Love Sleep

by John Crowley

  “Hi, hon.” She felt Sam’s forehead: hot, but not feverish, probably, maybe; just the August night and the blanket Rosie had absurdly, prophylactically wrapped her in.

  “Are we home?”

  “Nope. Dr. Bock’s.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Only be a minute.”

  Sam squirmed in the blanket, beginning to seethe, in a minute she would boil. Rosie slid across the seat to her and enfolded her. “You just take it easy, hon. You want me to sing?”

  “No.”

  “Sure.” She started a song. It was a mystery which ones turned out to be soothing ones. Michael row the boat ashore. Tell me the tales that to me were so dear, long long ago, long ago. Poor Mike: for some reason he had never learned or hadn’t remembered the little nonsense songs of infancy, sleeping drops or laughing gas, tried and true; when he sang to soothe her, what he came up with were old advertising jingles, maybe he had grown up minded by TV. Halo Everybody Halo. To look sharp, and be on the ball; to feel sharp, any time at all. Not that it mattered to Sam, the effect was almost the same. What would she think of them years from now when she found them in her memory along with the cow that jumped over the moon and Bobby Shaftoe gone to sea.

  Asleep again, thank goodness.

  What had they been thinking of, she and Mike, having a kid. Nearly impossible now to re-create the mood in which they had taken the plunge, decided to throw away the stuff, go to bed. One damn night was all it had taken, seemingly. Life and thought before Sam were out of reach now; that hospital bed had been a door, life on one side was one thing, life on the other side another.

  A twist in the plot.

  Where is the old fart anyway. She looked again at the radiant dial of her watch, changeless as a painted clockface. None of the car lights that swept over them slowed or changed direction; Rosie felt in her rib cage each one approach, and pass.

  Before she had got pregnant, way before, she had had an idea for an art project, she thought maybe she’d even written it up once for credit in a film or photography class. What she had thought was that a willing pair of new parents could create a record like no other in the history of the world, a record that would be mysterious and awesome and even reveal something ultimate—there would be no way of knowing till it was done.

  The parents would set up a camera and simple lights and a blank background. A movie camera, or a still camera from whose pictures a film could later be made. Every day, every single day, they would prop the baby up before the screen and take a picture. Every day, every single day the same framing and position. They’d have to continue through infancy and childhood, every day, like brushing teeth. Naked. Full body. By the time the child was grown (and rebelled, as she probably would) there would be some thousands of pictures, frames for a movie. String them together and run them at proper speed, and over the course of an hour or so you’d see a child grow. Subtly, unnoticeably from frame to frame, but cumulatively.

  Hair and teeth would grow, legs would lengthen, fingers articulate; she’d stand, neck elongating, hair curling and darkening; teeth would go, and come again, changing her face, her character growing too and changing, evident in the face and body. Cuts and bruises would come and go in a moment, a broken ankle in a minute.

  Life. Growth. Then what if the kid got interested, or if the parents could somehow force or inveigle the kid into continuing the thing. Then she’d grow older, more slowly but just as surely; breasts would come, and pubic hair; wrinkles, creases, oldness.

  Maybe a big belly too. And suddenly two of them.

  Or maybe not. Maybe the film would be short, not reach adulthood; stop suddenly, never to be resumed. Lights out. It could end up being not a general story (Human Life on Earth) but a particular tragedy.

  O lord. O please.

  A bright reflection in her window startled her, a car’s lights turning in at the entrance. “Well here he is anyway,” she said, and swung her door open as the doctor’s car pulled into its parking space. She got out, waved to the indistinct figure fumbling with his door key, and did not feel the relief she had hoped to feel. She came around the car and reached in to get Sam out. Sam didn’t want to come.

  “Now c’mon, hon. We came all this way.”

  “No. Nononono no. I said no.”

  Hauling her out by main strength then, a bundle of resistance inside her blanket. Stilled by the doctor’s voice, who held his door open for them to enter.

  “Hi, Sam.”

