by Jeffrey Ford
She pulled up in front of the building and her front right tire went up on the sidewalk. Parking the car like that, she turned it off, then opened the door, hinges crying out. Owen waved and she approached him, waddling along in a blueberry-colored skirt and jacket, white corsage pinned to the lapel. Her shoes were flats and her hat was a pillbox type he’d not seen worn since he was young and his parents would take him to church. Mrs. Hultz was radically bowlegged. Without saying hello to him, she walked up and took a seat on the bench.
“I see you’re goofing off on the job,” she said.
“Just too nice out today. What are you up to?”
“I came to see you.”
“To what do I owe the honor?”
“I’ve got a secret to share.”
“Well?”
“I was at the gas station, and the attendant was filling my tank—a young guy—big and burly with a long beard and a rat’s nest of long hair. Anyway, when he brings me back my credit card and the receipt to sign, the cuff of his shirt rides up a little and I see he has a small black tattoo of a circle with a cross in it on his wrist.”
“So, you’re thinking he’s part of the gang you told me about the other day?”
“What else?”
“And?
“We need to know what these people are up to.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re dangerous. The one who shot the poor Roan girl was obviously on drugs of some kind.”
“Did the police report that?” asked Owen.
“Not yet, but come on. It was the dumbest robbery ever. Zero planning. The guy was desperate for money to get high.”
“You should have your own TV show.”
“I’m not joking. As an upstanding member of the community, you need to help me.”
“Help you what?”
She stood up and started walking back to her car. Without turning she said, “I’ll be here at three to pick you up.”
“Why?”
“A stakeout.”
He tried to protest but she acted as if she couldn’t hear him. The door squealed open again, she got in, started the invalid vehicle that wheezed, and lurched away.
At three, good to her word, Mrs. Hultz was there at the curb, waiting for him, when he locked the front door of the building. Owen resigned himself to his fate. When he got in the passenger side, she handed him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“What’s this for?” he said.
“I thought you might be hungry after work.”
He really wanted to be on his way, cutting through the woods and across the old tracks, so he could get to the cemetery before dark, but at the same time he remembered what great friends Mrs. Hultz had been with his mother. He thought of all the times he played with her daughters, Ellie, Sue, and Lila, when they were young. She was there for his mom through her decline and final illness, even more so than Owen and his dad were. For that, he kept quiet and ate peanut butter and jelly.
“It’s going to be hard to be stealthy with this car,” he said to her.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “It runs like a charm.”
“Which do you think is in better shape? You or the Caddy?”
“What kind of question is that, Owen? Are you being disrespectful?” she asked, and laughed.
In three minutes, they were in the center of Westwend, a block of storefronts on either side of Cobb Street—a traffic light, a bar, two churches. She pulled into the grocery store parking lot, which was across from the gas station they were supposedly staking out. She kept the car running but put it in Park.
“Do you see the guy?” he asked. There were a couple of young men pumping gas for customers.
She shook her head. “It’s not one of them. I wonder if he’s already gone for the day. That would be a shame.”
“I can wait for a little while,” he said, “but I have to get back before it gets too late. I have an appointment at four.”
“Girlfriend?” she asked. “Who is it?”
“No, not a girlfriend.”
“A boyfriend?” she asked.
“No, I’m currently not engaged in a relationship of any kind.”
“Why not?”
“Too much bother.”
“You might as well join a monastery,” she said.
“There’s more to life than relationships.”
“No, there isn’t. You’ve got to get out there and meet someone.”
He was about to tell her off when she grabbed his arm and said, “Look, the guy coming out the bay door of the garage. That’s him.”
He saw a large man, 6′2″ at least, as she’d described earlier, with long tangled hair and a bushy beard. They watched as he made his way along the sidewalk and then turned off Cobb onto Margrave Street. Mrs. Hultz put the car in Reverse and backed out of the parking spot. When she shifted into Drive, the car made a sound like the transmission had fallen out. They were off at a blistering ten miles an hour.
“He’ll be in the next state by the time you catch up to him,” said Owen.
When they made the turn onto Margrave, the tires squealed.
“Do you see him?” she asked, and slowed to prowl along the suburban street.
As she spoke, the car passed by a house with more land than the usual half an acre, set back among pine trees. The path to the front door was visible from the car. The gas station attendant stood on the porch and stared out at them as they crept by. Owen saw him at the last second and tried to cover his face with his hand.
“He’s seen us. Hit the gas,” he said.
She jammed her foot on the gas and the car released a blast and a cloud of black smoke before crawling away.
“Are you worried about him having noticed your car?” asked Owen.
Mrs. Hultz shrugged. “I’ve got the old gat at home.”
“The old gat?”
“My husband’s gun.”
“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Do you know how to use it?”
“How hard could it be?”
“You’re a dangerous woman,” he said, and then asked if she’d drop him off at the cemetery on the way home.
“Socializing?” she asked.
