Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  ‘It was just like that. My suckers stuck to a rock underwater and my body waving back and forth overhead, like the weeds around me. Everything so quiet. Though that may have been because I had no ears. On sunny days, light shot down from the surface like an arrow. Fish of all colors and shapes drifted by above. And my mind was empty of thoughts. Other than lamprey thoughts, that is. Those were cloudy but very pure. It was a wonderful place to be.’

  The first time Scheherazade broke into someone’s house, she explained, she was a high-school junior and had a serious crush on a boy in her class. Though he wasn’t what you would call handsome, he was tall and clean-cut, a good student who played on the soccer team, and she was powerfully attracted to him. But he apparently liked another girl in their class and took no notice of Scheherazade. In fact, it was possible that he was unaware she existed. Nevertheless, she couldn’t get him out of her mind. Just seeing him made her breathless; sometimes she felt as if she were going to throw up. If she didn’t do something about it, she thought, she might go crazy. But confessing her love was out of the question.

  One day, Scheherazade skipped school and went to the boy’s house. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from where she lived. She had researched his family situation beforehand. His mother taught Japanese language at a school in a neighboring town. His father, who had worked at a cement company, had been killed in a car accident some years earlier. His sister was a junior-high-school student. This meant that the house should be empty during the day.

  Not surprisingly, the front door was locked. Scheherazade checked under the mat for a key. Sure enough, there was one there. Quiet residential communities in provincial cities like theirs had little crime, and a spare key was often left under a mat or a potted plant.

  To be safe, Scheherazade rang the bell, waited to make sure there was no answer, scanned the street in case she was being observed, opened the door, and entered. She locked the door again from the inside. Taking off her shoes, she put them in a plastic bag and stuck it in the knapsack on her back. Then she tiptoed up the stairs to the second floor.

  His bedroom was there, as she had imagined. His bed was neatly made. On the bookshelf was a small stereo, with a few CDs. On the wall, there was a calendar with a photo of the Barcelona soccer team and, next to it, what looked like a team banner, but nothing else. No posters, no pictures. Just a cream-colored wall. A white curtain hung over the window. The room was tidy, everything in its place. No books strewn about, no clothes on the floor. The room testified to the meticulous personality of its inhabitant. Or else to a mother who kept a perfect house. Or both. It made Scheherazade nervous. Had the room been sloppier, no one would have noticed whatever little messes she might make. Yet, at the same time, the very cleanliness and simplicity of the room, its perfect order, made her happy. It was so like him.

  Scheherazade lowered herself into the desk chair and sat there for a while. This is where he studies every night, she thought, her heart pounding. One by one, she picked up the implements on the desk, rolled them between her fingers, smelled them, held them to her lips. His pencils, his scissors, his ruler, his stapler—the most mundane objects became somehow radiant because they were his.

  She opened his desk drawers and carefully checked their contents. The uppermost drawer was divided into compartments, each of which contained a small tray with a scattering of objects and souvenirs. The second drawer was largely occupied by notebooks for the classes he was taking at the moment, while the one on the bottom (the deepest drawer) was filled with an assortment of old papers, notebooks, and exams. Almost everything was connected either to school or to soccer. She’d hoped to come across something personal – a diary, perhaps, or letters – but the desk held nothing of that sort. Not even a photograph. That struck Scheherazade as a bit unnatural. Did he have no life outside of school and soccer? Or had he carefully hidden everything of a private nature, where no one would come across it?

  Still, just sitting at his desk and running her eyes over his handwriting moved Scheherazade beyond words. To calm herself, she got out of the chair and sat on the floor. She looked up at the ceiling. The quiet around her was absolute. In this way, she returned to the lampreys’ world.

  ‘So all you did,’ Habara asked, ‘was enter his room, go through his stuff, and sit on the floor?’

  ‘No,’ Scheherazade said. ‘There was more. I wanted something of his to take home. Something that he handled every day or that had been close to his body. But it couldn’t be anything important that he would miss. So I stole one of his pencils.’

