Walking the Sleep

by Mark McGhee

  “What’s your name?”

  “Gary. I think my name is Gary. I might get a new name here though, Paul. I like it here.”

  I look back at him again and he is transformed. His clothes, his hair, his skin, his eyes, everything about him looks like a normal, happy healthy teen-age boy. His clothes are clean and stylish. If I didn’t know, I could not have recognized him. The weight was gone. The despair not even a memory now.

  “This is a good place, Paul.”

  I laugh and shake my head.

  “For you, it deserves to be, Gary. It’s your time.”

  “Yeah, Paul. Thanks.”

  I see her again. I thought I would never see her again. And there she is watching us from the side of the pier. Perched up on the rail and smiling. And my heart dances again for a second. I want to cry. She smiles at me from behind her glasses and though covered, I can see her smiling brown eyes from a million memories replayed in my mind.

  “Who’s that pretty lady, Paul?”

  “Someone I loved, love still, but I lost.”

  She waves and Gary waves back. She smiles and motions for him to come. Gary looks at me.

  “Thanks, Paul. I gotta go now.”

  “Yes, go. It’s definitely your time, kid. Bye”

  He smiles and walks over to her. She hops down and ruffles his hair. She takes his hand and they walk toward the shore. He is looking up at her and smiling. I see her laughing and telling him something as they walk off the pier and on down to the shore. She looks back one last time and smiles. A wave. The last wave or time. The last. I know this finally.

  Chapter 9

  A good day.

  DAY. I head back to the store and it is night there.

  Sam nods as I walk in.

  “Sorry about that shit I said.”

  “No worries, Sam.”

  He tosses me a pack of Camels. I light one up and catch a small bottle of Crown he tosses. I pop the cap and drink long.

  “What happened to the kid?”

  I laugh.

  “Sam, you wouldn’t fucking believe it if I told you.”

  I stay there for some time again.

  “Are you headed out again?”

  “Not sure. There’s good and bad out there, you know?”

  “You’ve seen some good stuff.”

  “Yeah but that’s usually when I’m not walking the sleep. I don’t stand around and see right into someone’s hell, Sam. It comes on me and I fight it off. And there’s always the ravens to deal with.”

  “I’m a stayer. I don’t like the ravens.”

  “Yeah? I thought I made that term up?”

  He laughs hard and pulls hard on an unfiltered Camel. “Yeah, right.”

  “So you’re a stayer. That’s what happens? You see it all?”

  “Yep”

  “Fuck, what makes you want to watch this misery?”

  “How do you know it’s all bad?”

  “Well then how about a good fucking story about someone next time cocksucker? Every time I come in here to talk I get a story that makes me wish I had brains to blow through my own fucking skull!”

  “Maybe next time. You were telling a story. Go on. I get so few good ones here, friend. I appreciate a good wanderer story”

  “I saw her when I first came. I didn’t know who she was. I just kept coming back until I saw her again. I finally could see speak to her, and her to me. She was someone I had loved more than any woman I had ever known. I had that love in a moment. I felt the love and then the sadness because I had hurt her. Threw away the only love I had ever known as a man.

  My life had gone downhill from that moment. I had good moments, times, I knew. I lived on. I can’t remember everything but I knew my life hadn’t been all misery. I was never really happy after that.”

  Sam shifted on his stool and lit a smoke. “At least you knew happiness for a time.”

  “I saw her face in my dreams. I woke up crying many nights and wishing for her. In my sleep I heard her laughs and felt her smile. I saw her brown eyes. Sometimes I saw her laughing with friends, and family, I didn’t know because her life had continued, and continued well after I was gone. She always acknowledged me in my dreams, but I was on the outside of a life.

  I couldn’t enter her life ever again. And yet she came back in my dreams again and again. Sometimes months, sometimes years, but always she came back. And her life played out in happiness as I watched and stood outside the glass.

  “Did you go to your funeral?”

  “Yeah but I didn’t stick around long. You asked me this shit before. Don’t fuck with me, Sam. It’s a hard time.”

  “Was she there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She was there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “When you saw her here, when she spoke to you, what did it look like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did she look like a wanderer?”

  “No. She walked above the ground.”

  “Maybe she wasn’t dead.”

  “What? No. She’s dead. I asked her.”

  “You’ll never see her again.”

  “I just saw her. The kid went with her.”

  “When?”

  “I can’t say exactly. The day we were in here. I walked out and took him to the beach. Maybe a DAY ago?”

  “You were gone awhile.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like how gone long time side?”

  “Like about five years real time.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah, I was bored for a second. Like I said, you’ll never see her again.”

  “Who the fuck are you, Sam? How do you know this shit?”

  He smiles and takes a long pull off of a pint of Jim Beam.

  “I’m just a guy that stays in my place.”

  “So why don’t you drink some decent fucking whiskey! Fuck you, Sam! I hate you.”

  “Sorry. Don’t ask then.”

  “Sorry, Sam.”

  “It’s ok. It’s DAY. Look the sun is rising.”

