by Roy Freirich
A few oblige, of course, and then a few others, faces twisting, eyes shut, but fewer care. It’s exactly the wrong example, probably—a prelude to sleep, not anything even remotely preventing it.
“Or say someone feels nauseous at a picnic,” he continues. “Then someone else thinks they do too. So you hear about a neighbor who’s not sleeping—next thing, you’re worried about sleeping, too, and can’t get any yourself. And so on.”
Group behavior can be odd, that’s the point, but the derision and disbelief that bursts from this crowd still surprises:
“No picnic last night!” This one looks like another old salt, with a pale, bald pate and a tobacco-colored face, probably a fishing charter owner.
A junior wise-guy type pipes up, eyes wide, fingers splayed on his chest, “I’m not sleeping ’cause somebody I don’t know from Adam ain’t?”
“Hey, I think I do feel nauseous.” A voice from the back, prompting guffaws.
It’s a chorus now, a cacophony, every weekender and local suddenly an expert:
“It’s the ocean, something from the ocean. How far are the shipping lanes? Who knows what they—”
“Bird flu—”
“Electro-magnetic fields, power lines. Have you ruled that out?”
“Lyme’s.”
“If it’s something toxic, or some kind of pathogen, we’re not taking the chance. We’re leaving.”
Sam makes a show of shrugging. “Every test, every blood panel and urinalysis, has come back negative for toxin or pathogen. If I were you, I’d hate to cut my vacation short when all the odds are you’ll be asleep, tonight. All of us.”
Chief enters, as if on cue, looking stern but worse for wear. The crowd turns to him. “Officer, maybe you can tell—”
A leathery-looking woman joins in angrily: “Chief, what the fuck—”
Chief puts his palms up: “Look, folks, I’m not the doctor.”
Wise-guy pipes up again, “Yeah, but you gotta know something. What about those murders yesterday?”
Chief glares, nearly sputtering, “Those—where do you get that? It was an overdose, that’s all we know. And all you need to.”
A Manhattanite in a punky tee isn’t buying, turning his tipped brush cut back and forth. Sam recognizes him as a patient from days ago, how many he can’t recall, or with what complaint. Earache, insect bite? “We need more cops,” Soho insists. “People are way out of control, we should call the mainland and have them send—”
“Hold on now! You want to call, then call! They’ll put you right in touch, refer you right away, give you a direct line right back . . . to me. And here’s what I’ll do: tell you what I’m telling you now—to listen to what Dr. Carlson here says, or go home—”
Alarums sound in thick Long Island accents, calling for retreat: “Works for me. Fuck this. We’re on the next ferry out.”
“We’re gone.”
Wise-guy again: “—sure, like I’m gonna see a dime back on my rental—”
The crowd seems to hesitate, en masse, calculating the slim odds for a refund on their Airbnb, or motel room, or share house.
“Seriously, what about some pills? The market’s sold out of the over-the-counter stuff.” This from an ad agency art department intern, probably, his hip, boxy glasses smudged.
Sam shakes his head. “Look, I need to examine you, one at a time, before anyone gets a pill. Sorry, that’s the rules. I’ll need admittance forms completed by each of you, and then Andrew will bring you back.”
Sam points to Andrew, who glances up at the crowd, a bit hollow-eyed too, daunted.
Paula shoots Sam her questioning glance, and he whispers to her sideways. “Buy us some time. Meanwhile, somebody’ll nod off. Then a few more.”
−−−
Outside, across the lane for an impromptu conference, Chief seems worn himself, one ear reddened as if he’s been slapped, stray hairs of one eyebrow askew, quivering, his breath sour. He listens to Sam’s theory with narrow eyes, lips pursed with distaste, before he finally interrupts, drily, “Good, great, sure, follow up on all that. Meanwhile, no harm in DWP testing the mains, see if some kids or somebody’s dumping anything into the water. And power lines for EMF.”