7
MRS. HULTZ DROPPED HIM off at the entrance to the park. He walked past the baseball diamond and along the gravel path leading to the cemetery. Taking a hard look at the scenery, he compared it to how it had looked late at night. When he reached the acreage of burials, he traveled aimlessly up and down the rows with the sun slowly falling. His mind wandered, thinking about Mrs. Hultz with a gun. After a little more than an hour had passed—out of the corner of his eye—as he lurched along an aisle of headstones, he saw the name HELEN ROAN.
The setting looked different by the light of the waking world. The grave was no longer empty and already there was grass sprouting on the packed mound of the burial. There was a tree behind the headstone when he’d visited it by night, but there was no sign of ribbons or deflated balloons hanging from its branches. Upon seeing this, he had no choice but to conclude that his so-called OBEs were merely a recurring dream. “Who would have a ceremony for a dead daughter at an open grave in front of a tree with pink ribbons and balloons?” Owen said aloud, admonishing his own foolishness. With that thought, his perception of being a sleeper went from freedom to suffocation. A sinking deeper into oblivion.
As he walked down the last row of graves on the way to the gravel path, he saw, pressed by the wind against the chain link fence separating the cemetery from the park, a finger’s length of frayed pink ribbon. He strode off course to where it was trapped and took it. Rubbing it between his fingers, he sought to verify its reality. In his imagination he saw the cemetery workers filling in the grave and cutting down the decorations. He wondered if there could have been enough time for all that since the memorial for Helen. It had been windy lately, and a shred might have easily blown free. He was so pleased to have found it. The little piece of material evidence confirmed his faith in M
elody and what she’d been telling him.
Across the picnic table that night, he told her about the death of Helen Roan, the hit in the head that made him a sleeper, and his test, comparing the girl’s night grave and beribboned tree to the same scene in daylight. The two of them glowed pale blue against the dark, talking in low voices, not because they had to but because that’s the way they would have spoken on a spring night in the waking world. Then he showed Melody the piece of pink ribbon he’d found against the fence and spoke about how it immediately mended his perception of her and of being a sleeper.
“Owen, you have to understand,” she said. “At night, when we rise up from our sleeping bodies and walk the neighborhood, the world isn’t exactly like waking life. There are things that can influence the night world. You already know it has its own predators, the cutters and the miasma. Sometimes, something from your dreams can slip into the night world. 99.9 percent of what you’re seeing and experiencing is the same as the waking world, but there is a small percentage of times where you’ll run into something inexplicable. Something concocted by your ego or id or whatever those processes are that take place in the shadiest corners of your imagination. Nothing to worry about until it happens,” said Melody.
“The very fact it’s possible, though,” said Owen, “makes it difficult to believe any aspect of the night world.”
“Everything is mutable, not exactly what it’s made out to be, and neither completely one way or the other. There’s always room for change and speculation, even in the waking world. It’s part of the human condition. The same goes for the night.”
He nodded and paused before asking, “What are we going to do tonight?”
“Let’s visit some of your fellow citizens.”
“You mean go into people’s houses? Isn’t that wrong?”
“You were in your neighbor’s house the other night. I didn’t see you hesitate.” Melody pointed two houses up the street.
“I was chasing you,” he said.
“Did you learn anything?”
“I suppose, but spying on people isn’t my thing.”
“Don’t think of it as spying. It’s a unique opportunity to see the intimate aspects of others’ lives.”
“Shouldn’t they be private?”
“For the most part, yes. As a sleeper, you have a special responsibility to see how people live, and to know their joy and suffering. There’s nothing prurient about it. As a sleeper, you are called on to bear witness to the night.”
“Then why would the police arrest someone for peeping in another’s window?”
“That’s in the waking world. You have other responsibilities there.”
“Are you serious, Melody?” he asked. “That we’re expected to bear witness? But are we supposed to do something about whatever suffering or evil or joy we encounter?”
“Sometimes, if we can. It’s up to you.”
“Vague.”
“Come then,” she said, and stood. She led him, again, over the hedge, through the adjoining backyard, and to the street. “Choose a house at random,” she told him.
“Do people have to be awake? Does there need to be a lit window?”
She shook her head. “Any house is fine. Discoveries abound.”
Ten minutes later, they stood in a darkened room, leaning over a crib, watching a baby sleep. Owen made as if to push the mobile above the child, a herd of zebras, into motion, but his hand passed through it.
“So sweet,” said Melody.
They moved down the hall and found the parents’ room. A young couple slept in one another’s arms. The spring breeze blew in through the screen of the open window. A black dog in the corner of the room awoke and tracked the movements of the intruders. “Can it see us?” he asked.
“Maybe. Some can but not many.” That said, the dog started barking—loud, low—and fierce.
“Someone’s here,” said the woman in the bed.
Her partner stirred and said, “What was that?”
Melody walked through the wall to the outside and Owen quickly followed. They stepped off from the second story and floated like feathers to the ground.
“What did you make of that one?” she asked.
“Peaceful until we showed up,” he said.
