Walking the Sleep

by Mark McGhee

  He nods and smiles.

  “Just remember not to stare too hard at things when you’re out there.”

  Back in time? Dreaming? Seeing? I am laughing and smiling. I am standing above myself watching. She is beautiful and loves me. I can tell. She hugs me and tells me something. I laugh and then kiss her. I know her. I loved her. And then she is walking away. She stops and takes one last look at me. Her eyes are sad and her head drops as she turns. She walks away. I can say nothing. I want to tell her to stop. I want to beg her not to go, but my mouth is frozen, and my heart stops beating. I am frozen in pain and despair. It’s too late to speak. And she is gone.

  I realize finally that I was walking the sleep again and wonder how long I had been because things around me looked different today. Checked out of consciousness. How long? It’s daytime but what is today. I’m sick of that question now. Things look different. I feel like I’ve been asleep but I do not sleep. There is no sleep. There is walking. There is slipping. Sleep is rest as I recall. Not all sleep of course. But there is a distinct time when a person closes off their consciousness and they slip into rest. This walking, this wandering, is not like that.

  Certainly, there is a slipping of consciousness, but there is no rest. It’s a fog that comes and overtakes the consciousness, and then, instead of waking up and maybe having a vague recollection of a dream, like in life, there are just images of places I have walked. Or I might be staring at a dream, at myself, at the past, and I see but do not always understand what it means. When you have that dream that confuses you, you sometimes try to piece it together, but sometimes I am watching the dream unfold before me in real time. Some good. Some bad.

  Dreams of people I have lost. I sit and weep. In these times there is no solace for my soul. I reach and try to find her. I ache deep down and wake up in tears. Slowly I pull my consciousness together. Remind myself that nothing matters here and no one cares. And with these confusing real time dreams I am suddenly snapped back to reality. I remember what he told me. “Don’t stare too long.” I was staring too long.

  I think I told you this already but humor me. There is no real sleep here. There are some pleasant times in wandering though. A good dream that becomes part reality. I twilight sleep between dream and awake. Between worlds and states of consciousness. And then I slip.

  And I sometimes long for this kind of sleep. In that place I sometimes see the eyes that loved me. The eyes that cared. So long from me now. They are gone. But in the sleep, I see them. I see her again. That time, when she loved me with her soul. And in the sleep it matters not there that it is all gone, that I will never see that love again in the soft brown eyes, because there, in the deepest places of disconnected images and words, she loves me again. And I can wake from that feeling happy sometimes for a little while. I will snap awake violently conscious. I might be standing in front of a building at lunchtime in downtown Los Angeles. People swarming by me, through me, and I stand there. In the sunlight. Blinking. Adjusting my eyes and ears to the mid-day city.

  And I feel and see the sweetness of a hidden moment in my mind. A time lost and never again, but for a moment, and through a foggy haze of morning happiness. I like starting happy like that. A dream of her smiling at me. When we were laughing and happy. And things were as they should have been. Things as they had once been before I fucked everything up. And some days, after a dream like that, I will sing a song she liked. A song I remember her singing to. Or dancing to. I will walk around with the sound of her laughter in my head.

  Sometimes it’s very fucking confusing, like today. I try to spend a lot of time in daylight. I don’t like the night very much, so I don’t stay in it unless there is something I need to do. The ravens are active during the daytime, but there’s a far worse and dark feeling most places at night. Not everywhere. Really fucked up souls walk and wander at night. People wearing their death faces. I have to go when I have to. I mean, sometimes I have to wander out at night. Some things only exist at night. Scattered memories and energy left as stains in the asphalt. Blood seeps down and stays there. I can smell blood from a death long ago. I often walk back to the place I got killed late into the night. I can pick up the energy better around the time it happened. I don’t know why. During the day it doesn’t look like anything. At night I can smell my blood mingled with the filth of the parking lot.

  Sometimes I feel what seem like mental directions and wander off. Sometimes it’s nothing and I go back towards the daylight. I try to stay in daylight. Sometimes I go into the night out of sheer boredom when I do not sense evil things.

