Moon Dreams (The Jeremy Moon Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  That should please Taplan Jr., Moon decided. Moon's boss, the younger Taplan of Taplan and Taplan, was a great believer in putting clients at ease. Moon thrust the pocket calendar into his jacket, sighing at how Byzantine advertising was, sometimes as much so as the law, or medicine, or even politics.

  The clock radio was still on. The announcer told Moon that this was the first day of winter and advised him to dress warmly, for there was an eighty percent chance of sleety rain. A brighter feminine voice was chirping the praises of Macy's lingerie department, to the background strains of “White Christmas,” when Moon turned the radio off.

  Taplan and Taplan was located, by any sane calculation, about twenty minutes’ drive from Moon's north Atlanta apartment, but then no sane calculator would envision the traffic snarl of Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, I-285 East, and Thornton Bridge Road during rush hour. Moon prudently allowed an hour for the trip, and this morning, with the promised sleet snapping against the windshield, he needed every second of it.

  At that, he was a few minutes late, for he had to find a parking slot at Taplan and Taplan, a quadruple-decked building of yellow brick within sight and hearing of the perimeter highway. He climbed out of the Civic, hunched a little deeper in his overcoat, and fished his briefcase out from behind the front seat. Just as he straightened, Moon became aware of Cassie—Cassandra Briggs, at twenty-four the youngest of Taplan and Taplan's department heads—close beside him. “Hi,” she said in a voice that Moon had once, in a moment of moderate inebriation, compared to a distant silver bell. “Shitty weather, huh?”

  “Awful,” he agreed. Cassie slipped her arm comfortably through his, shielding them both with her umbrella, and Moon had to transfer the briefcase to the other hand. He asked, “What's the art department up to today?”

  Cassie scrunched up her face, an arresting face, small-featured, elfin, with a faintly pointed chin, snub nose, and two tilted green eyes. “Easter-bunny crap for the dime-store chain. I wish old Max'd drop these penny-ante accounts, but what can you do?”

  “You can get his story about how he started in the business.” Moon grinned as they walked past dripping rows of parked cars. “Just a pen and ink and some paper, and a fellow in the dime-store business took a chance on him—”

  “Please,” Cassie said. “I'm not even pregnant. I don't want to puke right here in the parking lot.” Her hip gave his a soft nudge. “So what's up with you tonight?”

  Moon opened the door for her and stood back as she folded her umbrella. He said, “Not much. The usual, you know. Got some copy to work on for the wine people, probably be sharpening that up. How about the weekend?”

  Charlie at the front desk nodded to them over his morning newspaper. Cassie gave Moon a sideways glance. “Have you forgotten? Got to spend Christmas in Tampa with the folks.”

  Moon shook his head. “That's right. It slipped my mind.”

  “Won't even be able to attend the office party tomorrow afternoon. I have to be at Hartsfield at twelve for my flight.”

  Moon thumbed the elevator button. “Sorry.”

  “You don't need to be. Just don't get drunk and fall into the typing pool.”

  The elevator doors opened, and they stepped into an empty car. As the doors closed, Cassie reached up to plant a quick kiss at the corner of Moon's mouth. “Hey,” she said, “I've got an idea. I'll catch you in between.”

  “In between what?”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Christmas and New Year's, of course. Keep your mind on your work today, Jeremy.”

  “I'll try. If I could get some sleep—”

  The elevator doors opened on the third floor, the art floor, and Cassie slipped a thigh against the rubber bumper to keep them open. “That reminds me. I told you yesterday you needed to get some sleep—” She rummaged in her purse for a moment, then produced a brown plastic phial. “Got it. Here you go.”

  Jeremy took the tube. “What are these—”

  “Sleeping pills. I went through a rough spell a couple of years back. Take one and you'll sleep all night. No dreams. Guaranteed. Bye.” Cassie's pixie face disappeared behind the closing doors.

