Miles To Go Before I Sleep

by Bentley Little

  MILES TO GO BEFORE I SLEEP

  Bentley Little

  ONE

  In the dream he was whole again, and as he walked down the sunny street, head high, thinking of his wife, he felt good, proud, and he knew with a certainty borne of security that Barbara was all his, that she would never even look at another man.

  He looked down at his fingers. They were long, extraordinarily so, unnaturally so, but they curved gracefully in a way that seemed somehow sensuous. He wiggled the fingers of his left hand. They responded to the commands of his brain, but they did so on a delay, a beat or two behind his thoughts.

  He glanced up, and there was Barbara. She was standing in the middle of the sidewalk wearing the swimsuit he had bought for her on their honeymoon in California. To the left he could see a house, a two-story house, white with green trim. He had never seen the house before, but there was something about it that he liked, that made him feel good.

  “I love you,” Barbara said. Her voice was a throaty sexy whisper.

  He hugged her, his long fingers caressing the skin of her back, and she pressed against him as their lips met and they kissed.

  Ed awoke frustrated, his body tense and sweating. He looked at Barbara, lying next to him on the bed, her bare shoulder peeking out from beneath the blanket. He breathed heavily for a moment, then leaned back against the pillow, closed his eyes and tried to will away the feelings within him. For the millionth time he cursed the accident that had cost him his . . . manhood. He took a deep breath and reached for Barbara, but she pulled away from him, mumbling in her sleep, frowning. He stared at the back of her head, and against his will, alone on the far side of the bed, a tear escaped from underneath his eyelid, and he began to cry.

  At breakfast everything was fine.

  Ed awoke first, showered and shaved, and by the time he had made the orange juice and started the eggs, both Barbara and Lisa had awakened and come into the kitchen. Barbara gave him a kiss on the cheek and a happy smile, and Lisa gave him a quick hug before sitting down at the table and fishing through the pile of newspaper for the entertainment section.

  It felt good being with his family like this, and at these moments he could almost convince himself that this was what was important. Being close. Being together. Caring. He could almost convince himself that sex was, after all, only a minor part of life.

  Almost.

  He looked at Barbara, staring out the window, drinking her juice. She was as beautiful now as she had been the day he’d married her. More beautiful, perhaps. There were a few wrinkles around the eyes, a few extra pounds around the thighs, but those were the natural results of life experience, and they added character and maturity to the superficial good looks of her youth. He would not be rationalizing if he said that her beauty now was deeper and more real than it ever had been before.

  That worried him sometimes.

  His eyes moved over to his daughter, sitting on the opposite side of the table. Lisa knew of the accident, of course, but she did not know of his problem, and he doubted that she ever would. They had discussed it at length, he and Barbara, although they had never arrived at a decision. Based on past experience, however, based on how difficult it had been for either of them to discuss even the basics of sex with their child, he did not think it likely that they would ever get around to broaching the subject of his . . . physical inadequacy.

  Not that she needed to know. After all, he had never known any details of his own parents’ intimate lives, and he did not feel that it was something he should know. Some things were meant to be private.

  Lisa looked up from her newspaper, caught his eye and smiled. “What is it, Daddy?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “Can I ride to school today with Keith and Elena?”

  He stared at her with an expression of mock hurt. “You’re ashamed of me, aren’t you? You’re ashamed to be seen with your poor old father—”

  “Knock it off, Daddy.”

  He chuckled. “It’s okay by me, if it’s okay with your mother.”

  “Mom?”

  Barbara nodded distractedly. “Fine, dear.”

  “All right!”

  Ed slid the spatula under the eggs on the frying pan, placed the eggs on a plate and handed the plate to Lisa. "I’ll be there early today, though. And if you’re even a minute late, that’s it. You ride with me for the rest of the year.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t be crazy.”

  “Ed,” Barbara said. “Don’t be overprotective.”

  His comment was supposed to have been lighthearted, a joke, but although Lisa seemed to have understood the facetiousness of his remark, Barbara was taking it at face value. He frowned. She’d been doing that a lot lately, misunderstanding things, not seeing humor where it was intended. He had not changed since the accident, but she had, and it was as if the rhythm they had built up over the last twenty years had been thrown off. Comments he made that she would have previously understood, he now found himself having to explain.

  He shook his head. Maybe it was him. Maybe he was just overreacting, reading into events interpretations that simply were not there.

  “I’m not overprotective,” he found himself saying.

  Barbara looked up at him, smiled, and he suddenly felt foolish. “It was a joke,” she said.

  “Oh.” He turned back toward the stove and cracked another egg into the frying pan. The yolk broke, and he watched as the yellow slid into the white in tentacled rivulets that for some reason reminded him of blood.

  Maintenance supervisor.

  Janitor.

  “Maintenance supervisor” was technically the title of his job, the one that appeared on the tops of his annual reviews and on the single sheet of his job description, but he liked “janitor” better. It seemed more honest, more real, more descriptive of his actual duties. He was not sure which term Barbara or Lisa preferred. He had never asked them. He had the feeling that his wife and daughter were slightly ashamed of what he did. They had never said so, had never even indicated in any way that this was how they felt, but it was a persistent suspicion and one which he could not seem to shake.