  ‘A single pencil?’

  ‘Yes. One that he’d been using. But stealing wasn’t enough. That would make it a straightforward case of burglary. The fact that I had done it would be lost. I was the Love Thief, after all.’

  The Love Thief? It sounded to Habara like the title of a silent film.

  ‘So I decided to leave something behind in its place, a token of some sort. As proof that I had been there. A declaration that this was an exchange, not a simple theft. But what should it be? Nothing popped into my head. I searched my knapsack and my pockets, but I couldn’t find anything appropriate. I kicked myself for not having thought to bring something suitable. Finally, I decided to leave a tampon behind. An unused one, of course, still in its plastic wrapper. My period was getting close, so I was carrying it around just to be safe. I hid it at the very back of the bottom drawer, where it would be difficult to find. That really turned me on. The fact that a tampon of mine was stashed away in his desk drawer. Maybe it was because I was so turned on that my period started almost immediately after that.’

  A tampon for a pencil, Habara thought. Perhaps that was what he should write in his diary that day: ‘Love Thief, Pencil, Tampon.’ He’d like to see what they’d make of that!

  ‘I was there in his home for only fifteen minutes or so. I couldn’t stay any longer than that: it was my first experience of sneaking into a house, and I was scared that someone would turn up while I was there. I checked the street to make sure that the coast was clear, slipped out the door, locked it, and replaced the key under the mat. Then I went to school. Carrying his precious pencil.’

  Scheherazade fell silent. From the look of it, she had gone back in time and was picturing the various things that had happened next, one by one.

  ‘That week was the happiest of my life,’ she said after a long pause. ‘I scribbled random things in my notebook with his pencil. I sniffed it, kissed it, rubbed my cheek with it, rolled it between my fingers. Sometimes I even stuck it in my mouth and sucked on it. Of course, it pained me that the more I wrote the shorter it got, but I couldn’t help myself. If it got too short, I thought, I could always go back and get another. There was a whole bunch of used pencils in the pencil holder on his desk. He wouldn’t have a clue that one was missing. And he probably still hadn’t found the tampon tucked away in his drawer. That idea excited me no end – it gave me a strange ticklish sensation down below. It didn’t bother me anymore that in the real world he never looked at me or showed that he was even aware of my existence. Because I secretly possessed something of his—a part of him, as it were.’

  Ten days later, Scheherazade skipped school again and paid a second visit to the boy’s house. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. As before, she fished the key from under the mat and opened the door. Again, his room was in flawless order. First, she selected a pencil with a lot of use left in it and carefully placed it in her pencil case. Then she gingerly lay down on his bed, her hands clasped on her chest, and looked up at the ceiling. This was the bed where he slept every night. The thought made her heart beat faster, and she found it difficult to breathe normally. Her lungs weren’t filling with air and her throat was as dry as a bone, making each breath painful.

  Scheherazade got off the bed, straightened the covers, and sat down on the floor, as she had on her first visit. She looked back up at the ceiling. I’m not quite ready for his bed, she told herself. That’s still too much
to handle.

  This time, Scheherazade spent half an hour in the house. She pulled his notebooks from the drawer and glanced through them. She found a book report and read it. It was on Kokoro, a novel by Soseki Natsume, that summer’s reading assignment. His handwriting was beautiful, as one would expect from a straight-A student, not an error or an omission anywhere. The grade on it was Excellent. What else could it be? Any teacher confronted with penmanship that perfect would automatically give it an Excellent, whether he bothered to read a single line or not.

  Scheherazade moved on to the chest of drawers, examining its contents in order. His underwear and socks. Shirts and pants. His soccer uniform. They were all neatly folded. Nothing stained or frayed. Had he done the folding? Or, more likely, had his mother done it for him? She felt a pang of jealousy toward the mother, who could do these things for him each and every day.