  Once I set off into the night wandering to nowhere in particular. Slipped away. And there I was on the beach in Hawaii. And I watched the stars blink and twinkle. I watched the moon shine and reflect off the water in Kaanapali. I listened as the soft waves kissed the white sand. If I think hard enough about a place, or a time, I can be there. It takes a lot of energy. I thought long and hard about being in Maui, remembered many things, and found myself there. But it’s exhausting to the point where inevitably, I will fall into a wandering again. For the brief moments I am there, it is quite beautiful and calm. Moments. It could be months. I slip again and then end up back in Orange County, or Northern California, or sometimes in the Arizona desert. If I wake far from home, I will consciously walk back to Santa Ana. These can be long and tiring walks. These are walks where the ravens circle, peer down from dark trees, and hop along behind me at a distance. Watching. Waiting for a weak moment of consciousness.

  So, it is with memories here. They can be as clear as the moment they happened, or they can be confusing and fearfully unsettling. I always seem to know I don’t have to think about anything but I always do. And, inevitably, as I think of things, I end up there. I wander there. Wandering takes months, it takes years, it takes seconds, I have no fucking clue really. Like I said, the time thing really does a fuck job on the brain.

  There are always lots of questions I have for myself. Sometimes I ask them out loud to no one. Sometimes I ask them inside my head and they sound like echoes. Then I wonder if I spoke out loud. I look around to see if anyone heard. Sometimes a bird or crow is sitting nearby head bent sideways, and I wonder if they’re listening.

  Why was I living in a shitty apartment in Santa Ana? I had a bottle of Jameson’s whiskey, which was expensive whiskey. If I were poor, wouldn’t I have been smarter than to buy expensive whiskey, beer and Zingers?

  Why wasn’t I buying malt liquor and cheap whiskey if I were so poor as to have to live in a shithole like this? I hadn’t seen my apartment, but I imagined it had to be pretty shitty. I knew this area well. There wasn’t a whole lot of anything but shit in this area.

  Yes, I knew this area years and years and years well…I seemed to know this but not the reason why I knew it. Imagine the first place you can ever remember in life. Maybe some place you know like you know yourself. Now imagine leaving that place, or maybe you have left that place and can see it in your head. Leave it for thirty years, forty, fifty, a hundred….now go back and walk the street you had walked so many times. There’s that garage down the street where a girl let you feel her pussy outside her panties for the first time, or maybe you’re the girl that finally gave in and let him inside the bra. That street. And you will know that place even if everything around that place has changed. I did that as a young man once. I went back to the place I lived when I was five years old. A place I had not seen in twenty years. I walked around. It had changed so much. The giant granite mountain I had stood upon and declared myself ruler, and king, was no more than an outcropping of rock fifteen feet long and two feet high. How many times I had defended that mountain against marauding gooks. Really fucking racist, I know, but it was 1969 and my sisters were fucking Marines returning from Vietnam. That’s what I heard.

  “Fucking gooks, don’t never trust no fucking zipper-headed slope, kid!”

  I think that fucker was from New Jersey, now that I know what New Jersey sounds like. Back t
hen I just thought he was a funny guy, who talked funny, and made my sister scream a lot in the other room. She always seemed happy afterwards, so I figured it must be some kind of happy scream. I learned to call them “fuckers” later when I realized why my sisters were making so much noise.

  My big black brother, Ronald, told me.

  “They’re fucking in there! He’s putting his dick in her coochie hole.”

  “Why?”

  “I dunno but my brother does it to your sister too sometimes. I snuck a peek.”

  “Hmmmm. Must be fun.”

  “Yeah, I’m goin’ try it soons I can.”

  “Me too!”

  “I’m goin’ try it on your sister?”

  “She’s too big for you.”

  “The one with the red hair?”

  “Oh. Huh. She’s really ugly though.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t care. Gonna try it.”

  Anyway. The Marines were always good to me. They taught me how to take a punch, a little karate, and bought me lots of pizza. And they really enjoyed fucking my sisters, which made them nicer too it seemed.

  So many cap-guns, dart-guns, and makeshift stick guns I had gone through defending that granite peak from those gooks. And there I stood as an adult on top of nothing more than a glorified rock. An outcropping of granite. But there was so much there that I knew, and saw, and felt. Because we always leave a part of ourselves in places we spend time in. Those parts will wait for you there and remind you that you once belonged there.

