by John Langan
There was one, relatively minor improvement in Roger's behavior—he started coming to bed at night. He didn't sleep when I did. Every night, I drifted off to the steady sound of him turning the pages of whatever book he was reading. Awake or asleep, it was nice to have him there beside me. I tried not to make a big deal out of it, the first night I returned from the bathroom to find him sitting there, his book propped on his knees; I climbed into bed, leaned over and gave him a quick kiss, and picked up my own book from its place on my nightstand. Actually, I was more surprised the following night, when I entered the room and there he was, again. I couldn't help myself, "Roger," I said, "you're here."
"Yes," he said.
I wanted to ask, "Why?" but didn't think that would come out right, so I settled for "Good," and left it at that. When he was waiting for me the third night, and then the fourth, I understood that something had changed. He had decided that this was where he should be at this time, here with me. I didn't realize how happy this made me until about a week had passed. Finding Roger reading yet again, the half-glasses he'd bought at the pharmacy balanced on the end of his nose, his hair a mess—he let it go at least a month after it needed cut; before Ted had died, I used to tease him about developing crazy professor hair—my heart lifted, the way it does sometimes when happiness catches you unawares. For an instant, every detail of the scene in front of me was almost painfully clear: the lines on Roger's forehead, his wedding ring gold against his skin, the book he was reading, the edges of its cover worn a lighter shade of red, the places on the sheet where Roger weighted it taut, the yellow light of the reading lamp casting shadows across his face, his chest, the bed. It wasn't just that I remembered how much I loved him. I realized that love was even deeper than I'd known, not in spite of all the madness of recent days, but—almost because of it. The feeling was surprising, a little bit overwhelming, and in the grip of it, I did something I hadn't done in ages. I pulled my nightgown over my head, pushed down my panties, and walked over to Roger. He didn't complain when I took the book from his hands and placed it on his nightstand. He was already removing his glasses. We made love for the first time in weeks, and it was like rediscovering this person you knew years ago.
Can I tell you something crazy? I thought I might get pregnant. In fact, I hoped it. The timing was right. We weren't using any protection. Yes, given the situation, how could I have considered such a move, let alone risked it? While everything was happening, and for a short time after—when we were suddenly making up for lost time, making love the way we had when we'd first gotten together: doing it in the living room first thing in the morning, the kitchen after lunch, the third-floor stairs on the way to dinner; testing the beds in the guestrooms, the desk in the library, random chairs throughout the house; doing things that would have made the guy who wrote the Kama Sutra blush—I was filled with such hope. All at once, our problems, the black cloud we'd been living under since Ted had been killed, seemed more manageable. The bad things—Roger's disowning Ted, his heart attack, the miscarriage, Ted's death, whatever it was that was happening to us, this haunting—I was sure that if I were to have a baby, it would balance all of that, tip the scales in the other direction, even. The weirdness pressing in on me—if I were pregnant, full of life, I thought I'd be able to push back, send good energy streaming out along the very same channels that poured strangeness on me. Roger didn't ask what we were doing. If he didn't know the ultimate purpose of our lovemaking, that didn't stop him from participating enthusiastically. And he must have realized there was at least a chance something could happen. How different, finally to want to get pregnant.
Obviously, I didn't. I'd never believed those people who tell you that it isn't that easy to conceive a child. I guess all the safe-sex lectures in high school and college really did the trick. I'd become pregnant before without any difficulty, which had seemed to bear out the warnings of those teachers trying to hide their embarrassment as they talked about condoms and spermicidal lubricant. After my period showed up on time, though, that pregnancy seemed more of a fluke than I'd appreciated. Opening the door to the bathroom closet for a maxi-pad, I was disappointed. Funny how, after years of avoiding and fearing pregnancy like it was the plague, your attitude can change so quickly and completely. But my disappointment, sharp enough to blur my eyes with tears, was mixed with the tiniest drop of relief. Things were—at that point, I wasn't sure what they were.
At about three the morning my period arrived, I'd come out of a deep sleep to the sight of Roger sitting on the edge of the bed, his back to me. The room was dark—his reading lamp was off—but the windows admitted enough light for me to see that there was something different about him. The way he was sitting, the position of his shoulders, head—there was something odd about it. From being ready to turn over and slip back into sleep, I took a step in the other direction, not completely awake yet, but less asleep. I was about to speak, ask him what was going on, when he stood. For a moment, he remained there by the side of the bed, swaying slightly, and I understood. He was sleepwalking. Sleepstanding right then, but you know what I mean. Now I was awake. I raised myself up on an elbow. Roger turned to the door and walked out of it. I didn't know what to do. I'd never dealt with anyone sleepwalking. You weren't supposed to wake them, were you? That was supposed to drive them insane. Or was that an old wives' tale? From the hall, I heard Roger walking towards the third-floor stairs. I decided I better follow him. I wasn't sure how well sleepwalkers did on stairs.
When I leaned my head out into the hall, there was no one there. The third-floor stairs hadn't sounded their chorus of creaks, so it was as if Roger had walked right out of the house. Don't be ridiculous, I told myself, he went into a room, that's all. Maybe he had to use the bathroom.
