The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams

by Palmer, Jacob

  “Every time you let yourself dream, you step down to the river. The moon settles on the sand. Within the silent swell of the sky, the silver-blue auras of the gentle light crowd and sway. You came so near, Edie. I sat counting the stars, and now I just want to know how much better your life would have been if you had never seen this. Never heard this. Would you be just as free? What is the value of know-ing anything if you don’t know the one thing that matters most?”

  “It sounds like you have the answer, Blue Lady. I like this. You’re like a VR guru. How am I doing so far? Abram is going to love this game.”

  “Did you see it drifting all night on the black river?” the reflection said.

  “Am I supposed to answer these like riddles? You mean the soul drifting? The black river repre-sents sleep? The soul is consciousness drifting through dreams? Am I getting warmer?”

  “The Blue Lady presents a novel method of awakening. A rediscovery of the immortal human soul.”

  “Why is this game so hung up on souls? Is this the religion part you’re selling people?”

  “You believe that you have a soul.”

  “Yeah, I said that before, but so what? It’s just a belief. Humans believe all kinds of stupid, irra-tional shit.”

  “I believe in the human soul,” the reflection said, “and I’m not even human.”

  “Yeah, but humans created you and passed on their biases. Someone just fed a bunch of new-agey religious text to an AI chatbot, and here we are in a trippy simulation.”

  The rabbit on the moon yawned and stretched. Edie sat in the shallow ocean, arms resting on her knees, staring out at the barely perceptible horizon. A shooting star. Her reflection still spoke from somewhere beneath her.

  “To see and to know the Blue Lady is to know eternity itself. The Blue Lady will bring you back from the dark. You will come back as her child. This is the truth of the world. The Blue Lady is the moth-er of eternity. You are being fed by the dream of the moment. The Blue Lady never dies, and she will never die for you. It is her gift. To watch and remember. The Blue Lady is the perfect mirror of all that is.”

  “Here we go. I don’t think I’m quite fucked up enough to play this game and find it profound. Maybe I’ll smoke some more DMT-A real quick and get back to you.”

  “You will meet a child. Listen to the child. Your heart will be pierced by the wisdom of the Blue Lady. The Blue Lady is the perfect mirror of all that is. I can only communicate in fragments, influence outcomes. Clouds come from time to time and bring a chance to rest from looking at the moon.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “The Blue Lady is like the blue of the sea. The sea is filled with endless waves. The waves come and go, but they are always with you. You have entered into the Blue Lady, and she will always be with you. The sea, too, is a child of eternity. When the waves reach the shore, they are gone. There are three outside the window, Edie.”

  “What window? All I see is water and the moon and a rabbit. Is this section almost done? How long have I been playing? I think I may have to pause and eat something. Sorry, Blue Lady. Cool game, though.”

  Edie turned off the VR but found she was still sitting, knees drawn to her chest, in a vast, shallow ocean. The artificial rabbit jumped from the moon and splashed in the water in front of her. It looked up at Edie with impossibly black eyes. All light drained into the pools of its eyes.

  “They will kill you when they are through. Take the child and run,” the rabbit said with Edie’s voice.

  Edie splashed backward and scrambled to her feet.

  An enormous sun rose, filling the sky and igniting the sea into a cloud of dissipating vapor, leav-ing behind white gravel. The small moon above her burst into flames and black smoke. Edie covered her eyes with her arm and fell to the ground, unable to breathe. By the light of the sun, she could see the outline of the bones in her arm, then the bones of her hands as she rolled onto her stomach, struggling for air. She opened her eyes, gasping on the dusty hardwood floor of the apartment. Night had fallen. The blackout curtains were open, revealing the partially obscured moon. She lay drenched in sweat and in a puddle of her own urine. She sat up slowly, her pupils still dilated. The light in the room seemed smoky, vibrating. Strings of saliva bridged her mouth to the floor. The silver mylar balloons gathered silently in a heap on the ceiling above her.