  Jeremy rattled the pills in the tube. The label told him they were 100-milligram Nembutal capsules, that the dosage was one capsule at bedtime, that originally there had been eight pills in the bottle, and that the prescription was not to be refilled. He popped the top off the tube and shook three yellow capsules into his hand. With a shrug, he put them back into the phial, replaced the top, and dropped the tube in his coat pocket as he stepped out of the elevator on the fourth floor. Here, in a warren of offices, was his own home base. He got there, shucked off his overcoat and hung it on a hook behind his desk and settled into his swivel chair, ready for a day of work.

  He spent most of that morning proofing a series of magazine spots he had done for a Miami Beach oceanfront hotel, and reading them reminded him of Cassie and her Florida Christmas. When the words began to chime meaninglessly in his brain, Moon occasionally allowed himself to daydream, fantasizing about sand and surf and a very tan Cassie. At least once his daydreaming crossed the line into a doze.

  In a dream he recognized as a dream, Moon stood naked in the bathroom of a hotel suite—through the open door he could see a ceiling-to-floor window, and beyond that, the ocean shading from beachside white and green through brown over the sandbar to a faraway deep blue—while Cassie took a steaming shower. He was ready to shave, and looking into the mirror he decided he looked like a smiling lecher, Pan without horns, needing only some grape leaves in his tousled brown hair. But he'd have to get rid of the beard. Cassie began to hum, a nameless but cheerfully licentious tune, and he turned to look her way, her figure tantalizingly blurred by the frosted glass of the shower door as

  his reflection lunged out of the mirror to grab his shoulder

  “Hey, hey!”

  Moon blinked. Bob Escher stood over him, hand on Moon's left shoulder. “Hey,” Escher repeated. “What's wrong with you?”

  Moon rubbed his palm over his face. When he took it down, he saw his own cubicle, ad ideas and roughs thumbtacked to the corkboard covering two of the three walls, computer terminal glowing green on the desk in front of him, the hotel ad proofs fanned out beside it. “Sorry,” he said. “Guess I must've dropped off for a minute. What time is it?”

  “Nearly time for the Robinard meeting. You want some water or coffee or something? You look pretty rough.”

  You're not so hot yourself, Moon thought. Bob Escher was almost two years younger than he, but with his baby face developing a double chin and his fine platinum hair thinning to show pink scalp beneath, he looked older. At least, Jeremy hoped he did. But aloud, he muttered, “No, I'm all right. We might as well run on down.” He scooped up a brown folder and rose from the desk.

  In the elevator Escher said, “Any ideas so far?”

  “Nothing we didn't talk about last time. I thought we'd wait to see how Max decides to pitch it.”

  “Yeah, right. I thought that too.”

  Sure you did, Bob. Sure you did.

  The group at the meeting was small, with Max Taplan presiding, Albert Robinard moodily looking out the rainstreaked window at the gray woods beyond, at the gray office towers beyond the woods. The art, broadcast, and copy departments had all sent reps, and they kept up a desultory murmur until Taplan called them all to order.

  “Now, then,” Max said, rubbing his hands as his father did, “let's settle in and take a look at what Robinard Wines needs. Minter, what about the magazine art?”

  The room seemed stuffy to Jeremy. Too hot, or maybe it was just the influence of their fearless leader: Max Taplan was a nervous man in his early fifties, still seeking a way to impress his father, Taplan Sr. , with his acumen. Or perhaps by this point only with his bare competence. At the meeting Max was like an exceptionally jittery basketball player, passing the ball along as soon as it came into his hands, to the art department, the TV people, even to Robinard. Jeremy closed h
is eyes for a moment, and the moment extended.

  Again Bob Escher jostled him awake, but this time he came merely from sleep, not from a dream. “Well, Jeremy?” Max said for what was evidently the second time. “What do you think?”

  Jeremy tilted his head back, studied the rough-textured ceiling tiles, then dropped his gaze back to the walnut-topped table. His hands rested there, holding a pencil horizontally between them, and in the shiny table top he could see two pink blobs—his hands—and between them the fuzzy yellow bridge of the pencil. He cleared his throat. “Radio,” he said.

  Robinard looked at him with the indifference of a man dreaming of sun on Gulf waters. Max cleared his throat, and the sound was half a hysterical giggle. “But Bob has already talked about the possibilities of—”

  Jeremy lifted a finger for silence. When it fell, he said, “Just one word: demographics.”

