Sleepeasy

by Wright, T. M.

  "Ice water."

  "Nope. It feels like air."

  Harry reached tentatively into the water, then looked at his fingers. "You're right. There's nothing to it."

  "Or nothing to us."

  "You're going around in circles. First, there's nothing to the water and now there's nothing to us. It can't be both ways."

  Sam thought about this, then nodded. "You're right. It's got to be one way or the other."

  "And we know that there's something to us, because we're discussing it."

  "It?"

  "Yes. We're discussing whether there's something to us or not. If there was nothing to us, then we wouldn't be discussing it."

  Sam thought about this, then said, "That sounds like a lot of bullshit."

  Harry frowned. "It does, doesn't it."

  Sydney's accent was imperfect. A rat-puppy invention, it was a rattling combination of Middle Eastern, English and Bostonian that clattered and rolled off his tongue like marbles on sandpaper. But it was so imperfect that it fooled almost everyone into believing that it was a real accent they'd simply never heard before.

  Like the man at the shoe-shine stand at Grand Central Station, who gave the toes of Sydney's black shoes—peeking out from beneath his spats—a blazing shine. "Where you from?" the shoe-shine man asked. "That accent's a new one on me."

  "Casablanca," Sydney answered, with some uncertainty. Up to that point, he had had no reason to think about where he was from.

  "Is that in New York State?" asked the shoe-shine man.

  "I don't believe so," Sydney answered, for, in truth, he wasn't sure where Casablanca was, because Harry wasn't sure where it was. "I believe that it's somewhere in Africa," he went on.

  "Yeah," said the shoe-shine man, and when Sydney got up, he added, "Merry Christmas."

  And there was the man at a Hot Sam kiosk not far from Grand Central who said, "Canadian, huh?" as he handed Sydney a fresh, steaming pretzel. Sydney looked quizzically at the pretzel for a moment, then bit into it. His villainous, chubby face brightened and he chewed hungrily.

  "Alberta?" the man pressed on.

  "I'm from Casablanca," Sydney told him.

  "You mean like in the movie?"

  "Exactly," Sydney said, and took another hungry bite of the pretzel.

  "You know you look just like Sydney Greenstreet," the man said.

  "That's very possibly because I am Sydney Greenstreet," Sydney proclaimed as he chewed.

  The man grinned and nodded. "You want another one of those?"

  "Oh, yes. Two more. No, three!"

  Again, Sam and Harry were sitting in their little boat on a dead calm, blue-green ocean, under an empty blue-green sky. The oars rested on the gunwales. Harry sat with his elbows on his thighs, his hands clasped in front of his knees and his head down a little. He had tried to adjust the black fedora so it rested farther back on his head, but it was stuck in place.

  Sam was leaning backward, with his elbows on either side of the bow. His fingers were laced over his stomach. He said, "I'd give anything just to have a seagull fly over. A real seagull."

  Harry nodded glumly. "We were so stupid to be-lieve we could go back. What were we thinking?"

  "Hell," Sam said, "I wouldn't even mind if the damned thing shit on me."

  "We're ghosts, Sam! Spooks! The undead! What right do we have to insinuate ourselves on the living? I mean, remember all those ghost stories we heard on the other side, Sam? Invariably, the ghost was in one way or another not all there. Either he was physical but invisible, or visible but fuzzy, or translucent, or transparent, or physical and visible but voiceless and temporary. That should have told us something. I know what it tells me now. It tells me that you and I are trying to go someplace we can't go. It tells me that we're trying to be something we can't be. Like slugs trying to attend the opera." He looked at Sam. "Am I making any sense?"

  "Sense?" Sam asked, because he hadn't been listening.

  Harry lowered his head again. "Of course not. What sense can the dead make?"

  "How did he get over?" Sam asked.

  "He? You mean Sydney?"

  Sam nodded. "Yeah. How did he do that?"

  It was a very good question, Harry thought. Up to that point, they had supposed that they were simply going to follow Sydney over, as if he had blazed the trail and they were going to take it. Obviously, that wasn't happening. But Harry didn't have an answer. "I don't know," he said. "Do you?"