  Scheherazade leaned over and sniffed the clothes in the drawers. They all smelled freshly laundered and redolent of the sun. She took out a plain gray T-shirt, unfolded it, and pressed it to her face. Might not a whiff of his sweat remain under the arms? But there was nothing. Nevertheless, she held it there for some time, inhaling through her nose. She wanted to keep the shirt for herself. But that would be too risky. His clothes were so meticulously arranged and maintained. He (or his mother) probably knew the exact number of T-shirts in the drawer. If one went missing, all hell might break loose. Scheherazade carefully refolded the T-shirt and returned it to its proper place. In its stead, she took a small badge, shaped like a soccer ball, that she found in one of the desk drawers. It seemed to date back to a team from his grade-school years. She doubted that he would miss it. At the very least, it would be some time before he noticed that it was gone. While she was at it, she checked the bottom drawer of the desk for the tampon. It was still there.

  Scheherazade tried to imagine what would happen if his mother discovered the tampon. What would she think? Would she demand that he explain what on earth a tampon was doing in his desk? Or would she keep her discovery a secret, turning her dark suspicions over and over in her mind? Scheherazade had no idea. But she decided to leave the tampon where it was. After all, it was her very first token.

  To commemorate her second visit, Scheherazade left behind three strands of her hair. The night before, she had plucked them out, wrapped them in plastic, and sealed them in a tiny envelope. Now she took this envelope from her knapsack and slipped it into one of the old math notebooks in his drawer. The three hairs were straight and black, neither too long nor too short. No one would know whose they were without a DNA test, though they were clearly a girl’s.

  She left his house and went straight to school, arriving in time for her first afternoon class. Once again, she was content for about ten days. She felt that he had become that much more hers. But, as you might expect, this chain of events would not end without incident. For, as Scheherazade had said, sneaking into other people’s homes is highly addictive.

  At this point in the story Scheherazade glanced at the bedside clock and saw that it was 4:32 p.m. ‘Got to get going,’ she said, as if to herself. She hopped out of bed and put on her plain white panties, hooked her bra, slipped into her jeans, and pulled her dark-blue Nike sweatshirt over her head. Then she scrubbed her hands in the bathroom, ran a brush through her hair, and drove away in her blue Mazda.

  Left alone with nothing in particular to do, Habara lay in bed and ruminated on the story she had just told him, savoring it bit by bit, like a cow chewing its cud. Where was it headed? he wondered. As with all her stories, he hadn’t a clue. He found it difficult to picture Scheherazade as a high-school student. Was she slender then, free of the flab she carried today? School uniform, white socks, her hair in braids?

  He wasn’t hungry yet, so he put off preparing his dinner and went back to the book he had been reading, only to find that he couldn’t concentrate. The image of Scheherazade sneaking into her classmate’s room and burying her face in his shirt was too fresh in his mind. He was impatient to hear what had happened next.

  Scheherazade’s next visit to the house was three days later, after the weekend had passed. As always, she came bearing large paper bags stuffed with provisions. She went through the food in the fridge, replacing everything that was past its expiration date, examined the canned and bottled goods in the cupboard, checked the supply of condiments and spices to see what was running low, and wrote up a shopping list. She put some bottles of Perrier in the fridge to chill. Finally, she stacked the new books and DVDs she had brought with her on the table. ‘Is there something more you need or want?’

  ‘Can’t think of anything,’ Habara replied.

  Then, as always, the two went to bed and had sex. After an appropriate amount of foreplay, he slipped on his condom, entered her, and, after an appropriate amount of time, ejaculated. After casting a professional eye on the contents of his condom, Scheherazade began the latest installment of her story.

  As before, she felt happy and fulfilled for ten days after her second break-in. She tucked the soccer badge away in her pencil case and from time to time fingered it during class. She nibbled on the pencil she had taken and licked the lead. All the time she was thinking of his room. She thought of his desk, the bed where he slept, the chest of drawers packed with his clothes, his pristine white boxer shorts, and the tampon and three strands of hair she had hidden in his drawer.

