Deprivation

by Roy Freirich

  But I kept seeing his face, his wide blue eyes wondering as if in amazement, though I know now it was more likely fear. If the Boy had been rescued, wouldn’t he be here, too?

  I slipped quietly from my cot. In the glow of the nightlight I padded to the end of our auditorium and out in the hall where the polished floor felt chilly, and I climbed short wide stairs to a landing, and another, and stopped to catch my breath.

  Slowly then I went down halls of rooms of piled desk chairs and boxes, to others with more rows of cots where more strangers lay. Some I remembered from the island: another tourist family, a short, dark guy always fighting with his exhausted wife or girlfriend, a boat guy. No one turned their head to watch me cross by their row of cots, their curiosity gone.

  On a far bed, though, he lay on his back, a hand cupped by his side, the other limp on his little chest, his face shining, smeared with ointment. He moved his head slowly, as if a little at a time, to look up at me as I moved closer, his eyes wide and unblinking, curious, maybe wondering: am I the girl who never showed up to take care of him, here after all?

  “Hi lo,” I said.

  “Hi lo,” the little boy answered, and then lifted his arms to be picked up, which I did, holding his warm, living weight against me. I lifted him and he held on, the room blurring for a moment around me.

  −−−

  Back downstairs, we lay together in the dimness, the boy curled like a question mark against me, Tay’s arm flung across us both from behind me. Across the aisle between rows of cots, Mom rested on her side, almost childlike, with her elbow crooked and a hand flat beneath her pillow, her eyes blinking slowly, her weariness becoming like a kind of peace.

  For a little while more, the old fear gnawed and twisted inside like a living thing, that being awake would never end, but after the hours and hours of just lying there staring, some quietly telling sweet reassuring stories and tucking their thin blankets up higher under their chins, I think maybe I just got too tired to care. If we were still awake later, even forever, why worry about it now? “About that which you can do nothing,” Mom always said.

  Waiting, I remember I heard the gentle sounds of a voice murmuring, a fly buzzing against a windowsill, the longest day finally seeming somehow to end now, and all of it folding into a sound Tay made like a kind of soft laugh. “Now I lay me down,” he whispered, or I thought he did, and the last small light seemed farther and farther away, to slowly dim into sweet darkness.

  #epilogue

  Sleep returned to us all, of course, and our week of “civil unrest” became a story that faded, like those of so many unexplained events. The hysteria in LeRoy, New York, for instance, gets mentioned in the same obscure books and articles and websites about “phenomena,” with the same questions always lingering: what caused, and then what stopped, the spread of it, and will it reoccur? Yet in the end, dependably, it seems, newer mysteries—the crater in Siberia, the Marfa Lights, the Taos Hum—capture the public’s fickle imagination before those stories, too, largely disappear.

  There were deaths on the island, to be sure, but in each individual case, medical experts, police, and reporters fixed on personal animus—depression, delusions fueled by alcohol or drugs, excessive heat, insects, or yes, even extended insomnia—as causes, and in the end shrugged off the confluence of these factors as coincidence, or yet another exacerbating factor.

  Later, since the story continued to be of personal interest to me, I read that psychologists had finally agreed to call the Carratuck Island Incident, as it came to be known, a case of Mass Psychogenic Illness, which by all accounts was the initial diagnosis by Dr. Samuel Carlson, attending physician at Pines Beach Urgent Care. Further study revealed that a phone company lineman, my classmate Cynthia (“Cinder,” who created the #sleepless43 hashtag), an unnamed fisherman, and others all visited Dr. Carlson (whom I met too) for various individual, unrelated complaints before the onset of their insomnia. Consequently, interviewers asked others, as well, and discovered the same common link to Dr. Carlson, perhaps causal, some theorized—in the sense of a “patient zero,” as every sociogenic illness begins somewhere.

  I recall his face as a kind man’s, evincing weary good humor. By all accounts, his self-sacrifice and heroism remain beyond dispute. And so my eyes, my throat, my heart aches at the sad, innocent guilt of his true role as origin of all that occurred on Carratuck.

  Nevertheless, the Boy chose to rename himself after Doctor Carlson, “Sam,” long before I finished my studies and Tay and I married and applied for and were granted custody.

