“It’s like I can still feel her spirit in here,” he said.
He remembered nothing about his sleepwalking. I saw him walk into the hall in the dark, feeling his way along the wall to her door. I followed him downstairs, where he felt the doorknob of the closet, the front door, and the bathroom. I followed him into the kitchen, where he crawled on his hands and knees to the refrigerator, feeling it with his fingers, whispering to himself. I tried speaking to him, but he didn’t respond. He gave an uneasy sigh, which I found exciting in a strange and malicious way. I didn’t wake him—I’d always heard you weren’t supposed to wake someone during sleepwalking, so I left him there in the dark.
“It’s mostly harmless,” Agnes told me. “He’s never tried to hurt himself or anyone else. As long as he doesn’t leave, we’ll be fine.”
One night he found his way outside into the front yard, in the cold, completely naked. Harold managed to take a blanket and bring him back inside, where he woke disoriented, confused, and sad.
“I feel sad,” he told me. “I don’t know why. Maybe because Rosemary died.”
Strangely, I laughed. It was an uncontrollable reaction, and I could tell it bothered him. This made it worse. I laughed into my shirt. I had to leave the room.
Outside, the weather was getting warmer. The sun was shining more and the trees were turning green. Slowly George felt better. Though I never saw him physically break down and cry, I knew he was sad. Everyone was sad. For several days I continued to go to the woods, feeling numb, yet I couldn’t bring myself to feel badly about the way things had turned out, I have to admit. And all this built up. I was already irritable, exhausted.
On a drive out of town to a dental checkup, I asked Liz whether we could stop and visit my mother at the prison, but she said no. She was on a tight schedule, having picked me up early that morning in order to take me to the dentist and return me back to Little Crow so she could still make an important court adjudication hearing that afternoon. The drive was tense and quiet because I had overslept and now I was disappointed, tired, and hungry.
It was ten-thirty in the morning. Liz and I sat in the waiting room at the dentist’s office, a room I was familiar with but uncomfortable in every time I visited. The state agency made me go once a year for cleaning and checkups, but my mother had bad teeth and had never enforced good dental hygiene.
“I made a referral to Northside Counseling Services,” Liz told me in the waiting room. “They should be ready to do an intake with us for you in the next few weeks.”
“Another counselor,” I said.
“They specialize in grief counseling and independent living,” she said. “It wouldn’t hurt to gain some independent living skills. You’ll be sixteen soon.”
We were seated in vinyl chairs facing the receptionist area, where two receptionists seemed to be engaged in a deep conversation over a chart on a clipboard one of them held. I recall not feeling well from either allergies or a slight head cold, my nose was stuffy, and I needed a Kleenex, so I went to the desk and one of the receptionists looked at me as if I’d just interrupted something very important. When I asked for a Kleenex she merely pointed to a table with a small box of tissues that I hadn’t noticed.
It was this same receptionist who called my name and led me down a hallway to the exam room where I sat in the reclined chair. Her entire face and attitude expressed a revulsion to me. As I think back on it I wonder if she didn’t have a child or grandchild who had been burned in some way and looking at my face was a reminder of the terrors of such a thing.
The receptionist told me the hygienist would be in shortly, and I could’ve sworn she said this while gritting her teeth. She left, closing the door behind her. And there I sat, reclined in the chair, staring around the room, where various posters of decayed teeth and gums lined the walls. There was one framed reproduction of a Norman Rockwell painting, a boy sitting on a barstool at a diner next to a police officer, which struck me as a strange picture to have on the wall with so many photos of teeth and gums.
“Your last visit was over a year ago,” the hygienist said when she entered. She tied the paper bib around my neck and reclined my chair all the way. I heard people talking in the hallway, which irritated me. I started to feel angry and I wasn’t sure why. The hygienist turned on the lamp above me and asked whether I was brushing my teeth really well and flossing every night.
“Sometimes,” I lied.
The hygienist looked at me with her mask covering her mouth. In her hand she held a sharp instrument to scrape my teeth and gums. She told me to open my mouth, and I did, closing my eyes.
“Wider,” she said.
I opened wider and she began to scrape my teeth, stabbing my gums, which was painful. She talked to me about brushing as if I’d never done it, emphasizing doing it gently and circular, massaging my gums with the toothbrush. She talked to me about tooth decay.
“Open wide,” she said again.
She told me to spit. She leaned back a moment and looked at me behind her mask, telling me about gum disease. She told me about pain and swelling and blood. She stressed flossing, again, all while poking my gums with the sharp instrument. My head felt light and dizzy. When I spit again and she turned on a slow-speed tool to polish my teeth, I couldn’t take any more.
“Open wider,” she said, and this time I reached for her wrist. She pulled away, reassuring me the worst was done.
“Stop,” I said.
“I’m just polishing,” she told me. “It’s okay, do you want to hold this? It’s harmless. Here.” But I didn’t want to hold the tool. I felt a fear that grew more intense the longer I heard the whir of the tool in her hand. I reached again for her wrist and gripped it.