Sam glances back at the clinic, at the gathering crowd, their manic laughter, their rumpled clothes and private, spiraling little dramas. Misdiagnosis won’t help any of them. “No sign of toxins, like I said. And last I looked there weren’t more than a few houses anywhere near the high voltage lines. Not that the science is there anyway.”
“Less than your grad school seminar theory?”
“It’s what we have. And it’s good news. It means people will go back to sleep.”
Chief gives him an arid look: “Sure, great to hear. And until then, we . . . what? I keep the peace, and you—?”
Will he ever back off? “Treat the symptoms.”
#
Spinning, the circular blade bites into the wood. The shrill, grinding noise of the hot metal sawteeth ripping feels like a blade in the brain, especially after an all-nighter; so subcontractor Dallas Penske has stuffed bits of torn Kleenex in his ears, club-style, as he gets the jump on framing out this cutom job, now just foundation and studs amid the last dunes on Tern Lane.
Stu and Mike, fuck ’em, called in too sick after days of whining about being tired, for shit sake, more likely hungover, but no shut-eye. Join the club. Twitchy like from a sugar high, last night he logged in around four and ended up trolling for some names from high school. But no way Carla Habst could be this hot, still. How old is anyone’s Facebook picture, anyway?
He chalks another two-by, sets it on the sawhorse, and cranks up the saw. He starts the cut and a flash across the beach makes him glance up to see splinters of light dancing from the chop out past the surf, and there’s sudden warmth on his face, wetness, really, and his hand is jerking because it’s burning but when he looks it’s blood flying hot into his face from a flap of skin at the end of a finger, and the saw skittering off and out of sight, all of which is already going dim, with the sounds of the day fading as they get further and further away too.
−−−
Thrash metal, they call it, and what’s amazing is the sound of violence it imitates, like the metal of a crashed car shredding and twisting—the screeching that comes from the electric guitar microphone parts, or pickups is what they are, when they put them right up to an amplifier and the amplified sound gets amplified and around and round in a vicious loop. You see it at rock concerts, like Lynyrd Skynyrd however many years ago, but that’s at a rock concert, okay? Not all night long louder than this fucking rain, from the slum next door to the restored Cape Cod summer house you saved your whole working life for, where these weekender stoner kids figure they paid the freight and can do whatever the fuck they like, play their e or i or whatever Tunes as loud as they want.
You’d think asking politely to turn it the fuck down would help, but no.
You’d think offering up the logic of why it would be smart would convince, but hey.
Maybe a little item would help, if casually displayed during their next chat? Like the one from out in the storage shed, under the bungee’d tarp in the padlocked cabinet, wrapped in rags soaked in Cosmoline, beside the box of 12-gauge Fiocchi shells?
−−−
Drew Bennis bends, fitting his pipe wrench on the cylinder housing’s hex bolt. Tighten, tighten the wrench. Good. He wipes sweat from his eyes, already blurry enough, and straightens up to give his back a rest—of course, just enough to ding his head on the low engine room roof. “Fuck.” Whoever designed this ferry had midget mechanics in mind, typical of the egghead types with their T squares and mechanical pencils and compasses who never changed a gasket like this one, leaking diesel like a sieve. He’s downloaded and double-checked the schematics twice, not that he had to, but if this gasket keeps dr
ipping the whole engine will overwork, overheat, seize up, and that’s all she wrote.
He bends again. Just twist that wrench counter-clock, twist. She’ll give.
White Danskin top is what Agnes what’s-her-name wore in mechanical drawing class, sitting at the desk just in front of his. Catholic, dark blonde hair, peppermint shampoo smell, Danskin top thin and tight enough to see her whole bra through it, the back strap bumpy where the eyelet clasp things met. The top creasing diagonal across her front when she turned for her books, so you could see the shape perfect, her little gold cross swaying, her sharp eyes glancing up and holding his.
Whoa, fucking hex bolt. Wrench lost its grip, bolt corners gone smooth. Stripped, damn.
Well, no biggie. Gasket a little leaky. No biggie.
3
Cort’s bare feet scuff through heavy sand, sun heating her shoulders, brightness throwing rainbows at the edges of her eyes as she walks aimlessly along the surf leaping and spilling, windblown and breaking to the sky’s edge.