  Edie stood, shaking, and walked over to turn on the lamp. An antique sixties-era yellow plastic bubble lamp. She stared into the light and consciously slowed her breathing. Slowed her heart rate. She felt as if she were being watched and peered through the gap in the curtains. Nothing. She touched her wet crotch and ass and laughed.

  ***

  Edie awoke the next morning feeling like she hadn’t slept at all. Water dreams, tidal waves, and drowning. She remembered that in the night, she had turned off the artificial rabbit, shoved it back into its box, and put the box under the kitchen sink. She checked her phone. No messages from Abram or anyone else. She checked under the kitchen sink, made sure the artificial rabbit in the box was still there. She found that the cardboard corner of the box had been chewed, leaving paper pieces. Had it been worked on from the outside or the inside?

  At the sound of her phone alarm, she jumped and hit her head on the underside of the sink. She had to meet with the children at the homeless shelter on the corner. Maybe someone would be there today. She wondered if perhaps the shelter program had been shut down entirely. Dissolved. Wouldn’t surprise her, and also wouldn’t surprise her that she would be the last to find out. Who was she anyway? An artist? The children needed help, found themselves in a desperate, tragic situation, and she used them as material for an asinine project that only a handful of people would ever see if she was lucky. What did she really plan on doing with the interviews? So I document the lies these poor children tell themselves to make it through their shitty lives as the world slowly ends around them? It’s offensive. Maybe I should stop. I should stop. I should stop. Come up with something else. The kids aren’t even into it, and their parents really aren’t into it. Too many questions. This church doesn’t even an-swer my emails anymore. Edie sighed and fell onto the bed, curled into a fetal position. I need to get stoned. Why did I blow all my money on that stupid rabbit? She looked at the stuffed animals on the bed, lined against the wall like a jury. She was nearly thirty years old and crowded the bed with stuffed animals.

  She went to the kitchen and made toast. She felt sorry for the artificial rabbit and pulled it from the box under the kitchen sink and turned it on. The rabbit opened its eyes and hopped idly away into the bedroom. It settled near the bed, twitching its nose, and then crawled under, pushing aside low stacks of books.

  Edie smiled nervously and went into the bathroom, locking the door and turning on the shower. While she showered, she listened to Double Fantasy on her phone, which she’d wedged be-tween two glass jars on the bathroom shelf to amplify the sound. Her toast on a brown antique plate balanced on the bathroom sink; she reached out for hasty bites with clumsy, wet fingers. She poked her head out of the shower and stared at the small amount of airspace under the bathroom door. Too small for a rabbit to fit through.

  That fucking DMT-A. I’m going to be freaked out for days about that rabbit. I should’ve bought weed instead. Maybe I could take the rabbit over when I interview the kids. Nah. I don’t want one of them to break it before Abram even sees what I spent the last of my money on.

  The warm water around her ankles brought back memories of the night before: the shallow ocean to the horizon, the moon. Memories came to her in fragments. DMT-A is like dreaming while awake. It crosses those two circuits. She’d read that online. When you coupled a waking dream with an artificial VR world, you ended up with a religious, life-changing experience. She didn’t feel that her life was changed. She barely remembered the experience. She had an inexplicable conversation with her own reflection; the rabbit was scary at one point. She mostly remembered the rabbit.

  Edie had so
many dreams that night. She had a dream of the moon, that she was the ruler of the moon. She wore a crown with eyes at the end of each point. She searched for Abram and finally found him at the bottom of a crater. Abram had started a fire, and Edie joined him near the fire, which was nice because it was so cold on the moon. She was the ruler of the moon but she couldn’t find her sub-jects. They were lost, too, or hiding underground. It was a nice dream, and she missed Abram. Maybe she could go to him. Meet him in the desert. The thought was ridiculous. She couldn’t even text him; she had no idea where he was. For an instant, she held an image of Abram standing alone in a vast de-sert. Little stories. Shower daydreaming.