A little while later, they spent some time in the attic apartment of a young woman writing a book. She had sheets of butcher paper taped on the walls of the cramped room. Using a Flair pen, she wrote her lines around herself and became like a fly in a spider’s web.
“Her name is Shiela Tobac,” said Melody, as the woman sat at a small desk only two feet away from them, bobbing her head as she wrote longhand in a journal dedicated to notes about her massive story. She wore a green T-shirt and a green cardigan sweater, shorts, sneakers with thick yellow soles, and white basketball socks. Her movements around the room bordered on the athletic. Even when she stood reading from some section of the wall, she bounced on her toes, her long red hair swaying wildly.
“She looks like a hard worker,” said Owen. “I mean she’s up and she’s down and traveling from one part of the room and its chapter to another corner to, I guess, check the continuity?”
“She’s crossed the line between genius and insanity,” said Melody.
“Heading in which direction?”
“Well, I come here now and then and try to find my way back into her story.”
“What’s it about?” he asked as the busy Shiela Tobac passed through them on the way to a distant chapter.
“Too much to get into,” she said. “I wouldn’t know how to start telling you about it.”
“I think she’s amazing, living inside her creation,” said Owen. By then, they were out on the rooftop. They stood at the edge and Owen waited for Melody to choose a way to go. Eventually, she leaped across the side yard and driveway below and landed on the roof next door. From there, she leaped again, high and at the peak of ascent almost weightless, jump after jump, all the way down the street. Ten houses in a row. He followed her, with a few stumbles. The last of those mishaps saw him trip and fall headfirst through the roof, through the second floor, to the living room of an abandoned house.
He landed in the middle of a candlelit scene. One man was sitting in a chair in a corner that the light could almost but not quite reach, his face and much of his body obscured. Two young men, just visible in the glow, were sitting in chairs facing the first man in the shadows. They gave him a satchel of money and he produced a plastic bag of large, live cicadas. The two traders immediately dug into their plastic bags, pulled out squirming specimens, and shoved them into their mouths. As they chewed, laughter spilled out of the darkness, and Owen leaped all the way to the roof.
When he caught up with Melody, she was sitting on a dormer a few houses down across the street, facing out into the pine barrens. No moon that night but a wealth of stars again. “Where did you go?” she said. “I thought you’d been called back.” He told her about falling through the roof, and about the weird transaction of money for insects.
“I’ve seen it a few times lately,” she said. “Some kind of new drug. Big with the wealthy. Massospora, it’s called—a parasite that infects the rear ends of cicadas. It actually eats away their hind part and forms a shell around that area and produces a fungus. When ingested by humans, the fungus has the effects of psilocybin—like magic mushrooms. There’s a component of the chemical makeup that’s also an amphetamine.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I spend all night looking over people’s shoulders and reading what they read on the computer or in a book, I overhear conversations in dark corners, and I’ve seen quite a few of those drug sales going down in the last year or so.”
“There’s something wrong with it,” said Owen.
“You think?” she said, and then they sat in silence for a while and took in the beautiful night. He asked her, “What’s your life like during the day?”
“Oh, I work at a job. I have kids. I
’m married. This year will be our fifteenth year.”
“What’s your husband’s name?”
“Marcus.”
“Does he know you’re a sleeper?”
“Why should he? This is my private thing. Like Shiela Tobac’s web of words.”
“Have you moved through genius to insanity?” he asked.
“Only at the holidays when the in-laws show up.”
They visited a veteran who couldn’t sleep. A photo of him and his unit somewhere in the Middle East hung on the wall across the room from where he sat at a table. He smoked cigarettes one after the other, and had three packs stacked up on the table next to a neat pile of issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The copy in his hands was from 1999. The pages turned rhythmically and he silently moved his lips with each word. It wasn’t so much as if he was taking in the story but more that the act of reading was a ritual that sustained him or took his mind off something.
From there, they went next door to where two old men had fallen asleep in front of the television—one in the recliner and one on the couch. Both sawed wood through late-night talk shows while the glow of the TV blended with the glow of Melody and Owen. On the hutch in the next room, barely visible in the dark, were photos that appeared to be from the old couple’s wedding. The two burly men, much younger, wrapped in each other’s arms, kissing, on the steps of a church, while friends and family threw rice. Their apartment was neat as a pin and there were shelves everywhere with classical music CDs and stereo records. In the corner of a room down the hall were an upright bass, an electric piano, and an array of five different saxophones, each on its own separate stand.
The night went on forever, visit after visit. He was beginning to understand what Melody had earlier alluded to. He still felt creepy about spying, but seeing what people were like when they were all alone with themselves was instructive. Owen confessed this to Melody as they drifted through the walls of an apartment building next to the grammar school. Again, the television was on and lit the scene of a young woman, sitting on the couch, feeding a baby with a bottle. She wore her hair in box braids and had on an orange tank top and gray sweatpants. Moving slightly forward and back as if in a rocking chair, she occasionally made noises to the child. The woman’s eyes were closed and she was somewhere between the world and sleep.