There was a knock at the door behind Moon’s back. One of the men called out, “Come in.”
The door opened, and another man in a gray suit pushed in an elderly woman slumped in a wheelchair. At least Moon thought she was a woman. She was dressed in jeans and sneakers and a plaid shirt, the cuffs rolled back to expose twiglike wrists. Her large, wrinkled head leaned to one side, resting on the back of the wheelchair. Her white hair was cut very short. He became sure it was a woman when she spoke.
“Are you Moon?” she said.
He nodded.
“I just met your girl. What’s her name?”
“Linda.”
“Linda. Yes. A very special child, Mr. Moon. I’m very glad you brought her to us. A very special child. Do you know what makes her special?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s something very special about Linda, and I was just wondering if you would please say what it is.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Linda is covered with fur, Mr. Moon. Don’t you think that’s rather special?”
“Yes,” said Moon quietly. He didn’t know why he hadn’t said anything about her fur—her hair. He preferred to think of it as hair, and he wondered if he should correct them about that. He decided not to.
“Why is that?” said the woman. “Why is she like that?”
“She was born that way,” said Moon.
“I see,” said the woman. “Mr. Moon, if you don’t mind, would you tell me what you dreamed last night?”
“We asked him that,” said one of the men sourly. “He doesn’t remember.”
“Let me tell you about my dream, Mr. Moon. It wasn’t the green, for the first time since the disaster. Instead I was in the desert, with a little girl just like your daughter. Covered with fur. We walked up to a man sitting in a big wooden chair, like a homemade throne. He was a big fat man, with a horrible leer on his face, and he was eating dog food out of a can with the blade of a knife. He wasn’t anyone I know, Mr. Moon. Nor is he an acquaintance of any of these gentlemen”—she gestured at the men in gray—“though each of them dreamed of him last night, as did everyone I’ve spoken with so far today. Except you. But you’ve done something far better than dreaming of this man, or the girl—you brought her here. Which I think is extraordinary.”
The old woman seemed genuinely pleased, and Moon, in his confusion, smiled at her, thinking she would rescue him from the menacing, cynical men in the gray suits. But she didn’t return the smile. He felt instantly crushed, as though winning the favor of this woman was the most important thing in the world.
“Do you know my name?” she asked.
“No.”
“You should. My voice isn’t familiar in the least?”
“Uh, no.”
She rolled towards him in her wheelchair, under her own power. Before Moon could protect himself, she reached out and cuffed him across the mouth with an open hand. He jerked his head backwards and lifted his arms, but she was finished.
She glared at him. “Who are you?”
“Moon,” he said again, though he was beginning to have his doubts.
“Moon, whoever you are, I want you to understand something: I’m in charge of the dreams around here. Who’s the fat man?”
“Kellogg,” he said. He didn’t know how he knew. The name was just sitting there, waiting to be said. In fact, he had some dim sense that Kellogg, whoever he was, was to blame for all of this.
“Did Kellogg send you here?”
“No, no. I came on my own. My daughter—”
“You want to get her into our school.”
“Yes,” he almost sobbed.
“Where’s Kellogg?”
“In . . . another place. You don’t understand—”
“The girl: she isn’t meant as some kind of message to me. As far as you know.”
“No, no.”
“And Kellogg, he’s in this other place. The desert?”
“I don’t know.” He was exhausted by the questions. “I didn’t dream about him. You did.” As he spoke these words, he suddenly remembered his own dream of the night before. There was a small house by some trees and a lake. But that was useless, it had nothing to do with their questions. He pushed it out of his mind.
“So if I gave you a message for this Kellogg, you wouldn’t know how to get it to him?” The old woman’s green eyes sparkled, but her lips were trembling.
“No.”
“I don’t want to dream of him again,” she said ominously. “Do you understand?”
“I’m not responsible for your dreams. Give me back my daughter and let us get out of here.”