  Sam shook his head. "I haven't a clue."

  "Uh-huh. Well, you're supposed to be the real private investigator here."

  "I investigated cheating husbands, and missing wives and people who were trying to cook their company's books, Harry. Your Sydney Greenstreet doesn't fall into any of those categories." Sam was upset.

  "Sorry," Harry said. "I just thought you might know how we should approach the problem."

  "No, I don't."

  "I thought you might know what questions to ask. Isn't that where any real investigation begins? By asking the right questions?"

  Sam nodded. "And it ends by coming up with the right answers. We can ask all the questions we want, Harry. Hell, we've already started. But if we don't have a prayer of coming up with the right answer, it doesn't matter. The simple fact of asking a lot of brilliant questions isn't necessarily going to provide us with brilliant answers."

  "I see what you mean."

  "Though, of course, we might ask ourselves what's different about Sydney." He cocked his head and grimaced. "But that's stupid. If he has or does something that we don't have or do, then it's like asking why birds fly. They fly because they have hollow bones and feathers. We can't fly because we have solid bones and no feathers, and we also have no hope of changing that fact."

  "Sydney has time," Harry said.

  "Time?"

  Harry nodded. "He has time. Like ... clocks ticking. You said it yourself, Sam."

  "Don't we have time too?"

  "I don't think so. We have eternity. But I don't think we have time."

  Sam smiled. "You're flinging bullshit again."

  Harry shook his head. "No. I think I'm on to something. Think about it, Sam. Look around you and think about it. What is this place we're in? What words describe it? Featureless. Changeless. Timeless."

  "Harry, your Sydney Greenstreet isn't human. He doesn't have time. He doesn't have anything."

  "Sure he's human. I made him human. My subconscious gave him all the important ... facets of a particular human being. Tall. Overweight. Balding. A grim and ironic sense of humor. Fifty years old." He leaned forward and looked Sam in the eye to emphasize what he was going to say next. "And in a year, Sam, he'll be fifty-one. Last year, he was forty-nine. This is the way he sees himself because it's the way I created him. Myself—I'm forty-eight. Last year, I was forty-seven. Next year, I'll still be forty-eight. And the year after that, and the year after that too. Hell, in ten thousand years, I'll still be forty-eight, because I'm stuck in eternity. Just like you are. But not Sydney. I gave him an age. I gave him time. That other world, the world of the living, is in the midst of time. That's why people go to college, and get married, and write books. Because they have only so much time. But not us. Not you and me. We have forever. So we don't have time in the same way that the living have time. Do you understand?"

  "I don't know. I still say it sounds like bullshit." He looked very confused.

  Harry sighed. How could he explain what he was talking about? He pointed at the calm ocean. "Think about it this way, Sam. Say you find yourself, all at once, in the middle of the ocean. I mean, surrounded by water. Say you're drowning and you're in the middle of the water. You need desperately to breathe. And you know one of two things. You know either that you are surrounded by water and that it stretches to infinity above you and below you. Or you know that you are only a couple of dozen feet from the surface. If you know the former, then you do nothing. You resign yourself to drowning. What can you do? There is no place to go. But if y
ou know the latter, that the surface is only a couple of dozen feet above you, you try like hell to reach it." He smiled, pleased with his analogy. "We know, deep down inside us, that we don't have time because we are surrounded by eternity. Try measuring eternity. Try breaking it up into little bits—eons, centuries, years, days, hours, minutes, seconds. You can't, because eternity itself is unmeasurable. So, time, as the living usually think of it, has no meaning for us and consequently our attempts to do something inside of time—like cross to the other side and find Sydney—are useless."

  "I think," Sam began, still stuck on what Harry had said about the drowning man, "that either way you try like hell to reach the surface. No matter how far up it is. It's called the will to survive." He smiled too, certain that he'd blown Harry's argument away.

  Harry shook his head. "That's the point, Sam. How can we survive anything? We're already dead."

  "But you said we weren't. You said that here we're alive."