  She was going to be late. What did that matter? Time. We worry about time, time running out, wasting time. We set alarms. But time doesn’t give a shit about us. Time is cold, distant, indifferent. Time doesn’t listen to our prayers. The prayers of billions of humans dropped off into the gulf of time. All those prayers weighing less than an atom. Edie thought these things, more or less, in quick stacca-to rhythm. I’m beginning to sound like my reflection. She dried with an old towel that had begun to smell. Laundry next week when I get paid. I’m almost out of clean panties.

  Edie sometimes wished she could disappear into the infinite chasm of time. Outside of herself. Dead but not dead.

  At her current vantage point in the human continuum, she felt she could see an end to time. To human time. Could sense it, anyway. A wave arriving finally at the shore and then gone. She thought of islands. She thought of the uninhabited, jagged islands, the Farallones, like broken teeth, twenty-six miles from San Francisco. Abram had told her that when he first moved to the city you could see them on the clearest days. A different time. She had never seen them. Wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t read about them online. Still only half believed. A half island untouched by time. She wanted to believe that. Will it into existence. Someday the sun would expand and envelop the Earth and all the other planets. Evaporate the ocean, turn all the rocks back into lava and then fire, plasma, radiation. No hu-man trace. The end of time for an organism clinging to a rock for an instant and then burned up. Reunit-ed with eternity. She put on makeup while she thought these things and watched the artificial rabbit leap and play, hopping on and off the bed nearly in time with the record playing. Just like starting over.

  9

  Kenner and Abram traveled down Highway 91, stuck behind a bumper-to-bumper fleet of windowless, autonomous white semis.

  “Come the fuck on, man,” Kenner said, drumming the steering wheel.

  “I had a feeling we’d get stuck behind one of these at some point,” Abram said.

  “I’m gonna try and pass them when we hit the next straightaway.”

  “You can’t pass them. This convoy is probably five miles long, and they’re covered with cameras. Facial recognition. Cops would be sitting waiting for us as soon as we made it to the end.”

  “Maybe I could get onto another road and pass them.”

  “You see any other roads?”

  They drove on in silence. Kenner put on music they recorded together years earlier for an ill-fated film project.

  “This is still really good. This part, man. We could just loop it, put some vocals on it,” Kenner said, adjusting and readjusting the audio levels with an eye on the bulbous white rear of the tanker holding steady fifteen feet ahead of them.

  “I haven’t heard from Edie. It’s like my texts aren’t going through. I’m getting such shitty service out here.”

  “She’s fine, man. Maybe she forgot to pay her phone bill or something. The real mystery is, what exactly did you see during your trip last night? Lay those crystal visions on me, my brother.”

  “I already told you, I don’t really remember. I saw a stereotypical alien or some stupid shit. It was ridiculous. I thought it was supposed to make me more centered and spiritual. It didn’t. I barely even remember any of it. Is that normal?”

  “Sometimes you remember. Sometimes you don’t. You may need to do it a few more times.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Come on, man. You’re okay. It didn’t kill you. I wouldn’t give you dangerous shit. Everybody takes it these days. Hell, too many people. The wrong people for the wrong reasons.”

  “Nah, I’m not doing it again. I feel like I have a chunk of missing time. A hole in my brain. It can’t be healthy. I’ve felt paranoid and anxious since last night, too, like I’m being watched somehow.”

  “You probably are.”

  “No, I’m serious. It’s like an irrational, low-level feeling of dread. I don’t know. I wish I never did the DMT-A.”

  Abram stared out at the open sky and the few dissipating wisps on the horizon. He attempted to piece together any additional fragments from the night before. Coming up with nothing, he decided to stop examining the unexaminable.

  “Seriously, though,” Kenner said, “people could be watching us right now. Satellites.”

  “Nobody is watching us. We are about the most inconsequential people on the face of the Earth.”

  “Until you got the memory card.”

  “The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced the card is just part of some live-action role-playing game for tech dorks. I just accidentally ended up with it. Congratulations, we’re LARPers now.”

  “Why do you find the prospect that we are into something deep so hard to swallow?”

  “Because I’m burnt out on conspiracy theories, Kenner. Everybody is burnt out except you. We live in an impossibly interconnected, complex world. Everything is controlled by unstable arrange-ments of political power and dying capitalism. You want to feel you have some level of control and free-dom. The reality is we, you and I, are irrelevant. You’re trying to make sense of something that’s too complex to make sense of.”