  Chapter 10

  I don’t remember when

  But there was a day

  When I looked

  And I saw

  And Realized

  That there is no room

  Was no room

  No place for me

  From behind a filthy curtain

  Cat urine and filth

  And stench

  And Despair

  To those things hidden

  I saw

  There was no place for me here

  When my father died I was alone. I had never felt that alone in the universe. He had labored breathing all that day and I continued to go back in.

  The whoosh of the oxygen machine was steady and rhythmic. I watched him closely in his room. I knew and I didn’t know as these things go. When your mind comprehends what is happening and yet it does not, for it cannot.

  He was dying. Part of me knew that his soul was leaving. Part of me refused to accept that. I left. I returned. The Angels were playing the White Sox on the TV as he listened to his favorite team.

  They say the last thing to go is hearing. I switched the station over to a cable music channel that was playing Gaelic music. It was soothing and dreamy. I sat and watched. His breath stopped and started. Stopped and started again. I saw something happening. He was going to die. For hours I had watched. I had cried when the hospice pastor had prayed, gave him his last rites, and told me he was dying. But for hours after the last rites, the grief that I thought was real grief, he teetered between life and death. The machine kept beat as the breathing slowed. There was nothing they had promised. No struggling or labored breathing, fighting, shifting of the feet, or wrestling death. It was a slow descent. A quiet drifting away into eternity. Nothing amazing or outside of what one might expect. Maybe that’s what shocked me the most. He was passing peacefully and quietly. No fighting. What happened
when his soul left was what I cannot, will not, ever forget. As he breathed his last breath, I felt his soul pass through me. I was holding him in my arms and pleading,

  “Please dad, no. Not now. I’m all alone. Please not now.” I cried to God. I cried to no one.

  And his soul passed from his body and through me. In that second, a million memories passed through me. His soul passed straight through me.

  A billion memories in crystal clear definition in a second. Memories that were not mine, or forgotten by me so long ago. That was the strangest part of it all. I was weeping, crying, and pleading for him not to go. I was thinking not of anyone else, or anything else, but when he died, when his soul left his body, I was flooded at a trillion thoughts, images, and memories for each second I breathed.

  In that second, in that millisecond that his soul passed through my body, I saw his memories clearly. I saw the final image he was taking with him as he left. I don’t know why. I don’t believe the memory was necessarily for me. I think, now, knowing what I do, that it was more like seeing and hearing an extended play list of channels all at once, not my channels, not my playlist, but his. Hearing someone else’s music from a passing car. he and I fishing. We were at the side of the lake. My sister was there. It was serene and beautiful. He was watching me holding the fishing pole. And everything about that day was so clear. There were a million times a million other memories that flowed through me in that tiny moment, but that one was me, and him, and we were there. I dropped my head to his chest and cried. I pushed open his eyelids and stared into them. I begged him back and pleaded that God not take him when I was alone. And then I held his lifeless body in my arms and cried grief that rips the soul apart, tears the deepest part of a human’s being. And I cried, wailed, and screamed like a little child. And I asked God why. The answer seemed very clear. I cannot express that answer, I can only say the voice was there. It was not harsh. It was not anything but clear.

  DAY.

  I see more and more of what I was now. I live the moments and memories of my life long forgotten. It seems I am either walking the sleep, or watching my life. Things seem clearer now and yet they do not. I thought I would see my life, good and bad, when I died, but I always thought it would be fairly quick. Maybe like when my dad died. A trillion memories and emotions in a millisecond of time as my soul transcended or sunk. But this is not that. I wander in DAY, I wander in Night. I walk the sleep.

  I set out and I arrive. Sometimes it is a good place and sometimes it is a bad place. Is this hell? I have asked myself that question more than once, but I realize it can’t be for this is good here, and there are good people here, albeit, in a different state of consciousness than me for the most part. Not always. Sometimes I see good people in the same consciousness as me, but for whatever reason they are here, whatever business it is that they are about, I don’t feel they are trapped here by any means. I don’t think everyone and all walk the sleep, or wander, or slip. I think some have business and they take care of it. I figure they move on after that. I have some clues to this reasoning. I have seen them. I have had a sense that they are at peace, know what they are doing and where they are going. And I might see them here or there, and then I don’t see them again. And that sense I had about being able to leave, like some guarded secret, that sense is fading more and more. More often I have an underlying sense, a thick and slowly writhing knot of a feeling in my stomach that I cannot leave, have no place to go, and have been here much longer than I know. That I have developed survival skills for my soul, and that being through some torturous things that have happened here in whatever and however long these things occurred.

  All my lucid memories seem to be mine, but sometimes, like I said, without caution or warning, I can find myself in the hell of another’s memories. Walking the sleep from weary and unaware, I wake to screaming, I wake to crying, I wake to the terror of something I cannot understand or explain. And I am there but I am not. And I don’t have to be there, but I am, and perhaps, perhaps I have tricked my brain into thinking that I don’t have to be there. Survival skills for my soul. How long does it take in time here to learn those things? Like in a terrible nightmare. I see and experience all that is happening. I cannot do but watch. And hurt. And scream. Like a nightmare but with pure consciousness. That feeling of cloudiness and uncertainty one feels after waking from a night terror, or troubling dream can be my consciousness.

