Tombstone eyed the barrel of my gun. “You don’t make it easy.”
“I don’t have to. Tell me why you’re really here.”
“You won’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
“There’s a storm in Death Valley,” he said, shrugging. “Like the storm in ‘48.”
“That’s what you came here to tell me?”
“No, but if you don’t believe I’m telling you the truth, then none of this will sink in and I’ll have wasted my time.”
“Why do you care so deeply about my safety? You were just about to kill me.”
“I tried. I will try again. But if I can’t kill you, I want to protect you against them, because if they get a hold of you…”
“You’re just making this up.”
“I’m saying this so you’ll listen,” he spat. “I need to wake up and see what kind of world you’re living in.”
“What happened in ‘48?”
“Oh come on,” he sneered.
“Just tell me what happened in 1948.”
Tombstone raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know.”
I lurched forward another inch. The gun barrel pressed against his forehead. Tombstone seethed. “The supermoon in 1948. You don’t know what happened,” panic crept into his voice.
“If you don’t start talking—”
He lunged. I pulled the trigger, nothing happened, then the metal barrel cracked against my forehead with the knockback. A gaping hole thundered through the roof of the bridge. Tombstone leaped over the side, coattails flapping behind him, into the air, into the rain. Down over the side he fell, and vanished into the mist.
I ran to the railing. No sign of the man, just the dark harbor waters below. Further out, the pale white shapes of the yachts bobbed like sheets in the wind, and further still the moon hung just above the horizon, huge and luminescent, and pitted with dark craters, and faintly green, as if a thin layer of moss grew over the surface.
----------------------------------------
My breathing slowed, and a dread laid itself over me. The moon hung like a weight in the sky, and it weighed on my mind. Why green? What was growing there? Surely it wasn’t moss, but if I chose to accept my perceptions then I would have to accept the possibility that it was something.
If I take this seriously, if I don’t just dismiss the green moon as a hallucination, then what? If I accept the green moon, then I must accept certain other possibilities. I will need an explanation. I will also need to accept that certain knowledge and assumptions I have carried with me for years will no longer hold water. These things I used to know: nothing grows on the moon, and nothing can grow because there is no oxygen or water on the moon. Some of these things are verified by science. The shoemaker crater— I stopped mid-thought. My hands fell to the railing and I clenched my fists around it. The Shoemaker Crater. They must know about the moon.
The storm rambled on overhead, thunder and an undulating downpour. But my head was empty. Too many thoughts pushed in from the outside. I should proceed in an organized way, I told myself. Start with what I know, and go down the list until you encounter a contradiction. Then you’ll just have to make a call. Do you trust what you have always known, or do you accept this new reality?
“No,” I said out loud. “There isn’t time. There’s a storm in Death Valley, and Benji is there now. I need to help him.”
But you don’t know what’s going on. How can you help him? So many fundamental truths have been upturned.
Yes, I’m going in blind, but if I wait, then the storm will break over Benji and he’ll be alone, not knowing how deep the well goes. There are forces at work that I do not understand. Tombstone, and the Shoemaker Estate. I don’t know what they’re capable of, or their stakes in all of this. I’ll just have to take things as they come.
Wait. Do you know there’s a storm in Death Valley? No. Check first.
It was around ten by now, and the rainclouds had blown out over the sea, and weeknight events were coming to a close. Teenagers and young adults filtered out of the shops and into the fresh night air, with umbrellas ready and coats pulled tight around their necks.
From the shadow of the bridge, I watched the commotion. They were about my age, all heading back to their studio apartments or their parent’s houses, or to the dorms, or else to catch the last train back to the mainland. Slipping my hands into my pockets, I left the shadow of the bridge and followed the sidewalk, hoping to avoid the attention of strangers. Someone might call the police if they saw me loitering under the bridge.
As I strode down the lamp-flooded streets to my apartment, I head someone calling my name. Boots splashed on the sidewalk behind me.
I whirled around. It was the librarian. She was breathing hard and fell into step beside me. Her hair was soaked blacker than usual, and matted onto the jacket she wore. She was shivering. “He wants to talk to you,” she said.
“I don’t have time,” I said, walking fast. “Someone tried to kill me twice in a week, and I’m getting off this island. If needs to tell me something he can send a messenger, or find me himself. Or make a phone call. Jesus. Why can’t he just call me?”
The librarian grimaced. She seemed to be making up her mind. “It’s difficult for him to leave the yacht,” she said finally. “He has a condition that makes it impossible for him to travel.”
“Well I’m leaving, and I don’t have time to see him.”
“Where are you going?”
