Tips for Living(58)

I had visions of a child’s hand gripping a steel golf club. The hand lifting my mother’s Wüsthof carving knife, its blade glinting in the moonlight. I saw the hand, now larger, wielding razor-sharp scissors and stabbing a sweatshirt. Clutching an X-ACTO knife. All the hands mine. Hands that committed angry, violent acts.

Sickening questions swirled in my head. Was I, the woman who vowed not to let her life be ruined by anger, getting a message from my unconscious that rage had triumphed? Had I been so plagued by my conscience that I’d roamed in my sleep to wash my hands of blood like Lady Macbeth? Was I sleepwalking the night Hugh and Helene were murdered? Did that blood I imagined belong to them?

I’d read the literature on sleepwalking. The morning after I’d cut the heart out of Axel Bartlett’s sweatshirt, I’d rushed straight over to the lower level of Bobst Library at NYU. Hunched in a dark booth in the bowels of the enormous library building, I’d scrolled for hours through the American Journal of Psychiatry, Scientific American and scores of medical publications stored on pre-Google microfilm.

Somnambulists (the name sounded like a circus act: “Now for the flying Somnambulists, ladies and gentlemen!”) almost always made their move within the first hour of sleep, before REM and dreaming kicked in. In children, the triggers might be anxiety, sleep deprivation or fatigue. The biggest physical hazards came from falling and bumping into things. Generally, child sleepwalkers grew out of the problem by age eighteen—my age at the time of that last sleepwalk. A small percentage didn’t.

Adult sleepwalkers weren’t just overtired, nervous pups. Sure, there were harmless, blank-stared strollers who merely wandered from room to room moving furniture, flicking a light switch or raiding the fridge for ice cream. But a good number of adult sleepwalkers had serious medical or mental disorders. They drank heavily or took medication that set off dangerous, sometimes lethal behaviors while they slept.

The legal defense term was “non-insane automatism.” Defense lawyers argued that consuming alcohol and/or drugs could produce involuntary actions like “sleep driving,” as in getting behind the wheel and accidentally running someone over or slamming a car into a utility pole. “Sexsomniacs” woke up screwing total strangers. And, most terrifying of all, “sleep killers” murdered unconsciously.

Was I one of them? Had I consumed too much vodka last Saturday night and gone “sleep driving” over to Pequod Point? But where would I get a gun?

There were also cases where there was no drinking or medication involved. Killers had been acquitted using a straight up “sleepwalking defense.” A sleepwalking father smashed his shrieking baby against the wall: “I was sure it was a wild beast.” A sleepwalking fireman beat his wife with a shovel, believing she was an intruder. One major study showed that adult sleepwalkers had difficulty handling aggression in general. Could that be me?

I’d been too horrified to deal with what I’d read back then. I hadn’t even told Grace about the disturbing research I’d found. I just prayed the sleepwalking would end. She’d advised watchful waiting after the sweatshirt “heart attack,” and counseling if I had another incident. Grace was an unusually light sleeper, and we agreed more nighttime activities would certainly wake her up. There were none. I calmed down, eager to believe this had been a singular event, the affliction’s last gasp while I was still in my teens.

But as I shut off the water and dried my tender hands in Ben’s kitchen, a high-profile case I’d read about in NYU’s library haunted me.

Kenneth Parks drove to his in-laws’ house in his sleep. He choked and stabbed them, killing his mother-in-law. Later, he staggered through the doors of a police station, not knowing why he came. His own wrist had been severed, but he couldn’t feel the pain. He wasn’t awake. Given his history of sleepwalking and the fact that he “adored his in-laws,” he was acquitted.

There were sleep experts who theorized that Parks’s violent act was the result of a neurological glitch, that when Parks’s father-in-law discovered him sleepwalking outside the house and tried to detain him, he’d caused Parks’s amygdala—his primitive brain—to kick in. Parks fought him and went on to kill his mother-in-law without (literally) blinking. Or so his lawyer argued.

Did I have that same glitch?

Get a grip, Nora. As Ben would insist: “You’re a reporter. Look at the facts.”

Okay. Fact: I’d never left my immediate location when I was sleepwalking. Fact: my worst offense had been cutting a hole in a sweatshirt, and tonight all I was guilty of was letting water overflow from a sink. Most important, I’d never had access to a gun, awake or asleep. The facts said “no, not possible.”

But it was also a fact that I’d begun sleepwalking again. There were those jeans that I didn’t remember washing the night of the murders, and those blazing lights the other morning in the Coop. And what about the scratch, the twig and the leaves? Still, none of that meant I was a murderer.

Remember: no gun, no guilt.

A chill ran through my naked body. I scurried into Ben’s living room to look for my coat and spotted a fluffy mohair throw on the back of a leather armchair. I picked it up and wrapped myself in it. The soft wool felt like a warm hug, and for a moment I stopped wanting to crawl out of my skin.

Ben’s apartment overlooked the harbor. Moonlight poured through the wall of windows onto two plump white couches in front of the fireplace, a piano and a plush Oriental rug. I crossed the room to the windows. Over the past few days, mariners had hauled out the last of the boats for the season. Light shimmered on the inky water all the way to the horizon under an almost full moon. An achingly romantic view for someone in the mood.