by Roy Freirich
Barely a shadow, a low shape darts and stops and darts again in the tilting periphery of his vision, and he cannot blink it away, even with the quick hand he lifts from the handlebars of his bike to wipe at his rain-spattered eyes.
He would slow, but can go no slower without stopping, so he stops, touching his toes down for balance as he peers into the darkness. A dog stares back, trembling too, fearful but drawn slowly forward, short fur rippling.
“Hey, boy. Hey.” Have animals been infected, too? What would their pain be like, of awareness uninterrupted, of constant movement, noise, light, endlessly?
The dog whines, stops and half-turns away, turns back, whining again. Sam approaches slowly, a hand extended, palm down, low. “Easy. Easy there.” A metal tag glints, dangling from a black collar Sam can barely see against the dog’s soaked fur.
How far has this one wandered? Sam shields his eyes from the downpour and looks around; he’s on a remote stretch of lane between dunes, and his eyes strain to see another glint of light—from the open doorway of a lone beach house, flickering distantly between gusts of rain, like a broken beacon as the door swings open and shut to no rhythm but the wind’s. Not a hundred yards off.
The dog starts slowly toward it, pausing to look back, as if leading. But why follow? If that’s his home, he’s not far enough to be lost. But the door left open to the storm? The dog quivering with fear?
Sam sighs and starts forward, half-rolling, half-dragging his bike along through the wet pelted sand. The house sits atop a dune tall enough to require steps, and these are tiered railway ties with broad landings, a few too many to drag the bike up, so Sam leans it against a rickety wooden erosion fence and follows the dog up to the yawning doorway.
“Hello?” The wind swallows it, so he shouts, “Hello?” his voice ringing off the hardwood floors and wainscoting.
A hand out, grasping the edge of the front door before it swings again, Sam steps into the doorway, hesitating to listen. Close by, the surf sends up its broad, menacing sound, basso thunder and seething hiss. Rain streaming from the eaves, the gurgle and clatter of runoff in roof gutters. No one.
The high foyer light is a wooden chandelier, a ship-timber theme repeated in the gray hardwood planks of the floor Sam steps slowly across. Ahead, another half-open door seems a reproach, the hallway dimming along its length to another door shut tight, no trace of light beneath it.
Sam peeks slowly around the edge of the first into a clean, well-lit living room of white denim slip-covered couches, hurricane-style lamps, wood barrel end tables of distressed staves: Pottery Barn Cape Cod, spacious but inviting, neat as if ready for company.
He glances back to see the dog has disappeared, suddenly, unaccountably.
It’s dim at the other end of the hall, which is just exactly that, of course—a hall to a door, where they all seem to lead, the point of a hall, after all. He wants to laugh and yawn at the same time, a twinge at the joint of his jaw. A hollowness within slows him, a flutter of viscera. There’s a gap in the drumming of rain, filled by a moan of wind.
His hand twitches for his lost flashlight, but he takes a breath and a few resolute steps to the shut door and raps on it, knuckles first—thin, unconvincing impacts—and then simply bangs the heel of his palm hard against the wood.
“Hello?” He shouts it. Why waste anyone’s time here?
The doorknob feels warm in his wet fingers and turns easily, the latch mechanism releasing smoothly. He tries a soft push first, to just glide the door open.
It’s loose, but stuck, too, somehow. Something heavy up against it, other side.
A muscle lurches in Sam’s chest, a quick gripping, as if against some larger force trying to pry his arms wide, trying to open him. But it’s just another door right here, in a world of others.
A firmer shove still fails to budge it, and Sam finally puts his shoulder into it, nearly slipping in the wetness of his own soaked boat shoes.
The door gives, grudgingly, a fraction of an inch.
Again, cursing softly, “Fucker.” Harder now.
Something on the other side slips, flops heavily over, with a thick, dull slap on the floor.
A prickle crawls up the back of his neck, the tightness in his chest twists outward, and he leans with his full weight to push the door harder against the weight of whatever prone thing is now sliding away, an obstinate inch at a time along the floor.