  “Hi, Doctor,” Rosie said. “Say hi, hon.” Rosie trusted Dr. Bock, without exactly liking him; she did though like the way he always spoke first to his patient, liked him for having thought that was important. He went ahead of them, flicking on the piercing white overhead lights one after another through the waiting room to his office.

  “So now,” he said. Sam glued to her mother would have nothing to do with him. While he washed his hands, he had Rosie describe to him again what had happened; she answered his minutely specific questions as best she could, reduced finally to giving a grotesque imitation of Sam’s brief spasms, which made Sam laugh, but brought the moment vividly back to Rosie’s imagination.

  “Then that was all. She slept.”

  “Okay. Well, let’s take a look.”

  The lights shone on Dr. Bock’s big bald head and his glasses as he bent over Sam. To all his wiles she made no response, and when at last he put hands on her she shrieked. Too young to be cowed into obedience, too old to be manhandled. Dr. Bock did his best, patient except when he tried to look into Sam’s ears and she pulled away, knocking his instrument into his glasses.

  “Sam! Now stop!” Rosie pleaded.

  “It hurt!”

  “It didn’t.”

  “Did.”

  While the struggle went on, he asked further questions. Never had anything like this before? Positive? Did she herself remember having things like this, when she was young? No? Mike? Okay.

  He let Sam go at last, not exactly finished but apparently satisfied.

  “Okay,” he said. “She seems to have no indications of anything, flu, chicken pox. Throat. Lungs. All okay.”

  “All right,” Rosie said, uncertain.

  “What you look for when something like this happens is an outside cause. If Sam got a spiking fever from say flu or an ear infection, then we could say that very likely what she had was just a febrile seizure.”

  He smiled at Sam, who was still miffed.

  “Febrile seizures are mild seizures brought on by high fevers. A lot of kids get them. Usually there’s a family history. Nothing really to worry about. After childhood they almost never recur.”

  This time Rosie didn’t say All right. There was more to come.

  “But I don’t see anything that could have caused the fever. So then what you think is the brain activity itself brought on the fever. This sometimes happens. In other words the seizure caused the fever and not the other way around.”

  Sam had, unexpectedly, left her mother and gone to stand next to Dr. Bock, looking up frankly into his big face. He put an arm around her shoulder.

  “When you say ‘seizure,’” Rosie said. “You don’t mean that she had. You don’t mean like epilepsy.”

  “Well we don’t use that term much any more. There are many different types of seizure disorder. It gives people an inaccurate idea.” He looked at her with the grave remote pitiless kindness of an idol. “But yes, epilepsy is what it can be called.”

  This was it, Rosie knew: this was the source of all the strange darkness that had seemed to fall over her being like passing clouds; it was darkness coming out of the future, from this moment, a land of darkness she had been heading toward all along, which now she had finally come upon, and which had no end.

  “I’ll give you some basic information,” Dr. Bock said, “about what you might be in for, and Sam; but I don’t really expect you to remember it all, and we’ll go over it again whenever you want to. Okay?”

  Later on, when Rosie
recalled this night, as she would recall it often, she would find herself once again at this moment, when he said that to her, and she would wonder at it, why he would think she wouldn’t remember. She had been erased, like a blackboard, and he wrote on it her future and Sam’s; she didn’t understand everything he said about seizure disorders, and what she had imagined then that he meant was as hard to recall, and as hard to shed, as an awful dream; but she forgot not a word of what she was told: not even when she tried.

  “Now,” he said. “What I want to do is to put Sam on a sedative, just a trial course, for six months. There might not be a single recurrence. If there’s no recurrence, then we can think maybe it was a fluke. And take her off. Maybe.”

  Sam, weirdly, had sat on the stool beside Dr. Bock, and laid her head in his lap. Rosie was uncertain she could speak, as though the thick descending dark might clog her throat. “A sedative?” she said.

  “Phenobarbital,” said Dr. Bock, his hand on Sam’s curls.

  “O my god.”

  “Just a very small dose.”

