Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  In those days, I had a room – as I still do – in Madame Lafon’s house, and one of my best friends, Louis Bernet, who, now he’s a member of the Privy Council, has given up boating and all the spit and polish and larking about that go with it, had found somewhere to stay in the village of C—a couple of leagues downstream. We used to have dinner together every day, sometimes at his place, sometimes at mine.

  One evening, I was going home alone, feeling pretty tired, having a hard time making headway in my big boat, a sea-going twelve-footer with a drop-keel which I always took out at night. I stopped for a moment to get my wind back just off that spit of reeds over there, a couple of hundred metres below the railway bridge. It was a marvellous night. The moon was bright, the river gleamed, and the air was still and warm. It was so peaceful that I was tempted. I said to myself that nothing could be finer than to smoke a pipe in such a spot. The thought was father to the deed. I got my anchor and dropped it overboard.

  With the pull of the current, the boat went the length of the mooring chain and then stopped. I made myself as comfortable as I could on my sheepskin coat in the stern. It was quiet, dead quiet, except now and then I seemed to catch a faint, almost inaudible sound of water lapping the bank, and I saw the tallest clumps of reeds turn into startling shapes which at times appeared to sway and wave.

  The river was utterly peaceful but I felt apprehensive sitting there surrounded by extraordinary silence. All the marshy creatures, the frogs and toads which sing at night, were hushed. Then, just to my right, a frog croaked. I jumped. It stopped. Hearing nothing more, I decided to smoke my pipe to give myself something to do. Now I’m second to none at getting a pipe going, but I’m damned if I could make it draw. With my second puff, I started to feel sick and gave up. I began humming a little tune but couldn’t stand the sound of my own voice. So I settled down in the bottom of the boat and watched the sky. I lay there quietly for some time, but after a while the rocking of the boat made me feel uneasy. I had this sensation that it was yawing wildly, swinging into one bank and then the other; then I felt that some invisible hand or unseen force was gently pulling it down to the bottom then heaving it out of the water before letting it down again. I was being tossed about as though I’d been caught in a storm. I heard noises all round me. I sat up in a hurry. The water was shining and everywhere was calm.

  I came to the conclusion that my nerves must be a bit on edge and decided to clear off. I pulled on the chain; the boat surged forward but I felt some resistance. I pulled harder but the anchor wouldn’t come free. It must have fouled something on the bottom and I just couldn’t shift it. I started hauling on it again, but it was no good. Seizing the oars, I turned the boat round and moved upstream to change the position of the anchor. It was still no use: it was good and fast. I lost my temper and shook the chain in a rage. It wouldn’t budge. I sat down disconsolately and began reflecting on my position. There was no way I could break the chain or slip it off the boat, for it was heavy and bolted to a block of wood on the prow that was thicker than my arm; but since the weather continued very fine, I imagined it wouldn’t be long before I met up with some fisherman or other who would come to the rescue. The whole business had calmed my nerves and now I managed a smoke of my pipe. I had a bottle of rum with me, drank a couple of glasses, and then laughed as I saw that my predicament was really rather funny. It was very warm and if the worst came to the worst I’d be able to spend the night under the stars without coming to much harm.

  All at once, something thudded faintly against the side of the boat. I jumped and broke out all over in a cold sweat. The sound had probably been caused by a piece of timber floating down on the current, but it was enough to set my nerves oddly on edge once more. I took hold of the chain and arched my back in a desperate attempt to haul it up. But the anchor held fast. I sat down again, exhausted.

  Meanwhile, the river had become wreathed in a very thick, white mist which hung very low over the water so that when I stood up I couldn’t see the river or my feet or my boat, and all I could make out were the top of the reeds and, beyond them, the plain stretching away all pale in the moonlight with great black smudges reaching up to the sky here and there where clumps of poplars grew. I was so to speak swathed up to my middle in a cotton sheet of singular whiteness, and I began imagining the most fantastic things. I thought that someone was trying to clamber into the boat which I could no longer see, and that beneath the opaque mist the river teemed with strange creatures swimming round and round me. I was horribly uneasy, my head felt as though it had been clamped in a vice, and my heart beat so fast I thought I’d choke. I got a bit flustered then and considered swimming to the bank, but the very idea made me shake in my shoes. I could see myself getting lost, floundering about in the thick mist, getting entangled in the unavoidable reeds and rushes half-dead with fear, not knowing where the bank was, not being able to find my boat again, and I seemed to sense that there’d be something trying to pull me down to the bottom of the inky water.

