The Fact of the Moon Is Stranger Than Most Dreams

by Palmer, Jacob

  “Well, I think they still sell shirts and stuff at the charging station across the street. The kiosk is open twenty-four hours,” the clerk said, glassy-eyed from being pulled out of his reverie.

  “Great, I’ll get you two some clothes while you shower,” Betty said, looking Abram and Kenner up and down. “I’ll leave them outside your doors, and you can join us in the sandwich shop. My treat. Say, in forty-five minutes?”

  “Great, thank you so much,” Abram said.

  “Here are your keys,” she said. “Abram, you are in room 40. Kenner, you are in 36.”

  “You didn’t have to pay to get us separate rooms,” Kenner said.

  “It’s really no problem at all. I’ll write it off later. Okay, so we’ll see you next door,” she said, smil-ing, and then walked out.

  “Well, I guess let’s get cleaned up, then,” Abram said, laughing after a long pause.

  “This is crazy, man. What is this?” Kenner said, watching Betty walk across the street.

  “I don’t know, but we’re out of jail, and I’ve got the gold bar back. We’ll get your truck tomorrow and get the fuck out of here,” Abram said as they walked to their rooms. “Well, here’s my room. You must be down a little farther. See you at the sandwich shop.”

  Kenner continued silently down the hall, deep in thought.

  As Abram entered his room, the automatic light clicked on, as did the old television hanging on the wall. Abram examined it but couldn’t figure out how to turn it off, so he left it on. A program about ancient aliens. Abram took off his ruined clothes and threw them into the bathroom trash, standing na-ked in front of the mirror. He placed the gold bar in the sink and decided he should wash it. Naked, he washed the gold bar and then dried his hands and checked again that the door to his motel room was locked. He stood in the center of the bed, naked, watching television. He laughed when a CGI gray alien flashed on the screen. He went back into the bathroom, locked the door, and took a shower.

  Abram walked the short distance to the sandwich shop, which was actually just a very small, au-tomated Subway sandwich franchise. Two tables built into a wall, a floor-to-ceiling plexiglass partition, and six robotic arms putting together sandwiches. Pop hits, interrupted erratically with commercials, streamed from tiny hidden speakers. When Abram arrived, Kenner had already joined the rest of the party at the table. The little red-haired girl played with Legos, and the two women scrolled on their phones.

  Abram and Kenner now wore matching black spandex yoga outfits, the tops emblazoned with the motto Arizona Ditat Deus in gold chrome foil across the chest. The outfits were far too small, and Abram self-consciously folded his hands in front of his crotch to hide the clearly discernible outline of his penis.

  “Good, it fits,” Betty said. “Those were the only size they had.”

  “Thanks again,” Abram said, unsure if he was being made fun of.

  Betty entered their menu orders, and when the sandwiches arrived minutes later, Abram and Kenner ate ravenously.

  “So what time do we need to be at the police station tomorrow?” Abram asked.

  “Noon should be fine,” Betty said.

  Abram toyed with the lettering on his chest and thought of the gold bar he left in the motel room. It was well-hidden under the mattress, but leaving it still worried him.

  “You think I could possibly borrow one of your phones to make a quick call?” Abram asked.

  The women looked at each other.

  “Of course. Here, take my phone,” Betty said.

  Abram finished the last bite of his sandwich and then excused himself to step outside. As he stood in the parking lot, he could see Kenner watching him anxiously from inside the restaurant. Betty’s phone was the most expensive he had ever held, an obscenely beautiful piece of craftsmanship, like an otherworldly art glass object. He wondered what had happened to his phone and what would happen if he tried calling the number. He called the number and instantly heard, in the still air, a phone ringing faintly in one of the rooms of the motel. He hung up and the ringing stopped. He stared at the motel, his heart thudding in his chest. He tried it again. Ringing. He reached his voicemail and the ringing stopped. He hung up. He looked back, and now both women and Kenner were watching him through the window. He smiled and gave a nervous little wave and walked closer to them, pretending he was talking on the phone.