The bathroom was empty, and anyway, his footsteps had sounded as if they were taking him further down the hall. I checked the guest room on the other side of the bathroom, then crossed the hall and peered in the library. Empty, both of them. That left two rooms, the remaining guest room, next to the library, and Ted's old room. I didn't bother with the other guest room. This wasn't a horror movie; there was no need to draw out the suspense. I found Roger standing in the middle of Ted's room, gazing at a blank wall. I paused at the doorway, watching him watching bare space. His face was slack, almost confused-looking. His lips were moving—he was speaking, his voice too low for me to hear. It was unnerving—it was downright creepy to see him there and not there, you know? When he was finished studying whatever he'd seen there, he did an about-face and headed for the door, still murmuring. I retreated into the hall, expecting him to turn left and return to our room. Instead, he turned right, to the third-floor stairs, which he began to climb with no apparent difficulty. I followed half a dozen steps behind. He reached the third floor and walked along it to his office. I don't know what I thought I'd see when I reached the door—Roger holding the figure for Ted in his hand, something like that. I didn't expect to confront Roger. His eyes were dull, his lips moving. I yelped, stepped back. No, he wasn't waiting for me. He was looking at something on the wall next to the doorway, something hung at roughly my height. Once I'd started breathing again, I tried to recall what occupied that space. I could have squeezed past Roger and seen for myself, but I didn't know if I could do so without waking him, which I was still nervous about doing. I didn't think it would drive him insane—any more so—but I wasn't feeling especially lucky. From where I was, I could see the maps draping the bookcases opposite me. Visualizing the place Roger was staring at, all I could bring to mind were more maps.
We must have held our respective positions for a half-hour, forty-five minutes, Roger totally absorbed in whatever was in front of him, me, now that the adrenaline rush had subsided, struggling to stay awake. All the while, he kept murmuring, a steady stream of sound that never grew loud enough for me to separate into sense. A couple of times I almost fell asleep. My lids grew heavy; my eyes closed; for half a second, I dozed; then my head tilted forw
ard and I jolted awake. I should have gone back to bed. Roger appeared in no immediate danger of harming himself—he'd proved he could handle the stairs—and there would be plenty of time during the day for me to discover what had so fascinated his sleepwalking self. But I was concerned—I was curious, and my curiosity wouldn't let me return to the comfort of bed just yet. Watching Roger in this state—it was like I'd been given a window into his psyche, or—what it really was, was as if his unconscious had stepped out to take a walk around. In the process, the house—the rooms in the house had gone from rooms to symbols—everything had acquired a new level of meaning.
Finally, when the sky outside was starting to lighten, Roger left his office and returned to bed. Within seconds of his head sinking into his pillow, he was breathing deeply. I saw him safely to bed, then dashed back up the stairs. Inside the office, I fumbled for the light switch. Blinking against the sudden glare, I approached the spot where Roger had been standing. The wall beside the door was papered in maps, in eight smaller maps—each one about the size of a piece of printer paper—taped together at the edges to form a larger map. The individual maps showed streets, buildings, even trees, and were full of Roger's handwriting, of notes made in the typical assortment of different-colored inks, and of other writing, what looked like mathematical symbols, pi over delta, that kind of thing. It was a map of the square in Kabul. There was the same red circle Roger had drawn on the table, taking up almost all of one of the smaller maps and ringed by more notes than were on any of the other maps. This was what Roger had been staring at; although, as I came closer, I saw something else—something shiny inside the red circle. I drew closer. It was a mirror, a small, rectangular mirror like you find in men's toiletries bags, for shaving. It had been glued to the center of the red circle, so that, in looking into the circle, you were looking at yourself. There was no writing next to the mirror, no writing at all inside the circle, only white space and then the fall into that silvery plane. Uneasy, I stared at it. I didn't know what this was, but it was more than the effort to comprehend the circumstances of Ted's death. What more, though, I couldn't say, and it didn't take much longer than five minutes in front of this . . . diagram for me to know that I could stay there for another hour and I wouldn't be any closer to understanding the significance of what I was seeing than I was now. If I wanted to know what this meant, I would have to ask Roger.
Which was what I did that morning, forcing myself to crawl out of bed after him a few hours later. I waited until we were seated at the kitchen table with our coffee and cereal, and before Roger could open the day's Times, I said, "You know, you were sleepwalking last night." I was too tired to lead up to it with small talk.
Roger said, "I beg your pardon?"
"Sleepwalking," I said, "about three this morning."
"No," Roger said, setting the paper down.
"Yes," I said. "You woke me up getting out of bed. First you went into Ted's old room, then you went upstairs to the office. Then you came down and went back to bed."
"You followed me."
"I wanted to make sure you didn't hurt yourself."
"Why didn't you wake me?"
"Because," I said, "I heard you're not supposed to do that."
"Isn't that a myth?"
"I didn't want to take a chance."
"What did I do?"
"You stared. In Ted's room, you stared at the wall. In the office, you spent about an hour looking at that map by the door—the one with the mirror on it."
Roger said, "Hmmph."
