SLEEPEASY
By T.M. Wright
First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital
Copyright 2011 by T.M. Wright
Copy-edited by Kurt Criscione
Cover designed by David Dodd – Face image courtesy of Mike Oliveri
Background image courtesy of: http://luna-8-stock.deviantart.com/
LICENSE NOTES:
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OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY T.M. WRIGHT:
NOVELS:
STRANGE SEED
BOUNDARIES
THE CHANGING
THE DEVOURING
GOODLOW'S GHOSTS
THE ASCENDING
THE WAITING ROOM
NON FICTION:
THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO U.F.O.s
UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:
A MANHATTAN GHOST STORY – NARRATED BY DICK HILL
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Chapter One
These were the last words that Harry Briggs uttered in this life: "Hey, you! What in the hell do you think you're doing?"
He was calling to a craggy-faced, red-haired man standing not far off, in a field of new snow. The man didn't answer him.
The last living thing that Harry Briggs saw was his wife, naked and beautiful, rising into the air as she prepared to dive.
Harry had thought more than once of shucking his career as a professor of philosophy and doing something completely different. What did philosophy have to offer anyway? Only lots of unanswerable questions. What did anyone need with unanswerable questions? They only made life more difficult. Who the hell cared about Camus and Kierkegaard and Sartre anymore, except his students, who had to care about them if they wanted a passing grade. The answer to the question of humanity's existence on the earth was simple—people were put here to enjoy themselves. To smell the heady aromas of salt air and pine forests, to make love when and where the urge struck and to eat themselves into oblivion. Living equaled hedonism. Philosophically, Harry knew it was so. But putting that philosophy completely into practice was impossible for him.
The last film that Harry saw in this life was The Maltese Falcon. It was one of his favorites; along with The Big Sleep, Trouble in Mind and Chinatown. He liked detective films because he thought their heroes were ballsy, no-shit kinds of guys, and that was the kind of guy he had always wanted to be. A 1940s kind of guy. The kind of guy who used words like "buddy," "Java" and "gams," and who called attractive women "hot numbers" or "classy dames." The kind of guy who, beneath this gruff, absurd and anachronistic exterior, was single-mindedly on the side of good. Harry wanted to be single-minded.
His last meal in this life was potatoes au gratin and ham.
His last conversation was with his wife, Barbara, shortly before she went for one of her nude swims. Their conversation was, ironically, about death and dying, about being dead and what came afterward. Barbara maintained that it would be peachy if, afterward, after death, everyone had a chance to create their own private universe, complete with their own kinds of people and their own kinds of houses, and smells and sensations, et cetera. A place where wishes were made real. A place, and people, aseasily molded aswet clay. Harry conceded that this would be wonderful, but he doubted that anything happened after death.
"It's just not in the cards," he said.
"And how would you know?" Barbara said.
Harry shrugged. "I guess I wouldn't," he conceded, because he was always on the lookout for a fight brewing and always wary of participating in one.
Barbara pursed her lips. She was an exquisitely beautiful woman, he thought. She was even beautiful when she was pursing her lips.
"C'mon, Harry, don't be such a wimp," she said. "Give me an argument, for Christ's sake."
There were a couple of reasons that Harry didn't want to give Barbara an argument. Most importantly, she was right: how would he know, indeed, what happened after death (and, for that matter, how would she know?)? Secondly, if he got into a long, philosophical discussion with her, she would delay her nude swim, and that would be a pity, because the longer she delayed it, the more likely she would be to simply not do it. The hour was late, after all. And it was Christmas Eve, so, even though the pool was heated, the air wasn't.
Harry shook his head. "No, you're right, darling. I really wouldn't know anything about what happens after death. No one would."
"Including me?"
He shrugged again. "Well, sure."
"You just want me to get naked, don't you, Harry?"
He grinned, then fought the grin back because it was not, after all, the way a ballsy, no-shit guy reacted to such a question. "We'll both get naked," he said, stone-faced.
"Oh? And what are you going to do once you're naked?"
He said nothing for a moment, then answered, "Swim, I guess."
"Swim?" She smiled. "Harry, the act of swimming requires that you actually get into the water."
"Sure, I know that. Of course."
She sighed. "Keep your clothes on, Harry. Just watch me. I don't want you stepping out of character."
Harry's last dessert in this life was muskmelon and strawberries with whipped cream. It was one of his favorites.
The last book he read was Jurassic Park, which he thought was entertaining but preposterous.
And his last coherent thought in this life was, Barbara? Is this a joke?
