Never Fear

by Heather Graham

  Greg began to whimper: No! No! No! No! No!

  ***

  This time, Cynthia jabbed him sharply in the back as he lay there, curled in the fetal position (facing away from her), moaning, chest heaving, his breathing rapid and shallow. Hyperventilating.

  “Stop it! Stop it! You’re dreaming again!” Cynthia sounded alarmed, but not as sympathetic as the first night, now four nights ago.

  Greg woke much more quickly. He had, after all, only been in bed for three hours. It was six in the morning.

  He rose. Rushed into the master bathroom. Splashed cold water on his face. He noticed that his right ear was wet. Wet with blood. He took the washcloth, blotted the nicked ear, washed away the red stain. It wouldn’t stop. It just kept oozing blood. Did I cut myself? He had been so tired at bedtime that he couldn’t remember. Nightmare and reality were merging and becoming seamless. Things that happened in his dreams seemed to be happening in his real life.

  Now that he was awake, Greg couldn’t get back to sleep. He decided he might as well get ready for work. He had to be there by 7:30 a.m., anyway. That was only an hour and a half away.

  When he entered the kitchen this time, Cynthia was considerably less cheerful. No outstretched mug of hot coffee to greet the prodigal husband this day.

  “Cubans again?” she asked. Her voice had a tone somewhere between annoyance and empathy.

  Greg just nodded.

  Cynthia spoke the words, “Rhythm is gonna’ get you.” She sounded tired. Sarcastic. She turned and left the kitchen.

  Greg rummaged for a stale bagel, some juice and the remaining hot coffee. He prepared to face another day at the plant with both the cafeteria and his once-safe office now threatening places to be avoided at all costs.

  Fortunately, Greg had a meeting in the large conference room at the opposite end of the plant. The meeting lasted until nearly lunchtime.

  At lunchtime, one of the other visiting Supervisors from the John Deere plant in Waterloo, Iowa suggested they go get lunch out somewhere. The Waterloo plant was the largest in the company; it had recently laid off 460 workers. But John Hearn, the visitor to the Harvester Works, was not one of them. He had been sent to East Moline for this meeting concerning staffing levels and a collaborative project. He wanted to see a little bit of the second-largest metropolitan area in the state of Illinois, after Chicago.

  John said, “Hey, Greg. Let’s go out somewhere nice for lunch. You know the Quad Cities. I don’t.” John winked and grabbed his coat.

  This was fine with Greg. In fact, it was more than fine. Greg didn’t want to go back in the plant cafeteria. Now he wasn’t keen on going back to his office, either. And he was tired. So very tired. It was four days since he had slept soundly, going on five. Greg suggested Johnny’s Italian Steakhouse and the pair set off to drive to John Deere Commons in Moline where it was located.

  Three hours of sleep is not enough to think straight, Greg thought. I wonder if it’s enough to think crooked?

  He cracked the bad joke to himself and smiled inwardly.

  ***

  That night, when Greg got home, Cynthia waited, primed to have a serious discussion.

  “Can’t you take something to help you sleep through the night, Honey?” She interrupted herself to ask, “What happened to your ear?”

  Greg had put a Band-Aid on the outer curve of his right ear before leaving for work. The ear just wouldn’t stop bleeding. “Maybe you should call Dr. Jenkins and see if he can prescribe something? Or, if you don’t want to take anything that is prescription strength, try melatonin over the counter or extra-strength Tylenol PM or something. It’s not that I don’t love you, dear, but I’m going to sleep across the hall tonight in the guest room. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since that first night…going on five days ago.”

  Tell me about it! Greg thought.

  He responded, “But, Cynthia, I can GET to sleep. The problem is that I keep having these nightmares after I go to sleep and they wake me up.”

  “I know, Greg, but they also wake ME up. And you look like hell. You need to find a way to sleep through the night. Maybe there is somebody you can talk to about different sleep techniques?”

  ***

  So it was that Greg found himself walking down the hall to the factory infirmary to consult with Dr. Jenkins, the plant doctor.

  Dr. Jenkins looked up, slightly startled, when Greg entered.