  Now what was she going to do. Not only must she bear this, she was going to have to say something, she was going to have to do something. She didn’t at first believe she would, but the alternative was inconceivable, so she did. She said, tears thick in her throat:

  “Well I have a real problem with that.”

  He lifted his eyes to her, but the light striking his glasses made his look unreadable.

  “Well, Rosie,” he said. “We don’t want a recurrence. We don’t. They can be harmless, basically, as I told you. Maybe the majority are. But not all.”

  “Well,” Rosie said. “I just have a problem with giving a three-year-old phenobarbital.”

  “It’s quite well tolerated,” said Dr. Bock.

  “Uh-uh,” said Rosie. “It just has to be no good. It just has to be.” How long could she stand poised here, sword raised? Why didn’t he back off?

  “Look, Rosie,” he said. “I’m going to give you a prescription. Tomorrow we can make you an appointment with a neurologist, who can talk to you. But I’m sure he’ll tell you the same.”

  “Can I wait till I talk to him?”

  “My advice is not to wait. I want to make that clear.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I hear you,” she added, Mike’s stratagem, picked up from group therapy, he had often used it on her when he had no way out of replying.

  He weighed weary Sam, made some calculations, and wrote a prescription on a pad, telling her how it should be taken.

  “First thing in the morning,” he said.

  She looked at the oblong of paper. His exquisite small writing, odd for such a big ham hand. Phenobarbital Elixir.

  Ticket to the underworld. She folded it carefully and put it in her bag. And got all the way back to the car and closed the door before she shed tears, holding Sam, watching the lights go out in Dr. Bock’s office.

  She’s not sick, Dr. Bock said, and she doesn’t have to be treated in any special way: but it was impossible not to handle her with fearful care, as though she had become one of those glass animals Rosie had always detested, infinitely breakable; she carried her up the stairs and laid her in her bed, conscious that she was trying not to shake her, for fear she might go off again, like a gun.

  There had been a kid in her junior high who had fits. Rosie remembered her, darkly beautiful, she took ballet lessons too, that was the only other thing Rosie knew about her. Rosie herself never saw her have a fit, but they were talked about. Sometimes she fell asleep on her desk. That was the phenobarbital, Rosie saw that now, it must have been. Pale, dark-haired; the teacher gently rousing her, maybe as afraid as Rosie was that she might go off.

  She listened to Sam’s steady breathing.

  What if she were wrong, why should she act like she knew best, what if she hurt Sam by thinking she knew best. Propped on her elbows in her bed in the deep darkness she begged for counsel. Shouldn’t she just fill the scrip.

  She couldn’t.

  Steady breathing. A minute pause came after each exhalation, before each inhalation began; Rosie entered into each one, holding her own breath till Sam resumed.

  She lay again on the pillow.

  Once during her pregnancy Mike came home and told her that he had spent a long bad day, thinking about all the awful possibilities they might be in for, which might demand a lot of sacrifice and extra commitment, and might mean a lot of sadness, a lot of loss; and he said that through the day he had worked through that, and faced it for himself, as he had not before; and he felt readier. She had not done that; she had been keeping all those possibilities far from her, and she had been a little awed and deeply grateful to Mike, though she wondered how he could know what he would be capable of giving up or taking on; and now one of those things had actually maybe possibly very likely happened, and where was he.

  She didn’t want him here, no, she really didn’t: to want him here now would be like making a deathbed conversion, it was beneath her. But she sure wanted someone there. Someone, someone to tell her she was right, was doing the right thing, the wrong thing; was a dope; should wait, shouldn’t wait. Someone.

  “Mommy?”

  Rosie was out of bed faster than she had thought possible to get, and standing foolishly naked beside Sam’s bed.

  “Mommy I don’t feel good.”

  She was hot again, though not so terribly hot as she had been. “Okay,” Rosie said, her heart beating and her mouth dry. “Okay.”

  Sam kicked back the bedclothes Rosie had put over her. “Mommy.”

  “Yes, hon.”

