The Sleep Police

by Jay Bonansinga

  Turning away from the bulletin board, panic squeezing his chest, he tried to think back to that night five days ago when he felt so dizzy. He remembered going into the bathroom and throwing open the medicine cabinet, looking for his Verapamil for his heart murmur. And then he remembered going into the kitchen, and making himself a sandwich.

  But he had never gotten a chance to eat it. He had blacked out on the kitchen floor.

  And he had awakened in another part of the apartment, his bare feet filthy, cracked and bloody.

  “Wait a minute, wait-a-minute, wait-a-minute,” he muttered, his heart jittering. He went over to the VCR, his pulse thumping in his ears. He pressed the PLAY button and watched the TV screen, the image flickering for a moment, then locking onto the mysterious talking head.

  “—only come out when Frank’s asleep—”

  Frank punched the FAST-FORWARD button, then pressed PLAY again.

  “—I’m doing God’s work—”

  Frank hit the PAUSE button again, glancing at the window, the anger seething inside him. He pressed the FAST-FORWARD button, then hit the PLAY button again.

  “—It’s pretty amazing, how it works. It’s like I live in a cocoon, and I turn into a butterfly every few nights when Frank finally drifts off to sleep—”

  Frank slammed his hand down on the PAUSE button, the monstrous version of him frozen on the TV, eyes glowing with tiny orange specks of light.

  Like cinders smoldering.

  “Son of a bitch!” Frank cried, then spun away from the TV and kicked the bulletin board as hard as he could, and the blow cracked the cheap corkboard down the middle, jarring the photographs and notecards loose, sending them fluttering to the floor.

  Then he turned to the bookcase and swiped his hand across the contents of the shelf. Tapes, paperbacks, and LPs careened to the floor. An old, cracked, yellowed photo album fell open on the rug. Frank stood there for a moment, staring down at the photo album, his fists clenching.

  It had fallen open to a boyhood photograph of Frank and Kyle in snowsuits, circa early seventies.

  Frank knelt. He picked up the album, holding it with trembling hands. He rubbed his fingertip across the yellowed plastic protective layer. It was a snapshot of him and Kyle on a Toboggan at Garvey Park, a few blurry figures in the background. One of the figures was the Old Greek, the boys’ guardian, Uncle Andreas, his big, bushy handlebar mustache barely visible under the hood of his parka.

  Frank turned the page.

  And he stared.

  And somehow, deep down, Frank knew exactly what he had to do before he even saw the picture.

  It was another grainy black-and-white snapshot—this one showing a heavyset woman in a house dress with dark circles under her eyes, smoking a cigarette, leaning against a cheap Formica counter in some low-rent Chicago bungalow. She was smirking at the camera, half embarrassed, half defiant. There was a plastic Flintstones cup next to her on the counter, alongside a sixteen-ounce can of Colt 45 malt liquor.

  It was one of the most indelible memories Frank had of his mother. The way she drank her beer out of that silly Flintstones cup.

  Frank knew what he had to do even before he laid eyes on her picture.

  He knew what he had to do.

  It took Frank five and a half hours to make it up the dark river of asphalt called Highway 94 to the outskirts of Green Bay. Blinded by the passing lights of long-haul semis, head buzzing with the Dexedrine drone, Frank was driving a ‘96 Honda Civic that badly needed new plugs and points, and when it got up around seventy-five it vibrated furiously. But it had a good stereo, which helped Frank think and stay awake.

  He reached Clarendon at around midnight.

  A state facility, comprised of about fifty acres of desolate wetlands and aging brick buildings, Clarendon Psychiatric Hospital had always enjoyed a long-term reciprocal agreement with the Cook County Psychiatric Association, housing many of Chicago’s overflow mental patients. At night, the winding two-lane that led up to the main building was fairly imposing, a narrow channel shrouded by hemlock and black pine, broken only by the occasional reflector pole or errant deer.

  Arriving through a cloud of fog, Frank steered the Civic up the snaking access road, his vision blurred from lack of sleep and night blindness. He parked in the visitor’s lot and went into the main building through the side entrance.