  "And where is here? It's an endless loop. It's the stuck computer program. Don't you see? Our… real selves know that we're stuck in eternity. Our real selves know that we're immortal. So we simply cannot do what mortals do."

  "Unless we can convince our inner selves that we're not immortal."

  "It sounds good to me."

  "Me too."

  "So how in the hell do we do that?"

  Prisoners of Time

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Kennedy Whelan, driving his Ford Crown Victoria to work at Manhattan's 10th Precinct, crossed the George Washington Bridge just as a Coast Guard cruiser was beginning to pass beneath him, on the Harlem River. It was responding to a report that a small rowboat was apparently adrift, and empty, several miles out in the Atlantic. Whelan took no notice of the cruiser. He was intent on other things—on the eight-by-ten color photo of the young man whose throat had been cut. On the coffee and Danish waiting for him at the little bakery next door to the precinct house. On the possibility that he might get back to the apartment after his shift ended in time to watch the Rangers play the Sabers.

  He glanced at his watch. Christ. He'd been up for nearly three days, but he'd slept for less than six hours, because his damned internal alarm clock had awakened him at 5:30 in the morning, just as it had every morning for the past twenty years. And, once he was awake, it was impossible for him to get back to sleep.

  He turned on the radio. Morning drive-time drivel. People talking about getting laid in strange places—in closets, in the trunks of cars, on an ironing board. He changed channels, got an oldies station, listened for a minute to "Peggy Sue," changed channels again, got a sports report and turned the dial back to the drivel.

  On Houston Street, in Greenwich Village, a man in his early twenties was robbing a store owner who was in his late sixties. The young man, whose name was Patrick, had a sawn-off shotgun pointed at the store owner's forehead and he was giving him an ultimatum: "You open that safe in ten seconds or I'm going to blow your brains all the way into the middle of next week." And he started counting. Slowly. "One . . . two . . . three—"

  The store owner, whose name was George, thought a couple of things as he stared into the wide barrel of the shotgun and listened to the young man count. He thought that "blow your brains all the way into the middle of next week" was an interesting turn of phrase for a hoodlum to conjure up. He thought, also, that the young man was probably going to kill him, regardless of whether he opened the safe or not. And he thought that if that happened, it wouldn't be so tragic, because his life had been basically satisfying and having his brains blown out was probably one of the quickest and most painless ways to die. He thought too that he should be more frightened. It was true that his knees were quivering and his stomach was fluttering, but the idea of dying didn't bother him as much as he supposed it should. He wasn't sure why. He guessed it was because it was all so inevitable. If this young hoodlum didn't kill him now, then he would die soon enough in some other way. In a couple of months, another young hoodlum might come along. Or, in five years, he'd develop some terminal illness, as several of his friends had. Or, in fifteen, or twenty, or twenty-five years, he'd go to sleep and simply not wake up. Did it really matter when it happened?

  These were certainly heady thoughts for a man whose life was hanging on a crazy person's count to ten, George knew, and this knowledge gave him a little blush of pride. And so he smiled, despite the shotgun staring him in the face.

  Then, because Patrick had grown tired of waiting for George to open the safe, and because he had long since finished counting to ten, and because he was sick to death of people not giving him any respect—which was why, he was convinced, George was smiling—he blew George's brains out. Then he stared for a long moment in deep fascination and disbelief at what he'd done, threw the shotgun to the floor and bolted out of the store in a panic.

  A UPS truck, driven incautiously by a man named Arthur, slid on a patch of ice and ran him down a couple of minutes later. Patrick died almost immediately.

  And ashe stood and stared in awe at Patrick's broken body, Arthur thought that the rest of his life would be colored by this moment—the moment that he had inadvertently taken the life of another human being.

  "And not only did we have to worry about one of the teachers coming into the room any second—I mean, it was between classes," said the female caller to WGRZ Radio 960, "but my . . . big O—"

  "You mean your hot fudge sundae," interrupted WGRZ's morning DJ. "Hot fudge sundae" was his pet name for orgasm because he didn't want to offend anyone by actually using the word.

