Broken Sleep

by Bruce Bauman

  When his tears stopped, no sermons could dispel his internal sobbing. His actions in the world of objects and people were those of a man drifting in a somnambulistic trance. On a good day, numbness prevailed. Already emotionally traumatized by Moses’s illness, Jay flailed helplessly to keep their spirits from succumbing. She begged Moses to go out more often with her. Or have their friends over. He refused.

  Moses’s social interaction was limited to the Internet. He and Alchemy often e-mailed and IM’d about politics, books, music, and movies, the virtual locker room verbiage common even to nonathletic guys like Moses. Alchemy continually solicited Moses’s views on the national and geopolitical events of the day. Sometimes Moses answered. Sometimes he didn’t. Alchemy let Moses know he’d been elevated to the role of “chief history and current events adviser” alongside the ailing Nathaniel, who had suffered a series of disabling strokes. More intimate and delicate was the subject of Salome, whom Moses made clear he was still not ready to meet. Not infrequently, her “presence,” her madness, rattled through their conversations; they spoke of mood swings, bipolar disease, and the genetic basis of lifelong depression versus the postoperative form, from which both agreed Moses was suffering. One July middle of the night, as Moses surfed sites on psychosis and genetics, he tapped Alchemy’s IM moniker.

  MThead23: Talk time? Yay, nay, or way dismayed?

  Sctfree1: way dismayed, but still, yay i say. how’re you feeling?

  MThead23: More so-so than yay-yay. You know my motto? What doesn’t murder me only makes me more tired.

  Sctfree1: astutely mottoed.

  MThead23: You just get in from carousing?

  Sctfree1: carousing in the nightmare. woke up. sleep deprivation demon now lurking.

  MThead23: Lurking here too. What’s worse the nightmares or the insomnia?

  Sctfree1: i’m easy or uneasy with either.

  Sctfree1: one is fear of sleep. the other is fear of life …

  Sctfree1: in one you have no control. the other, you have the illusion of control.

  MThead23: Both presume a fear of death. I’m afraid of the fear of the fear of death.

  Sctfree1: the only thing we got to fear is fear itself? i fear anyone who buys or sells that can of bullshit.

  MThead23: Yeah, with food lines stretched from the Hudson to the Mississippi, that was one good sales pitch. That fear was real and so is my fear of death.

  Sctfree1: after what you been thru, damn right. my fear—the void is de void and then the big id panic hits and i get undid by my id.

  MThead23: You got any ideas how to handle it?

  Sctfree1: feed the id … fuck drink play music. do good works. try to avoid acting like a self-righteous nihilistic hypocrite.

  Sctfree1: you?

  MThead23: I fantasize about doing some of those things.

  Sctfree1: i see this shrink, ben butterworth.

  Sctfree1: does random associative nocturnal therapy. basic idea in RANT is that insomnia is a form of exile from your subconscious. that dreams and nightmares can help explain and repair the exile.

  Sctfree1: he has legit phds from stanford and the psychological institute.

  MThead23: Is it helping?

  Sctfree1: well, “the void is still the void/and I’m still awake …”

  Moses laughed and sang to himself the next lines of the Insatiables’ “Sleep of Faith,” which he knew well: and with rocks in my roll / holes in my soul / and gods to forsake / I’m searching for the sleep of faith before reading farther.

  Sctfree1: yeah, some. i figured out a few things. ben helped me accept and embrace both my nightmares and insomnia. other shrinks willied me out as voyeurs with degrees who wanted to mess with or understand my “creativity.” ben respects that and wants to leave it alone unless i want to delve into it.

  Sctfree1: and i don’t.

  Sctfree1: he calls you at indiscriminate nighttime hours and if you’re awake you have a phone session. if you’ve been asleep he wants to know what you were dreaming/thinking the second you woke up. his theory is that in scheduled sessions the brain and body prepare beforehand and your defenses rise too high. in trad therapy most people pretend and blab about themselves.

  Sctfree1: if you’re interested …

  Moses did not immediately contact Ben Butterworth. He stuck with his “trad” therapist, and aside from the occasional Xanax, continued to resist the pharmacological antidote. He had started teaching a limited schedule. He still spent much of his time at home, where he often hibernated in his room, feeling stranded, a Robinson Crusoe who feared more than desired finding Friday’s footprint. He stared blankly at books he could not concentrate on enough to read, or the computer screen pouring out endless bytes of forgettable minutiae. More than once, twice, ten times, he found himself reaching for the phone to call his mother who, of course, could no longer answer. How goddamned idiotic, he berated himself.