  The place smelled of misery, old urine, disinfectant and overcooked gruel. Frank checked in with the central reception desk, flashing his detective’s shield in order to get in after hours. He was directed to Dr. Hemphill’s assistant. Frank thanked the nurse and strode down the main corridor, bypassing the assistant’s office and heading straight for the special care ward.

  Helen Janus’s room was number 177-B, which was the last room on the right. Frank had to go through two security doors, and flash his badge at twice as many orderlies in order to get to his mother. When he finally reached her room, his palms were sweating. He gently opened her door, expecting to see her unconscious, hooked to IV tubes, mouth slack, eyes rolled back in her head as she had been before.

  But when he stepped inside the private room, he was greeted by one very noisy, very hungry surprise.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “You zee pudding man?”

  The old woman’s voice croaked out across the room on a burble of phlegm. Amazingly, Helen Janus was sitting up against her headboard, eyes open and awake, staring directly at Frank, the loose flesh beneath her chin jiggling. She had bandages wrapped around her wrists.

  “Mom?”

  “Veneeela pudding—I order eet hours ago!”

  “Mom, it’s me, it’s Frankie,” Frank said softly, coming over to her bedside. He was shaking furiously now. He didn’t know what to do.

  “I order eeet hours ago!”

  “I’m not the pudding man, Mom, I’m your son, Frank, Frankie, your son.”

  “Vat does a girl need to do to get pudding around here?”

  “It’s Frankie, Mom.”

  She waved a plump, arthritic hand, the fat under her massive arm swaying. “Eeet’s no use,” she said, and then she put her face in her ruined hands.

  Frank cautiously came around and put a hand tenderly on her shoulder.

  And that’s when he saw the cup.

  The cup.

  It was sitting on her bedside tray. Someone must have gone down and fetched it from her personal trunk in the basement storage room. It was empty, dry as flint, the cartoon characters long faded off its side. You could barely see Fred Flintstone’s trademark orange animal skin tunic, Wilma’s bouffant. It probably still smelled of rancid Colt 45.

  It was Helen’s security blanket.

  Something about that Flintstones cup sent Frank reeling backward in time...

  ...and for one long excruciating moment, he saw his mother’s whole sad life flicker across his mind like a nickelodeon.

  America in the 1950s.

  A lonely Levittown tract home.

  Hiding from the world, barely able to speak English, newlywed Helen Janus finds herself living the life of a recluse, while her husband, Constantin, travels the Eastern Seaboard in his beat-up Nash as a Fuller brush salesman. Conny Janus is a heavy drinker and a womanizer, and he takes advantage of every opportunity to stray. Along the way, he acquires not only emphysema and cirrhosis of the liver, but a major case of gonorrhea. Meanwhile, Helen is gaining weight and becoming the town flake. She papers her windows with the covers of movie star magazines, and she talks to voices, and she dresses in men’s slacks, which is highly scandalous to the neighbors. But her illness is just beneath the surface, buried in eccentricities. The undiagnosed schizophrenia becomes an integral part of her life, like a wooden leg or a set of dentures.

  By the time the children come, the Januses are living in Chicago, their marriage teetering on the brink. Constantin is drinking a quart of port wine every day now and availing himself of the local prostitutes on a regular basis. Helen balloons to nearly three hu
ndred pounds and starts taking Phenobarbital for her “nervous spells.” She is also talking to pictures of Jesus Christ and Sophia Loren. It is a miracle the boys are born healthy. Little Frankie comes first, in the spring of ‘64, and a couple of years later, little Kasos (AKA Kyle) is born.

  Helen is strangely galvanized by motherhood. It touches off some deep instinct within her, and she showers the kids with affection. The children become her raison d’etre. Her solitary purpose on this earth. She loses sixty pounds, and her schizophrenia goes into a sort of remission. Unfortunately, the stress of raising two little boys is too much for her marriage. One morning, Constantin just ups and vanishes. No note, no sign that he had ever lived in their little brick bungalow other than a few empty drawers and the lingering smell of stale cigars and Aqua Velva aftershave.

  Helen is left to fend for herself and her children.

