The Sleepwalker(34)

“I don’t remember anything,” I told Paige. “I really don’t recall anything at all.” The last thing I wanted to do was share that nightmare of a recollection with my kid sister, especially when she was already feeling such anxiety. Our conversation had put a serious crimp in my buzz.

“Nothing?”

“Not a thing.”

Paige seemed to think about this. “What are you dreaming about these days?” she asked. “You said you’re dreaming more.”

“I’m not one of those people who recalls her dreams.”

“Can you think of anything?”

“Sure. I had a dream last night about a building on campus that—at least a part of it—has eight sides. It’s called the Octagon. I’ve had two classes in there. It’s an older building.”

“What happened?”

“I wish I could tell you something interesting and amazing. But all I remember is that I was eating cigarettes.”

“Eww. Gross. Why?”

“It’s even grosser. The cigarettes were lit. I was doing a magic trick.”

“Who was in the room?”

“A couple people. I have no idea who.”

“You’re right: that’s not very interesting. It’s only disgusting.”

I smiled at her. “Okay, then. What about you? What have you been dreaming?”

“Joe the Barn Cat watched Mom leave the house.”

“That’s the dream?”

“Yup.”

“Well, he probably did.”

“I was with him—in the dream. We followed her.”

“Where did she go?”

“That’s the problem. That’s what’s so frustrating. All I remember is that Joe and I follow her downstairs. We follow her when she opens the front door, and we follow her when she goes outside. We follow her when she starts to walk down the street toward the village. She’s walking on the yellow lines right in the middle of the road, but it doesn’t matter because it’s nighttime.”

“Arguably, that’s an even worse time to sleepwalk down the middle of the road.”

Paige frowned in exasperation. “I just mean there aren’t a lot of cars on the roads around here at night.”

“Okay.”

“Anyway, there’s Mom and Joe and me. Mom is maybe twenty-five meters ahead of us. You know, the length of the college pool.”

“Do you call out to her?”

“I want to, but I can’t speak. I can’t make my voice work. Dreams are like that, right? Then she disappears. It’s so frustrating.”

I thought about this. “Did you get as far as the general store? The bridge?”

“Nope. Then, poof, Joe and I are just home again.”

“I’m really not an expert on dreams. But I think it shows how much you miss her. That’s all.”

“Duh.”

“You asked.”

She pointed at the television screen and the frame of the magician with his doves. “You’re not going to get doves, are you?”

“No.”

“Good. It would just be so sad when Joe ate them or they died.”

“God, you can be ghoulish.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m just the realist in this house.”





YOU MASTURBATE IN your sleep. So you are told. So it begins. And, for some people, so it ends. Self-stimulation. That’s all.

That’s…all.

But, alas, not for you. You swim through a nocturnal world of slow-wave non-REM stage-three sleep—a clinical term that is just metrical enough to sound like bad poetry—and experience an abrupt pseudo-awakening with your heartbeat a frenetic paradiddle in your chest. And your prefrontal cortex, which is dormant because you are asleep, can’t help you. It can’t rein in your hands as they reach down below your waist. Or, when that’s not enough, as they reach for whoever’s beside you. Or, when there is no one beside you, as you set out to find someone.

We see a Berlin Wall between sleeping and wakefulness, between the conscious and the unconscious mind. But that’s wrong. Think a spectrum. Imagine a line.

And then imagine your limp surrender when you cross that line—the tremors, the unbidden release, the subsequent shame when you wake. And then imagine that you cross that line one time too many.





CHAPTER EIGHT


IT WAS A revelation as a twenty-one-year-old to push a grocery cart. I realized that despite having been in supermarkets easily hundreds of times in my life, I had never before taken a metal cart and guided it up and down the aisles. I had sat in them, of course. I had walked beside my mother or father as one or the other had pushed one, eventually with Paige in the seat. And I had shopped for myself at the grocery in Amherst and I had picked up things for my family right here over the years, but I had always used a plastic basket. Or I had balanced the cat food, the apples, and the heavy cream in my arms like a circus clown. And now I decided that I rather liked pushing the cart. I knew the pleasure would wear thin if this really were a weekly chore, but there was still an element of unreality to it—a sense that I was playacting. Twice when I was alone in one of the long, well-lit aisles, I had given the cart a little shove with the toe of my sneaker and watched it roll half a dozen yards ahead of me. I might have done it a third time, but my second push had sent it swerving like a bowling-alley gutter ball into a section of boxed cereals, and the impact had caused some of the cartons on the very top shelf to fall to the floor. Still, this task—grocery shopping—had exhumed some latent childhood happiness. There were the Saturday mornings before Paige was born, when my parents together would do weekly errands and I would wander these aisles with either my mother or father or both, and pick out the items that I wanted to bring with me to preschool or daycare, or I wanted packed in my lunch for school. How many of those very early memories were real and how many were manufactured from conversations with my parents or photos of me and my preschool pals at snack time I would never know. But the recollections from second grade? Precise. Same with the Uncrustable lunch phase. The peanut-butter-and-banana-sandwich phase (still one of my favorite sandwiches when I came home from college and craved comfort food). And, yes, the curried egg salad phase. (I was, apparently, a fourth-grade gourmand.)