  One afternoon, a messenger delivered an envelope from Alchemy. Moses read Alchemy’s enclosed note: “Three tickets to Rio. Open-ended dates. You alone. You and me. You and Jay. You, me, and Jay. Your call.” Jay watched as Moses dropped the envelope on the wood floor and crumpled up the note and threw it against the wall. Jay strode in from the kitchen and uncrumpled the note. She read it while Moses stood motionless.

  “Moses, what is wrong? He helped save your life. He wants nothing and is—”

  Moses stepped in front of her, picked up the envelope, took out the tickets, and marched down the hallway to his room. His eyes indicted Jay with a clear warning: Do not pursue this line of questioning.

  On a top bookshelf of his room stood the menorah that once belonged to Hannah’s mother. Around it he’d hung Hannah’s favorite faux pearl necklace, which she’d also gotten from her mom. He lifted the menorah and placed the tickets underneath its stand. He knew damn well at that moment he was not honoring his mother’s wishes: “Moses, do me proud and act like a mensch in a world of putzes.” He collapsed on the Turkish rug. And simply lay there.

  Jay eased into the room and knelt beside him. Her eyes welling up, she cradled him. “Moses. Cry. Cry. Please.”

  After many moments, she spoke in a calm yet determined voice. “You can be mad at me, at your illness, at Salome, at your mom, your dickhead father, whatever else you want … You have lots of reasons to be angry and sad, so be angry and sad! Let it out! And then, be generous. Be thankful for all you do have.”

  “Jay, I could not have survived without you.” Moses searched for the adequate words, but he could only muster, “I’m sorry. So sorry.”

  Neither one could articulate exactly why or for what he was apologizing.

  Over the next month, Moses skirted his glance toward the tickets. He could neither rip them up nor act upon the offer. Finally, thinking, Why not? he decided to get Ben Butterworth’s number.

  Butterworth, a stocky man in his late sixties, with stillblack, neck-length knotted hair and a withered face, looked like a mixture of Gertrude Stein and Geronimo. His brown-eyed stare was as brawny as his heft. A former college wrestler, Butterworth carried himself like someone thrilled by psychically pinning his patients to the mat. “My aim is to excavate and translate the essential messages from the dross embroiled in that lava mass that we label the unconscious,” he began. “This instant, tell me three fears. Don’t think.”

  “I have these daymares. I had one in the hospital that haunts me. I don’t want you to confuse these with fantasies, sexual or otherwise. They’re nothing like that.”

  “Don’t explain. Don’t digress. Talk.”

  “I’m afraid of losing my mind. That my wife really wants my brother, who she slept with before we met, and that I was her second or third or twentieth choice and she settled for me after she’d had her fun because I’m a schlemiel. And meeting either of my biological parents.” He surprised himself that he had not mentioned death.

  “Tell me your ‘daymare.’ ”

  Moses pressed his back against the worn gra
y couch with equally worn and gray pillows. It was either spill or get the hell out. Butterworth remained inscrutable during Moses’s halting equivocations of the “Visitation” daymare. When he finished, Butterworth volunteered his reactions.

  “There are many dimensions of ‘reality’ we don’t understand. Odd things occur that can’t be explained. That does not make you a candidate for a mental breakdown. I believe in what can be proved and I’m agnostic on what cannot be disproved. I do not subscribe to past life memories, extraterrestrials, time travel, ESP, or any other speculative sci-fi concoctions. This doesn’t rule them out for eternity. It rules them out for now. There’s more in here”—he pointed to his head and then to the heavens—“than there is out there. We work with your daymares. Your dreams. Your all-too-human insecurity and jealousy probably have more to do with you and your self-image and your parents’ desertion than they do with your wife or brother. Still, those are universal emotions that have implications we can examine, and they will become less detrimental if we resolve the issues with your parents. Your daymares intrigue me. They seem to be a form of night terrors, pavor nocturnus, accompanied by hallucinatory sleep paralysis. Most so-called professionals are ill equipped to properly diagnose and treat these disorders. I am equipped. I can work with you.” He stopped. His eyes projected compassion without sentiment. “Go home. Think about it. No questions asked if you choose not to proceed.”

  32

  THE SONGS OF SALOME

  You Talking to Me?

  In late August, Alchemy and I moved in with Nathaniel. Hilda didn’t put up much of a fuss after Bicks Sr. informed her that I was within my rights. Nathaniel, Gibbon, Ruggles, even my New York therapist blathered on about how I needed to rent a studio and get to work. I lacked inspiration. The opportunity to use it for activities other than making art might be too enticing.

  I’d kept my polyamorous diversions to zero until Nathaniel left town to do a series of university lectures deploring Reagan’s election and the few flatulent and toothless protests. Alchemy spent the weekend with Hilda. Holencraft finally received his long-awaited reward (he rented us a suite at the Pierre), which was sexually gratifying, but after the fact added a nasty odor of moldy banana bits and rusty nails to my soulsmell. It put me off flings … for a time.