“Maybe,” said the old woman, turning her wheelchair to face the door. He felt the movement of her attention away from him vividly, almost physically. Her voice was suddenly distracted, her thoughts elsewhere. The man who’d guided her in came and took the handles of the wheelchair again. “But not yet.”
They brought him a meal of sandwiches and water, led him once to the bathroom, then took away the tray and brought in a small cot, turning the little room into a prison cell. When the last of the men in the gray suits left the room, he got up and tried the door. It was locked. He went back and lay on the cot, gazing up at the green haze that filled the empty room.
He remembered now that his name was Chaos. But he also knew, with the conviction he’d displayed under interrogation, that his name was Moon. He felt the distinct flavor of both lives in him. Both sets of memories seemed to recede to the same distant point, too, a vague sense of a life before disaster, and a dream of a house by a lake.
Moon and Chaos shared that, just as they evidently shared a body.
When a man brought his daughter to him, though, he quickly reverted to Moon. Chaos, after all, didn’t have a daughter. This man wasn’t like the others; he was older, less brutally confident, more remote and distraught. His hair was white, and his eyes looked worn, as though he’d been peering through the green murk at endless rows of tiny print for a long time. He slipped into Moon’s room, holding a finger to his lips, and the girl ran in past him, to Moon’s cot.
Linda hugged him. She apparently agreed that he was Moon. She cried against him, her head tucked into his chest, and he held her and stroked her hair, some instinct commanding that he whisper, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” though he didn’t for the life of him know whether it was.
“Chaos,” she said, “let’s go back. This place sucks.”
“Linda—”
“Melinda,” she said. “C’mon, Chaos. This guy will get us out of here.”
“The girl remembers,” said the man, “even if you don’t.”
“Who are you?”
“Who I am is tired,” said the man. “I have a very hard job to do and you’ve just made it so much harder. I want you to go away. Please.”
The white-haired man rubbed at his nose fussily and then offered a replica of a smile. He even nodded at Moon, as though he’d explained more than enough.
“What did I do wrong?” said Moon.
“You’re hurting her. I’ve really had my hands full, you can’t imagine. When you hurt her you hurt everyone. And of course they’ll kill you for it in the end.”
“What? Hurting who?”
“Elaine,” said the man, his lips drawn back. “It’s miserable that you don’t even know her name. Did you imagine you could just slip in here without knowing her name?”
“The old woman?”
“Yes,” said the man admonishingly. “Elaine is an old woman.”
Moon looked away from the man, to his daughter. Tears had stained the silky, fox-colored hair on her cheeks. He was seeing his daughter’s face for the first time in years, but it didn’t seem strange at all.
He looked back to the man. “Tell me who you are,” he said.
The man emitted a long, high-pitched sigh, as though he were in great pain. “I’m a psychiatrist,” he said. “Do you even know what that is, you grubby litt
le man? It’s my job to keep Elaine from having nightmares like you.” He sighed again, this time ending in a self-pitying chuckle. “So here I am,” he said with false brightness. “Doing my job.”
Moon didn’t say anything.
“Melinda told me about your escape from ‘Little America,’” said the man. “And about your difficulties with dreams. I simply can’t have you here. You’re very bad for her, and what’s bad for her—” The psychiatrist didn’t finish, but tugged at his collar and rolled his eyes, like he was gasping for air.
Linda—Melinda—tugged at Moon’s hand.
“Okay,” he said. Anything, even the green, was better than the room with the cot. He held on to the girl’s hand, and together they followed the psychiatrist out of the room.
Moon could see the hallway now, but there wasn’t much to see: a fire extinguisher and a row of empty glass cases. He caught sight of his own reflection in the glass and was startled by his unshaven, wild-haired look. That was Chaos, he supposed.
The psychiatrist led them through a series of doors. The last was an airlock, which opened with a hiss, and when they stepped through, the green fog formed around them again, before Moon had a last chance to look at his daughter.
