by Roy Freirich
“You’re paranoid! How does that make any sense? So kissing you . . . doesn’t mean anything?”
She shakes her head, as if trying to clear it. “Why are you being like this?
“Why are you?”
Oh, how could this not be? What does she even know about him, really? Is a smile a reason to trust? The way he looks in a wet suit or on a wave, flinging back his wet hair with a toss of his head?
For a brief moment they stand there, close enough to touch again, but too far away, really, to ever reach each other. It’s easier, somehow, to give in to this pain than to suck it up and apologize, to admit she was wrong or over-reacted, or is just being weird. This ache is small enough, manageable; later she will have given too much to shake it off, so now is best, this night, this ending.
His eyes dart downward, and she follows his look to see his cell in his hand, screen brightening and fading, a bluish shining, that stupid game again. A sound comes from her throat, almost a laugh, but more like the start of crying. Was he always holding it, always half-someplace else, on with his goofy crew, only pretending to be with her?
He actually holds up a finger. “One sec, lemme just . . .”
She tries, breathlessly, through the shadows and the heavy loose sand and up the beach steps to her lane, but she can’t outrun his voice, traveling through the dark at the speed of sound: “Cort!”
11
“It’s one of those things. People get an idea. It goes around, and psychosomatic symptoms spread.” He clings to the best examples he has, a mantra: “Nausea, panic, cases of hysteria.”
With the Boy finally tucked in below, it’s later than usual, but he and Kathy try to recreate their ritual, last nightcap out in the cockpit, in the soft air of the late summer night. Usually they sprawl on banquette cushions, her head on his shoulder, sipping wine and trading hits on a fatty, gazing idly up at the shrouded moon, but tonight they face each other across the sole, leaning forward with elbows on knees as they confer. She’s watchful, face impassive, all common-sense Yankee skepticism. Her folks must have been hard cases, Libertarians in no-nonsense L.L. Bean gear, autodidact agnostics.
A drunken shout echoes across the float from the pier gate where a few tourists wander by, well past closing time, back to their share house, razzing each other: “Moron!” “Up yours!” “Oooh-woo.”
Kathy lifts a bemused eyebrow at Sam, at the revelers out so late, as if to prove his point.
He offers the clearest example: “Sometimes it’s as simple as a rumor in a school lunchroom—one kid hears somebody got sick, others imagine they are, too. And imagining can make it so.”
“So we’re just crazy, or some of us more than others, anyway.”
“Not at all. Simple example: laughter. Simpler? Yawning. Involuntary reflex spread in a group.”
Kathy looks thoughtful, and then, of course, helplessly yawns, finishing with a soft little laugh as Sam follows suit.
As if on cue, a cascade of faint, loopy laughter sounds from a few boats down. Kathy and Sam trade another glance.
“So . . . there have been other cases?”
He pauses. “People get afraid and lose sleep. War of the Worlds, the Orson Welles radio show? Anthrax scares. Escaped convicts. The panic in Puerto Rico, chupacabra.”
She squints, bemused. “‘Chupa—’ who? But what’s everyone afraid of here?”
“Actually? Not sleeping, best I can tell.”
Kathy gives her head a tiny shake. It’s a ribbon of thought, twisted once, ends met.
He sighs. “It’s also all I’ve got, and without more, nobody official’s in a hurry to come check it out.”
“So, okay, say you’re right. What happens?”
“Well, good news there. Sleeplessness for no physical reason? Always goes away. Always.” He keeps on, clinching it with a show of kindly understanding, his voice warm: “But you always can get on the next ferry, Kath, if you decide that’s what you want. I don’t think anyone needs to, but anyone can. Probably not me so much, you understand.”
She nods slowly, weighing the irony: it’s easier to stay when you don’t really need a way out. Even easier if you have one.
Her gaze shifts down the companionway steps to the Boy awake in the dinette bunk, eyes gleaming in the dimness. She drops her voice: “Sam, he’s up too. You should try and talk to him again. He seems . . . traumatized?”