  “What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck,” he repeated into the phone.

  He casually turned his back to the women and quickly dialed Edie’s number. It rang for a long time without an answer. He tried it again and let it go to voicemail, but her voicemail was full.

  “Come on, Edie. Come on.”

  He tried again. Nothing. He thought of going through the woman’s phone but thought for sure that she would somehow be able to tell he had done so. He walked back inside.

  “Able to get ahold of someone?” Betty asked.

  “Yeah, yeah. Just called my girlfriend, Edie. She said to say hi and thanks again for bailing us out.”

  He handed back the phone and stood awkwardly as the women looked at him; something about their body language was less cordial now. The little girl continued playing with Legos. Kenner stared up at Abram, a hint of fear in his eyes.

  “Well, I guess I’m going to go back to the room and lie down,” Abram said. “Long day tomorrow.”

  “Yes, long day tomorrow, and I’d like to go over some of the key aspects of your case beforehand,” Betty said.

  “Sure. Thanks for dinner,” Abram said, taking Kenner’s arm and pulling him toward the door. The two women went back to idly scrolling and tapping on their phones. The little girl finally looked up from her blocks to watch them leave.

  “I’m scared, man,” Kenner whispered as soon as they had turned the corner and were in the long motel corridor leading to their rooms. “My gut is telling me we need to get out of here.”

  “I called my phone,” Abram said. “I called my phone, and I heard it ring in one of these rooms.”

  “Are you sure? What does that mean? The people that killed the people in my truck are here in the motel?”

  “Or these women are the people? These women killed them? I don’t know. I’m all fucked up. I mean, we saw the dead people alive again the next day. Did that even happen? Maybe no-body got murdered,” Abram said, turning to Kenner, pale.

  “We hid two bodies, man. There was blood everywhere,” Kenner said. “Blood in my truck. The cops even said there was blood in my truck, remember?”

  “I just need to get my head together,” Abram said. “I need to think. Let’s just consider the possi-bility it didn’t happen. Or it happened, but after we think it happened. Things are out of order. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

  “I think we should just take off,” Kenner said as they reached Abram’s door.

  “How? We don’t have your truck. Where would we go?”

  “You’ve got your gold bar. We could bribe someone to drive us with your gold bar. I don’t know. I could probably borrow the clerk’s phone down in the lobby and post something online. We could bum a ride out of here. Or we could hotwire a car.”

  “You know how to do that?”

  “No.”

  “Listen, Kenner, these women know exactly who we are. They have our info. They’ll know we’re running back to San Francisco. They would probably be waiting for us when we got there.”

  “It’s worth a shot. I’m going down to the lobby to use that dude’s phone,” Kenner said, turning back the way they came.

  “Wait. Be careful that they don’t see you. I’ll go with you.”

  “It’ll be more suspicious if we both go. If I run into them, I’ll say I needed to check my email or something. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  Abram watched Kenner recede down the hall, gangly, barefoot, and ridiculous. “What are we do-ing? What is this?” Abram asked himself. I just need to get some sleep. The sun will rise, and we’ll be on the way back to San Francisco. />
  As Abram entered his room, the light and television flashed on. He checked under the bed, re-trieved the gold bar, and sat it on the sheets. He stared at it. He looked for the thermostat to turn off the air-conditioning but couldn’t find it. He opened the door and looked out into the empty hallway. Noth-ing. He closed the door, locked it, and pulled a nearby chair in front of the door.

  There was a small window in the bathroom, the only window in the motel room, and Abram craned his head out into the darkness, examining the inaccessible fenced-off space one story below. Be-yond the fence sat an undeveloped square of desert with a lone streetlight at its edge. A few squat hous-es beyond that.

  He heard an autonomous semi roar by in the early evening. He remembered being comforted by the sound of trucks passing in the night as a child. Someone awake and driving, in direct opposition to the oblivion of the endless void. Now all of the trucks were empty. “Empty vessels,” he said to himself. He reached, and the air outside the window felt pleasantly dry and warm compared to the air inside the room. He closed the window and locked it.