She thumbs her cell blindly as she walks, glancing down torn again at the text Tay has left this morning, after the dozen or so that came in last night:
still sorry—need to sleeeep. don’t b mad. And my parents are wack - weird 2. Meet me? pls
What now? Forget him, or run back to him and risk everything, because what does anyone ever have if they don’t? Does love ever live otherwise?
Heat has already driven everybody indoors or into the water. Old guys with white chest hair stand up to their droopy waists inside the break, swaying against the push and pull of the spilled waves, staring at the edge of the sky like they’ve always been there, waiting. Like maybe somebody’s ship will come in.
The sky looks white, bleached, almost. The world between each blink seems like a short, random video clip. A woman sits alone, twirling a curl of her hair around a finger, over and over; a sunburned guy walks in circles, talking to himself; a little kid bawls while two others smash his complicated sandcastle back into sand.
Just past Claude’s Clam Shack, where the lane narrows and turns inland, a burst of reggae blares and stops, a peal of laughter rings out from a share house. On the patio, trashed-looking in a saggy bikini, a girl lights a cigarette and closes one eye against the curling smoke while she whoops wearily and flounces back inside as the reggae blares again. A party starting, or ending?
Cort trudges on, down a boardwalk ramp along a patch of sunken forest—thorny bramble of twisted, peeling branches buzzing with deerflies—through the green dapple and hot, still air out onto shadowless redwood planking.
Her timer chimes and she pulls out her cell again, thumbs flying blind again to type:
still here u f*kers – 44 3/4
She sends, because at least it’s some connection to something in this boring place with no one now but too many dopey families with babies and dogs and staring geek boys in slipping jams with their bony sunburned chests and chicken arms.
She slows to scroll back and check, and sees she missed a tweet war between two from back in Bayshore, Jane Felsh and Sarah Rubaker, now accused of cheating because she missed the fifteen-minute mark.
JanesterJane flames:
UR OWT!!!
Cort can imagine SaRuba90 rolling her eyes, her face stony, as she typed:
I absolutely did tweet in time and if your time on your page is wrong, it isn’t my fault.
Cort snorts laughter; has Sarah become British?
Jane definitely hasn’t:
UP URS LIER
Someone she doesn’t know and didn’t notice before, KatieMatson87300, chimes in, whiny:
too juve, sorry. I didn’t lose, but Im quitting. Anyone else have a life?
Cort almost smiles. Her thumbs fly again:
less & less
She looks up as the boardwalk tops a rise over a low dune, emerges from behind a bank of sea grape and tufts of seagrass into the day of ordinary bickering, laughing tourists carrying coolers and umbrellas to the beach, seagulls yawping and diving at trash, rap blasting, a dog barking at a family, boys younger and dully gawking, the flying shadow of a kite.
She could cry; her eyes want to from not closing for two nights, unless they did and she can’t remember, which would be even weirder. She could cry, though, mostly from the total confusion over Tay, the what-ifs of it, the chance of truth being lies or vice versa.
She stops and feels a surge of something rising in her throat and realizes it’s only laughter. Manic, is what, she’s in some absurdly emo bipolar phase of all-nighter mania.
Just ahead, a big lady in pouchy shorts and some sort of peasant blouse has on giant ugly sunglasses that seem to swivel Cort’s way as she lifts a photograph. It’s always something, right? As if Cort has a dollar to spend on a homeless project, or her signature on a petition means anything, and she tries to slide past but the face in the photograph slows her down, because it’s the little kid, him, with his big dark eyes but no smile now, just a stunned blank look—the little kid she’s supposed to be babysitting.
4
“Hey, no, spread out, okay, folks?” Chief shouts above the surf, and points across the kelp-strewn width of beach that today’s volunteers seem so reluctant to patrol.
Drugs, TV, alcohol, video games, porn—Chief can only hope one or all are why this group moves in a slow, dazed bunch along the tide line up ahead. Unfortunately, worse and more likely, everyone’s a little spacey since this insomnia deal hit. But is it rocket science to fan out and cover a little more search pattern for an MP?
