But I don’t argue.
I hardly sleep anymore. When I find myself alone in a room with the lights off, the panic begins, a tightness in my chest like a stress ball squeezed to the point of popping. I press my finger against my neck to feel my pulse. It’s always too fast.
My father’s heart beats too slow. He’s dying. My mother died two years ago, and I hear that it’s common for men to lose hope after their partners are gone. He won’t wake up. Never recovered from the anesthetic used during his open heart surgery. The doctors don’t know if he ever will. I, his only daughter, his only child, stay at the hospital as much as I can, leaving only to man a desk at a real estate office or, like tonight, to smoke. I need these breaks like I need water.
The sleeper is white, just as they said it would be. So few people have seen them up close, I think at first that I’m imagining it. A white blur, the slight shape of thin, bellbottom legs – thick at the bottom near its hooves and covered in matted white fur – galloping through the otherwise empty street. I half expect the billowy skin of the legs to lift and reveal a person under there, in control, like those Chinese New Year dragons. It runs in a graceful hurry right on past the bench where I sit. I stop smoking and stay still until it disappears around the corner of the street. Stunned, I slip the e-cigarette into my pocket and go back inside.
There’s no one to talk to about what I saw. In my chest, I feel the familiar constriction, like persistent heartburn, and with it, this sense that I have forgotten something. The experts say the sleepers don’t mean anything. That it is dangerous to try and call them omens, to assign meaning to a phenomenon they cannot yet explain. But I never asked for a sign, never wanted one before now, so I think that the universe is trying to tell me something. I think I missed the message.
* * *
My mother was a strange and haunting person. She had blue eyes and white hair and travelled through our childhood homes like a tourist. Places eluded her; she never grew attached to them. But she clung to people like life rafts. Without a home to bring her comfort, she needed me. She needed my father. And we needed her. We moved from place to place, all throughout my childhood. Transients. Our shared unsettledness only brought us closer. So close that I imagined, when I moved to college, that I could feel my parents’ pains, their failing knees, their twisted hips, their bones brittling, but I didn’t expect it when my father called and told me that my mother had been in a terrible car wreck.
And I didn’t feel my father’s slow death. That I only knew of when I found him, clutching his chest, on the living room sofa. I’d come over for our Sunday lunch, a weekly tradition since I’d dropped out of school and moved back. It was his second heart attack. They rushed him to the hospital. He’s been there ever since.
I wonder if the sleeper knows about my father. I wonder if, passing the hospital, it could feel the death inside. I wonder if the sleepers being here have anything to do with his coma. I wonder if I can make them give my father back.
* * *
When you’re a child, you never think of the day your parents will no longer be there to help you. It never crosses your mind that one day their advice will be inaccessible. I realized that this would happen when I moved away from them. That’s when the panic started.
The first panic attack, I called 911. Asked for an ambulance to come get me. The sirens and bright red lights made my palms sweat, and the EMTs took my blood pressure and my heart rate and told me, yes, it was high, but they didn’t think it was a heart attack. I insisted they take me anyway. The ER doctor told me about panic. I left feeling doomed, as though I had discovered something dark inside myself, something that would never leave me. A cold comfort.
When my father goes, I fear it will take me over until there’s nothing left.
* * *
I wait for the sleeper to return, but it doesn’t. Every day outside the hospital, the streets are empty of all but cars: necessary beasts. I hate them. I hate the hospital, too, with the neon blue cross stretched across its front, with its complementary valet parking and maze of corridors I’ve learned like my own hallway. I hate the chair in his room where I try to stretch to sleep and fail. I hate my father and his beeping and the raised red incision down his chest.
On the walk from the real estate office to my apartment, I pass a coffee shop. I catch snatches of conversation from the smokers outside. Sometimes I daydream of stopping, butting in, asking for a light, offering a smoke. It’s been years since I had a friend. I walk on by. But today I hear them talking about the sleepers.