  Anyway, since I’d have had to swim upstream for at least five hundred metres before finding a pot free of reeds and rushes, where I could scramble ashore, I had one chance in ten of navigating my way through the fog and making it without drowning, good swimmer though I was.

  I tried to talk some sense into myself. I felt my will was telling me not to be afraid, but there was something else at work other than my will, and that something else was scared. I wondered what I had to be frightened of. My courageous self jeered at my cowardly self and never more clearly than at that moment did I understand the struggle that goes on between the two opposing forces that lie within us, one wanting, the other resisting, with each taking turns to win the battle.

  My idiotic, inexplicable fears went on growing until they tuned into terror. I stood there absolutely still, eyes staring and ears cocked, waiting. What was I expecting? I had absolutely no idea, but I was certain it would be something horrible. I do believe that if a fish had taken it into its head to jump out of the water, as they often do, it would have been more than enough to make me fall down in a heap unconscious.

  Yet in the end, by making a supreme effort, I managed to reclaim most of my wits which were on the point of turning completely. I reached for the rum-bottle again and took a few good swigs.

  Then I got an idea and began yelling as loud as I could to all the points of the compass. When my throat finally seized up, I listened. In the distance, a dog barked.

  I took another drink and then stretched out full length in the bottom of the boat. I stayed like that for perhaps an hour, maybe two, not sleeping and not closing my eyes and with nightmares zooming all around me. I didn’t dare stand up and yet oh! how I longed to! I kept putting it off from one minute to the next. I kept saying: ‘On your feet!’ but I was too afraid to move a muscle. In the end, taking every care not to make the slightest sound, as though my very life depended on it, I sat up and looked over the side.

  I was dazzled by the most marvellous, the most astounding spectacle anybody could ever possibly expect to see. It was the weirdest sight – like something out of a fairy-tale, or one of those wonders that travellers just back from far-off lands prattle on about while you listen and don’t really believe.

  The mist which had been clinging to the surface of the water two hours before had lifted slowly and collected all along the banks. Leaving the river quite clear, it had formed into an unbroken ridge which stretched along each side to a height of six metres and shone in the moonlight as blindingly brilliant as a snowscape. As a result all I could see was the river streaked with fire between two white mountains. And high up, above my head, full and looming, a huge shining moon hung in a milky, blue-washed sky.

  All the creatures of pond and marsh were now awake. The frogs were making a tremendous row and against it, throbbing away to right and left, I could make out the squat, unvarying, melancholy croaking which the brass-voiced toads blare at the stars. Oddly enough, I wasn’t afraid any more. I was sittin
g right in the middle of such extraordinary scenic splendour that the weirdest things could have happened and left me cold.

  How long it lasted I couldn’t say, because in the end I dozed off. When I opened my eyes again, the moon had set and the sky was overcast. The water lapped lugubriously, the wind had got up, it was cold and very dark.

  I drank what was left of the rum, then sat shivering, listening to the swish of the reeds and the ominous sound of the river. I peered around but could not make out my boat or even my hands, even when I held them up in front of my face.

  Gradually, however, the blackness thinned. Suddenly I thought I sensed a shadow gliding just by me. I gave a cry and a voice answered: it was a fisherman. I called him, he rowed across, and I explained what had happened. He pulled alongside and we both heaved on the chain. The anchor would not shift. Day was breaking, grim, grey, rainy, and bitterly cold, the sort of day that brings sorrow and grief. Then I spotted another boat and we hailed it. The man at the oars joined forces with us and only then, little by little, did the anchor give. It came up slowly, very slowly, weighed down by something very heavy. Finally, we made out a black bulky mass which we manhandled into my boat.

