Behind the Moon Read online

  “Madison Smartt Bell writes with the urgency of someone who just received a dire prognosis. And Behind the Moon will remind you that you are alive.”

  —JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER, author of Here I Am

  “Behind the Moon would have caught my attention simply because it was written by Madison Smartt Bell—a writer whose voice I always trust. I would have expected another precise detailed chronicle like All Souls Rising, one of my favorite novels. But this is not at all the voice I know—this is a unique and startling descent into a completely different kind of narrative. Yes, a fever dream but couched in the voice of a deft and careful writer who knows how to steer us into the lives of characters in trouble. We shift from the feverish imagination of Julie in her hospital bed to the plainly matter-of-fact accounts of the boys who chased her into the cave where she slipped and fell into a dream of cave paintings and the all too close terror of a black-headed bear. Between fever dreams and stone-hard reality, Madison Smartt Bell has crafted a powerful examination of what is and what might be. It is simply wonderful.”

  —DOROTHY ALLISON, author of Bastard out of Carolina

  “This new novel by Madison Smartt Bell is disarmingly good. The patience, the deliberate strokes, the understated tension and the inevitability of it all is pure Bell and yet he shows up here with a completely different voice. I love these characters. I love the writing. Behind the Moon is a brilliant work.”

  —PERCIVAL EVERETT, author of Half an Inch of Water

  “Bell gives us this fast-paced, spiritually inspired dream-story, full of heart and hope and danger. It’s adventure at its finest: a spiked drink, a desert cave, a gunshot, a mother looking for her child. Buckle in: you are headed for a terrific ride.”

  —DEB OLIN UNFERTH, author of Wait Till You See Me Dance

  “Behind the Moon is a visceral, full-body primal experience; terrifying, seductive, Madison Smart Bell at his best.”

  —A.M. HOMES, author of May We Be Forgiven

  “Behind the Moon is a thrilling and uncannily powerful story by one of the best living American fiction writers. I couldn’t put it down.”

  —JOHN MCMANUS, author of Fox Tooth Heart

  “Madison Smartt Bell is one of the great American masters. His prose scintillates with particularity and hints at divinity. I read Behind the Moon in one sitting and was moved by Julie’s inchoate spiritual longing as well as her mother Marissa’s primal drive. This book has a pre-religious power, read it and be inspired.”

  —DARCEY STEINKE, author of Sister Golden Hair: A Novel

  “With spare but lyrical prose, Madison Smartt Bell tells a harrowing story with propulsive drama. A haunting and hypnotic read.”

  —HEIDI W. DURROW, author of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

  “Madison Smartt Bell’s Behind the Moon is a fever dream, indeed. Modern medicine has conceived no antidote for such an atmospheric, rewarding entanglement of lyrical genius. Mr. Bell writes like a scrimshaw’s angel, as he’s been doing, luckily for us, nigh four decades.”

  —GEORGE SINGLETON, author of Calloustown

  “In his latest work, Madison Smartt Bell secures his position as one of the country’s most innovative, inventive and accomplished writers. Part horror story, part dream, part meditation, Behind the Moon creates its own meta-Gothic category. The story turns the usual teenaged drama of sex and drugs on its head and then spins it into a four-dimensional God’s eye woven with mystical, spiritual and maternal threads. From the heart-racing opening to the eye-opening end, you won’t be able to put this book down.”

  —JESSICA ANYA BLAU, author of The Trouble with Lexie

  “Madison Smartt Bell is a master of structure with tremendous range, which is on full display in Behind the Moon. This cinematic novel is a rare combination of smart literary novel and compelling page-turner, at once menacing and sweeping, dark and transportive, eloquent and hallucinatory.”

  —MICHAEL KIMBALL, author of Big Ray

  “Taking readers to places both spiritual and shot through with adventure, Madison Smartt Bell’s new novel renders the many ways in which longing can take form, with both disastrous and redemptive consequences.”