A sight line opens, narrow, into darkness complete. He lifts a hand to feel blindly around the edge of the doorframe for a light switch, but a heavy waft of cloying odor, palpably warm, feels like someone’s breath on his face, and he yanks his hand back.
Gas.
Back up, now, away. Call Chief and let him find whatever there is to find. Let him call in the auxiliary guys, Stuart, or Tim, that he says are so useless, or what’s-his-name, the EMT. It’s their jobs, best luck to them. So just turn now, blunder away back to the bike, and pedal hard straight back to the boat and a warm berth, where sleep may yet come.
He moves quickly back down the hall to the lighted foyer, eyes searching. For what?
There, a faux-antique wooden boot bench with a hinged seat. He lifts it and rummages past the rubber boots and umbrellas to find what he hoped for: a serious, four C-type battery flashlight. He flicks it on; even in this bright, shadowless foyer, the trace of a beam snaps out, dancing along the wainscoting.
Good enough, it seems, when he returns to the ajar door at the end of the hall and sends a broad beam inside, downward first to see the striped child’s mattress someone must have propped against the door, barely pushed aside. He aims the beam higher into a shadowy kitchen. He hesitates, seeing stacked baking tins, nesting bowls, pricey stainless cookware hanging from a pot rack. Behind the chunky stove, a row of prep knives gleams darkly from a mag strip. A cook’s kitchen.
He shoves the door wider, enough to step carefully in, a hand covering his mouth, beam already finding a bay window behind dual prep sinks, sealed with layers of gray duct tape. Quick now, to pull a knife from the block and slash sideways at the duct tape, parting it, yanking the frayed edges of the gaping split back to crank open the side casements and breathe in great lungs full of rich, wet night.
To the stove, now, a chunky stainless, commercial-style affair with oversized, gleaming knobs set full-on, burners hissing like snakes. He snaps them off and stops there, a glimpse worrying the edge of his vision, still safely at the edge of his vision just so long as he doesn’t turn his head to look.
He turns his head, points the beam floorward, and takes a step around the edge of the broad kitchen island.
Fear would be familiar, something to which one may become accustomed, but this dread is a cold fist around his heart, a brutal, insolent grip.
His first recognition is of squares of solid colors, and he blinks to see they’re pillows—on which lie three prone, naked human forms, white as bone. His eyes follow the beam’s swath over details, refusing them even as he understands these are a family: a young pre-adolescent girl, a father, a mother—though her body’s hands are not covered in quilted oven mitts like the others. Like the others, though, a quilted sleep mask covers her eyes, and her ears are hidden behind furry-looking earmuffs.
Her hands are bare, one wrapped loosely around the wrist of the other and the other upturned, as if awaiting receipt of some object, a key or coin, a talisman to grant her passage.
Only after he has done his best to shut it from his memory can he let himself admit he recognizes her, can he let his eyes wander again up her angled white neck to her lifeless face to her dull, lank red hair. Red.
The woman he quoted Wordsworth to. The world no longer with her, late and soon.
A dim, small white square on the countertop draws him closer. He bends to it, pointing the flashlight beam to see his own rushed scrawl on the wrinkled, wet page from his prescription pad: the
prescription never filled, somehow, with neither real nor ersatz sleeping pills. No matter which now.
His gaze darts to the young girl and to the downturned cell that lies beside her, the edge of its screen dimly flashing. He moves nearer, bending to flip it over and see the home screen notification center, pushed Tweets appearing white on black, each new one pushing the last downward, one after another, all #sleepless43, until one stops him with a lurching in his chest, an ache in his throat:
asleep is the new dead
12
On hands and knees, rain streaming down his face, Chief inches forward in clothes soaked cold and heavy with brine. He pauses and sweeps his Maglite’s beam into the dimness ahead, spotting a black gleam.
His hand closes on kelp and shoves it sideways. He’s found a horseshoe crab shell, a black stick of driftwood, a piece of broken glass worn smooth. He’s a beachcomber, that’s all; it’s a hobby of the idle, absently sifting the sand for some fool’s hand-me-downs, cast-offs, forgotten objects.