  “Hi, Greg! What can I do you out of?” (The doctor was a well-known jokester.)

  “I’ve been having some trouble sleeping through the night, Dr. Jenkins. I can GET to sleep all right, but I’ve been having some really troubling nightmares that wake me up. When I’m awake, I can’t get back to sleep.”

  “How long has this been going on, Greg?”

  Greg looked at the ceiling and counted silently in his head. “Well…let’s see. This is about the fifth day that I’ve not had a whole lot of sleep.”

  “How much is ‘not a whole lot’? Bigger than a breadbox? Longer than an Infomercial? Shorter than ‘War and Peace’?” The doctor appeared legitimately concerned for his patient, but was searching for specific information and doing so light-heartedly.

  “One night, I got three hours. Another night---the best night…maybe five. Mostly a couple of hours for all of this week since Monday. It’s Friday now and we have a chance at a nice weekend. I’m so tired I just want to sleep. But I’m afraid to. I’ve had two pretty weird nightmares. They were scary as hell. It’s all over but the shouting, once I’m awake.”

  “Did you watch anything violent on television prior to going to bed? Eat anything strange or different from your normal eating patterns?” The doctor was starting with the obvious and being serious now. Greg hadn’t given much thought to his viewing habits or his diet. He’d been more fixated on the effect of workday stress. He was responsible for supervising thirty plant workers, and he knew each of them personally. If the Harvester Works followed the path of the Waterloo Works, some of those friends that he supervised might soon be out of a job.

  “The first nightmare just--happened. But, yes, I think we were watching ‘The Walking Dead.’And we watched an episode of ‘Game of Thrones’ before the second one. ‘The Red Wedding’.”

  “So, you’ve had at least two of these disturbing dreams, right?” The doctor was scribbling on a piece of paper on his clipboard. Doctor Jenkins looked up and added, “Knock off the gore fest before bedtime. Go with some comedy sit-com offerings. Don’t eat anything that might upset your stomach, either. Nothing spicy or heavy. Other than that, I’d say you simply have an overactive imagination. You know all the Freudian bilge about daytime fears coming out in our dreams at night, right?”

  “Of course. You don’t sound like you believe old Sigmund was on the right track.” Greg had no firmly held opinion of his own concerning dream theory and Freud, but he was interested to hear what the doctor would say.

  Doctor Jenkins just shrugged dismissively.

  “I think REM sleep is necessary for good health and dreams go along with that, but you’ve got to learn to relax and put the day’s worries aside. You might try some meditation or yoga or the traditional glass of warm milk before bedtime. Something like that. If I start you on pills…well, it’s a slippery slope. Sometimes, people taking the really strong ones become addicted. A few of them can even cause hallucinations and side effects that are worse than the nightmares you’re having. It’s sort of like all those commercials you see on TV that tell you how great this or that drug is going to be for some illness. Then, at the end of the ad, they rattle on about twenty-five to thirty things that sound far worse than what you had in the first place and will kill you. Makes you want to err on the side of caution. My vow is ‘First, do no harm.’ Do you think you could alter some of those R-rated shows as an experiment?” Doctor Jenkins was smiling. Acting like this wasn’t a Big Deal. Just a little speed bump for old Gregory Chandler.

  “Okay. I can do that,” Greg agreed. “A
nd, as for the nightmares, they were just so REAL! Two of them. But I thought about those nightmares all the next day…all week, in fact. They were so vivid in my mind. Disturbing. One night, after I woke up, I even saw that my ear was bleeding. I think that was in the dream. A couple of nights I couldn’t remember the nightmare, afterwards. They were so frightening, I think I blocked them out.”

  The doctor shook his head, agreeing. “Yes, it’s quite common to have a nightmare, wake up, but not be able to recall what the dream was about. Nothing unusual about that.”

  “I don’t sleep well normally,” said Greg, “and now this. My wife is pretty upset with me. She moved across the hall into the guest room. When I have one of these dreams, I hyperventilate. I cry out. I wake her up. Afterwards, I talk nonsense.” Greg looked at Doc Jenkins, self-conscious that he was admitting all this to a medical professional. “Then, after I wake us both up, neither one of us is worth a shit in the morning. Or all day.”