“I found a nest of them,” says a grungy blue-haired woman in a raincoat. “We were thinking of going back there tonight. We’re meeting here at midnight, if you want to come.”
“I don’t know,” says a boy. “Those things eek me out.”
I walk on, but the thought doesn’t leave me. A nest.
That night, I sit at home and think about going to the hospital. I watch the white of my walls and try to see shapes in the popcorn texture. I can’t. When I was a child, it used to be a game; I’d spot faces and leopards and rivers full of fish. I was imaginative then, but with age all that imagination has disappeared. Now I feel like my bones are all ash, all empty spaces, where the people I loved most have left holes.
I remember the people outside the coffee shop. The clock tells me it is an hour until they’ll meet. I gather my things and make my way to join them, though I will do so in shadow, in secret.
Only one of them is there, leaning against the side of the coffee shop building: the blue-haired woman. She keeps frowning at her watch. When twenty minutes have crept by, she sighs and walks on. I follow. I feel like a creep, like a spy from one of the black-and-white espionage movies my parents used to watch when I wasn’t around. I wish I could walk beside this woman, hold her hand, but the thought of approaching her makes my chest heave. This, this secret, it’s the good kind of scared. The kind of scared I haven’t felt in a long while.
We walk, unknowing companions, around the bank building, down an alley which makes me, for a moment, regret my decision to follow her. We slip through a hole in a fence and into an abandoned parking lot. Broken glass litters the ground, and I worry that the crunch underfoot might alert her to my presence. But we keep on until we come to a raised platform, the top of which I cannot see. A sign out front reads: keep out. water wells stored here. A set of concrete stairs leads to a fence surrounding the top of the platform. She climbs and jumps the fence, wedging her foot into the chain-link grooves. I hear her feet thump on the other side.
I wedge one foot in the chain-link and look down. If I fall, there’s a full staircase between me and the concrete. I grip the fence top. I propel myself over, and when I land against the concrete platform, my bag crashes against the ground. The woman storms at me, fist balled at her chest.
“Who the hell are you?” she says.
I wrap my hand around her fist and lower it. The touch of skin startles.
“I just had to see them,” I said.
She wilts when I say that, as if she understands. My eyes have adjusted to the dark, and I can make out the faint smile that crosses her face.
“Thank God,” she says. “I don’t want to do this alone.”
They say if you touch one, you’ll get what you want. They say no one has ever touched one.
The woman leads me to the nest, a jumble of feathers and ripped up pillows atop a giant bed of shredded bark and rotting leaves. The concrete around the nest is littered with cigarette butts.
There are no sleepers here.
When she starts crying, down on her knees, I don’t know how to comfort her. I can’t touch her again. I don’t like the look of the platform anymore, and I worry about how I will get back over the fence, when the top stair is lower than the platform. I’ll fall. I’ll be stuck up here forever. I move away from the woman and walk through the panic to the fence and force myself, with shaking hands, to jump. I land safely on the other side. I leave the woman. I wonde
r what she would have asked for. But I’m too scared to go back.
I drive to the hospital where my father wheezes in his permanent sleep. I watch out the window as the sun creeps in. I see no white blurs blazing past. I do not sleep. I do not sleep.
* * *
I drift out of a fevered dream. It has been one month since I’ve felt as though I had any sort of sleep pattern. I go outside for a smoke. I walk through the parking lot, weaving through the cars.
White shimmers in the corner of my eye. I hold my breath, turn slowly, and there, beyond the corner of the hospital complex, I see another sleeper. This one is taller than the last, as tall as the fully grown crape myrtle outside my apartment complex. I walk toward it. I don’t want it to leave. I want to know what it means.
It just stands there, caught but calm as the night. Its body heaves, as if it’s difficult to inhale. It doesn’t look, on the outside, wounded, but why else would it be so still, its breath so heavy? I walk closer and closer until I am right next to its leg, and still it hasn’t moved. My own breath catches in my throat, and I realize I’ve been holding it in for as long as the sleeper has been there. I breathe in, and it smells of horse and clean laundry and the oil of my father’s beard. Its face – the nose smooshed flat like a reptile’s, its eyes large and buried in a catlike head too small for the monstrous body – snaps in my direction. I reach out and stroke the leg. It flinches but does not move. Its skin, despite the fur, is smooth as eggshells.