  “My ear hurts.”

  “It does?”

  “Inside.”

  “It does?”

  “Mommy!” Sam laughed at her mother’s bewilderment. “My ear!” And she pointed at it vigorously, once, again, again.

  A nice bright otitis media, said Dr. Bock (a little shamefaced, Rosie thought, that he had missed it last night), which, okay, accounts for the fever, frequently we get a spiking fever with the onset of an ear infection; so if we’ve accounted for the fever, then it’s a lot more likely that the seizure was a febrile seizure, and a lot less likely that a seizure disorder is indicated.

  Not ruled out though.

  No phenobarbital?

  Well no. Let’s not then. See what happens.

  “Well that’s nice,” said Dr. Bock’s nurse, fixing a clown sticker to Sam’s sunsuit. “Just as well you hadn’t started on the phenobarb. My experience, they won’t take you off once you’ve started. Not till the six month course is up. So good thing.”

  The morning was brilliant, a hot, clear, happy day, happy. A nice bright otitis media.

  Like a near-miss dreadful accident, she thought: sailing through without a scratch, inches or seconds from collision; and driving on at a crawl, appalled, newly conscious that at any moment … Then gaining speed again.

  Should she tell Mike?

  On Monday she drove up the Shadow River road to The Woods, having agreed to deliver Sam to her father this one time. Mike had apparently begun a new program of rule-bending. Every now and then he would grow restive or maybe only curious, and try to alter the agreement they had come to about who did what when. Rosie had not had the strength this time to contest.

  She no longer liked coming up to The Woods, though. She had to search for him through the long halls and big common rooms of the old resort, dragging Sam by the hand and extricating her from the attentions of people glad to see a child here. She caught up with him at last in the staff lounge.

  “Blue jay,” said Sam.

  “No,” said Rosie. “Woodpecker.” All the lounges and common rooms at The Woods were named after forest creatures, a leftover from the resort days. Mike was piling the ingredients for a sort of shake into the blender kept there for the staff: a banana and some yogurt and some sort of gray powder he spooned from a plastic container.

  “Hi, Mike.”

  “Well look who’s here.” Lookin
g at Sam. He put more items in his shake, fruit juice, honey from a honey bear, a different gray powder from another container. Sam had to be allowed to push the button to make it go, and stared as it foamed and sloshed queasily.

  “Want a taste?”

  “Yes.”

  But a taste was enough. Rosie got her an ice cream in a paper cup, sensing Mike’s disapproval. It was funny. Most single mothers Rosie knew had to counter Dad’s wholesale indulgence of food whims, Dad no good himself at self-control, that being one reason why he was single again usually; but Rosie found it harder than Mike to impose food rules. Funny that Mike could make himself eat or not eat almost anything, even though he wasn’t in charge of any of the rest of his wants, the other way around in fact.

  “I like mine,” Sam said, digging in the phony confection with her little wooden oar.

  “I like mine,” Mike said.

  It had been here, in Woodpecker, that Rosie had first told Mike she wanted a divorce. She’d shoved a bran cake in his face when he made a dumb and smirky remark about her and Rose Ryder, whom he’d been seeing himself. Long time ago.

  “So Mike,” she said. She stood, her arms crossed before her, unwilling to sit. “How’s your research here going?”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “What is it, really?” she said. “This special stuff.”

  “Rosie. I’m not going to go into detail here.”

  “Well.”

  “It’s about,” he said, watching Sam. “Healing. Partly. It’s about how much we can do for ourselves by… By using methods people have used for centuries but aren’t often recognized today as efficacious.”

  “Like.”

  “Prayer,” he said. He still looked at Sam bent over her ice cream. “Doctors have always known that certain people are able to reverse even incurable terminal conditions. Miracles. Every doctor knows of a few.”

  “Mind over body.”

  “Well. More than body. Why restrict it to that. It’s documented that there are modes of shaping your personal universe.”

  “You mean like wishes come true,” Rosie said. “Is that what you’re talking about?”