  As in waking from those dreams on that side, your conscious mind struggles to recollect the fuzzy and dissect, categorize, analyze the images, thoughts and feelings – to make sense of things in the early waking moments. I can be in this state for what seems like a very long time. And in that time, there is a place where dream becomes reality for me, and reality becomes very much dream.

  Sometimes they are pleasant, and sometimes they are horror. And sometimes I walk around throughout the day, trying to figure out what they meant. What was the connection of that dream? Ever ask yourself that? Why did you live in that alternate reality as you slumbered? And maybe sometimes it makes sense. When it doesn’t I stuff it away and call it fatigue, food before bedtime, or maybe a movie watched as I slipped away into a fitful sleep. But I don’t sleep. And so this is. How about the really disturbing things?

  Ever dream something that made you feel ashamed? You immediately push the ideas away and try not to think about them, because that isn’t you; you would never do or think those things, would you? Could you? Maybe not. Maybe you’re a good soul that was polluted momentarily by a bad movie, a commercial, a dark paragraph, or a lurid story. Maybe you were offended, reviled, sickened, even infuriated…but it came back on you in the dark hours, the early morning hours, where slumber is deep and eyes dart and dodge. So, upon waking, you stuff it away, think it away, and pray it away. And if your soul is truly as pure as you think or believe, then maybe it will never be here to see again. But for those that entertain that darkness, there’s a place here to work through it. I see it. I see them. There’s a regular place among the ravens for those that dwelt upon the dark things in life.

  I call this reality as such. And it is. And it is good. And it is horrifying. And it is real.

  I do not hope anymore. I see. I see that which is not real, I wonder, sometimes, that it might be. I see that which is real because I look through a window that was once me. I look into windows that are open and see what once was a private and dark place for some. A shade that was drawn and is now wide open, as they deeply walk the sleep. I see that which I know is real because I did live it, and now I live it again. I live it as an observer. And I cannot cry, I cannot scream, I cannot whisper into the past. I can only watch.

  Some DAYS things seem bleaker now. I know she will not return and I don’t care to see who I might run into now. The frustration of wandering for miles to a destination I feel compelled to seek. Arriving there and seeing nothing unusual or special. A carnival, a birthday party from forty years ago, and wondering, ‘What the fuck did I need to come here for?’

  And there aren’t always good answers. There aren’t people everywhere standing around giving answers. I’m watching a pool party we had thirty years ago. Lots of young people I recognize. All of us with our stupid 80’s hair. I’m puffed up on steroids and have a flat-top with the top dyed blonde. My first wife is there and she’s wearing an 80’s bikini in hot pink. Friends all laughing and doing back-flips into the pool. Duran Duran blares from the radio and the sun is warm and high in the sky. A typical 1980’s California pool party. I recognize All my old friends from that period. Mostly bodybuilders and power lifters. No booze. We are all high on Jesus and pumped up on steroids. I laugh at the scene. Every one there was perfectly cast. All pretty girls tanned to a crisp and suspiciously skinny. Guys pumped up and darkly tanned, listening to 80’s music and…talking about Jesus. I stopped talking to this crowd about a year after this I think. It was embarrassing to watch. I was ashamed yet transfixed at the severity and sincerity of the hypocrisy that was unfolding b
efore me.

  We were all full of shit and eventually each of us figured that out about ourselves, and each other. Walking around like we had something special to say and share. I listen to the phony conversations, the preening, the false brotherhood. I see the furtive looks here and there. The leering and sexual tension between friends who liked to call each other “brother” and “sister” but secretly wanted to fuck each other. Friends that talked about Jesus and God in one breath, and how best to smuggle steroids across the Mexican border in the next.

  The embarrassment of this time flows into my throat in bile.

  I stand and watch the pool party for a while longer feeling stupid and ashamed.. And why did I come here?

  I think I was in Arizona when I felt compelled to walk here. I wanted to be anywhere but here but I had to stay and watch. Maybe there was something here I needed to see. I keep looking and watching. Trance of stupidity and shame. I listened to Flock of Seagulls, Midnight Oil, The Go Go’s, and The Fix. I watch and only stay longer to listen to the music. The people were embarrassing, I was embarrassing, maybe I saw something in a few of my friend’s eyes that I missed back then.

  Things that I should have seen. But other than the glimpse of something impure, a reflection of knowing that everything we were was fake and ridiculous, in the end I only stay to listen to the end of The Cure’s Love Song.

  And I had wandered here from the Navajo reservation in Arizona. I forget where I had been before that because I had been walking the sleep for a while.

  Dragged into a few nightmarish lifetimes that weren’t mine.

  Awakening to a particularly fat raven staring cock-eyed at me.

  He tilted his head sideways and stared at me with an onyx ball. He was alone which was unusual but he had been feeding on some wretched soul. His belly was fat with flesh and bloat, distended with anguished rotted soul.