  He turned on both bedside lamps and lay on the bed with the gold bar against his side, under his arm. He folded both edges of the comforter over him and sank into the center of the bed, staring at the television hanging on the wall. A trashy program about ancient aliens. He patted, searching for his phone, and remembered that it was inexplicably somewhere in the motel, possibly in the next room.

  The killers could be in the next room, he thought. If there were ever killers at all. Maybe nobody had been killed. Maybe it had been a prolonged hallucination from the DMT-A. Maybe he was still hal-lucinating. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to think about anything. He wanted to cry. Grimacing, he squinted in an attempt to cry, but nothing came. He watched the television, which blared incessantly. A CGI alien gesticulated on the screen. “Why is the alien dancing?”

  27

  Edie’s head throbbed and her vision blurred with each pulse. A sensation of a dentist’s drill slowly worked its way through the crown of her skull. She stopped and vomited, all the while tightening her grip on Octavia, who fought to return the way they had come. The rabbit sat perched on Edie’s shoulder, its back nails hooked into her vintage red Missoni blouse. It sniffed and licked at her earlobe.

  “Okay, come on. We have to go in here for a second.”

  She pulled Octavia into a small hardware store, delirious and stumbling. She found a package of silver mylar emergency blankets and sat them on the counter in front of the elderly clerk who stood, fro-zen, behind the register.

  Edie retched and threw up a small amount on the linoleum floor.

  “Sorry. I actually don’t have any money. I need these emergency blankets, though. It’s an emer-gency. I’m sorry. I’m leaving now.”

  “Take them,” the clerk stammered.

  Hurrying down the sidewalk and into an alley doorway, Edie frantically opened and wrapped a silver foil blanket around her head, tying it into an enormous bow on top. The relief was instantaneous.

  “Oh, man. I got throw-up on my shoes.”

  “Are you okay, Miss Edie?”

  “I’m okay now. Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  “I’m okay. I think we should go back to the church, Miss Edie.”

  “We have to stay away from there for a while. I’ll take you back to your mom in a little bit, okay? But right now we have to get to a safe place. I just need a second to think.”

  “Well, I know a safe place. I have a special safe place that nobody knows, not even my momma. It’s not too far.”

  At a loss for other options, Edie let Octavia lead the way down Market Street toward downtown. They blended seamlessly with the throngs of homeless, who were either bedding down in their tents for the evening or rising to start their day. Octavia did attract a smattering of attention, as very young chil-dren were becoming a rare sight in San Francisco.

  “Get the fuck away from me,” Edie said to a man, his opiate eyes half closed as he tried to pet the rabbit on her shoulder.

  They spotted a lone cop strolling the tents at Civic Center Plaza. Edie considered briefly ap-proaching and asking for help but thought that if those women in the apartment were indeed CIA, the cops would probably just hand her back over to them. Her mind churned under the crackling headdress. But if they were CIA, why did police drones bust in through the window? If they had guns, they were probably really CIA, right? They seemed like professionals. Cops barely even have guns anymore. I can’t even remember the last time I’ve seen a gun outside of VR. What has Abram gotten us into? It’s probably all Kenner’s fault. Shit. What should I do?

  They continued down the grimy sidewalk, turning onto Kearney Street and again at Post Street, ending at a stately old building that could have been a bank a century before. The ornate Art Deco con-crete framing the entrance was caked with soot. Octavia stood at a green keypad glowing dimly in the darkened doorway, looking up and thinking, remembering, then keyed in a series of numbers.

  “Now we just wait,” Octavia said.

  “What is this place?”

  “It’s a library.”

  “If it’s a library, I think it’s probably closed right now, Octavia.”

  Edie watched and marveled at how calm the little girl seemed after the trauma they had just passed through. It was as if it had never happened to her. She was recalibrated, focused. Did it leave no mark? Was her skin already so thick? Edie suddenly wanted to cry for reasons she didn’t understand; events were happening faster than her ability to contextualize them. She choked it back, swallowed, pet the rabbit on her shoulder. Although its abdomen flexed back and forth, no breath left its nostrils, just the illusion of breathing.