  The doctor shook his head sympathetically. “I see. She works, too, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes. English teacher at the high school. She really wants me to get something to help me sleep--anything to stop these dreams. It’s not just me that ends up being disturbed. It’s her, too. To be honest, I’ve never been as terrified in my life as I was during the first nightmare. Can you help me out with something, Doc?”

  The doctor listened to Greg’s fanciful tales of Cubans armed with machine guns. He didn’t laugh, but he seemed slightly incredulous, all the same. Then Dr. Jenkins scribbled a prescription for Clonazepam.

  “Take one of these at bedtime. It’s a long-lasting benzodiazepine. It acts as a muscle relaxant, among other things. It’s used to treat convulsions, sometimes.

  You should be able to drift off if you take one. It’s a low dosage, though. If you don’t find yourself being able to fall asleep, take two.” He gave Greg a quick lecture on other side effects the drug might have.

  Greg shook his head as though he understood even half of what the doctor had just said about the amnesiac and hypnotic properties of the drug. Then he said, very seriously, “Thanks, Doc. Thank you very much.” Greg thought he was verging perilously close to prime-time Elvis with that expression of gratitude. “It’s getting so I don’t want to even TRY to go to sleep. Who said, ‘To sleep, perchance to dream,’ Doc? Shakespeare?”

  “Don’t know, Greg. Can’t tell you. Ask the wife,” said Dr. Jenkins, hand on the doorknob, ready to move on to examine his next patient.

  Greg walked to the far end of the factory, trying to figure out a way to avoid both the cafeteria and his office. Those sites still spelled danger.

  Then it came to him. He was a Supervisor of thirty workers. He hadn’t been doing much “supervising” lately on the plant floor. The company had been having meetings about the lay-offs necessitated by market conditions and about new collaborative initiatives with the Waterloo Works, so he had been cooped up elsewhere all last week. He’d check out the activity on the plant floor and actually supervise the thirty workers he wrote up for performance reviews. He knew all of them by name. A familiar face would be a welcome sight.

  “I’ll get a good weekend’s sleep and this Monday I’ll earn my pay on the plant floor,” he thought, turning over a new leaf.

  But the weekend would prove to be as problematic as Monday through Friday had been. He hadn’t been this tired since the twins, who were now sixteen, were infants and he and Cynthia took turns getting up in the night with them.

  Greg made a hard right turn within the labyrinthine hallways. He headed for the floor where the gigantic combines were assembled--the most complex machine, in terms of moving parts, aside from the lunar landing module. The S690-S Series. Up to 45 feet wide. Half a million dollars to purchase just the main combine. (Attachments optional, extra, necessary and expensive).

  Ninety acres under one roof. Operating since 1913. Over four million square feet…and East Moline’s Harvester Works wasn’t even the biggest of Deere’s factories. (That distinction went to the Waterloo Works).

  When Greg emerged on the plant floor, one of the line workers, Stan Sanchez, hollered, “Hey, Greg! What’s up? Long time, no see.” He waved. Greg waved back and smiled. Stan’s parents had fled Havana after the 1959 revolution. His dad had been a mucky-muck in the Batista government. Stan had been working here twenty years, himself, always running the workstation with the big hammer.

  Greg walked over to where Stan was operating the jackhammer. The jackhammer machine stood at least thirty feet in the air. A piece of molten metal would be placed on the stamping block below it. The jackhammer would come down with thousands of pounds of pressure and stamp out a combine door or some other part of the huge machine. The jackhammer did this over and over again, with a distinct tempo that was reverberating in both their ears right now.

  Over on Stan’s far right the grinders were welding various parts for the behemoth machines. Sparks flew.