Sam Carlson’s group behavior theory is no help, and typical of an MD who was a shrink: it sounds neat, but where does it leave you? Shrinks always find the perfect, clever little realizations—it’s really your mother you’re angry with, or your father—or don’t you see how you’re just recreating the same problem here that you never solved over there?
His earbud chimes and he clicks through. After his emails and voice messages, it’s County finally getting back, a lieutenant he knows on the line now: “Chief, hey. It’s Marvin.”
Chief scrimps on the pleasantries, maybe a bad idea, but it’s a way to convey some urgency. “Marvin, any luck on the personnel—”
“—working on it.”
Stay loose, stay easy. “Look, I don’t call you guys lightly. I need a search team for the parents. And Child Services for the kid. Sooner than tomorrow’s ferry.”
Typical of County’s attitude toward Carratuck, the leftie chuckles. “Hey, Gilligan, come on, dial it back. Folks get robbed and killed over here, we’re kind of busy. Not to mention shorthanded from budget cuts.”
Chief rubs his eyes, debating. Will the truth bring help any more slowly? “Hey, Marv, listen? People are . . . strange, not sleeping. Flaky, edgy, like. Out of control. You know I wouldn’t be saying anything if I didn’t think it was something serious . . .”
A pause gives him hope. Maybe he’s rung a bell? Maybe people on the mainland are experiencing the same weirdness and there’s an easy explanation: sunspots, or some new airborne pathogen.
But laughter bursts through his earbud, loud enough to wince at. “Not sleeping, out of control? Sounds like Pines Beach. Man, I was there for my buddy’s batch party, 24/7 the whole weekend. I needed a nap, too.”
The prick. See if he gets comped a room for his anniversary ever again. “Hey, look—”
“Tomorrow’s ferry, Chief. Best we can do.”
Chief shakes his head, frustrated. These mainland prima donnas have all the slack in the world—full backup, EMTs, IA, IT geeks and gophers, MP specialists and their assistants out looking for lost cats, pro bono psychics and profiling shrinks, for god’s sake, and it takes them a day to spare anybody?
“Tomorrow? Seriously? You guys can’t—” His earbud chimes and he sighs, frustrated. “Hang on, this could be—” He flashes the line.
“Chief, it’s Brian H
ennessy, DWP. We got nothing out of range here.”
“Nothing?”
“Sorry. We ran it hard—trace elements, parts per million, full stats.”
“EMF?”
“Ran a gaussmeter by the high voltage lines. All in range, no surge.”
It was always one for the tinfoil hat crowd, anyway. “Brad, thanks for getting on this.”
“Brian.”
“Hey, right.” But Brian is already gone.
Chief’s earbud chimes again, but when he clicks though a new voice startles him, a woman’s: “Chief Mays? You said to call if anybody recognizes the Boy in the picture?”
5
Sam sits on a metal folding chair in Room Three, willing himself to keep still and not look too directly at the thirteen-year-old who sits now on the wax paper-covered exam table, picking at his bleeding cuticles, a foot twitching.
The eyes of patients, today, are wrong somehow, darting and hooded as if harboring a secret, but dull with dryness, reflecting less.
This one isn’t much more than a boy, with a studded eyebrow and a swirl of tattoo on his arm. Manhattan, private school, son of an internet marketing guru or media conglomerate exec, Sam guesses. The kid gives a raspy, weary little laugh. “I keep thinking of some things I wanted to do, but I knew better and I don’t want to. Keep thinking of them. Kid who told on me for pushing him, spike his juice box with powder from a bag on a shelf in the garage. Dog next door wouldn’t shut up, yap yap. So I scotch-tape a dog whistle to an electric fan. I used to dream about doing them, not so great, but then at least when you woke up nobody got hurt or sad or disappointed in you about it, so okay. But now . . . I don’t wake up because all I am is awake, really, these days. Nights. So, what if I go ahead and do something because I think I’m dreaming, but I’m not?”