  It was the body of an old woman. There was a large stone tied around her neck.

  (1876)

  Translated by David Coward

  ★

  Can A Corn

  by Jess Walter

  Ken took dialysis Tuesdays and Thursdays. It fell to Tommy after his mom passed to check his stepdad out of the Pine Lodge Correctional Facility. Drop him at the hospital. Take him back three hours later.

  Ken groaned as he climbed up the truck. –Whatcha got there, Tom?

  Tommy looked over the back seat. –Pole and tackle.

  –You goin’ fishin’ this weekend?

  –I ain’t skydivin’.

  Ken stared out his window. –You stop me by a store?

  There was a downtown grocery sold Lotto, fortified wines, and forties. Ken hopped out. Tommy spun radio stations until Ken came back with a can a corn.

  –Oh, no you ain’t, Ken.

  –So got-damn tired, Tom. Can’t sit on that blood machine today.

  –You’d rather die?

  –I’d rather fish.

  –No way, Ken.

  He drove toward Sacred Heart. But when Tommy stopped at a red light Ken reached back, got the pole, and jumped out. Fine, Tommy thought. Die. I don’t care. The old man walked toward the Spokane River. Tommy pulled up next to him, reached over, and popped the passenger door.

  –Get in the damn truck, Ken.

  Ken ignored him.

  –That pole ain’t even geared.

  Ken walked, facing away.

  Tommy drove alongside for another block. –Get in the truck, Ken.

  Ken turned down a one-way. Tommy couldn’t follow.

  Fine. Stupid bastard. Tommy went back to work, but the only thing in the pit was a brake job on some old lady’s Lincoln: six hundred in repairs on a shit-bucket worth three. Right. Pissed, Tommy gave the Lincoln to Miguel and drove back downtown.

  He parked, got his tackle box from the truck, and walked back along the river. Found his stepfather under a bridge, dry pole next to him.

  Tommy gave him hook and weight.

  Ken’s gray fingers shook.

  –Give it here. Tommy weighted and hooked the line. He pulled a can opener from the tackle box and opened Ken’s corn. Carefully, Tommy pushed the steel hook into the corn’s paper skin until, with a tiny spurt, it gave way.

  He handed the old man back the pole. Ken cast it.

  Half-hour later, Ken reeled in a dull catfish, yellow-eyed and spiny. No fight in it. Almost like it didn’t mind.

  Ken held it up. –Well I will be got-damned.

  Tommy released the fish. It just sort of sank.

  He dropped the old man at the front gate of the prison, his breathing already shallow. Rusty. He was so weak Tommy had to reach over and pop his door again.

  –Hey that wadn’t a bad got-damn fish. All things considered. His eyes were filming over already. –We should go again Tuesday.

  –We gonna start playin’ catch now, too? Tommy asked.

  Ken laughed.

  Tommy watched the old man pass through the metal gate. The fucker.

  (2013)

  After about an hour of sleep, a dramatic shift in brain activity occurs. A swell storms our systems. Those leviathan delta waves are splashed aside by a flotilla of new wavelets, leaping frenetically over and over, skimming wildly within your brain.

  This new pattern of slumbers is often called Paradoxical Sleep because outwardly we still seem discombobulated and suspended in the depths of sleep – and yet inwardly, science has shown us (via such mechanisms as an EEG or electroencephalogram), our brains are as awhirl as when we are awake. Indeed, we are now whirring with energy, expending a huge amount more metabolism than during those prior, deeper-slung and slower-wave sections of sleep; our blood pressure and pulse rate have also markedly risen – and yet our muscles are totally paralysed.

  Welcome to Dream Sleep (another term for it). This is the province of REM, as discovered in 1953 by Nathaniel Kleinman and Eugene Aserinsky while the latter was monitoring his eight-year-old son, Armond’s, sleep patterns. Had he not been studying his child, the science of sleep might have been delayed yet longer – children experience REM sleep earlier in the sleep cycle than adults. Kleinman and Aserinksy deduced that oculomotor activity (the up-down and left-right continuous movements of the eye) were linked to periods of intense brain activity and, as it occurred intermittently but regularly during sleep, vivid dreaming.