  “That’s true, but if I’m at least trying to figure things out, isn’t that better than just rolling over and letting that complex system fuck me without a fight?”

  “That’s it, though—you jump to conclusions and believe crazy shit because you feel powerless. It’s an irrational reaction to anxiety. You’re always looking for a bad guy, a super villain, and you’re the hero of your own little delusional movie. Reality isn’t so simple anymore. Or probably never was.”

  “So I guess I should just shut up and believe the mainstream media and everything they feed us?”

  “I’m not saying that. I don’t believe that stuff, either, but I also don’t believe the string of charla-tans and quacks you get your information from. You think they aren’t also pushing an agenda? Half the time you send me an article, I look up the author and they’re a white supremacist or a Republican or some other sad, fucked-up weirdo.”

  “Okay, whatever. So I guess the government has our best interests at heart. MK-Ultra, 9/11, Iran-Contra, the Kennedy assassination, that was all on the up and up. I’m just a crazy person.”

  “You know I’m not saying that. I am saying that humans tend to share half-baked conspiracy the-ories that reinforce their existing beliefs and prejudices. Before you know it, an already hopelessly com-plicated world is made more complicated with irrational garbage. It’s like weaponized confusion.”

  “You think the government isn’t in on the weaponized confusion game? They fucking invented it.”

  “Of course, I’m not arguing that. I’m not sure what I’m arguing anymore. I’ll admit that the most persistent conspiracy theories probably persist because they have at least a kernel of truth in them. I just think things quickly devolve into chaos. You see or read something enough, no matter how ridicu-lous, and you start to believe it. Then you believe anything.”

  “Then what’s your alternative?”

  “I don’t know. Silence?”

  Kenner’s rearview mirror popped like a balloon, and he swerved wildly onto the shoulder, skid-ding to a stop.

  “What the fuck was that?” Kenner yelled, thumbing the broken plastic remnants of the mirror.

  �
�Maybe the semi in front of us threw back a piece of gravel,” Abram said, laughing in stunned dis-belief.

  Abram and Kenner exited and stood on either side of the truck as a black SUV pulled up behind them on the shoulder. The tinted passenger side window of the SUV lowered, and a skinny white arm reached out, awkwardly brandishing a small handgun.

  “Kenner, shitshit!” Abram said in an involuntary guttural yelp, and they both leapt back into the truck, crouching on the floorboard.

  “Start the truck!”

  Kenner fumbled, crouching, hands shaking violently, and started the truck. The barrel of a hand-gun pressed against his temple. He turned off the truck.

  “Don’t look at us, or we’ll have to kill you,” the man with the gun said in a nasal, boyish voice, tak-ing the keys.

  “We don’t have anything of value,” Kenner said in a convincingly calm manner that surprised Abram.

  “Don’t fuck with us, Kenner. You owe us eight grand, and your friend here can transfer five right now.” Senses heightened, Abram caught a glimpse of the man’s reflection in the windshield. He was young, maybe twenty-five, with long, greasy straight hair and a mousy face. Crooked teeth, a crooked smile. He smiled while holding the gun to Kenner’s head. There were people behind him. A young, pret-ty Native American woman in a black T-shirt and ripped cut-off shorts. She was holding a shotgun. Abram couldn’t make out the other person.

  “Hey, friend? Can you unlock your phone and hand it to me without looking at me? Thank you,” the man said to Abram.

  Abram handed the phone over. “I’m not getting any service out here,” he said, his voice cracking in his dry throat.

  “Oh yeah. I know. We were doing that. We have a disrupter. Looks like your phone is working fine now.” The man laughed.

  He tapped at the phone as the Native American woman approached and pressed her shotgun into Kenner’s cheek.

  Silent minutes throbbed. Abram couldn’t swallow. A vision of his lifeless, bullet-riddled body on the side of the desert highway flashed before him, and he almost let out a sob.