The shakes rise up in my stomach and strangle my breath so that I, like the sleeper, am gasping for air. I can’t do this anymore. To wake in the morning is like walking into a slaughterhouse. I live all day with a fear shaking under my skin. I can’t.
I drop my hand and run until I’m back in my father’s hospital room, where the walls both soothe and stress me. His breath comes ragged from his mouth, and two nurses huddle around him, one’s eyes glued to the monitor, the other adjusting his breathing tube. He sounds just like the sleeper. I stand in the door to his room, my arms wrapped around my chest, unable to move, and pray that my father does not die. But there is that ball of relief in my gut slowly unraveling, too, and for that I press my eyes shut and hope my father cannot read my thoughts, hope no one in the whole world can read my thoughts, because I also want nothing more than for him to die.
* * *
He lives. After six hours of ragged breathing, the doctors shake me awake from a half-sleep and, smiling, whisper that my father is okay, that he will be okay. That for now, he will go on living. If that’s what you call it, I think. If that’s what this is.
The sunshine hurts my eyes, which feel as though they are glued shut as I stumble through the front door of the hospital and into the morning air, cigarette vapor hot from my lips. I hop the bus, too frightened to drive with my eyes shut so tight, and ride past the stop for work. I get off the bus halfway home. I walk back to the nest.
I climb the fence – it’s less daunting in daylight– and walk across broken beer bottles and cracked concrete.
The woman is sleeping in the pillows, her body covered by their white. She looks worn, as if she hasn’t had a home to go to in years. I feel lucky all of a sudden, that I have two places I can go to get out of the air. I envy her for her sleep, so I shake her awake.
“You,” she says.
“Me,” I say.
“You left me the other day. You bailed. I thought you were cool.”
“I’m not,” I say. “Cool. I’m not that.”
She shrugs, and a few flakes of dandruff fall onto her shoulders like snow.
“Are you homeless?” I ask. “You didn’t look homeless, the other day.”
“I’m not that,” she says. “Homeless.”
Despite myself, I feel like smiling. I turn away so she can’t see. When I turn back, she’s rifling through the feathers. “Damn kids, stole my fucking wallet,” she says. “It was right here when I fell asleep last night.”
“Sucks,” I say. “Did you at least see a sleeper?”
She shakes her head, tosses a handful of feathers into the air. They fall just like the dandruff. “Nope. Nada. Can I borrow three bucks to get a cup of coffee and a brownie?”
I hand her a ten. “Buy a sandwich,” I say. “Some fucking vegetables.” I sound like my mother. This makes my heart sink, and I tell the woman I have to go. I go.
* * *
The nurses at the hospital remain hopeful but realistic. Every day they give me one piece of good news and one piece of bad. I cling to the bad. I wish they would just tell me if he will live or die. If I will be an orphan or a caregiver for the rest of my life. I want to know something solid about my future, but everything is ethereal as vapor, impossible to wrap my hand around.
Including the sleeper. I see it again, disappearing around the hospital, closer than it’s ever been to that overwhelming building with its neon cross. I run after it, out of breath, e-cigarette dangling from my mouth. When I finally stop, the sleeper stands before me, head-on, its flat face looking back at me from eyes the color of coal.
My father’s eyes, too, are dark.
“Is that you?” I ask. My voice shakes.
The sleeper doesn’t stir, though they say they’re supposed to be skittish. They’re supposed to run from people, and aren’t most animals intuitive? Can’t they sense when someone isn’t right, emotionally? Run, I want to say to the sleeper. Run like you’re supposed to.
Instead, I say, “I love you. I’m sorry for wishing you dead. But you understand, don’t you? Don’t you understand?”