  The smell of molten metal was in the air. Although the plant was extremely clean and every effort was made to keep it cool and to remove noxious fumes, a particular odor filled the air. Anyone who has been in a foundry knows the smell. The smoke from the heat of the production process drifted through the factory, permeating the workers’ clothing. Still, it was a far cry from “the old days,” when Greg had worked on the line in the now closed Moline Malleable Works, working with nodular and gray iron. In those days, Greg would come home from work, hot, sweaty and filthy from the ironworks. Today’s Harvester plant was quite a step up as a work environment.

  “Haven’t seen you out here for a while, Boss.” Stan smiled.

  “Yeah. I’ve been being meeting-ed to death,” Greg replied. (At least I don’t have to admit that I’ve been worried about being sung to death by Gloria Estefan, he thought, amusing himself with that.)

  “Well, keep on keeping on,” Stan said, reaching for the safety apparatus for the jackhammer. Pushing two buttons brought down a safety cage around the device. The buttons had to be pushed with the fingers on each hand. The metal safety cage would descend with a bang. The jackhammer stamped with a consistent deafening rhythm that Greg had heard in the background for all of his twenty-five-year work life. It was the specific sound of the factory in full operational mode. Sparks flying. Smoke drifting over the scene. Greg felt right at home and, although fuzzy from lack of sleep, better than he had felt in over a week.

  “This thing is getting old. It wants to rest, I think,” Stan said to Greg, with a grin, gesturing towards the jackhammer.

  “What do you mean?” Greg asked. “Is something wrong with it?”

  “Oh…it’s just the tempo. The safety cage, when it descends, it seems to be slightly ‘off.’ One time it comes down immediately, going a mile a minute. The next time I push the buttons, it takes its own sweet time.” Stan smiled as he shared the information.

  “Reminds me of some workers I supervise,” Greg joked as he walked away. “Let me know if it keeps doing it, and I’ll take a look.”

  ***

  Greg’s first stop after work was at the local pharmacy at Kennedy Square Shopping Center. The Jewel/Osco pharmacist, daughter of a life-long drugstore owner in nearby Silvis, knew him on sight.

  “What can I do for you, Greg?” Karen asked.

  “I need to fill this prescription for Clonazepam, one milligram,” Greg answered, checking the scrip to make sure he had the right dosage.

  “Okay. It’ll just be a minute.”

  Karen quickly filled the prescription and then asked, “Do you have any questions?”

  “No, not really. I guess I should ask if this is going to give me a morning hangover?” Greg said.

  “Naaah. It’s a small dosage. You’ll be fine.”

  I hope so, he thought.

  That night, Greg popped one of the little round green pills right after he brushed his teeth. He turned in at his normal 10 p.m. bedtime, even though tomorrow was Saturday. He lay there, tossing and turning.


  After two uneasy hours, he got up and took a second pill. After all, Doc said I could take more than one if I needed to, he rationalized.

  ***

  The first sound he was aware of was the rapid beating of his heart. The second was the whisper: “Greg-oh-Ree! Greg-oh-Ree! GREG-OH-REE!”

  Greg began to whimper, although he didn’t know he was making any sound. Cynthia was no longer lying next to him, prepared to “save” him.

  The Cubans had on long coats this time. They wore slouched fedora hats with brims--like characters from an old Humphrey Bogart movie, their faces shrouded by the brims of the fedoras. Greg could not pinpoint the exact location where the men were standing. It looked like a street from a movie set. The shadowy streetlamp cast a dim light on the sinister figures clad in long coats. The Cubans were about twenty yards away. There were three of them. They were no longer running after him, guns blazing, but the long coats--dusters like cowboys wore in the old west…might be hiding those long guns. Mainly, Greg heard the men whispering. It grew louder. And Louder. And LOUDER!

  Greg-oh-Ree! Greg-oh-Ree! GREG-OH-REE!

  The sound of their voices was just as frightening as the unexpected shooting in the cafeteria that first night. It was unclear what they intended to do with him when or if they caught him, but it was quite clear that they wanted HIM. Not Brad Clemens. Not Stan Sanchez. HIM.

  Greg grew frantic, suffering a full-blown panic attack. He woke in a cold sweat, heart racing. He rushed for the bathroom, where he promptly threw up what was left of last night’s pizza.

  Week Two