  —CHANTEL ACEVEDO, author of The Distant Marvels

  BEHIND THE MOON

  A fever dream by

  Madison Smartt Bell

  City Lights Books | San Francisco

  Copyright © 2017 by Madison Smartt Bell

  All rights reserved

  Cover and book design by Linda Ronan

  Original calligraphy by Miles Mermer

  Thanks to Hillary Louise Johnson for being the first to get the point and for the germ of a design plan, to Linda Ronan for making this fantastic design happen, to Stacey Lewis for making them look, and to Elaine Katzenberger for being a wise, good, patient and insightful editor.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bell, Madison Smartt, author.

  Title: Behind the moon / Madison Smartt Bell.

  Description: San Francisco : City Lights Publishers, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016057672 (print) | LCCN 2017004677 (ebook) | ISBN 9780872867369 (softcover) | ISBN 9780872867444 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780872867376

  Subjects: LCSH: Coma—Patients—Fiction. | Teenage girls—Fiction. | Shamanism—Fiction. | Magic realism (Literature) | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Visionary & Metaphysical. | FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Occult & Supernatural. | GSAFD: Occult fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3552.E517 B44 2017 (print) | LCC PS3552.E517 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057672

  City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore

  261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133

  www.citylights.com

  For Celia,

  who tried her best

  to help me make it better

  “The dreamer enters the unknown world. . . . The dreamer, in the course of such journeys, meets other beings and speaks with them. She may sometimes meet other dreamers, in the form of energy. She is able to make speedy departures and returns between the known world and the unknown world, which always gives the impression of being outside time.”

  —Mimerose Beaubrun,

  Nan Domi

  “Understandably enough, they would have believed that caves led to that subterranean tier of the cosmos. The walls, ceilings, and floors of the caves were therefore little more than a thin membrane between themselves and the creatures and happenings of the underworld. The caves were awesome, liminal places in which to be.”

  —Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams,

  The Shamans of Prehistory

  “The acoustics magnify every sound, and it takes the brain a few minutes to accept the totality of the darkness—your sight keeps grasping for a hold. Whatever the art means, you understand, at that moment, that its vessel is both a womb and a sepulchre.”

  —Judith Thurman, “First Impressions:

  What does the world’s oldest art say about us?”

  1

  The eye was on her first—the first thing she knew. A brown eye with sickles of a yellow gleam around the edges of the iris, attentive, indifferent—did it even see her? She could not see any part of herself, only the eye that seemed to regard her, with a kind of warmth, she felt, but she was still wondering if it saw her at all and not at all sure that she wanted it to.

  She couldn’t feel her body in the dark, and she thought of being frightened by that, but it was just a thought, not fear itself. She remembered that not long before she had been truly frightened, but she didn’t remember anything more than the sensation. Where did the light come from in which she saw
the bear? It was so, so dark at the bottom of the . . . Of the shaft. A sort of shaft, maybe; she had fallen into it.

  Maybe. She didn’t remember that, either. There was no pain. Now the bear’s head organized itself around the golden-brown eye, there the dark muzzle, damp nostrils, a hint of white teeth and red tongue . . . another eye, but this one hidden under the heavy, hairy bone of the brow, and turned a little into the stone, as if it had not yet come out of the stone.

  Maybe it was only a a trick of a few deft lines, streaks of hematite and ochre, that made the bear appear in her mind. Cunningly stroked across a natural contour of the rock. Yet she could feel the warm ebb and flow of the bear’s breath across her face (it was that near), could hear the grumbling of its breath. The big shoulder and the high, humped back of a grizzly coming toward her, as if through a fissure of the rock. Emerging, as if the stone was water. A grizzly!—she should have been afraid.

  But this, this creature was older than any grizzly, by hundreds—no, thousands of years. And the eye was like her own, she knew, and she was seeing with the same eye that saw her.

  2

  A bright white light bore down on her, piercing, like a laser or a diamond.

  Julie, Julie . . .

  The voice hauled on her, dragged at her. She knew it. Did she, had she loved it once upon a time?