  Although he enjoyed his job, although he liked working at the school, being around the kids, he himself felt slightly guilty about his occupation. It seemed to him that his position was one that was supposed to be a way-station, a temporary spot filled by young kids on their way up and old men on their way down, not the way to make a living for a middle-class middle-aged man with a wife and daughter.

  But he liked his job. It was fun, did not require a great deal of thought or effort, and for a man of his age and education, it provided security, good benefits and a decent living. What more could a person ask for?

  He rifled through his ring of keys until he found the one that opened the maintenance supply office. He walked into the underlit office, moving past the newspaper-covered desk to the bent shelf in the back where the fluorescent lighting tubes were kept. One of the lights had burned out in the art classroom yesterday, and the resultant shadows made it difficult for some of the beginning students to differentiate between closely related color shadings. He had not had time to get to the classroom after school and before his shift ended, so he’d promised the teacher he’d fix the problem this morning before school started.

  Ed found a box with the proper-sized lighting tube, carried it into the hall, closed and locked the supply office behind him. He turned around and almost ran into Cathy Epstein, one of his daughter’s best friends and the only one who still lived on their street.

  “Sorry, Cathy,” he said. “Didn’t see you there.”

  The girl looked at him and her eyes widened. Her eyes darted from his
chest to his face and back again. “Where did you get that sweater?” she asked. Her voice was high, shaky, and it sounded to him as though she was frightened.

  He looked down at the clothes he was wearing and saw that he had put on a red-and-green-striped sweater. He could not recall making a decision to wear the sweater this morning and could not recall where or when he’d bought it. He looked at Cathy, shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess my wife must’ve bought it for me. Why?”

  She said nothing, only backed away, shaking her head, her face pale.

  He frowned. “Cathy?” he said. “Are you all right?”

  She held up a hand to stop his progress, tried to smile. “I’m fine,” she said, but he could tell by her tone of voice that she was lying. “I, uh, have to go, Mr. Williams. I’ll see you later.”

  He watched her continue down the hall, then looked down again at his sweater. Was this what had frightened her? It hardly seemed possible. A sweater? He tugged on the material, pulling it tighter. He could not remember ever wearing the sweater before, but it looked good on him, and it felt comfortable.

  He shrugged, then continued down the hall toward the art room.

  TWO

  Cathy Epstein did not breathe easily until she was safely out of the hallway and in her seat in Algebra. She put her books on the rack under her seat, and only then did she realize that her hands were shaking.

  What was wrong with her?

  She had never before been so frightened by a nightmare that the elements of its composition retained their horror in the waking world.

  But she had never before had a nightmare like the one she’d had last night.

  Goose bumps appeared on her arms even now as she thought of it. In the dream, she’d been going to a party at Lisa’s house. She’d strode confidently up the walkway, opened the door and stepped into the house. Inside, the party was in full swing. But there was no furniture in the house save a low ugly table covered with a variety of drinking glasses: expensive crystal, average tumblers, empty jelly jars. She didn’t recognize any of the people in the living room, so she walked through the crowd of party-goers into another room, and another, and another. The house was bigger than it was supposed to be, and she continued moving backward, as the number of guests dwindled. Finally, she found herself in a small white room where Lisa was sitting in front of a computer terminal.

  The figure turned around, but it was not Lisa. It was a life-sized Barbie doll.

  The doll grinned at her.

  Cathy turned and ran back the way she had come. In the living room again, at the front of the house, everyone was standing in a circle, cheering and clapping, while in the center of the circle an upright dead body spun like a top, blood flying outward and splattering against the walls, dripping into the drinking glasses on the table.

  Then the clapping and cheering stopped, the room grew silent, the lights dimmed. The only sound in the room was the whirling body and the falling blood.

  And he stepped into the room.

  Cathy could not remember having ever been so frightened in her entire life. The figure did nothing but stand there, in the doorway, but his mere presence caused the temperature in the room to drop a good twenty degrees, and made even the partygoers, who a moment before had been celebrating the fall of blood from the spinning corpse, stand still and silent with terror. She stared at the figure, unable to look away. There was something so evil, so fundamentally wrong about his being, that she felt unclean and corrupt merely looking at him. His face was in the dark, hidden both by shadows and by the hat he wore low on his head, but she had the feeling that he was hideously deformed. Her eyes moved down. His fingers were long, unnaturally long, and curved. She could see them silhouetted against the lighter night outside the door, and somehow those fingers scared her most of all.

  In the second before she had awakened, screaming, the figure had turned, and she had been able to see the thick red and green stripes of his old sweater.

  The same sweater Mr. Williams had been wearing.

  Cathy looked around the room, reassuring herself with its light, with its people, with the concreteness of its existence. How could she let herself be so scared by a dream? So scared that she was frightened of a sweater worn by a man she’d known since she was a baby. Maybe she needed help. Psychiatric help. Did teenagers go to psychiatrists?