The sleeper lowers its head to the sidewalk and opens its huge mouth; it looks like its face is splitting in half. Inside its mouth, its teeth are sharp and white, and I should be scared, but I’m not. For the first time in years, I feel okay. I feel like I might be able to go on in the world.
The sleeper takes a bite of grass, chews it for a second, spits it out. The gob of green looks like vomit on the sidewalk. The sleeper turns, slow and tedious, and begins its night gallop away from me.
Back in the room, I sleep for three full hours.
* * *
The woman is still at the nest when I go back. My father’s condition hasn’t changed.
“Who are they, to you?” I ask, sitting down beside her. She still looks dirty, her skin oily, her hair tangled.
“What?” she says.
“I thought one was my father,” I say. “But that’s silly, isn’t it? Sometimes I think people just need strange things to make sense.” I shrug. “He had my father’s eyes, though.”
The woman lets out a laugh as uncomfortable as I have ever heard, a half-cry. “That’s ridiculous,” she says. Then, softer, with a sly smile, “My grandmother had whiskers just like the one I saw here. And the wrinkles on her face were the exact same as the sleeper’s.” The woman picks at her nails. “And why not, anyway? Why couldn’t they be the spirits of the dead?”
“Could be anything, I guess.” I pull a bag of cookies out of my purse and hand them to her. I’ll take her to get dinner later, I’ve decided, once the sun goes down. Once she feels okay leaving here. And if that’s never, well, I’ll bring her dinner back.
But the sun sets silent upon us, and we look up at the sky, listening for the rustle that would signal their return to the nest. I don’t want to leave this place. Then we hear it, a clip clop like hooves on concrete, and we run to the side of the platform and peer out into the night. There, in the distance, we see the white blur that is the sleeper running. We see another, and another, running side-by-side. Five of them. And then, they lift their front hooves and, just as though they are still running across the grass, take to the sky. They run up and up and up until they’re so far up there that they look just like a group of airplanes. Soon there are more, at least a dozen of these sleepers running on an invisible path of air. I can’t breathe they’re so beautiful. And then they look not like airplanes, but like stars, hundreds of new stars, disappearing. It’s cold. I put my arm aroun
d the woman, to keep her warm. She nuzzles close to me. I wonder if they’ll ever come back.
* * *
“It’s okay,” I tell my father. I hold his hand. His skin does not feel like eggshells but dry and cold and thin. Up close, he smells nothing like the sleeper. “If you’re waiting, if you’re sticking around for me, it’s okay. I’m okay now. You can go.” I kiss his forehead, and it feels like kissing the dead. “Go,” I say. “Please, go.”
His monitor beeps like a breaking clock.
* * * * *
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam lives in Texas with her partner and two literarily-named cats: Gimli and Don Quixote. Her fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Goblin Fruit. You can visit her online at bonniejostufflebeam.com. Her story ‘The Damaged’ appeared in Interzone #250.
BOOK ZONE
THE MOON KING
Neil Williamson
plus author interview
ANNIHILATION
Jeff VanderMeer
THE BURNING DARK
Adam Christopher
DESCENT
Ken MacLeod
TESSERACTS 17
edited by Colleen Anderson & Steve Vernon
THE THREE
Sarah Lotz
LAGOON
Nnedi Okorafor
THE BOY WITH THE PORCELAIN BLADE
Den Patrick
ASTRA
Naomi Foyle
THE FIRST FIFTEEN LIVES OF HARRY AUGUST
Claire North
EUROPE IN AUTUMN
Dave Hutchinson
SON OF THE MORNING
Mark Alder
FAMADIHANA ON FOMALHAUT IV
Eric Brown
WE THREE KIDS
Margo Lanagan
FUTURE INTERRUPTED
Jonathan McCalmont
SHOOGLING THINGS ABOUT
Andy Hedgecock interviews Neil Williamson and reviews his debut novel
Interzone 252 May-Jun 2014 Page 10