Afterward
Chapter Two
Harry had been driving for a long time on a road that seemed to snake endlessly through fields of tall grass and nodding sunflowers. He wasn't sure how long he'd been driving. It felt like centuries. He'd stopped for coffee and for meals—at friendly little restaurants that rose up magically from the fields of tall grass and sunflowers—and he'd stopped to stretch his legs, but he hadn't stopped to sleep and he thought that he should be getting tired by now. He supposed that it was mid-afternoon when he decided this, and that he was sweating because the road that cut through the nodding sunflowers and tall grass was supernaturally hot.
He didn't notice until the deed was done that a fat, black spider had crawled up from somewhere inside the car's front seat and bitten him on his bare forearm. He saw the spider—it was staring at him with tiny red eyes—and he saw the slight discolored area on his arm, so he hit the brake pedal and pulled over to the shoulder of the road.
"Jesus," he whispered, not because the bite hurt, but because it was so unsettling to be bitten and not have noticed right away. It was unsettling also to have huge black spiders living inside his car's front seat. There might be dozens of spiders in there. Aunt and uncle spiders, mother and father spiders, baby spiders waiting to grow up. A whole community of fat spiders with tiny red eyes.
He stared at the spider that was staring at him from his bare forearm—gripping the steering wheel—and he realized that he didn't know what to do. He thought that the spider had to be killed, of course. If he didn't kill it, it would bite him again, and who knew what kind of spider it was and what the effects of its bite might be? But if he slapped it with his other hand, it might bite him again, then and there. And if he tried to shake i
t off, it might bite him too, because it was clinging to him with legs that looked as big as pencils.
Perhaps the spider was cold inside the car's front seat, although that seemed unlikely on such a hot day. Or perhaps it merely wanted light and air. Blood and companionship. So it had staked a claim to his forearm, and if he, Harry, tried to uproot it, it would probably bite him again.
"You can't stay there," Harry said, and the creature moved its huge front legs a little, asif in response.
At last, it lumbered off, down his forearm and into the seat again. Harry thought it was amazing that a spider so big could slip through the crack between the seat bottom and the seat back.
When he looked up again, he saw that the shadows had lengthened and that dusk, like a shower of fire, was upon him.
Harry showed a photograph to a woman behind the counter at a natural foods store called Sustenance for the Spirit and asked if she had ever seen the person in the photograph. The woman answered that she hadn't, then added, "But there are so many people coming and going these days. It's like a parade," which confused Harry, who hadn't seen another soul on the road all day. He nodded, frowned, said, "Thanks, anyway," and bought some of the woman's natural foods, because he felt duty-bound to now that he had taken up her time.
When he was putting the groceries in his car, he noticed that the spot where the spider had bitten him had swollen alarmingly to the size of a Ping-Pong ball. He decided that this was okay, however, because the arm didn't hurt, or itch, and he was feeling all right otherwise.
He stopped at a gas station and showed the man tending the pumps the same photograph. The man looked at it for a moment and said, "She's one classy dame, ain't she?" Harry agreed, but then the man went on to say that he had never seen her before and that even if he had, he probably wouldn't remember her, considering how "crowded the roads have been." Harry frowned, said thanks, put $5 worth of gasoline into his monster Buick—though he didn't need the gasoline—and drove off.
It was well past dark when Harry remembered that he was probably tired. He began looking for motels. Within a half hour, he passed several that had NO VACANCY signs out—one sign read NO VACANCY, NO NOTHIN', KEEP MOVING! in big, blue neon letters, which Harry thought very strange indeed. He passed one that had a vacancy, but its parking lot was too brightly lit and he thought he would never get to sleep with so much light coming in through the curtains. Then he pulled into a motel called Habuda's Heavenly Hideaway, which had a dark parking lot and only a green neon OPEN sign at its office door.
He showed the man behind the counter the same photograph as before and asked, "You seen her, buddy? I'm looking for her," and noted that this was the first time he had ever called another man "buddy." He liked it. It was straightforward, it was no-shit.
The man—short, dark-haired and chunky—studied the photograph for a few seconds, handed it back, and shook his head. "Sorry, no," he said. "I have not seen her. Is she missing?"
Harry nodded and put the photograph back into his shirt pocket. "Sure, yeah," he said gruffly, "missing." He paused, then added, with a little catch in his voice, "I know that I miss her," which elicited a curious look from the chunky man, who then asked Harry to fill out the motel's registration form.
As Harry did this, he noticed that his arm was still swollen where the spider had bitten him, and that it was beginning to turn several gaudy shades of purple too.
"That looks like a nasty bite," said the man behind the counter.
"I think it probably looks worse than it really is," Harry replied. He finished filling out the form, got his keys and said gruffly, "Ain't nothin'. No pain," before going to his room.
As he lay on his bed in his clothes in the darkened motel room—only a sliver of green light shone beneath the bottom of the curtain on the picture window—Harry thought about his wife and wondered if, at that moment, she was thinking of him. How could it be otherwise? he decided. They had shared so much. They shared so much even now. His life was her life and her life was his life. They were each other. How many relationships grew to be that wonderfully close? Only a lucky few.
