When the Lights Go Out(58)

As a result, his brain’s tasks were all out of whack. His muscles twitched. His heart raced. His blood pressure soared. Coordination was lost. He could no longer function properly. It went on like this until he died.

The most gruesome part? Though the body goes to pot, the mind does not. Thought processes remain relatively intact. They’re clued in completely to their own demise.

The ill sweat profusely.

They stop eating, speaking.

They shrivel to nothing but a glassy-eyed stare, eyes shrunken to mere pinpricks, like mine. And then they die. Because, after those long, agonizing nights lying in bed, failing to truly sleep, fatal familial insomnia is nothing but a death sentence for them. The grim reaper coming to steal their life.

I’m waiting for my time.

I sit up in bed. I don’t delude myself into lying down because I know I won’t sleep. And so I sit, engulfed in blackness, legs pulled up to my chest. The blanket is kicked to the end of the bed because, though it’s cold in the carriage home, I’ve begun to sweat. The sweat, it gathers under my arms and in my hairline. My palms are damp with it. The soles of my feet. The skin between my fingers and toes.

My heart beats rapidly.

My head spins.

I stare into blackness, seeing things that I hope are not there. I go through the motions. The typical night, thinking the morbid thoughts, followed by the grieving ones where I miss Mom so much it hurts. It’s a pain in my sternum this time, like heartburn or indigestion. Except that it’s grief.

And then when I’m done grieving, the self-loathing comes, where I despise myself for all of that which I would’ve, could’ve, should’ve done differently. Said I love you while she could still hear me. Hugged her longer and with more frequency. Run a hand over the dark chocolate fuzz that had started to regrow on her scalp after her last round of chemo was through.

I bullet point them all in my mind. All the things I should’ve done.

The silence and the blackness of the room become suddenly suffocating and I feel like I can’t breathe. I’m drowning in silence. Being asphyxiated by it.

I turn to my knees and peel the shade back, gazing outside. The world tonight is dark, a carbon gray. Not quite black, but close enough. Little by little, my eyes adapt to it, and though it’s dark outside, I can see. Not perfectly, but I can see something. A halo of light from a streetlamp, a half a block away. Orion the hunter, brightening the sky. His shield is aimed at me as he hovers, light-years above the greystone, club hoisted above his head with a dog at his feet. For whatever reason, the light makes me feel less alone and less scared.

And then, as the moonlight slips out from behind a cloud, it settles on the greystone. As my eyes adjust to it, the house begins to slowly take shape. My eyes rise up from ground level, grazing over the kitchen’s sliding glass door, an enclosed porch, up the home’s rear facade, and there they make out an amorphous shape standing in the open window of the third floor. The very same window, which, for the last two nights, radiated light.

Except that tonight it’s dark. There is no light, but rather a pair of eyes.

The bile in my stomach begins to rise. I feel like I could be sick. I press a hand to my mouth to silence my own scream.

The moonlight reflects off the eyes, making them glint in the darkness of night. They’re undeniable. They’re there. I’m not just making them up.

But beyond the eyes I see little else. Just a formless, shadowy shape to let me know that someone is standing in the window, watching me.

I let the shade go and it falls closed.

I grab Mom and her urn from a bedside table and slip to the floor, thinking that I don’t want to be here in this carriage home, that I want to leave. That I’d rather be anywhere else in the world but here. But also realizing that I have nowhere to go. I press Mom to me and hold her tight because with her in my arms, I feel less alone. I scoot to a wall and press my back to it, heart beating hard. I try to defuse my fears, to make myself feel better, by telling myself that it’s only Ms. Geissler. That it’s only Ms. Geissler watching me.

And yet it doesn’t make me feel better. Because Ms. Geissler is a stranger to me. We’ve hardly met. I don’t know a single thing about her, other than she lied about the squirrels inside her home, but for what reason, I don’t know.

My heart pounds. My hands are moist. They sweat and again I’m sure that I am dying. That the perspiration is a symptom of fatal familial insomnia, which has stolen my sleep from me and is now coming to take my life.

I want to get out of here. I want to leave. And yet I paid nearly everything I have to be here. I can’t get out of here, I can’t leave. I have nowhere to go.

I pull my knees into my chest. I drop my head to them and close my eyes. I pray to sleep, over and over I say it. Please just let me sleep. Please just let me sleep. Please just let me sleep. I beg for morning to come, for the sun to rise higher and higher in the sky, chasing the nighttime away.

For eight days now it’s gone like this. Eight nights.

How many more days and nights can I go on without sleep?

And then I hear something. Just a murmur, faint at first like the sound of a piano playing from some other room. A gentle melody. But, of course, that can’t be because there’s no piano in the next room, and no one here to play it but me. And I’m not playing a piano.

My ears stand at attention. My head tips. I listen, and though I want to stay, firmly anchored to the wall where I can see through the darkness to know what’s coming for me, I lift my body from the floor, carrying Mom’s ashes with me. It’s unintentional when I press a single palm down on the ground to hoist myself up. The other clutches tightly to Mom, pressing her to my chest like a newborn baby. I stand to an almost-upright position, bent at the shoulders so I don’t hit my head on the low ceiling. And still I do hit my head, crashing into a lowlying wooden beam, so hard that when I press my fingers to it I feel the undeniably sticky texture of blood.