The psychiatrist led them outside, onto soft, wet grass. The green was filled with the sound of crickets chirping. The psychiatrist gripped Moon’s shoulder. “Here.” He brought them to a waist-high guide rope attached to a tree. “Follow this path through town. It’s just before midnight; you’ll be back on the highway before morning. Please.”
Moon’s clothes were damp with sweat, and when the wind hit him, he started shivering. He remembered the highway, and the car he’d left behind to walk into town through the fog, the car with its trunk full of canned food and water, and then he remembered that the girl who held his hand wasn’t his daughter.
“C’mon, Chaos,” said Melinda softly.
Chaos moved her hand to the guide rope and turned in the grass and followed the sound of the psychiatrist’s footsteps. He ran up and caught him just at the door, grabbed him and held him by his collar.
“How am I hurting Elaine?”
“By your very existence, you awful creature. Let go of me.”
Chaos tightened his grip on the psychiatrist’s collar. “Explain.”
The psychiatrist moaned. “Don’t you understand about the dream?”
“No.”
“Since the disaster”—he coughed raggedly, then continued—“we’ve dreamt only of the green. Even those of us here, on the hill. Whether we work in the facility or not. Mostly we dream of her, her voice speaking to us, reassuring us . . . it’s always there. Do you understand? When we dreamt of your little girl, and the awful fat man in the desert, it was the first visual dream any of us had had in years. For those out in the green it was the first they’d seen at all, since the disaster.”
“Why?”
“That’s just the way Elaine has it. If they saw in their dreams, she feels, they wouldn’t stand the green anymore.”
“She thinks the visual dream was my fault.”
“It is your fault.”
“Kellogg has the dreams. He’s following me.”
The psychiatrist tittered. “As you wish. If you brought him with you, you’ll take him when you leave.”
Chaos didn’t have an answer for that. He let go of the psychiatrist’s collar, and the older man grunted.
“It doesn’t make sense,” said Chaos. “The green isn’t a problem. You only have to go a few miles away—”
“The green is everywhere,” said the psychiatrist. “It’s you who don’t make sense.”
“Then what’s Elaine scared of? If I don’t make sense, why am I such a threat?”
“Elaine’s not scared,” said the psychiatrist. “She’s angry. I’m scared. You’re a mistake, you’re somebody’s terrible mistake, whatever else you may think you are, and you have to go away. Back to the horrible place you came from, the place in the dream.”
“I’ll go,” said Chaos, “but I’m not going back there.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’ll probably disappear as soon as we forget you.”
Chaos was getting impatient with the conversation. “You don’t have to live like this, you know. Groping around in a blind fog.”
“I don’t,” said the psychiatrist. “I work for White Walnut. But even if I didn’t, I’d rather live in the green than like some smelly, rabid animal.”
Chaos turned back and found the tree where Melinda stood waiting, her hand on the rope. “I’m just trying to say it isn’t necessary. You ought to tell that to Elaine.”
“I beg your pardon, my unpleasant little friend,” said the psychiatrist, clicking his keys in the lock, “but Elaine doesn’t listen to voices in dreams. She originates them.” The airlock hissed. “Goodnight.”
They walked all night. First, led by the guide ropes, into town, then through it, to the highway. They didn’t run into any people, but a stray dog picked up their scent as they came down the hill, and accompanied them through town, trotting invisibly behind them in the green, sniffing at their heels, finally turning away at the highway. The guide ropes stopped at an abandoned gas station. They felt their way past the buildings and up the entrance ramp. Up on the highway, out of the cover of trees, the sounds of chirping insects died away and the air grew cold. They crossed to the grassy divider and headed into the wind.
They walked out of the green just a little before dawn. The opaque mist suddenly yielded hints of depth; they raised their hands and wiggled their fingers in the fog. In another minute they turned and looked at each other and smiled. Then the stars appeared.
Soon the dark mountains ahead of them began to glow. They turned and watched as the sun crept up through the mist behind them. They walked a bit farther, then stopped and sat in the grass and watched, entranced, grateful. He was Chaos again, but part of him—however crazy this was—hadn’t seen the sunrise in years.