  These years later, in this modest mainland home we share with him, late when the drone of a far-off plane, or a dog faintly barking, or the creak of the house settling into itself lulls me into drowsiness, I still sometimes startle from remembering too much, or from the quick thought: somewhere, in some exotic tropic or snowy latitude, or perhaps just some bland, temperate suburb, is someone opening their eyes, woman, man, or child, waking from the very last of their sleep?

  I hold this against it, the same vision that closed my eyes, finally, lying in that makeshift dorm with the Boy in Tay’s loose arms: running along the beach with Tay, the sun flashing rainbows in our eyelashes, feet slapping the warm backwash until we bent, out of breath, laughing, over the Boy playing with his toy pail and shovel in the damp sand. His hair is stiff with dried salt and funny, his jams are wet and the skin on his hip is pink where the waistband sags, and his eyes are bluer than the ocean. And then we all look up to see his mother coming down a dune toward us in a bright cover-up with a beach towel over her shoulder, pausing to shield her eyes with a glad thoughtless smile as she lifts her hand in the air to wave.

  acknowledgments

  Thanks always to my first inspiration—my lovely wife and tireless, perspicacious editor, Debrah; to Deborah Dill for her encouragement; to Jeff Dorchen for his astute thoughts; to Fran Lebowitz for her steadfast advocacy, and to Tricia Reeks of Meerkat Press, of course, for seeing something worthy in these pages, and for knowing when to pry the manuscript from my sweaty, white-knuckled grasp. Thanks to L.Mai Designs for the beautiful, disturbing cover design.

  If this book reads as a cautionary tale, I’m content with that. Empathy requires effort, and it’s among the first faculties to fail in weariness. Sleep deprivation is an invitation to the supremacy of our own stories and points of view, to the tunnel-vision of solipsism, gateway to delusion. The ability to read the room deserts us. We feel misunderstood—the beginning of righteous anger, the prelude and pretext to every form of violence.

  Sleep enables us to dream, and dreams enable us to relive unresolved moments in disguised form, and so diffuse their power; little by little, dreams free us from our pasts and allow us to live more fully in the present. Without sleep, denied the outlet of dreams for too many nights, the unconscious finds other ways to surface. The past stalks our waking lives, old wounds bleed anew, urges can become obsessions, worries become terrors, and our worst selves win. Emotional stability is lost, confusion and chaos rule.

  Sleep matters.

  Good night.

  about the author

  Roy Freirich leads multiple lives as a writer. He adapted his novel Winged Creatures for the film Fragments, featuring Forest Whitaker, Dakota Fanning, Guy Pearce, Josh Hutcherson, and Kate Beckinsale, and has written screenplays for Fox Searchlight, Dreamworks, Warner Brothers, and Sony. His lyrics have been sung by legends Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, and Patti Labelle, among many others. He lives with his wife, ever-patient editor and frequent cowriter, Debrah, in Malibu, California. Together, they’ve written the libretto for a musical adaptation of Anne Rice’s Cry to Heaven, for Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre. Visit him online at www.royfreirich.com.

  ALSO BY ROY FREIRICH

  WINGED CREATURES

  Did you enjoy this book?

  If so, word-of-mouth recommendations and online reviews are critical to the success of any
book, so we hope you'll tell your friends about it and consider leaving a review at your favorite bookseller's or library's website.

  Visit us at www.meerkatpress.com for our full catalog.

  DEPRIVATION. Copyright © 2020 by Roy Freirich.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For information, contact Meerkat Press at info@meerkatpress.com.

  ISBN-13 978-1-946154-21-7 (Paperback)

  ISBN-13 978-1-946154-22-4 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955315

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by L. Mai Designs

  Author photo by Marie Buck Photography

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published in the United States of America by

  Meerkat Press, LLC, Atlanta, Georgia

  www.meerkatpress.com

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  #day_two

  #day_four

  #day_five

  #day_six

  #day_seven

  #day_eight

  #day_nine

  #epilogue

  acknowledgments

  about the author

  also by author

  a note from Meerkat Press

  copyright

  Landmarks

  Cover