Two possibilities present themselves: one where he patiently explains the dangers of beginning a difficult, lengthy treatment he can’t finish, and the other, which he chooses for simplicity’s sake, and because it’s just as true: “He knows he’s safe with us tonight, Kath. Child Services’ll be here tomorrow. They know what they’re doing.”
“Come on, Sam,” she presses. “I’ll just go on in to bed, you can try. You were a psychiatrist, you could at least—”
He gives her a smile, stubborn but not unkind. “I’m just . . . really not anymore, Kath. And it’s just until tomorrow.”
She watches him silently, appraisingly, waiting.
She’s put a good-natured face on another night with their guest, and it’s shifted the ground.
He nods, finally, and stands.
−−−
In the dimness, the Boy’s eyes flash toward Sam as he nears, and then away.
“Hey, Captain. Mind if we talk? Or if I do?”
Nothing. Sam hesitates, and then sits near the Boy in his dinette bunk.
“Wish I knew what to call you. I guess Captain’ll have to do. You like boats?”
It’s still a cloying, patronizing approach, but too much, too soon can bring too many unimaginable consequences, with too many regrets sure to follow. Of course, too little, too late brings its own attendant sorrows. “How’s the bunk? It’s funny to sleep on the kitchen table, isn’t it? But I like the way it folds down.”
The air around the Boy seems charged. His eyes remain downcast, his pale lips pressed together, a stubborn line.
Sam takes in a breath and seems to hold it as he asks, “We’d sure love to know who your mom or dad are. They’d want to know you’re okay.”
The Boy begins trembling, eyes everywhere, breaths quickening until he’s nearly gasping.
Sam backs off quickly, raising his palms. “Okay. Okay, Captain. You know the most important thing of all? You’re safe. Everything is fine here. It’s just us . . . and the little sounds we talked about. You can hear them if you listen. You hear them?”
The Boy seems to calm, little by little, slowly.
Sam murmurs, “Hear them, the boat, the water?”
Suddenly, inexplicably, the Boy’s eyes find Sam’s with the cold certainty, once again, of an accusation.
Sam pales and stands; it’s a look he recognizes from eyes he remembers, of the desperate, the failed and forsaken.
He backs away, speechless, and with a half-turn ducks into his cabin, where Kathy’s already in bed, Destination: Tuscany cued up on her eReader.
She looks up inquisitively.
“Your turn.”
−−−
Through the main cabin, Kathy moves quietly and quickly to the Boy. No hesitation, she simply puts her arms around him and brings him up against her. He doesn’t resist or respond, but she doesn’t falter, just gently clinging, accepting his stillness and silence.
”It’s okay. You just sleep. You’re okay. Shhh . . .”
Somehow, she has guessed correctly; he needs gentle decisiveness, freedom from the confusion of choices.
He blinks slowly, as if absorbing her reassurance, and his eyes begin to close. They open again, briefly, but weariness seems to overtake him and trust to allow him, finally, to yield.
She listens to his breaths slow and deepen, and feels his little muscles relax as his body sags, and she carefully lays him back down, tenderly brushing hair back from h
is forehead. She watches him another moment, relief glistening in her eyes at his, now closed.
She stands quietly, steps to their cabin doorway, looks back, and then slips inside, leaving the door ajar.
From their bunk, Sam looks up inquisitively. He has simply been waiting, it seems.
“He’s fine now. I guess we’re all gonna be,” she offers.
He exhales. “Good. Thanks.”
“Sure.”
Both go still with uncertainty.
Finally, she switches off the light. They turn away and close their eyes, lying in the dark, listening to the night’s customary sounds: the faint ringing of a halyard against a mast, the gurgle of an eddy against the hull, soft groan of a plank ripening with moisture. When will they stop—these ceaseless motions of air and water, of everything keeping them from their own stillness?
Slowly, she opens her eyes again.
Beside her, Sam opens his.
−−−
Out in the main cabin, the Boy lies in the dinette bunk, clutching his little game, the dim light of it flickering in his face like a small warming fire in the dark.