I wiped the rain off my forehead and looked at her.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I want to help you.”
“I don’t think you can,” I said.
“And how would you know? You just stumbled into all this. I helped you once already, don’t you think I can do it again? You’re crazy trying to do this all alone.”
“I don’t know if I can trust you.”
“And the people who you can trust can’t help you. So a thing has got to give.”
The gun was still warm against my side. I stopped and looked her in the eyes. “For my own safety, I am going to decide not to trust you. But I will let you help me if you insist. If you meant any harm, you could have hurt me already.”
“That’s a common sentiment. But keep your guard up.”
“Is that supposed to make me trust you more?”
“You’re desperate, and you need help. And desperate people make mistakes. I need you to think clearly. And it will help if I know who tried to kill you.”
“He told me to call him Tombstone.”
There was a long pause. I turned to look at her.
“Right,” she said. Her face was pale, but she didn’t say more.
“You know him?”
She hesitated, thinking of a lie. “Yeah.”
“He tried to use some kind of hypnosis on me, less than an hour ago. I tried to shoot him. He jumped off a bridge into the harbor.”
The librarian raised her eyebrows. “You tried to shoot him?”
“Yes, but my hand slipped. The knockback almost killed me.”
“Jesus. Where’d you get a gun?”
“I’m working for someone. They warned me things might get harry. But until this week, nobody tried to kill me. In fact, a whole bunch of unusual things happened this week. It’s as if everyone found out about me at the same time.”
“Weird,” she said, but she wouldn't look me in the eye.
We parted ways shortly thereafter. I didn’t press her for answers. I had enough to think about and I didn’t think her answers would simplify anything. When I got home I phoned Benji. There was no answer, so I texted him. Then I cleaned up. In front of the mirror I stipped down to my shorts. My back ached. My hands stung, and dried blood caked my palms. My cheek and forehead were bruising.
My clothes smelled of smoke when I threw them in the wash. Then I pulled off my socks and threw them in as well. The tile floor was cool on my feet and I shivered. The lights were dim in the bathroom. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I straightened up. When did my posture get so bad I pulled my hair into my hands and held it behind my head. Turning this way and that I look over my body. Everything seemed in order. People used to compliment my body. In the half-light, the body could have been someone else’s, on the other side of a glass window. Both of us were naked, myself and the girl in the mirror.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The weariness came in waves, and a wave crested over me then, and I felt pleasantly exhausted somehow. I feel as if I haven’t learned anything definite, but I’ve learned a lot.
I can’t say it was a waste of time, I thought. Even if I spent almost none of it in the library researching that poor little kid.
It could be all these strangers and I are headed to the same conclusion, and maybe I’ll find what I’m looking for there. But I need to be more careful. I was lucky I thought to ask for a gun. Imagine if Tombstone had caught me unarmed. I shuddered and turned on the lights. My eyes hurt, then adjusted, and I turned on the shower.
As the water and warm washcloth eased the dirt off my skin, I let my mind wander. Whenever I thought about something, I let it pass away into the distance of my mind until a pleasant distance developed between my conscious mind and all the troubling things I needed to think about. I breathed deeply, and the steamy air filled my lungs.
When I had finished, I laid down in bed and pulled the sheets and duvet up over my head. They were pleasantly cool. I had bought the highest quality I could afford, and since I didn’t have expensive tastes elsewhere in life, the sheets were nice. Now I cherished them. Pulling them off my head, I let myself fall into a deep state of physical release. My hips sank comfortably into the mattress. My shoulders relaxed. My head was warm and foggy. And then I left my body behind for a while, and sank into the world of dreams, where all the thoughts that had passed by in the shower came home to roost. When I woke, my body was calm and loose, and a deep restfulness had washed over me all night, but there were tears on my cheeks and my stomach was flexing with a sob, and my nose had run down the side of my face in the night. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. What time was it? The gray curtains billowed in slow motion with the draft. A shapeless light hung there, no harsh angle of morning sunlight. The red alarm clock on my nightstand read 3:00 a.m. but the numbers blinked. I sat up with the covers still over me. A fresh, chilly morning smell filled the apartment. I must have left a window cracked, and rain came down overnight. The blinking alarm clock meant we lost power sometime in the night while I was asleep. Slipping out of bed onto the carpeted floor, I padded to the window and threw open the shades. Outside a gray mist filled the air, but I could see clouds overhead, where the mist thickened. The sun had not come up. I could feel a chill through the window. Shivering, I went to the closet and pulled a hoodie on. Then I sat on the bed, pulled my knees up to my chin and stared out the window. My mind was strangely quiet, as if I had worked everything out in my sleep.