  "Uh-huh. My hot fudge sundae," the female caller corrected herself, "seemed to go on for hours. I know that's not possible, Alan." The DJ's name was Alan Crocket and he was thought of as the best and ballsiest morning drive-time DJ in New York City. "I know that orgasms . . . oops, I mean hot fudge sundaes, last only a minute or so, maybe not even that long—"

  "My producer," Alan cut in, "claims to have had a hot fudge sundae that lasted five minutes. Now this is the same woman, you must remember, who claims to have spoken to aliens and who says that, in an earlier life, she was Joan of Arc."

  "I think mine lasted five minutes, Man," said the female caller. "At least five minutes. God, it seemed to go on forever."

  Alan guffawed. "You girls are lucky. If one of us guys had a hot fudge sundae that lasted that long, we'd be dead."

  On the Coast Guard cruiser that had passed beneath Kennedy Whelan's Ford, a young ensign scanned the horizon for signs of the reported rowboat. He saw a yacht named Stephanie, which he'd seen more than once in his tour of duty at this station. It was out in all weather, the entire year. And he saw an oil tanker on the horizon. But he saw no abandoned rowboat.

  He glanced around at the cruiser's pilot, shivered from the cold breeze that had come up and motioned to the northwest to indicate that they should turn their attentions that way.

  Sam asked, "Are you wearing a watch?"

  Harry's brow furrowed. He didn't know. He tried pulling back the sleeve of his trench coat. It wouldn't budge. He might as well have been trying to pull back his own skin. He sighed. "I think I am. I don't know."

  Sam looked at his left wrist. It was exposed only a little beneath the sleeve of the tweed suit. He held the wrist above his head and peered into the opening between the edges of the sleeve and his wrist. "I've got one," he announced.

  "Can you read it?" Harry asked.

  "No. But I can see a gold watchband."

  "You're sure it's a watch? It could be a bracelet."

  "Shit, Harry—I don't wear bracelets." He peered into his suit sleeve again. "You know, I think it's my father's watch. It has to be. I've worn it ever since he died." He dropped his ann. "But it doesn't make any difference if I can't read it."

  "Why would you want to know what time it is?" Harry asked.

  "I don't know." He shrugged. "Just an idea. Clocks. Watches. Time. Getting caught in time. It was a stab in the dark."

  "You're a v
ery intuitive man, aren't you?"

  "Intuitive?"

  "You think in grand abstractions. I'd assume that that would be a hindrance in your line of work."

  Sam looked skeptically at him. "Why do I get the idea that you're making fun of me?"

  "I'm not." He wasn't. "And, on second thought, being a right-brained sort of person would probably be very helpful in your line of work."

  "Right-brained?"

  "Sure. The kind who absorbs the big picture in one huge chunk and responds to it according to his intuition. He's the kind of person who gets hunches. The kind who can read other people instantly, without knowing why or how."

  "And that's what I am?"

  "Apparently."

  The little rowboat was beginning to pitch and roll. It was a very gentle movement, barely noticeable, but Harry noticed it and he grabbed the gunwales. "Shit! Not again!"

  Sam said, "It's like this place is alive."

  The boat pitched and rolled faster. Small whitecaps formed.

  "You know what?" Sam said. "I'll bet we're stuck to this rowboat too. Just like our clothes are stuck to us."

  Harry didn't believe it. He shook his head and stiff-armed the gunwales. "If I can grab the sides of the boat like this, I can sure as hell jump out of it too."

  "You think so? Then try it."

  "Hell, no! You try it!"

  Sam grinned at him. It was a broad and toothy grin, but tinged with uncertainty.

  Harry said, "So go ahead. Have the courage of your convictions."

  "I'd like to think about it a moment."

  "Think about it? What's there to think about? Just latch on to your idea and run with it."

  "That's real easy for you to say."

  Harry felt like a coward.

  Then, in one quick, fluid motion, Sam stood and leaped from the boat. He hit the frisky blue-green water and was absorbed by it. There was no splash, no turbulence where he went in.

  "Oh, Christ!" Harry whispered, and cast about frantically over both sides of the boat. "Dammit to hell!"