  So it was here. I knew I belonged here at one time, but it might as well have been a thousand years ago in this haze. Still you never forget places you stayed in for a period of time.

  Chapter 3

  I need to stop asking questions. Day. Not today. Get it? Day. I don’t know what today is. Day. Happy? I feel. Today. I can feel pain and sadness but I feel happy in daylight. Sometimes at night. I cannot keep saying today, or tonight, or last night, or yesterday. I don’t know what that fucking means and it makes me angry. And I had a life of too much angry. That seems to be something I am aware of. So I say Day. I say Night. I do try to avoid “today” or “tonight” or “yesterday” because those terms seem like nonsense to me now.

  I am sitting on the swings in the dusty playground of Val Verde elementary. The only thing more ironic than the name Val Verde for a scorched, dusty wasteland, like this, is that I can come here. And I can come here and anywhere I’ve ever been. Why I choose this God forsaken dust pit is beyond me. But I sit and swing back and forth and listen to the rusty chain ache against the aged bars. I see myself now. On the playground. I’m about seven years old and the only white kid on the playground. A bigger kid has pushed me down and is threatening to punch my face in. Then there is Ronald. He’s grabbing the bully by the neck and slamming him into the ground. And then he’s pulling me up, dusting me off as the kid, cursing, walks away. He’s yelling threats of retaliation but the look of fear in his eyes tells me he will think twice about it.

  And then the big brown arm around my shoulder, as he walks me off and away from the circle of kids, disappointed at not seeing the fight they had cheered for. Ronald is my neighbor. He’s older than me by a few years. Large, black, friendly, and protective. He was my only brother. My big black brother. I called him. My little white brother. He called me. How many fights he had protecting the little white pastor’s kid, I will never know.

  DAY. My dad calls me outside. I am standing outside the trailer on our property, next to the small white Pentecostal Church of God in Val Verde.

  “I’m going away son. I’m sorry. I will be gone for a while, but I will come and get you.”

  I’m crying as I watch him get into the little red 1967 Nova and drive away in the direction I know only as “aunt’s house.” I stand in the dirt driveway and wave goodbye. I cry and cry. I taste the dust and salt on my checks.

  NIGHT. I’m tired. I don’t want to keep going on like this. I think there is something I can do about it and sometimes it’s very clear but then I do not always see what it is I can do. I am walking the sleep more and more. Walking the sleep is sort of like when you’re sick for a very long time. You enter that time wherein you no longer feel the heat of fever, the shivering and chills, and you simply fall very deeply into a realm of thought and dreams that make no sense, and make perfect sense in all. I know I explained this before, but it changes. I’m changing and I don’t know why, how, or how much time is passing. I’m sick. Listen. I need you to pay close attention because I think I’m slipping. I might not make sense, or I may disappear. Just don’t come here if you can. Straighten your fucking head out and clear up all the bad shit in your mind. You can’t get forgiveness. You have to take care of shit on that side.

  I see Christians, Muslims, Hebrews, and every other fucking type of religious nut you can imagine here. They walk around in a fucking stupor praying. Pleading for forgiveness. No one is here that listens to any of that bullshit so forget about your fucking get out of jail free card – if you have bad shit on your hands, in your head, on your conscience – you’re going to be wandering around here. I see it every DAY.

  For the drinker, as I was quite often in life, and for extended periods of time, drinking for days at length. You will slip. You will begin dreaming unsettling dreams, happy dreams, terrifying dreams….walking the sleep is like this, and yet it is not.

  I walk the sleep, for how long I don’t know, but then I am NIGHT. Or I am DAY. Then I do decide certain things. I decide where I go from there Awake. Am I asleep? I cannot say because this seems to be where dream and consciousness have a very reasonable coexistence without any seeming contradictions. I think. I go. I sit. I walk. I run. I walk the sleep, but I never stop thinking. And I wake from walking the sleep and I do not know how or why but I look and I see and I go or I stay. Or I walk the sleep and then see again. The DAY. The NIGHT. If it hurts I watch with morbid fascination until I cannot see anymore, and it feels like my soul is vomiting, and then I walk the sleep, or I run to DAY if it is NIGHT and I feel afraid. Mostly, I feel no anticipation. DAY. Walk the sleep. It will happen. I think I forgot how to leave this place but I also believe I can figure it out. I want the fuck out of here. And then I know I don’t want to leave at all. Can’t. Not yet. Maybe never. But I still hold that in my brain – I can leave.