His girls, Linda and Jan, would imagine his side of the story worth telling, and invent it if he didn’t: he was saving a man’s life, after all, when his gun was stolen, and it could not and should not have been any other way. No backup, blameless, brave, in fact—that’s Dad, Navy hero, cop, hard case with a soft heart, the family man devoted to his community, to the values he swore always to protect and defend.
Suffolk PD might believe it. If no one got shot, if his weapon is never used in a suicide or murder, or robbery or maiming. If, if. But then why steal it?
How can he admit it? Someone simply ran off with his department-issue, fifteen-round, semi-automatic Glock 9-millimeter handgun while he braved the surf to pull out a man who laughed in his face. The truth is his to nurse in secret, like an illness that will slowly, surely kill him. It’s started already, the hollowness of humiliation spreading from his stomach, poison in the thrum of his pulse and the blood in his veins.
If he could just lie down, even in this wet sand beside the roar of the ocean with the rain pelting his face, if he could maybe just for few moments let his eyes close, then maybe he could dream a new dream—a beach filled with dozing, sunbathing parents and kids greeting him as he rides by with his blued Glock in his holster and an elbow out the open window and his wry little salute: “How’re ya?”
He blunders to the Jeep, hand slipping on the door handle, yanking open the driver’s side to climb into the seat, saltwater and tears and snot and rain dripping as he sits watching the storm streak the surf white and black, blurred through his windshield.
A gust rocks the Jeep, but his stare is fixed, a resolute refusal to look elsewhere or to think of anything else but water in all its forms, and how living in a place surrounded by it puts you so completely in it at some point, over your head, figuratively if not literally.
He’s not sure, though, exactly when the little cell phone in his lap began ringing, its little screen flashing, a buzzing, busy little rectangle. His Bluetooth set, of course, is gone, yanked off his ear in the maelstrom, and he needs to swipe the screen with a wet finger and lift it to his face, motions nearly forgotten—the thing had become such an appendage.
He wipes at his face, clears his throat, but still his voice sounds choked, ragged, broken, as he lifts it to his face: “Hello?”
−−−
When he has seen all that Sam has summoned him to see, Chief drifts stunned from the kitchen into the hall and stops, and to Sam the moment seems to begin and end again before Chief takes another half-step backward, his head quickly back and forth as if in denial of some unimportant fact, but his voice somewhere between a sob and a whisper. “They knew, they knew, they knew . . .”
Chief’s gaze is wild, unfocused, darting over the walls and floor, the look of someone desperate to escape. Sam grabs him by the shoulders, dimly realizing he’s soaked through, too. “Knew what?”
“That it will never end, none of it.”
Sam tightens his grip. “Fuck all that. That’s nonsense, okay?”
“How did they not try and get out, get off Carratuck, get anyplace else?”
Sam shakes his head. “You know deep sea diving. You trained. It’s like hypoxia, the disorientation takes over, total confusion. Which way is up, or out, which way to town, where there’s no ferry. Maybe they tried. But where are their glasses, wallet, children? Maybe a kid runs off, refusing to go. Do they wait? Maybe they’re too afraid. They start to believe there’s no place to run from it.”
“How bad will it get? What if you and I—?”
“Teams’ll be here tomorrow. I’ll pull some strings, get CDC, full event response, forensics, counselors, everybody, here tomorrow. But tonight, just you and me, that’s all who can know about this, understood? You don’t call Tim or any of the auxiliary or fire guys, you don’t tell Jan, I don’t tell Kathy. Word gets out, it’s just panic. There’s nothing to be done tonight. Understand?”
Chief tilts his head at Sam as if he has just spoken in some utterly foreign language.
“Got it?”
Slowly, Chief blinks at him, his eyes finally focusing. He nods.
13
In a daze of déjà vu, Kathy turns from the Boy again as he sits at the dinette. The shut, close cabin seems to slightly turn in place and stop, as though from a bout of dizziness.