  She does the best she can under the circumstances. She gets a job in a sweatshop on Damen Avenue sewing tent canvas, and she starts dating a succession of single men around the neighborhood. Frankie and Kyle get used to seeing a different “uncle” in their mother’s bed every night. Money is tight, and sometimes the neighborhood kids tease the boys about their “crazy mom,” and once in a while the voices plague Helen late at night. But mostly things are okay because Helen Janus adores her children with every fiber of her being.

  Even on the night of the murder, the boys know that their mother adores them.

  It’s Frank who first stumbles upon the bloody scene. Only ten years old, his bare feet cold on the hardwood floor, he peers into his mother’s bedroom and sees the blossom of deep scarlet on the curtains. He sees the school teacher’s body splayed across the bed, half naked, the flesh marbled in blood. He sees the school teacher’s head lolled backward, the left eye a tiny black pocket of gore. And Frank sees his mother, sitting on the edge of the bed, murmuring under her breath, conversing with one of her voices, her enormous breasts dangling inside her robe, her plump fingers gently cradling the .38 special in her lap as though it were a lost kitten.

  She glances up at Frank then—gazing through a blue veil of cordite smoke—and she says in her thick Greek accent, “Jez ree-membeer thet I luff you, Frankie.”

  And even after the cops come and take Helen away, and the courts send the boys downstate to live with their Uncle Andreas and Aunt Nikki, and the system all but banishes Helen to a lifetime of institutions...those words continue to fester in the recesses of Frank’s burgeoning mind. I love you, Frankie. What does she really mean by that? What does it mean for a mother to love a child as furiously as Helen? Does it mean people have to die? Is it all Frankie’s fault?

  These questions will haunt Frank Janus for the rest of his days.

  Especially late at night. Especially when he can’t get to sleep.

  “Mom, please—”

  Back in the here and now. Frank kneeling next to the bed. Moonlight spilling on hospital sheets, a plump, rheumatoid hand clutching the linen.

  “It’s Frankie, mom, please, listen to me, it’s important—” Frank was leaning toward Helen’s headboard, his lips only inches away from her liver-spotted ears. He couldn’t stand it anymore. He had to ask her the question. Whether she understood or not.

  He had to ask her.

  “Mom, can you hear me?”

  Her lidded eyes gazed up at him. “You’re not zee pudding man.”

  “No, mom, I’m not the pudding man, I’m your son—”

  “My—?”

  “Your son, mom—Frankie—it’s Frankie.”

  Eyes blinking, creases around her mouth deepening. “Frankie?”

  “I need to ask you something,” Frank said, his throat filling with a lump, his eyes moistening. All of a sudden he felt nine years old again, and it was late at night, and he had wet the bed again, and now he had to ask his mommy to clean him up. “It’s very important,” he said.

  “Frankie—?”

  “That’s right, mom, it’s Frankie, and I have to ask you something very important. Do you understand?”

  “My baby,” she said, and her hand fluttered around his face like an injured bird.

  “That’s right,” Frank said, his throat squeezing his words, his voice breaking. He had to get the question out before he broke down. “I need to ask you something, mom, something about me.”

  “Some-zing about my little Frankie?”

  “Think hard, mom, it’s important.”

  The old woman’s face warmed, her eyes glistening, filling with affection. “Vot’s the matter, Frankie? Tell me vot’s the matter.”

  A tear broke and tracked down Frank’s cheek. “Am I sick, mom?”

  “You are not feeling vell, honey?”

  “No, mom, it’s not that,” Frank said, wiping his eyes. He was fighting the tears with everything he had. “What I want to know is, am I ill? Like you? Am I mentally ill? Did you ever notice anything? When I was growing up? Later? Anything at all?”

  The old woman pressed a palsied hand to Frank’s cheek. “You are my baby boy,” she said.

  “I know, mom, but—”

  “You are zee sweetest child I ever saw,” she said, her big milky dark eyes shimmering. “Never gave your mudder any problemz, always the sweetest boy.”

  Frank closed his eyes and wept.

  “Frankie?” Helen’s voice was like a rustle of dead leaves in the silent room.

  Frank swallowed all the blackness and pain. For a moment, he couldn’t find his voice. His knees ached from kneeling. He felt as though he were taking some kind of horrible communion.