My inner calm persisted through the morning. My precious inner calm. The feeling was so rare that I couldn’t help waiting for the other shoe to drop. In the back of my mind I could sense the near future, waiting for me, ready for me. And here I was, calm and unconcerned. I guess I was ready too.
I called Benji that morning and still got no answer. But that didn’t matter. I knew where he was. I checked the weather. A storm was over Death Valley. I saw it on the weather radar, online. The long, trailing body of the storm, blue within green, and red alone the center. The red dot moved steadily from West to East.
Then I packed a bag. I took my old duffle bag from the compartment over my closet and laid it on my bed. I packed a change of clothes. On top I placed my notebook and a cloth bag of pens. I placed these things in the bag automatically. I had taken them with me on every trip I could remember. There was a knock at the door. I sprang upright. The gun was in my hand. How alien it seemed in my hand, my thin fingers, my knobby joints. Not killing hands.
Lifting up my shirt I shoved the gun underneath and zipped the duffle bag. Then I tiptoed to the hallway.
There was another knock, this one quieter. In a few steps I was at the door.
I closed one eye and put my face up to the peephole. I stared for a moment, unable to comprehend. Brown hair filled the view. Then a girl’s face appeared in profile.
She was turned, her side to the door. The girl with brown hair raised a hand again to knock, but her face convulsed with a cringe that touched beneath the outer layers of my heart.
She lowered her hand. Some process of thought unfolded behind her eyes.
My hand hovered over the door automatically. I clamped my own hand over my mouth. I knew who she was. I stood with my other hand on the doorknob, my face pressed to the keyhole.
She was my neighbor. Who I’d never seen. The question mark where I hung something childish and empty. I came home to her lights and quiet music spilling across the quartyard. And me coming home to no one, it helped to know she was there.
The girl walked away. She looked back for only a second.
The lights came on across the courtyard. Then music played dimly. Much later, a smell of pasta wafted across the air currents of the courtyard. But I would be gone by then.
My forehead fell to the door and I breathed a long, singular breath.
Then I retrieved the duffle bag, got into my shoes, and left.
----------------------------------------
The moon was out. I jogged across the lawn to the street. The road was dry and cool. The moon hung directly overhead, centered over the road so that its rays lit up the reflective yellow lines on the new black tar. I looked discreetly up at the moon. Still green, still cream underneath, or gray, with a layer of tuft-like, fuzzy green just barely clinging to the ancient moon.
As I jogged, my bag bumped painfully against my side. Winded, I slowed down until I was walking. My breath came hard, but it soon calmed and my thoughts began to wander as I walked toward the train that would take me to Death Valley.
It occurred to me around this time how the moon might appeal to my imagination. While the earth appeared full of color and life, the moon was a blank slate. Of course it contained shades of cream and gray, but this only increased the effect. The moon gave the ghost of an impression, and my mind filled in the rest. If I had imagined the green—continue to imagine the green, I reminded myself—what might it symbolize to me? I thought, without much pleasure, that it might symbolize growth or new beginnings that were all out of reach.
Something new and vital is brewing up there, I thought, while our own world seems to be dying. All our systems depend on one another. The systems themselves are not delicate, but we have been steadily unraveling their foundations for decades now, and when they do become unraveled, it will be nearly impossible to reverse the damage. The future is bearing down on us. It would be nice to start again somewhere new, or to escape before the world rots.
Maybe I think it is like a garden on the moon, and little moon people walk around, smelling the moon flowers, and children jumping high in the air, and then a meteor strikes again and it’s fireworks, and a blossom of dust and heat that burns out soundlessly, like a lens flare. I wonder if the moon people share our past, or if they have lived in our barren moon for eons, and only now began to grow life on their field of rock.
For them, the future is better than the past. It used to be that way in America, too, I think. Right after World War II there was this sentiment about the end of history, and people thought the old cycles of chaos and war had ended. But something changed, something switched. I guess it happened during the new moon. When everything was dark, and nobody was looking, something slipped into the world.
I guess it comforts me to imagine something else is responsible for the way things are, and not, you know.
I was almost to the station when my phone rang. My phone rang. Gunther spoke over the bad connection.
“Hello, is this Liza?”
“Yes, hi Gunther,”
“Can we talk?”
I scanned the road around me. Apart from a chattering couple, who were already passing me and walking away, I was alone on the road. The station ahead was moderately crowded, but the noises of steam vents, generators, and trains passing through was enough to offer us privacy.
“Yes,” I decided.
“Is everything okay?” He chose the words very carefully, and his voice was more formal somehow. I realized he was controlling his tone very carefully.