  I haven’t seen a wanderer I thought I knew for what feels like a long time. It is one minute, and it is ten years and I don’t know that they may have just grown sick of this place, and remembered how to leave. I have as of late, rarely seen a wanderer I thought I recognized, or have thought I have seen more than once. That beautiful wanderer on the pier and her smirk. She lives in my DAY and in my NIGHT. When I wander, when I walk the sleep, when I am somewhere in between, I see her soft cheeks, her soft brown eyes, and her pouty smile.

  I try to connect whether I am dreaming about her, or whether I am seeing her though the fog and haze of walking the sleep. I have seen her wandering, as I said before, but I also see her through a fog and haze too. In the confused time following an extended walking of the sleep, where dream meshes with reality. Walking the sleep. Where time stands still, changes speed and motion, and challenges the sanity if not the concept of time, of space, of dimension, and of reality.

  DAY. I was walking the sleep for what seems like a long time because I am having trouble with my memories today. And I seem to think like a child. And I’m angry. Things seem unfair today and I’m angry but I’m fucking helpless to do anything. I remember the bully on the playground and my dad saying goodbye. But it’s hazy now. A bad dream but it wasn’t. A remembering, a seeing while walking, and wandering. Walking the sleep.

  Chapter 4

  I remember waking up and there was a raven looking at me with a cocked head. And he laughed at me. Those fucking things. If people only knew they would shoot them all dead. They’re smart, and they know things, and worst of all they talk. This is something I had learned in hazy times. The waking. Coming to as it
were. Like a drunk. That morning feeling. Raw. Remembering the beginning of the evening fairly well, when the alcohol made you just a little bit funnier and wittier above the norm. But as the evening wore on, time sped up. The next morning wasn’t so clear. It wasn’t so funny, or witty, or anything but an embarrassing blur. That’s waking here. And I had learned to shake myself awake quickly after walking the sleep because, inevitably, there was a crow, or worse yet, a raven there about. The noisy screeches. They mostly talk in deep and throaty voices. There’s a few high-pitched screeching demons here and there. Some are very articulate, some are effeminate, and some have accents.

  They sometimes mock me and others. And I’ve seen them eating rotting corpses. They pick and chew. They stick their black heads into the stomach and emerge shining with bloody pieces of entrails and intestines. They pick at the eye sockets, having devoured their favorite of delicacies, the plump and fleshy eyeballs. I have never seen them feasting on a corpse with eyeballs. Always gone first. Though I did come upon one once who had ripped a fresh eyeball from the socket. He flipped the round fleshy ball with a long serpentine string attached to the ocular nerve. He flipped it into the air and then swallowed it with a noisy slurp.

  He flipped it up and tossed it into his black gullet like one would toss a peanut, or a piece of popcorn into the air, right into his black gullet.

  I remember thinking about how when we were small kids, my sister had tried to return a fallen raven chick to its nest. She was subsequently pecked so hard on the head that she was bleeding and screaming.

  And I felt bad for laughing. My sister, a terror, trying to do a good deed and then getting pecked in the forehead. It’s still funny to me.

  Now I try to kill ravens when I see them. They hurl insults and bring up my bad deeds, screaming them through the air as I fling rocks at them like bullets. Like I said, they know everything, and they are rotten evil things. They will taunt the weak that wander. I watched six of them screaming insults, and yelling unspeakable things to a young female wanderer. She flailed her arms and screamed, and cried for god to help her. And I figured she must be walking the sleep because we know there is no god here. I whizzed a round stone so hard it took the top of a large raven’s skull off. It bled black into the desert sand. The others screamed threats and vowed vengeance on me as they flew away screeching my sins into the skies. Screaming, screeching, threats… promising to devour my black soul.