  She shook her head. She wanted to put the nightmare behind her, to forget about it the way she usually did when she had a bad dream, but she didn’t seem to be able to do so.

  Because it seemed more like the remembrance of a real event than the memory of a dream.

  That was stupid, she told herself. She was behaving like a little child.

  But the thought would not go away, and she spent the rest of the day moving carefully between classes, avoiding Mr. Williams.

  THREE

  A kid puked at lunch in the cafeteria, and though he quickly mopped it up with the soap and water that was already in his bucket, Ed knew he’d have to go back later with some heavy-duty Lysol and really scrub the spot clean.

  It was a busy day. In addition to his regular duties, he had to take over the work of Rudy Martinez, the other day janitor, because Rudy had called in sick, and it was after the bell rang and fifth period began before he finally had a chance to head over to the supply office.

  The way things were going, he’d probably be here until six tonight.

  The Lysol was not where it was supposed to be, on the floor next to the desk (he’d have to talk to the night workers about that), so he moved back into the stock shelves to look for it. Walking past the tools, he scanned the middle cleaning shelf for the familiar bottle and his eyes alighted on the strange half-hidden object he had found last week.

  A leather glove fitted with long steel razor fingers.

  He stepped back as though shocked. He had forgotten all about the glove. He had come across it in the basement, buried amongst a pile of old rags near the corner of the incinerator, and he remembered now that he’d intended to talk to the principal about his discovery, to ask what should be done with the object.

  But somehow he’d forgotten.

  He picked up the glove, holding it gingerly. The razor fingers, hanging limp, clicked together, making a satisfyingly martial sound. This, no doubt, had been the inspiration for his dream. His dream of long fingers. His dream of potency. He pulled on the glove. The fit was tight but it was comfortable, and the long steel fingers did indeed make him feel more strong, more manly somehow.

  More powerful.

  From somewhere he heard the sound of a child humming, a vaguely familiar nursery rhyme tune which seemed at once innocent and chilling. He slashed the fingers once through the air and the humming disappeared, replaced by a gratifying silence. He tapped the razors on the metal shelf. They clicked loudly and pleasantly, making a drumroll sound. He looked around, saw a sealed box on the top shelf above him. He reached up, and the fingers, long enough to reach the box, sliced cleanly and easily through the cardboard, causing a flood of pencils to spill out and onto his head.

  Ed smiled and took off the glove. The steel fingers, which had been extensions of his own shorter flesh-and-blood fingers, drooped impotently down as he replaced the glove on the shelf.

  The smile faded from his face. The happiness he had felt seconds before fled, replaced by an unsettling empty feeling. He stared at the glove, at the brown-lined leather and the faded brilliance of the razors. The glove had fit him, had felt good on his hand, but looking at it now, it seemed wrong somehow. It looked like a weapon. Who would make a glove with razors for fingers? Who would even think of something like that? Some kid in shop class? He didn’t think so.

  He’d stick to his original plan, tell the principal about the glove, let him decide what to do with it.

  Ed found the bottle of Lysol, took it from the shelf and carried it out of the room. He stopped in the hallway, closed and locked the door behind him, then stood there for a moment, slightly p
uzzled. He knew he’d intended to go to Mr. Kinney’s office and tell the principal something, but now for the life of him he could not remember what it was.

  He looked down at his hand, wiggled his fingers, and the missing information almost came to him. But then whatever he had been thinking faded away, receding into nothing.

  Oh well. It would come to him eventually.

  He picked up his mop and his Lysol and started down the hallway toward the cafeteria.

  FOUR

  Lisa awoke in the hospital. Around her, she could hear the rhythmic pulsing beeping sounds of modern medicine in action. But she heard no voices, no people. She sat up and looked around and found herself in a long white room filled with sympathy flowers lined up by order of size along the wall. Aside from her bed and a bank of miniature television screens, all of which showed a solid red pattern, the room was devoid of furniture or medical instruments. She blinked. This did not look like any hospital room she had ever seen.

  She climbed out of bed, feeling slightly dizzy. Behind her bed, she saw, was a window. She walked over to the window and looked out, but behind the glass square she saw another hospital room, identical to her own save for the fact that the walls and bed were red and the bank of miniature televisions showed a solid white.

  In the bed was a life-sized Barbie doll.

  She turned away from the window and ran the length of the long room toward the door. She pulled open the door and dashed into the hallway, but immediately had to steady herself against the wall. Everything here was eerily off-center, sharply angular, wrong. Floor and wall and ceiling met in strangely peaked lines, the checkerboard floor tile a shifting optical illusion. A gurney sat in the center of the hallway, its metal joints held together in crooked junctions that should not have been possible.

  “Help!” Lisa cried. Her voice echoed, changing as it moved away from her, growing deeper and more assured instead of dimmer and faint, until it was coming back toward her in a mode and manner that was truly terrifying.