She remembers the Boy’s empty, haunted eyes staring at the water from the end of the float, and it chills her to think this child may be an orphan and has likely witnessed more than any should.
She wasn’t old enough when she watched her mother drift off coughing and shuddering and then wake up terrified in her last minute, pleading. Now that terror is hers forever, gift of the dying, and she hopes against hope and reason that this Boy wasn’t given it. But then why is there nothing but his wide eyes and the faint sound of his breathing through his mouth as he watches her desperately fill these hours with bright, idle nonsense and thin cheer?
It’s painful to think these months haven’t been so very different—filled with frivolous diversion.
She has an idea, suddenly, ridiculous and from nowhere, that if the Boy would only speak, everyone would sleep again. Sam would laugh, of course, but would she see a tiny glint in his eyes, as if at hope, no matter how silly? And how crazy is it, really, to think in some way the world hangs on the first words of a boy whom tragedy has silenced? In some way, anyway, it is true, maybe not literally, but as if in a kind of story or fable of a cursed kingdom.
She yanks open cabinets, a drawer, busy. Finally, she spins, holding up a sealed package of hot dogs and a box of cereal. The Boy points: hot dogs.
Kathy gives him a tearful smile. “After my own heart.”
−−−
Clambering down into the cabin, soaked and breathless, Sam slows beside the Boy thumbing his handheld game at the dinette table. He meets the Boy’s quick glance with a murmur: “You okay, Admiral?”
Sam watches the Boy’s dark lively eyes that follow everything but always return quickly to his bright little screen. Did his mom walk him halfway to the beach and turn him bewildered but mercifully away, down some other lane, while she kept on?
“Sam, you’re drenched!” Kathy exclaims, but he’s drawn by a glimpse of the Boy’s flashing screen—a princess in a castle, waiting to be rescued, no doubt. His eyes fill to see it.
None so lost as children who witness.
Sam turns away with a quick, apologetic smile. “Just going to dry off and make a quick call. Anybody hungry?”
He doesn’t wait for a reply, but steps into the stateroom. He wipes his face with a flung tee shirt and paces, scrolling his contacts for Dr. Malcolm Hale’s home number. His finger trembles over it as he hesitates. Hale was his psychiatrist for much of the required therapy that any psychology professional must undergo, and through the sudden loss of his client, later, when continuing in the field no longer seemed
like such a given.
He closes his eyes and rubs the lids, trying to focus, but a sheet of improbably hard rain drums on his deck and a gust has rigging ding ding dinging against masts.
He imagines a relaxed, murmured tone that doesn’t sound panicky or scattered, but it all deserts him when he leaves his message:
“Professor! Sam Carlson here, hope you’re well. Been awhile, I know. Can you give a call back when you get this? I could use some advice on a . . . situation. I’ll try you back later, too. I’d just like to—”
“Hello? One moment.” A rustling on the line, a creaking sound. “Yes, I’m sorry, who’s calling?” Hale sounds annoyed.
“Doctor Hale, it’s Sam Carlson, I’m—”
“Ahh, of course. How are you, Sam? Out on Carratuck, I heard. A clinic?”
“Yes, Urgent Care, a day facility. Barely an ER, really.” He plows on, absurdly, too edgy for silence. “Sunburns, jellyfish stings, that sort of thing.”
Sam hesitates here, hoping Hale will prompt him to continue. Is his call so unwelcome?
He wades in: “More lately, it’s why I’m calling.”
Ten minutes of pacing, positioning, framing and cajoling meet kindly skepticism: what proof has Sam got that these fatalities, the missing suicidal mother, and the dozens of sleepless share a single cause? Or even the same multiple causes?
Hale shifts from mild doubt to musing speculation: “Of course, these days sleep deprivation is a complaint I hear more and more. But why not? We’re barraged, everywhere, by screens flashing more and more images, faster and faster, overt and subliminal, wearing down our resistance to suggestion. Why shouldn’t it affect us in unprecedented ways?”