#day_six
1
Fidgeting on the sofa in Sam’s campus office, Gabriel Thomas craved a smoke. His hands found each other, one bending the fingers of the other back, flexing, rubbing, making a quick fist, together a steeple. His hands had a repertoire.
“I’m dreaming, but I’m awake,” he said, Aussie-style: “awake” like “awike.” He laughed a little, almost bitterly, grimly.
Sam tried not to lean forward. “What are you dreaming about?”
“Oh, shrink porn, man. Water and fire. Mirrors and hands.” He laughed again. “Doesn’t matter. It’s that I’m awake, see. My best mate Jimmy knew—he’s in a Sydney jail now, another Abbie statistic. But he knew—the dreamtime was coming through a hole in the world . . . what Jimmy said . . . before he went crazy ’cause no one would listen—”
“Do you feel like no one listens to you?”
So Gabriel had haunted Sam—in small ways at first, with notes, phone messages, off-hour office visits, a glimpse of a face in a window on the quad, or turning to look as Sam’s car pulled out of the faculty lot. Upturned in the rain of a late winter night, under a streetlamp, spectral.
“You know my office hours, and you have your appointments,” Sam reminded him.
Laughter, always somehow knowing.
−−−
Light is an enemy now; colors possess a paler aspect, bleached by it, promising nothing but hours upon hours of the ache in our tender eyes.
Sounds, too, signify nothing but more of the same as the day begins: faint radio, footstep, clang of block on mast, over and over again in a dull predictable pattern of no significance.
He turns. Kathy’s gone, out in the main cabin with the Boy, of course. Alone in this close little stateroom with its sagging painted plywood ceiling, its mahogany walls and sole in need of varnish, there’s nothing to look at.
Already the day feels wronged by glare and stiffness in his quads and ankles as he climbs silently from his bunk; this ache of too many hours of unending stimuli become the omnipresent pain of consciousness without respite. The air around him has achieved a different, stubborn density, and every movement demands enervating will and effort.
What now, after another night awake, when the one before was to be his last awake, everyone’s last night awake? Cast off, make for the mainland and some far, safe harbor? But how many others are staring up from their share house and motel room beds, facing the day and the fear that it may never end, after he promised them all otherwise?
He kneads the back of his neck with one hand as he stands in his boxers, running the tap in the stateroom head’s sink, gray brightness through the porthole making the side of his face throb. In the smudged mirror, the skin beneath his eyes doesn’t bear study—indigo, with faintly yellow, jaundiced margins; like a tweaker on a binge, sweat dried in his hair, uneven stubble, stinking white paste in the corners of his lips. A whiff of his own fetid breath has him grabbing his toothbrush and scrabbling through the drawer for the toothpaste, but the sound of his cell reaches him—BLIIIING—on the hall utility shelf just outside the head. He steps out to snap it up.
“Yeah?” Did he say it, or only think he did?
Inexplicably, he hears a wave of static, indistinctness made audible. It isn’t possible—digital signals are either dropped or not. But a sound emerges from the white noise, growing louder and louder now, the last voice he wants to hear, wheedling and smug. It’s the same outback Aussie accent, garbled and underwater, but sharp with treble, the end of an interrogatory: “—sleep?” Pronounced “slape.”
Sam’s eyes flick sideways at the cell at his ear, his hands trembling, gripping the cold edge of the sink, heart pounding a rush of blood to his ears.
Slowly, his lungs fill again, a tremulous breath, another. He pulls the now-silent cell from his ear to check the recents. There’s no one, no call, no connection to anyone or anything but the state of his own nerves fraying from the sounds and sights that won’t stop entering his brain for even one blessed, beautiful second of silent darkness.
Memory flashes him dreadful glimpses: a sight line through a dim doorway into more and more of an empty room, to the darkly spattered sneakers and cargo pants of someone small and thin lying against a wall, their hand on the bare floor, palm up, fingers curled on nothing.