“Hey,” she said, moving back on her stool and standing. “You just have to cooperate and it’ll be over quickly.”
“No.”
“Sequoyah,” she said. “Are you okay?”
My head was aching all of a sudden and I had to close my eyes. I felt light-headed, fatigued, and near panicked by the thought of staying in that room. I wasn’t entirely sure why I felt this way—I’d been to the dentist before, but this time felt different. The whole room slanted, and when the hygienist saw how panicked I was she left to get help.
“I don’t like it,” I said, “I want to leave, I want to go home, do you hear me?”
“What’s wrong?” another hygienist said. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t like it,” I said again. I put my hands over my face, sitting up as they started to help me out of the chair. I’m not sure how long I had my hands over my face, but it was long enough for people to come in and out of the room. I heard Liz telling me everything would be all right, and when I removed my hands I saw all of them—Liz, the hygienists, even the surly receptionist with her clipboard, all of them standing there watching me.
“We’ll go,” Liz said. “It’s fine, Sequoyah. We can come back and get your teeth cleaned another time.”
When I returned home I went upstairs and vomited. It was loud and painful. George was knocking on the door, asking if I was okay, but I ignored him. I’d locked the door and I stayed in there for a long time. Later, I went into my bedroom and pretended to sleep but didn’t rest at all. By then the sky had fallen gray, and George’s voice trembled as he stood by my bed asking Harold whether I was going to die.
“Of course not,” Harold said. “When Agnes gets home we’ll call Liz and let her know what’s going on. Sound okay, Sequoyah?”
“Fine,” I said.
Once Agnes got home and came upstairs, she sat on the edge of the bed and put a cold washcloth on my forehead. She told me about a time when she was a little girl and got lost in a field full of wild brush. She told me about eating muskrat and taking long walks in the country with her mother, who was deaf. Agnes tried to comfort me as best as she could. Then she put her hands on my
head and said a prayer that God watch over me and heal any sickness attacking my body. Downstairs, Harold called Liz, who called my doctor who made a referral to a neurological institute. The rest of the night my body was consumed in heat. I shed my clothes and lay sweating on the bed while George snored under his covers all night.
The next day they drove me to Northridge Neurological Institute in Tulsa. They checked me in and a nurse wheeled me down a long hallway to an elevator, which we took up to the seventh floor, then down another long hallway into a room. The window overlooked the post office and downtown buildings. I changed into my gown and got into bed, where they checked my blood pressure, my temperature, and put an IV in my arm to keep me hydrated. My head was hurting and I still felt nauseated.
“How many times have you vomited?” the nurse asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Several?”
“A bunch.”
“And the headaches?”
“He’s been having them for several weeks,” Harold said.
The nurse typed something in on a computer. “He doesn’t have a temperature,” she said. “His blood pressure is good. When was the last time you ate anything?”
“He had toast for breakfast,” Agnes said. “Nothing else today.”
“We’ll have to see what the doctor says,” she said.
Harold and Agnes followed the nurse out of the room, and when they returned with a doctor he told me I would stay overnight. He explained that they would be performing an EEG procedure to determine if I was having slight seizures or some sort of neurological disorder. They would study my sleep pattern and my reaction to flashing lights.
“That’s all there is to it,” the doctor said, and wrote something down on his clipboard. “What you need to try to do is get some rest. A nurse can give you something to help if you’re having trouble. A nurse will be back to check on you in a while.” He left.
“Seizures?” I said.
“We’re worried about your frequent headaches,” Harold said. “The procedure isn’t bad at all. Just some tests basically. Rosemary had the same thing done last year.”
“Everything will be fine,” Agnes told me. “We’ll leave so you can sleep, and I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
When I got back into bed I didn’t do much except watch TV, some sort of soap opera in Spanish. I thought about Rosemary in the hospital bed, waiting for the same procedure. Rosemary, probably dying for a cigarette. She told me the whole experience was too confining and invasive for her, being observed all night. Every breath monitored, every movement. Some man sitting in a small room, watching her on a screen all night. A machine tracking her brain waves, giving access to some stranger. It was all too much for her. She told me it was like suffocating. But it didn’t bother me. I welcomed the idea of being drugged and collapsing into a deep sleep. I wanted to know what was happening inside my head. Maybe I was morphing into some altered state of consciousness, some other being. I was losing my mind. They would tell me I was part animal, part human, some other entity. I stretched my legs under the covers. I cracked my knuckles and my neck.
When the EEG technologist came in later, she had a small rectangular machine. She told me to sit up and had me look directly into it while a light flashed like a strobe light. It didn’t hurt my eyes. She told me to stay relaxed and that I could blink if I needed to. It only took a couple of minutes. Just before she left she told me that once I was asleep she would begin the procedure, basically a sleep study.
“You’ll sleep through the whole thing,” she said. “Just try to relax.”