Afterwards he got up to walk, but the girl had fallen asleep in the tall grass of the divider. He lifted her and carried her across the highway to a dry spot under some bushes and out of the sun. He sat down in the grass a few feet from her, in a place where he could keep an eye on her and also watch the highway.
He thought about Elaine. He had a feeling she would take her psychiatrist’s advice and forget about him and Melinda, write the whole thing off as an aberration. He thought about Kellogg’s dreams, about the way he seemed to serve as a kind of antenna for them, and how he’d walked into that town and become Moon, but it didn’t get him anywhere, and he let it go.
For the moment, anyway, he had other things to worry about, like food and water. Here in the mountains there should be a creek, but he hadn’t seen one yet. There wasn’t any wildlife on the road, either. To eat they’d probably have to go into the next town, wherever that was. And he was beginning to think that towns were bad news.
He stared at the empty highway for a while, and then, feeling that he should do something, walked in the other direction, through waist-high grass, looking for water. He didn’t find any. He thought of his room in the Multiplex and cursed himself for having left. He wanted to be back there, not here, confused and bereft in the mountains; he wanted his cigarettes and his booze. He gave up and walked back, curled up around the girl, and went to sleep.
The hippie in the pickup—Chaos thought of him that way from the moment he saw him: the hippie in the pickup, like the beginning of a joke—woke them up some time in the late afternoon. They’d slept straight through the day; Chaos, as far as he could recall, dreamlessly. The man stopped his truck on the highway a few feet ahead of them and walked back to where they lay on the grass.
“Hey! Wow! What are you cats doing out here?”
He had a droopy blonde mustache and a fringe of long yellow hair around a reddened bald spot, and he wore bleach-spotted jeans and a loose, flowery shirt. A hippie, Chaos recognized, and the fact that he knew what a hippie was, he th
ought, was more proof against Kellogg’s theory about there not having been a disaster, a change. There hadn’t been any hippies in Little America or Hatfork. Something had at least rid the place of hippies.
Chaos waved his hand. Melinda was still asleep.
“Hey, where’s your transport? This is like, nowhere, you know. What, did you just come out of the Emerald City? Hey, that is one hairy chick, man.”
Melinda, woken by the sound of his voice, sat up and stared. The man shambled up to within a few feet of them, took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “Hot, man. Hey, she’s just a girl. That’s jailbait.”
“Emerald City?” said Chaos. “You mean back there?”
“Yeah, the Green Meanies, the Country of the Blind. What’s the matter, you couldn’t get with Elaine’s program? I don’t blame you.”
“You used to live there?”
“Nah. I got a problem with The Man—all that dreamstuff doesn’t work on me. I’m immune, got a built-in bullshit detector. I used to live in California”—he pointed his thumb over his shoulder, at the mountains—“but I headed out this way after the big bust-up. Needed elbow space.” This he performed for them, a brief knock-kneed dance with swinging elbows. “Bumped into Elaine’s boys at the border, saw the way they were sniffing their way around with dogs, got the scoop on the green. I couldn’t relate to that scenario. So I set up back here, on the Strip. Nobody here but me and the McDonaldonians. Maximum headroom, you know?”
“You can see in the green?”
“Told you, I’m immune. Use to go in there just for laughs, steal food and stuff in front of their noses, but a couple of times they almost caught me. Now I just leave them alone. We got nothing to say to each other.”
“Do you—have any water in your truck?”
“Oh, sure. Stay there.” He turned and jogged back up the embankment. Chaos turned to Melinda, who smiled weakly. Before he could say anything, the man was back with a camouflaged canteen. Chaos and Melinda both drank, and the man went on talking.
“—got everything I need on the Strip, anyway. But I ought to go in there with a shotgun sometime, the stores on the Strip are full of them, you know, one behind every counter, and pick off Elaine, blam! See what happens after that. Probably some other dumbshit setup, you know? Because those cats were just born with their heads naturally up their assholes.”
Amnesia Moon Page 5