It’s him, still him, always him.
Movement turns Sam to see Kathy and the Boy standing there now, staring. The Boy trembles wide-eyed, lifting a hand to point terrified behind Sam at water rushing over the edge of the sink, pouring out into a puddle inching across the floor.
BLII-INGGG!—the cell in Sam’s hand rings, and he flinches as he spins to slam off the tap. He hesitates—BLIIINGG! BLINNG!—dread like ice touching his heart, and then he lifts the cell to his ear.
“Sam?” Paula’s voice crackles out at him. “It’s spreading. People are just not sleeping.”
2
Sam’s bike stops with a little wfff, wobbling there as his foot floats to touch down and balance himself while he stares at the line of patients snaking out his clinic door.
How is it possible? These faces are too many, maybe twenty now, blurred ovals swiveling toward him, some dimly recalled from prior visits. These are the Sleepless, but all actually look as if they have just awakened—shirts buttoned wrong, makeup smeared, hair sweaty, faces haggard. The colorful cheer of vacation-wear appears a ghastly joke; the bright Hawaiian shirts and fanny packs, short shorts and clingy tube-tops highlight the pallor beneath sunburns, the smudged darkness under eyes, the bloodless lips of the exhausted. Some sit in the attached plastic chairs along one wall, with pencils hovering uncertainly over admittance forms; others stand leaning or bent, as if beneath the burden of their own weight.
Inside, med tech Andrew sits at the admittance counter, eyes wide and downcast as he checks patient forms. “These are wrong. These.” He shakes his head, angry. “These, too.” Sam steps behind the counter and glances over the paperwork, seeing illegible scrawls, cross-outs, shredded spots from erasures.
Paula approaches from the back hall now and joins him, an eyebrow raised at the crowd.
“Doctor Carlson, that’s you? Can we get a sleeping pill?” One tourist has raised his hand, like a grade-schooler for a hall pass.
“Or just find out what’s wrong, at least?” another chimes in, and from the back someone unaccountably lets out a yelp-like laugh and goes silent.
Sam straightens to regard the crowd, winging it: “Folks? Who slept last night? Hands?”
No one. Even Paula gives Sam a tiny shake of her head. A small prickle of panic climbs his neck.
“How do we all have the same problem?” This guy has a long horse face dotted with acne, hair dried stiff with salt, a dingy collar half-
up.
There’s some iffy hygiene all around; a sweetish, sweaty odor prevails from so many unwashed bodies, from dirty hair and rumpled clothing worn too long.
“I got a kid cryin’ nonstop!” insists a woman, her shirt on inside out, label sticking up.
“Three nights, I’m starting to see things. I mean, I hope I am.” Unfortunately, this confusion comes from the most credible so far, a clean-shaven guy, early thirties, in immaculate khaki walking shorts and a white linen shirt over an unwrinkled tee.
Sam gives him a sympathetic nod, but it’s unwelcome news. Hallucinations can certainly begin after three sleepless nights, and with a host of other attendant worries: paranoid ideation, hysterias, obsessive compulsions, dissociative states, generalized delusions. It’s a potpourri of whatever fears, furies, and urges our dreams keep in check—since we unconsciously process all these while we sleep. All good, since no one gets hurt that way. Probably not so good otherwise.
Sam is tempted to let out a taxi whistle, but instead makes a show of cupping his hands to his mouth, megaphone-style, to shout, “Hold up! Please?”
The crowd falls silent, staring with mouths like dim slots.
“Everyone I’ve examined for insomnia so far? Nothing. I don’t see any physical reason why you’re not sleeping. Meaning, of course, that you will, sooner than later. If we make it through the day awake, we’ll be out like lights tonight. The body always wins.”
“Okay, same question, then. What’s wrong with everyone?” Horse-face again, with an aggrieved edge.
Absent evidence, there’s only deduction. “Look, it’s rare, but it happens. Behavior can spread. We’ve all seen it. Simplest example?” He tries again: “Yawning.”