  Many sleep experts believe that during REM sleep, the flicker of our eyes is the tracking of our own visions as depicted in our dreams. In which case, the mind’s eye itself becomes an aperture, as our little lives unspool like a roll of film and play themselves out, complete with shutter speed and forty-wink frame rate.

  In other words, we tell ourselves a story.

  Activity is particularly intense within the lateral hypothalamus and amygdaloid complex of the brain: our chambers of memory. The harbour from which our dreams are launched is our own past history. Memories ripple outwards from a childhood echo chamber, projecting the ultimate home movies.

  As we trip down memory’s lanes, meanwhile, the brain continues its churn. Cerebrospinal fluid is pumped through it, in and around the blood vessels, rushing and sluicing the brain’s circuitry. The pineal cells (so-called because the pineal gland resembles a tiny pine cone), meanwhile, deliver melatonin (during REM and its obverse NREM state), which oils the cogs of your body clock. It is sometimes called the Dracula hormone, due to its elixir qualities being vampiric, in that it is only produced at night. It chronometers the body, internally, and is pumped from the pineal gland mainly, which operates like a lock-keeper for your brain – its cells piping melatonin to order – all helmed by the suprachiasmatic nuclei in the brain. This opening of the byways during deep sleep, allowing melatonin to rush up and down the spinal cord, is particularly pronounced during the dead spot. Its production not only chronicles the length of night, but is also varied in line with the different seasons.

  Our body clock pendulums back to childhood rhythms when we hit late middle-age. While teenagers are genuinely marooned on a different time zone, adult circadian rhythms plateau from about the age of fifty-five, returning to roughly the same cycle as when we were ten and younger (most of us wake up earlier again, basically).

  During our dotage, we are more likely to find ourselves awake during the small hours. This lighter sleeping is attributable to our increased susceptibility to light, as the eyeball’s lens sepias over time, dimming the key photosensitive receptors in the retina, called ganglion cells, and also as melatonin is produced less and less. Plasticity in the brain is slowly but surely reduced.

  In Holland, some old-people’s homes have found cognitive and behavioural improvements in their residents by over-lighting the interio
r between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. The over-compensation in brightness of lighting during the day has helped the elderly sleep at night, floodlighting their circadian receptors.

  The brain also loosens in terms of charge and activity over time. While half of a two-week-old baby’s sleep will consist of REM, the elderly spend the least time in such an emblazoned state. Those crucial cleansing processes that the brain conducts on itself during this type of sleep are curtailed.

  Sometimes the result of such weakened sleep patterns is the accumulation of amyloid beta, the dread plaque that is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. It should be no surprise, when we talk of dreams as echoing memories, that such weakened sleep patterns can contribute to this condition’s depleting the mind’s ability to remember. The symptoms of Alzheimer’s are directly analogous with the functionality during sleep of the brain’s aminergic (switched off) and cholinergic (live-wired) systems. We should not be surprised when we discover that often what linger on for the advanced Alzheimer’s patient are childhood memories. A song or poem learned during early youth can be perfectly rendered, even while a spouse’s name is forgotten.

  In such ways, we tick to the rhythm of our chronobiology. Yet, whatever our age, mysteries of sleep remain. The cartography of our dreamscapes, the journeys undertaken in oneiric life, is less easily charted. Many have tried, from Aristotle to Freud, from your friendly dream-diarist to the highest-tech sleep scientist. Even the most banal dream seems awesome to me. Let’s not explain away the spectacular atavism that allows us, cumulatively during our nightly flights of fancy, to map the human heart – or, rather, the ever-active brain, lit up by a total eclipse. Those exilic explorations of our inner space – our cosmic consciousness, whole firmaments of our very being – fire us into the next waking day. Now, you might say that I’m a dreamer . . . but I’m not the only one. This wonderment is common to us all, each night, as the time-and-space continuum is left far behind, in sleep’s exuberant wake, and we safari past that second star on the right, taking fabulous wing ‘straight on till morning’.