“Things got a little scary this week.”
He was silent.
“I had to use the tool you let me borrow.”
“Ah.”
I felt a sob creep into my throat out of nowhere. “No one else knows, except a man called Tombstone who tried to hypnotize me on a bridge down by the harbor.” I said, swallowing hard. “It reminded me of something I wanted to tell you, but I don’t know if you’ll understand.”
“Well try.”
“Ok. I have experienced a persistent blindspot in my memories; that’s how it feels. Like a smell that recalls the open pathway to a memory that’s not there. But I wasn’t alive then, I was never there, and yet I feel as if I was, my working mind believes I was there, at that place, at that time.”
“When the world changes tracks, evidence of the change appears in subtle ways. Things which shouldn’t change noticeably at all change gradually over a single lifetime. Those things basically shouldn’t change at all or else in big ways as a result of a visible catastrophe, after, say, a natural disaster. But this slow acceleration of change followed by a full return to the ordinary pace of things… That’s how you can tell we are in a different world entirely, filled with mostly the same things, rearranged and permuted slightly. So a river that had just barely flowed one way down an impossibly gradual slope might now flow the other way. Sometimes the flow stops at a dam, man-made or built by animals, or at a clogged place choked with fallen trees, and a buildup of sediment or the flow might reverse, like I described. And people are the same way, and their dams and changes in psychological topography are the same. Changes within manifest changes without. Which in turn can change the way things move over you, or flow through the troughs of your outermost psychology.”
“You’re taking a lot of heat,” he said. “You should back out. Tamara says you should back out now before things get dangerous. But she didn’t know about the tool I gave you. So you should really back out. She’ll pay you in full, in exchange for whatever information you gained this week, and we’ll hire somebody who’s trained for this level of danger.”
Now I was silent.
“You’re the second person to tell me I should back down. If I don’t see this though—”
“Liza, we don’t need you to get hurt. We need a professional. I think you may have led us to the source of Tamara’s sorrow, and maybe you are not equipped to deal with what comes next.”
“You mean, you don’t need one person risking their neck alone, impotently straining to perform a task. You think a team would do better.”
“Yes, I think that.”
“I don’t have time. Someone very close to me has become involved, and certain other events have made my participation inevitable. All the disparate elements of my life have begun to swirl around this mystery. I’m going to Death Valley, to the mouth of the whirlpool, where everything leads. Something’s going to happen there, maybe like what happened on that mountain in 1948.”
“What did happen then, on the mountain?”
“I think Tamara’s brother was sold.”
“You think he was a victim of human trafficking.” Gunther’s voice told me he had wondered about this himself, already. “Is there any reason to believe that?”
“Not directly.”
“Then be careful, because Tamara has thought about that before. We discussed at length what it might mean if her brother was sold as part of a human trafficking business. She has grieved the possibility of that outcome for her brother, but dealing with the reality would pain her in a new way. But please explain what you mean by, not directly. Please explain how something points to that outcome indirectly.”
“I can start by ruling out alternatives. I think the man wanted to kill that kid, but he didn’t. He hinted at this repeatedly. I read the interview in that book you got me. He confided to his friend, admitting his intention to kill the young boy because he hoped, after his confession, the author would trust him enough to believe what he told me next. But his story was a fantasy. He described events that can only be explained as hallucinations, and his story contained many lies and much confusion. But that’s to be expected. For one thing, he experienced a severe acid trip while he was on the mountain. For another, these events occurred during an extreme weather event. But in his hallucination, he described giving the boy to one of the people he hallucinated.
The second crucial element is this. The events of that night took place during a supermoon, one of the biggest we’ve had in decades. But that’s about to change, because an even bigger supermoon is coming in twenty-four hours. The storm will reach its peak intensity over Death Valley, at the same time the supermoon rises over the valley.
I am not a superstitious person, but in the course of my research I have encountered several individuals and organizations of high scientific repute who place great importance on the events of that night, and while they deny the importance of the coming supermoon and its simultaneous storm, but their actions show otherwise. Someone called a hit on me. The Shoemakers paid me a visit. That’s why I utilized the tool you let me borrow.
“A preponderance of evidence.”
“Exactly. In 1948, three things happened at the same time. A supermoon rose over the Firewatch tower on Mount Coney, a storm ravaged the island, and a child went missing. I have documented witnesses to each of these events, and reason to believe that these events are connected, or at least that several disconnected organizations believe they are connected, or consider them connected in some way. All that I did already. Tomorrow night, in Death Valley, two of those three events will occur simultaneously, which has not happened since 1948. I am going to stop the third.”