Soon it was dark outside and I kept watching TV, trying to get comfortable. There was a black-and-white movie on, some gangster movie. A beautiful woman was smoking a cigarette and talking on the phone. She sat with her legs crossed and wore high heels. She was stunning, this woman. I stared at the TV until the nurse came in and interrupted me. She gave me a tiny plastic cup with liquid.
“Drink this,” she said. “It’ll help you get to sleep.”
It was red and sour. She drew the curtains all the way so that it was completely dark except for the light from the TV. I tried to watch the movie, but now there were men in overcoats talking. They kept talking and talking and nothing ever happened. I used the remote to turn the TV off. The medicine eventually kicked in and made me groggy, and I struggled to keep my eyes open. I drifted off to sleep quickly.
I slept a heavy and dreamless sleep. I don’t remember anything, not the EEG technologist or a nurse ever being in there. I woke up feeling a pain in my arm from the IV. I saw that a different nurse and the EEG technologist were with me. I vaguely remember hearing their voices, but before I could make out their conversation they saw that I was awake, and the nurse said good morning.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Quarter till eleven.”
“In the morning? I slept that long?”
“I checked on you when I came in to work last night and you were sleeping. You’ve been asleep the whole time.”
The room was bright from the open curtains. I looked at the window and saw that the sun was out. While the EEG technologist wrote something down, the nurse had me sit up so she could change my pillow. “Your days and nights might be mixed up for a couple of days from sleeping so much. That happens to me, too. I work the eleven to eight shift, stay up late and sleep in. That way I can get my shopping done before work if I need to.”
“I usually don’t sleep well,” I said.
“You did last night. Twelve or thirteen hours. You’ll sleep well after the doctor prescribes something for you.”
I liked the idea of taking sleeping pills. After they left I got my toothbrush out of my bag and brushed my teeth. I wasn’t tired at all. I stayed in bed and watched TV most of the morning, flipped through some magazines, then buzzed the nurse and asked for more of the sleep medicine, but they wouldn’t give me any more. I closed my eyes, and I must’ve slept even more because when I opened them I saw Liz and Agnes staring at me. Sunlight flooded the room.
“How are you feeling?” Liz asked, feeling my face like I was sick.
“I’m better,” I said.
Harold was sitting in a chair by the window, reading a newspaper. Agnes brought me my clothes, so I went into the bathroom to change. Soon the doctor came in. “Good news,” he said, “no signs of epileptic seizures.”
“So why the vomiting? He’s been sick a lot,” Agnes said.
“Has he been through a lot of stress lately?” the doctor asked.
“He’s been through a lot,” Liz said.
“I don’t think he handles stress well, do you, Sequoyah?” Agnes asked.
“Probably high levels of stress,” the doctor said, and looked at me. “You need to take it easy, son. Try not to worry so much.”
“He’s been through a lot,” Liz said again.
I was starving, so they took me to eat on the way home. We stopped at a barbecue place off the interstate, and I ordered brisket and ribs. I remember smothering the meat in barbecue sauce and hot sauce and ketchup. I devoured everything, wolfing it down with my hands, eating like an animal. I was so sated in that moment, so freshly and newly awake, I didn’t even notice until I got home that all the rooster sauce and ketchup on my shirt looked like blood.
Back home I rested for a few days, sleeping late and watching TV. I started feeling better. George was feeling better, too. Just as easily as he fell into sadness, he came out of it. One evening he began to talk about mountains, snow, and a desire to go places. He spoke of cold places like Mount Kailash in Tibet, the Meili mountain range, Snowbird in Utah, places with giant mountains full of snow. He talked of snow pillows, avalanches, and elevation levels. He talked about precipitation on mountains when winds sweep from the southwest compared to north winds.
“It’s all about topography,” he told us. “Westerly s
torms are more perpendicular to the Sierra Nevada than, say, the Central Valley of California.”
“What are you talking about?” Harold asked.
“Air.”
Harold stared into open space, thinking.
“He’s researching snow mountains for school,” Agnes said.
“It’s about topography,” George said again.
We were all in the kitchen for some reason. Agnes put slivers of parsley and garlic into a pot of boiling water and began peeling a potato. Harold had a Bloody Mary in his hands, which he sipped from.
“Air,” George said again, staring at his glass.
The next day I rode along with Agnes as she ran errands, going to the post office, the grocery store, the hardware store. I carried her groceries, pushed the shopping cart, opened the door for her, anything I could do. I felt the need to help her. I even told her I appreciated everything she was doing for me.
“That’s really sweet of you to say,” she told me.
I never felt guilty about the way things had turned out since I moved in with them. I didn’t want them to think anything was my fault. On the drive home I told her about the homeless community by Black River that Rosemary had introduced me to. Agnes didn’t know anything about it.
“I’m not surprised Rosemary gave them food,” she said. “She had such a giving spirit.”
I asked her if we could drive by and see it, but when we got there, all the tents were gone. The trash sacks, all the chairs and firewood—all of it gone.
“They must’ve moved someplace else,” Agnes said.
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