"Do you ever do this, Barbara? Do you ever stop and think that someday, far in the future, the person you're living with, the person you're sharing space with on the earth, is going to be gone . . ."
"You mean dead?"
"Dead. Sure. Gone. And when you stop and think about it, you think that it simply won't happen. This person who shares your life can't possibly stop sharing it with you. And you can't possibly stop sharing your life with her."
"You mean me?"
"Of course you. Who else?"
"I appreciate your devotion, Harry."
"'Appreciate' it?"
"Yes. It's very sweet. I appreciate it."
He remembered eating with her. They ate the same things, almost completely shared the same tastes. Asparagus, potatoes au gratin, Fettucini Alfredo, strawberries and cream, burritos, enchiladas and Swedish meatballs.
It is so good, Harry decided, to eat tasty food with someone who finds the same food tasty.
Their favorite restaurant had been a place called Wanda's, and Harry didn't know if it still existed. It could have been torn down, burned, closed, sold. Things in life changed so quickly. What was there to count on or cling to? Only memories. Only the past.
The present, so fleeting and so mercurial, twisted this way and that because of the past, and danced to the tune that the past sang.
He got out of bed to pee. He stood over the toilet in the brightly lit bathroom for a long time, but, though the urge was strong, nothing happened. Harry found this very frustrating.
He stared at the swelling on his arm and decided that it was nothing to worry about. It looked awful, but then so did a bruise. So did a black eye. And bruises and black eyes were nothing to worry about.
He went back to bed. The urge to pee had left him completely.
When he thought about his wife, he found that he couldn't remember the color of her hair. He could remember her smell, her laugh, the size and shape of her nipples, the color of her eyes, the way she ate—with gusto—the way she made love, the way she pouted, the way she chided him for small misdeeds. But he couldn't remember the color of her hair, and that wasn't good. Certainly he should be able to remember the color of his wife's hair. They had shared so many years, so much tasty food. If he couldn't remember the color of her hair, then there was something wrong with him.
He fingered the photograph in his shirt pocket. But what could it tell him? he wondered. It was a black and white photograph. And how would he be able to see it in the dark anyway?
He decided that remembering his wife's hair color wasn't important. Remembering her voice, her words, the ache she created in him—these were more important things.
"Are you happy?"
"'Happy'? That's a sloshy sort of word."
"I mean with me. Are you happy with me?"
"Even that particular sentiment is sloshy. We have our own lives to live, after all, so the idea of being happy 'with' someone is not very instructive, is it?"
"You're playing games again."
"Am I?"
He got out of bed and went to the motel office. No one was there. Only one dim light was on and, in combination with the green neon OPEN sign on the outside of the glass door, it lit the small room badly.
He found a bell on the front desk and rang it. It was as loud asa church bell.
The motel's proprietor appeared from a back room. He had apparently been eating, because he was wiping his mouth with a napkin. He politely asked what Harry wanted and Harry asked, "Is there a restaurant nearby?"
"We have a little restaurant here," the proprietor answered, "but it's not open now. Not enough people are staying to open it."
"What are you talking about, buddy?" Harry said, and grinned quickly. "I was told that there were all kinds of people passing by."
The proprietor smiled. "We are off the beaten path, I'm afraid."
"Sure," Ha
rry said. "I was just looking for a cup of java." He went back to his room, took off his clothes and got under the blankets.
His search was futile. No one anywhere knew what he really wanted.
He closed his eyes and thought about his wife: about the size and shape of her nipples, about her voice and her smell, about tasty food....
Spaces in the Emptiness
Chapter Three
As he struggled through the dark water, toward the pinpoint of yellow light so terribly far above him, Sam Goodlow, former private investigator, thought that he must be sinking. Inhaling brine and becoming light-headed and giddy. Thinking odd thoughts about naked women he wished he had known.
God, God, the water was closing in. He wanted to scream, but who could scream at a time like this?
And who was he anyway? How had he gotten into this precarious position? When would his lungs explode? And when they did, would the end come quickly and silently? Instant oblivion? A moment's unease, then nothing? Who could hope for more? Or less?
He wondered why it was taking so long. The tiny point of yellow light above was growing smaller as he struggled up through the dark water, which meant, surely, that he was sinking, that his lungs were filling up and his belly was bloating with brine, that the flesh eaters of the sea were gathering around, waiting for the explosive moment—the sprinkling of fleshy Goodlow bits through the dark lake, their watery evening's heady repast.
The water was so cold. Death was so cold. Panic and dying were such cold and anxious things. Perhaps he should have worn a sweater.
Chapter Four
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