  Julie . . . What happened? Julie . . .

  The voice wanted her to come out of the cave. She would not come.

  3

  In the yellowish gleam of her mind’s eye she saw herself among them, five of them on three motorcycles raising red dust as they came across the desert floor toward the rock shelters. She would have liked to ride with Jamal but he had the smallest, lightest bike—hardly more than a scooter really, and Marko had urged her up behind him, while Karyn and Sonny rode together, and Marko roared out in the lead. Julie sat with her legs uneasily forked around the squat muscles of Marko’s back, and now and then he looked over his shoulder at her in a greedy way she didn’t like, but she liked the rush of air in her face and the way her long black hair streamed in the wind, from under the band of the turned-around ball-cap she was wearing—none of them had helmets.

  To savor the speed she closed her eyes. A picture appeared: a tousle-headed little girl in a calico dress, riding behind her father on a bicycle, reaching out for something—rambler roses twined through pickets of a fence the bicycle passed; in this daydream it was springtime. The little girl could never quite get her fingers to touch a rose, but whenever she reached, the rear wheel of the bicycle wobbled, and the father, unaware of the cause, bent more sternly into his pedaling.

  “Don’t do that.” Marko’s voice, cutting through the snarl of the engine. “You’ll dump us.”

  Julie started out of her reverie. Had she, herself, reached out her hand? There was nothing nearby. They were crossing a long wide flat of the desert and the nearest hillocks of painted sand looked halfway to the horizon.

  Sonny pulled level with them, the drone of his engine beating with Marko’s. Karyn’s face smooshed out against his leather back, her mouth a little open, moist, like a sleeping mouth that breathed against a pillow. Sonny shrugged his near shoulder, rolled the throttle with a faint smile. He pulled ahead, and Marko tilted in to the right of his tailpipe. In the roar of the bigger engines Julie couldn’t catch any hint of Jamal’s smaller one. She tried to look back to see where he was, but she couldn’t turn her head far enough without unbalancing the ride.

  Now they were coming into the long shadow of the cliffs where the rock shelters were. Marko swung the heavy bike in a long curve that brought them out into the sunlight again, beside a boulder, where Sonny had stopped. He put his heel down and cut the motor. In the quick shock of silence Julie thought she heard the cry of a hawk overhead and she looked up, blinking into the sun, which was still high. There would be several hours of daylight yet, and she thought it must be three, or three-thirty—buzzers would be ringing to let her out of school, if she hadn’t skipped.

  Karyn, who might have been thinking a similar thought, gave her a complicit smile as she swung her leg clear of the saddle of Sonny’s bike. Hastily, Julie scrambled down herself. Her legs felt rubbery from the long, shuddering ride. She took a few backward steps away from the others and turned to look in the direction they’d come from. With a distant, crickety sound, Jamal’s smaller bike persisted toward them, leading a plume of the reddish dust. His hair in a cloud around the triangle of his face. Sunlight winked from a yellow lens of his wraparounds.

  “Rice-burner,” Sonny said, and turned to spit Skoal Bandit juice in the sand.

  Marko winked at Sonny, then pulled the bandanna from his head and used it to wipe grit from his face. “That’s a spaghetti-burner, dude,” he said and grinned aslant at Julie, pushing back the inky waves of his hair. “He’ll get here some day, won’t he?” Marko said. White teeth.

  4

  Now the light of the eye was extinguished, and she saw instead a pattern of dots, in umber and ochre, splayed over a hump of the stone, dividing into two bands like a tree trunk forking, like branches of a stream. The pattern swirled and scattered, and then for a time there was just darkness.

  She could feel an object in her hand, a cool and smoothly contoured rectangle; it must be her phone. If she turned it on, there would be light. If it turned on.

  Away on the surface, in the rose-colored dusk, the moon had appeared before the sun quite set, a wafer frayed on the edges like lace and pale to near transparency, against the deepening blue of the sky. Jamal said one of those weird things that charmed her: I wonder what it’s like behind the moon.