  A flicker of interest, like a marlin below the surface, showed in Robinard's eyes. “That's the stuff we need,” he said. “What can you tell me about demographics?”

  Escher murmured inanities for a moment before Taplan ordered a far-reaching demographic survey of potential radio markets. That should be ready, certainly, by the middle of January—

  Robinard, Jeremy was sure, felt delight at the reprieve. Now he could get in a month of sailing before having to return to Atlanta. At any rate he beamed. “Good thinking, fella,” the yachtsman said across the table to Jeremy. “I can see you earn your keep around here.” He got up, terminating the meeting.

  On their way back up to the fourth floor, Bob Escher glared at Jeremy. “Thanks a lot, guy,” he said. “Demographics. You had to do that to me.”

  “You should've worked them up,” Jeremy said. “That's standard for accounts like Robinard's.”

  “Yeah,” Bob said, his voice still surly. “You wait till I'm department head. We'll see about demographics then.” But a moment later he added, “Hell, I'm kidding. You know I'm kidding.”

  Yes, Bob, of course you're kidding. You've still got an ad campaign to blunder through. You'll need somebody's brain—you never use your own.

  Jeremy didn't say that aloud. To Escher he said, “Sorry. I didn't mean to put you on the spot. But Robinard likes the idea, so go with it.”

  “Yeah,” Escher said, turning into his own office.

  By the time Moon got behind his desk again, his head was pounding. He kept aspirin in his desk drawer, but after he managed to flush them out from their hiding place among paper clips and printer ribbons, he found the flat tin jammed shut. Press red corners, the instructions snidely told him. When he did, he succeeded only in hurting the pads of his thumbs. Moon put the tin on the floor and used his heel, crunching the aspirin container twice before finally unjamming it. By then he had powdered aspirin.

  Grunting with disgust, Moon ripped a square sheet off his notepad ("Taplan and Taplan,” it proclaimed. “Ideas on tap for you!"), veed the paper into shape between his fingers, shook some aspirin into it, tilted his head back, and dumped the contents into his mouth. Suddenly, forcibly, Moon remembered his grandfather, dead fifteen years now, in life an overalled farmer on 120 acres of red north Georgia clay.

  His grandfather used to take headache powders, the individual doses wrapped in waxed paper about the size and shape of a band-aid wrapper. After his grandfather had swallowed the dose, for some ungodly reason Jeremy had liked to lick the last of the bitter, astringent dust from the wrapper, following it with a nose-stinging gulp of icy Coke. The aspirin was like that now, coarser but reminiscent enough to make him long for a soft drink.

  At noon he phoned the art department, but Cassie had already acquired the harried manner of preholiday rush. She was tied up with some last-minute changes, sorry, sorry. He went to lunch alone.

  For no reason Moon ate at a restaurant that Cassie favored, a young professionals’ haven. It was a trendy little place hung with ferns, its menu given over to veggie burgers, whole-grain breads, organic salads, and its service provided by waiters who seemed to have sprung to life by means of asexual fission. The alfalfa sprouts in Moon's salad got stuck between his third and fourth molars.

  Back at work, Jeremy cleared his desk of the old proofs, then worked for four more hours on prelims for the wine campaign, ones that Robinard had casually okayed before leaving the meeting room. He became aware of the overtime he was putting in only when Glenda, the division secretary, stuck her head into his cubicle and told him that he could spend the whole Christmas season at work if he wanted to, but she was heading home in about two minutes.

  Shaking his head, Moon finished typing a paragraph, printed it, tucked it into a folder with the rest of the ideas, and put the folder into his briefcase. He took his overcoat from the hook, and when it rattled, he examined the pockets. Of course. Cassie's prescription.

  He got into the overcoat, hefted his briefcase, and arched his back. His spine crackled. On the first floor, Tony, the night security man, had replaced Charlie. Tony didn't look up from his newspaper, but grunted as Moon passed. Charlie and Tony, Jeremy thought. What would happen one morning if some evil being substituted the Journal, the evening newspaper, for Charlie's morning Constitution? Chaos, probably. The downfall of T&T.