  “Frankie?”

  Frank opened his eyes and looked at her.

  She was grinning, showing her yellowed teeth and crumbling bridgework. “I know vot you are doing,” she said with a smirk.

  “What?”

  “You cannot fool me,” she said.

  “I don’t understand, mom, what are you talking about?”

  The old woman pointed a pudgy, bent finger at him. “You’re trying to fool me into letting you stay up.”

  “Excuse me?” Frank wiped his eyes, wiped his mouth. He was nonplussed.

  “You ought to be in bed, Frankie,” she said.

  “Mom—”

  “Look at zee time, Frankie, ees way past your bed time.”

  “Mom, I’m trying to—”

  “You know vot happens to boys who stay up past their bedtimes,” she said.

  Frank didn’t answer.

  The old woman wagged her trembly sausage finger at him. “Zee sleep poleeese come and get you, Frankie.”

  Frank stared at her yellowed eyes. A cool tremor knitted down his spine.

  After a long moment, he said very softly, “You’re right, mom.”

  “To bed you go now, Frankie. Okay?”

  “Okay, mom, I will.”

  She smiled, patting his hand. “Turn out zee light on your way, huh?”

  “I will, mom. I love you.” Frank stood up, leaned over the bed and kissed her forehead. She smelled like body odor and Minute-Rub.

  Frank started for the door.

  Helen’s voice trailing off behind him: “And ask zem, vot’s a girl got to do to get some pudding around here?”

  On his way home, the hallucinations started.

  He was on the Edens Expressway, a few miles south of the Illinois border, chewing a caffeine tablet, his denim shirt damp with sweat, his eyes burning from fatigue and overworked tear ducts. His mind was a broken kaleidoscope of fractured memories and half-formed fears. He was staring at the flickering white lines in his headlights, the sky just starting to bruise a pale blue predawn glow on the horizon, when the first image flashed up at him—

  (—his own fingers manipulating a syringe—)

  —and Frank slammed his eyes shut, nearly losing control of the Honda.

  The car jagged across the center line, kissing the gravel shoulder and sending a spume of dust up into the night. Frank wrestled the steering wheel. His heart leaped in his chest. A
nd he just barely avoided sideswiping a guardrail before pulling the car back in line.

  He swallowed the urge to scream and felt a tide of dread rising in him as black and poisonous as cancer. The vision had popped out of the dark passing forest like a jack-in-the-box, and now it had touched off something inside him. Old emotions were flooding through his veins. Like when he and his brother had to go live with his Aunt Nikki, and Frank had acted out his anger by burning down the tool shed. The guilt had been unbearable. Denatured, hundred-proof guilt, flowing through him, making him sick to his stomach.

  Now he was drowning in guilt for something a million times more savage.

  He gripped the wheel tighter, and he concentrated on nothing but the road for several miles, as the dawn lightened the sky, melting from a dull grey to a faded salmon color. The approaching day was making Frank’s head pound. He was up to seventy-two waking hours now without much more than a few scattered blackouts of sleep.

  He was reaching for the cigarette lighter with trembling hands when the next hallucination jumped out at him from the dash board—

  (—his own hand clutching a curved hunting knife, thrusting it into the soft, pale meat of a woman’s belly—)

  Frank cringed, and the car swerved as the dread spurted through his arteries.

  Shame flowed through him. Self-loathing coursed through his marrow. How in God’s name could he have done these things? Even with an alter personality, how could Frank have done these things with his own hands? He wanted to kill himself. He wanted to yank the wheel and careen across the median into oncoming traffic, but that would only raise the tally of victims who had died at his hand.

  He managed to make it all the way back to the north shore without passing out.

  Later, Frank would remember driving off the road near the B’hai Temple in Wilmette. He would remember his hands going numb on the steering wheel, and his vision clouding, and the Honda cobbling over a sidewalk, then sliding down an embankment and into a deserted construction site.

  The last thing he would remember—before blacking out—was coming to a rest near a foul-smelling, deserted Porta-Potty and trying to get his door open. It was futile. He had nowhere to go, no place to hide. And besides, how does a person hide from their self?