"Do you remember any of it?"
"Not a thing."
"I took a look at that map myself," I said, "after you were asleep. Honey, what is that?"
Roger took a mouthful of cereal. "That map," he said after he swallowed, "is my attempt to bring together and coordinate the information I have gathered on Ted's death—every last piece of it. I've tried to connect all related facts with one another."
"And the symbols—the math?"
"In addition to understanding the event historically—narratively, as it were—I've also tried to comprehend it mathematically, to know the various angles of fire, the velocities of the weapons employed, the energy released. It's another means of apprehending the situation."
"Okay," I said. "What's the mirror for?"
He must have known I'd ask about that, but he blushed anyway. "I don't know."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that setting that mirror on the map was an action I felt compelled to perform, but for reasons that remain unclear to me."
Now it was my turn to say, "Hmmph." I asked, "Where did you find it?"
"In a box of Ted's things," Roger said. "On his fourteenth birthday, I gave him a shaving kit. He'd been shaving with an electric razor for a few months by then, but I fancied I was upholding something of a Croydon family tradition. When I reached fourteen, my father presented me with a shaving mug and brush, which he told me his father had done for him on his fourteenth birthday. It was one of the few kindnesses the old man did me. In keeping with the tradition, I presented Ted with a kit that contained a mug, brush, soap cake, razor and pack of razor blades, and a travel mirror. He was less than enthusiastic about the gift. He perked up when I said I had one more thing for him, and followed me into the bathroom, but his face fell when I told him I was going to teach him to use the kit I'd given him.
"To put it mildly, that was a mistake. Ted refused to hold the razor properly, so in the process of scraping it across his neck and chin he opened dozens of cuts, some of them quite deep. There was blood everywhere, all over his shirt, the counter, the mug, the mirror. I ruined one of Joanne's good hand towels stanching the flow. When the worst was past, Ted stalked out of the bathroom, leaving me to wipe the spatter from the counter, the mug, the mirror. I placed the kit in his room, but he made a point of using the electric razor for the rest of his time in the house.
"I discovered my old gift when I went searching for the photographs of Ted. To be honest, I'm not sure how it came to be in my possession. I brought it to the house because," Roger's voice wavered, "because it had touched him, once. I kept the kit in one of the desk drawers in my office. Every now and again, I'd take it out, turn the mug over in my hands, run the brush over my palm, play sunlight off the mirror." He shrugged. "Almost the moment I started work on this particular map, I knew the mirror would go in its center. Having presented itself to me, the notion would not be denied. On the one hand, having something of Ted's included in what I was constructing seemed somehow appropriate. On the other, I was concerned that I was indulging in a kind of fetishism. My concerns aside, into the center it went.
"So much for the mirror," Roger said. "Well?"
"I don't know," I said. "If you hadn't been staring at it while you were asleep, I would have said it was no big deal."
He crossed his arms. "Since I was—"
"Since you were, I still don't know. You were in Ted's room first, and you spent a long time on the wall in there, too. Don't get me wrong. I think there's something to this. I think maybe spending so much time on Ted's death is taking its toll on you."
"It is necessary. If Ted is to exit the bardo—"
"I understand," I said. "I understand why you're doing it. All I'm saying is that doing it so much may be more than you can handle."
That was all there was to the conversation. Roger said he would have to consider the matter, and we finished breakfast in silence. Once he was done, it was upstairs for a shower, and the third floor after that.
So when I felt my period later that day, and realized I wasn't pregnant—up till then, I'd been in this kind of in-between state, not sure if I was or wasn't. I hadn't gone so far as to buy a home-test, because I didn't want to jinx anything and I thought it would be nice for Roger and me to go for it together, but I had found the baby name book I'd bought for my previous pregnancy and flipped through it. I'd thought about a nursery, too. There were plenty of rooms going unused in the house. The guest ro
om closest to ours, on the other side of the bathroom, seemed like it would make a good choice. We could paint it pale green, put down a new rug, get a rocking chair—one of those gliders. Pregnancy was still a series of largely disconnected images for me, like pictures in a magazine, and when I understood that that was all it was going to be—the home-test would remain unbought; the baby name book unread; the guest room undecorated—disappointment stabbed me. I climbed the stairs to the second-floor bathroom—I'd been reading in the front parlor—with tears hot in my eyes. By the time I was opening the bathroom closet, my cheeks were wet. In the midst of that sadness, however, that sharp regret at opportunity missed, there was relief—which at the time felt like such a betrayal, yet another act of treason, as if I were admitting that I hadn't really wanted this, that I wasn't totally committed to it. For a second, my sense of my own—unworthiness, I guess, forced a series of sobs out of me.
I knew, though, I knew that wasn't it. Had I been pregnant, I would have given it everything I had. But Roger—things with Roger were worrisome. The sleepwalking, of course; the mirror didn't thrill me, either; and both of those occurred against the background of the Mutual Weirdness, which we seemed no closer to understanding—and which seemed less mutual and increasingly focused on yours truly. They say that if you wait until life is perfect to have kids, you'll never do it. Fair enough, but a child deserved better than this.