  The air outside was colder, but overhead the sky had cleared, showing a pale full moon already risen in the east, and in the early twilight it looked as if the world had never even heard of sleet. “Another day,” Jeremy remarked to himself unoriginally as he unlocked the Civic. Then the difference between the fair blue sky overhead and the rain of the morning struck him more forcibly. “Another world,” he added.

  Might be a peg there, he thought, sliding behind the wheel. Might just be something to hang the Robinard campaign on. Robinard wines ... take you to another world. Robinard, when the Old World needs a new look. Robinard, a new world of taste. Robinard ... gets you drunk as all hell.

  With a rueful chuckle Jeremy switched off his brain, or at least the part of it that was creative on demand. Time enough for the wine account later. After all, he wasn't exactly bound for a new world. He'd be right behind his desk tomorrow, and next year, same as always. Meanwhile, he thought, the Bob Eschers of the world would nail down their promotions and pass him by.

  He, on the other hand, would be stuck in the same old world, stuck there forever.

  Pulling out of the parking lot, toward the murderous traffic of I-285, Jeremy hoped, just for a moment, that he was wrong.

  As a matter of fact, he was.

  Chapter 2

  Moon went to bed at eleven, tired enough to hope no dreams would disturb him and trusting enough in modern alchemy to believe that Cassie's magic pill would help to insure that. But sometime in the dark he found himself running again, fleeing through an ill-defined and shifting landscape something that he feared, though he did not know what it could be. From one part of his mind, some removed and objective part, Moon watched himself with sardonic detachment, knowing all along that this was all dream and illusion, that nothing real pursued him.

  Even so, another part of him ran with heart-busting speed through a gray world, all slumping, runny cubes of gigantic size, twisting pathways between them, and a glaring gray-white sky overhead. Manhattan would look like this, he thought fleetingly, after the high-altitude bombs went off.

  Slow down, the observer part of himself told the runner. Slow down and think.

  Somewhat to Moon's surprise, his dreamed self did just that: pounded from a full run into a trot, from a trot to an exhausted shamble, and finally to a walk. Dry air, tasting of hot metal, rasped in his mouth and nose. His lungs ached. The slower pace was a godsend, but even so his muscles quivered in exhaustion. If only he could find a place to rest, to sit....

  But there was no such place, none that he could see. Indeed, when he looked ahead, Moon could see only the path before him. Dimly, peripherally, he was aware of the melted-candy land around him on either side, but whenever he looked directly at one of those colossal, sagging cubes, he
found instead that the pathway had turned and that he was following it through the place where, a moment ago, the obstacle had stood.

  Finally he stopped, the thudding in his chest now diminished to something more like a normal heartbeat, and turned completely around, making a searchlight survey of his surroundings. “Great,” he mumbled to himself. No matter how he turned, he seemed to be facing the pathway, with vague blocky shapes on either side. “Now what?” he asked aloud. It was a perfect time to wake up, if only Cassie's damn pill would let him.

  Since it wouldn't, the observer part of his mind, that part that was comfortably aware of being snug in bed light-years away from this place, suggested with cool rationality that he continue along the path. Something was bound to be at the end. The part of him that seemed trapped in the gray netherworld told the observer to stuff it—but his body began to plod along the pathway nonetheless.

  After what might have been an hour of walking, or a week, Moon perceived a reward of sorts. Ahead of him, like a wall running from horizon to horizon, was a dim gray barrier, one that did not dance away to nothing when he looked directly at it. He recalled a Jimmy Durante sketch he had seen on TV years ago: Durante and another actor were shipwrecked sailors lost on an empty ocean. He gave himself the advice that the Schnoz had given the other sailor: “Pull for the horizon,” he muttered to himself. “It's better than nothing.” Each step brought him imperceptibly nearer the wall. He began to count his paces, but somewhere past a thousand he lost count. Just at the point when Moon had decided that nightmares at least had the virtue of excitement and interest, unlike this endless trudge, he became aware that he had more than the wall as a goal: he saw a doorway.