  A light blinked on, exposing a white marble-clad lobby through the double glass doors. An eleva-tor inside opened, and a short, very thin Black woman, possibly in her early thirties, stepped out warily. She met eyes with Octavia and smiled, laughed, and began to cry. The door opened with a buzz, and Octavia ran into the lobby and jumped into the woman’s arms. After a few moments of the woman hold-ing Octavia and stroking her hair, she walked over to Edie, who stood like a wild-eyed aluminum-foil flower holding an artificial rabbit like a baby.

  “Who is this, Octavia?” the woman said.

  “That’s my best friend, Miss Edie. She saved me from some devils that came to get us.”

  “Where is your mom, Octavia?” the woman said, all the while staring warily at Edie with tired eyes.

  “Momma’s back at the shelter. Devils tried to get us and we had to get away from there. You said I could come find you here if it was ever an emergency.”

  “I know, Octavia. I did tell you. Did anybody else know you came here?” the woman said to Edie.

  “No, not at all. Nobody followed us.”

  The woman extended her hand to Edie, her eyes still intensely cautious.

  “I’m Octavia’s aunt. I know that she wouldn’t have come, wouldn’t have brought you here, unless she were in serious danger, so thank you for any help you gave her.”

  “It’s . . . it’s no problem. I know Octavia from the shelter. I live near there and . . . volunteer there sometimes.”

  “She asks me for my stories and about my dreams and stuff,” Octavia said, pressing the elevator call button.

  “Are you a social worker?” the woman asked.

  “No, not really.”

  “A journalist?” A look of disgust passed over the woman’s face.

  “Umm . . . I’m an artist.”

  The woman had no reaction. The elevator arrived with a distorted ping, and they boarded. The in-side of the elevator was mirrored and Edie recoiled at her own reflection. Octavia laughed and took Edie’s hand.

  “My name’s Gabrielle. Are you absolutely sure you two weren’t followed?” she asked Edie’s reflec-tion in the tarnished mirror.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “They could’ve tracked the phone in your purse with a Stingray.�
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  “My phone? The battery died, I think.”

  “They can track a powered-down phone. Most phones have a trojan backdoor installed that con-tinues emitting a signal for a couple hours even after you power it off.”

  “I, umm . . . I . . .”

  “Don’t worry. Your scan came up clean. Your phone and your artificial rabbit. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be in here. You have a very old-model phone. Nobody uses those anymore.”

  “It’s old.”

  “Antique.”

  The elevator opened into a darkened hall with a 1920s collegiate aesthetic. Wooden doors with frosted glass windows. Dust. The warm ceiling lamps snapped on and then turned off as they passed. They reached a door like all the others, except this one bore a small wooden sign: CHESS ROOM.

  They passed through the ancient room. It was like a stage set, solid 150-year-old chipped tables with various chess boards frozen mid-game. An uneven avocado-green floor. A scoreboard against the back wall. Yellowed flyers announcing events twenty-five years past. As they approached the back clos-et, it unlocked with a thick thud and hiss, breaking an airtight seal. They climbed down a utility ladder through jagged holes broken through concrete, into a series of hastily converted rooms and cubicles, aquariums bubbling, lab equipment on every available surface. A rising, sour ammonia smell caused Edie’s allergies to flare. She chanced removing her noisy silver headwrap, shoving it into her purse, and found she had no headache.

  Two people approached, smiling.

  “Hi, I’m Ash.”

  “Hi, I’m Luci.”

  “You two know my niece, Octavia,” Gabrielle said.

  “She’s growing up so fast,” Luci said, her forced smile belying nervous concern.

  “We were just sitting down to eat if you want to join us,” Ash said.

  They gathered around a large table and served themselves out of an enormous steel salad bowl.

  “We grow all the greens down here,” Luci said.

  Gabrielle washed Octavia’s hands and face at the kitchen sink.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, what exactly is this place? Octavia told me it’s a library,” Edie said.