of a few hours.”

  Moon waved his hand in front of his eyes, as if to disperse the mist. It had no effect. “But then . . . they’ll never fix the world.”

  The men shrugged, and one said, “Probably not.”

  Moon put his hand down. “Why did you take my daughter away?” he said. “What did I do wrong?”

  “We’ve got a problem, Moon. Something very strange happened last night. Something that’s got people here very upset. And no one knows what it means, no one knows why it happened. And then you show up with your girl and your name that doesn’t register. It’s weird, I’d say. Wouldn’t you? It’s disturbing. It suggests connections. Now, if you started answering some questions, maybe we’d find out it’s nothing but a coincidence. That would be nice. In that case all you did wrong was show up here on the wrong morning. We’d owe you an apology. But until we can make that determination, well, you’re looking to us like part and parcel of our new problem.”