  5

  The bikes ticked slightly as they cooled, there beside the boulder. Jamal had pushed up his yellow sunglasses to investigate his saddle bags. Karyn frowned into the screen of her phone, blinked at the bright images emerging and dissolving. Sonny ran his blunt fingers down her spine into her waistband, and Karyn elbowed him and wriggled away.

  “Of course no signal,” Sonny said. “What else did we come here for?”

  Marko pulled a clear bottle full of a bright violet liquid from his inside jacket pocket and tossed it Sonny, who had to stoop to catch it. Bad throw. Straightening, Sonny uncapped the bottle and passed it to Karyn, who took a gulp without looking, still fidgeting with her phone. Once she had registered the taste she pushed the phone into her tight front pocket and reached for the bottle again. Then Sonny offered the bottle to Julie. Julie shook her head.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got water.”

  “You need your vitamins,” Marko said. She could feel him looking at her—she didn’t look back. Jamal was laying out the components of a small dome tent on the sand beside his silvery-blue Vespa. Julie watched him, his long fingers shaking out the sectioned poles so that the elastic cords snapped them together at full length. She picked up one of the poles and flexed the fiberglass.

  “Here,” Jamal said. “You thread it this way.”

  Marko bent over his heavy black-and-silver Harley, unloading from the leather saddlebags: trail mix and MREs, a much, much bigger tent kit, a small vinyl case that he unzipped to reveal a sleek little video palm-corder.

  “Whoa,” said Karyn. “Cool camera! Where’d you get that?”

  “Ultimo.” For a moment, Marko caught her in the camera’s steely eye. Julie watched Karyn, playing up, shifting the rounded weights of her body, tossing her honey-streaked hair back and exposing the white line of her throat.

  “Okay, lemme see,” Karyn said, reaching for the camera. Marko held it away from her, making her reach across his body, then let her have it.

  “Jeez,” Karyn said. “High rez, huh?” Her fingernail jabbed at the tiny buttons. “Look how you can zoom in on that. Look, Julie, I can see all down in my pores.”

  Gross Julie thought, but she was helping Jamal with the tent, capturing the poles at the corners so he could slip the floor pins into them. The tent took shape as its own small world, a free-standing
hemisphere, and for some reason Julie pictured the other half that would make it whole, existing somehow like a reflection beneath the sand.

  Jamal stood back, resting his knuckles on his narrow hips, and in the next moment a gust of wind caught the tent and whirled it end over end across the sand toward the horizon. Jamal stood frozen for a beat before he took off after it, and Julie started after him, but the wind was faster than both of them; they would never have caught the tent if it hadn’t died down.

  Jamal seized the poles where they crossed at the top, then doubled over, winded by the two-hundred-yard dash. Julie trotted up, gasping herself, and laid one hand on the curve of a tent pole. Back by the boulder, under the cliff, the others were capering and slapping their knees, their faces twisting with inaudible laughter.

  “Shit,” Jamal said, running a finger along a four-inch tear in the netting of one of the side windows.

  “No biggie,” Julie said. “There’s no bugs out here anyway. Too dry.”

  Jamal looked at her thoughtfully, then nodded, as if they’d made a deal. Then he picked up the tent like a briefcase and started back toward the cliff.

  “Need help?” said Julie.

  Jamal shrugged. “It doesn’t weigh anything.” But then the wind gusted up again, and Julie had to catch the other side of the tent to steady it.

  “Stakes won’t hold in this loose sand,” Sonny said, when they had come back.

  “Tell me about it,” said Jamal. “We’ll have to get rocks and weight it down.”

  “What, inside?” Julie said.

  “Of course, inside,” Jamal said. “Hold this a minute.”

  Jamal’s tent would barely hold two people, and that was without any rocks inside it. There were only two tents. Julie had not thought about how that part would work out, and she decided not to think about it now, holding the tent in place while Jamal looked for rocks.