  She had lost all interest in schoolwork. In class, she either fiddled with the badge and the pencil or gave in to daydreams. When she went home, she was in no state of mind to tackle her homework. Scheherazade’s grades had never been a problem. She wasn’t a top student, but she was a serious girl who always did her assignments. So when her teacher called on her in class and she was unable to give a proper answer, he was more puzzled than angry. Eventually, he summoned her to the staff room during the lunch break. ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked her. ‘Is anything bothering you?’ She could only mumble something vague about not feeling well. Her secret was too weighty and dark to reveal to anyone – she had to bear it alone.

  ‘I had to keep breaking into his house,’ Scheherazade said. ‘I was compelled to. As you can imagine, it was a very risky business. Even I could see that. Sooner or later, someone would find me there, and the police would be called. The idea scared me to death. But, once the ball was rolling, there was no way I could stop it. Ten days after my second ‘visit’, I went there again. I had no choice. I felt that if I didn’t I would go off the deep end. Looking back, I think I really was a little crazy.’

  ‘Didn’t it cause problems for you at school, skipping class so often?’ Habara asked.

  ‘My parents had their own business, so they were too busy to pay much attention to me. I’d never caused any problems up to then, never challenged their authority. So they figured a hands-off approach was best. Forging notes for school was a piece of cake. I explained to my homeroom teacher that I had a medical problem that required me to spend half a day at the hospital from time to time. Since the teachers were racking their brains over what to do about the kids who hadn’t come to school in ages, they weren’t too concerned about me taking half a day off every now and then.’

  Scheherazade shot a quick glance at the clock next to the bed before continuing.

  ‘I got the key from under the mat and entered the house for a third time. It was as quiet as before – no, even quieter for some reason. It rattled me when the refrigerator turned on – it sounded like a huge beast sighing. The phone rang while I was there. The ringing was so loud and harsh that I thought my heart would stop. I was covered with sweat. No one picked up, of course, and it stopped after about ten rings. The house felt even quieter then.’

  Scheherazade spent a long time stretched out on his bed that day. This time her heart did not pound so wildly, and she was able to breathe normally. She could imagine him sleeping peacefully beside her, even feel as if she were watching over him as he slept. She felt that, if she reached out,
she could touch his muscular arm. He wasn’t there next to her, of course. She was just lost in a haze of daydreams.

  She felt an overpowering urge to smell him. Rising from the bed, she walked over to his chest of drawers, opened one, and examined the shirts inside. All had been washed and neatly folded. They were pristine, and free of odor, just like before.

  Then an idea struck her. She raced down the stairs to the first floor. There, in the room beside the bath, she found the laundry hamper and removed the lid. Mixed together were the soiled clothes of the three family members – mother, daughter, and son. A day’s worth, from the looks of it. Scheherazade extracted a piece of male clothing. A white crew-neck T-shirt. She took a whiff. The unmistakable scent of a young man. A mustiness she had smelled before, when her male classmates were close by. Not a scintillating odor, to be sure. But the fact that this smell was his brought Scheherazade unbounded joy. When she put her nose next to the armpits and inhaled, she felt as though she were in his embrace, his arms wrapped firmly about her.

  T-shirt in hand, Scheherazade climbed the stairs to the second floor and lay on his bed once more. She buried her face in his shirt and greedily breathed in. Now she could feel a languid sensation in the lower part of her body. Her nipples were stiffening as well. Could her period be on the way? No, it was much too early. Was this sexual desire? If so, then what could she do about it? She had no idea. One thing was for sure, though – there was nothing to be done under these circumstances. Not here in his room, on his bed.

  In the end, Scheherazade decided to take the shirt home with her. It was risky, for sure. His mother was likely to figure out that a shirt was missing. Even if she didn’t realize that it had been stolen, she would still wonder where it had gone. Any woman who kept her house so spotless was bound to be a neat freak of the first order. When something went missing, she would search the house from top to bottom, like a police dog, until she found it. Undoubtedly, she would uncover the traces of Scheherazade in her precious son’s room. But, even as Scheherazade understood this, she didn’t want to part with the shirt. Her brain was powerless to persuade her heart.