  I was still unmotivated to make art or exhibit until one late night while vagabonding across the Brooklyn Bridge. Awash in the East River’s aquatic mist and the skyline’s iridescent flickers of light and death, a corpselike man wearing a long overcoat bumped into me. I stumbled, snapping the heel of my silver mule, and scraped my right palm on the pavement. I leaned back against the rail and yelled, “Watch out, asshole!” Already far ahead of me, he turned and waved a massive fist and kept walking. I felt droplets of blood oozing from my hand. I dabbed at them with the bottom of my blouse when the psychopomp communes of Lou Andreas-Salomé—DNA ancestor, rapturer of Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud—vapored through my body. “Do not let men or their desires intimidate you, not by physical strength or the demands of marriage or sex. Never let any man dictate the designs of your life.”

  She absolved me for my slavish behavior when I was under Horrwich’s sway. “Oh, I understand. I lament that the photo of me whipping Nietzsche and Paul Rée has become my legacy. It overshadows my books on female sexuality that predated Master Freud. True child of mine, do not let us down. I expect you to right the wrongs of our history.”

  Inspired by her visit, I created the Women of the Scourge series of representational canvases (which appalled Gibbon), challenging the historically accepted phallocratic histories of my women. My first painting was Juan de Juanes’s Beloved Disciple and Jesus with Jesus as Salome’s disciple. I modeled Salome’s face on Greta’s. Using the same role reversals, I did Charlotte Corday and Marat (Jacques-Louis David), Salome and John the Baptist (Caravaggio), and of course the photograph of Frau Lou and Nietzsche.

  At the opening, Alchemy came running up to me. He had scraped his elbow, which was bleeding. Gibbon fetched a Band-Aid and I bandaged it quickly, but not before Frau Lou ascended to me. “Salome, you must protect him. Explain to him the history of these works. It is essential to his future and ours.”

  Gibbon and I made a pact about selling the paintings, which were fetching five figures—I could veto a sale to anyone I deemed unworthy. Over Nathaniel’s protests, I sold one to Malcolm Forbes, who gave me a ride on his motorcycle.

  A few nights after the exhibition came down, Nathaniel and I went to our favorite Chinatown dive. After the salt-and-pepper squid, he sighed and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Yes? Speak,” I demanded.

  “I received a letter from Jean-Marc at Vincennes University in Paris. They offered me a one-year position.” Nathaniel had adopted the tactic of unveiling any potentially inflaming situations while we were in public, and with Alchemy present. He thought that might keep me from erupting.

  “Are you asking me to join you? Or telling me you don’t want us to come?”

  “Of course I want you to come. But there are extenuating circumstances.”

  His desire to escape the U.S. didn’t surprise me. He was appalled by Reagan’s election, felt thwarted by the apathy of American college kids, and was energized by the promise of the new French Socialist prime minister Mitterrand. He explained that Vincennes was no longer the radical flash point, but it still offered an opportunity he couldn’t find in America.

  I didn’t erupt then—not because we were in public but because his evasiveness wounded me. “Are you sure this isn’t a ploy so you can leave me? Or so I’ll marry you? What happened to offering us stability?”

  He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. His bottom and top teeth clicked against each other as if they were tapping an urgent telegraph. I understood that his once vibrant hope for domestic calm was wrecked by me. In dark moments, I feared he saw himself debased by the cunningly crazy dominatrix with whom he had tragically fallen in love.

  “Not at all. I won’t desert you. I want you two to come.”

  “And I want you to take it.”

  Over the following weeks, Nathaniel never mustered the courage to say: I am going to France with or without you. Our relationship became laden with recriminatory jibes and plaintive facial tics. I finally erupted.

  “Stop looking at me as if I’m your ball and chain!” I stomped off and locked myself in the bathroom. Facing the door, I shrieked, “I love you, but if I marry you, you’ll share power over me with the Bickleys. I can’t give you that!”

  His bare feet thumped on the wood floor toward the bathroom and he bellowed in his self-righteous/aggressive/injured Nathaniel-Brockton-on-the-podium tone that he rarely used with me, “Is that so terrible? You can’t possibly trust them more than me!”

  I tempered my voice. “You love me and they don’t. You’ll act with your heart. You’ll feel guilty. I don’t want to hate you if you put me back in Collier Layne. And you will.” I opened the door a few inches and peeked out. “You’re scared, right? Afraid that I was in here hurting myself?” He grimaced as if I’d clawed his cheek. “Answer me, Nathaniel!”

  “Yes,” he said dejectedly. “Yes, you scare me. Are you proud of it?”

  Perhaps it was better for all if he left without me.

  33

  THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2005)

  The Big Enchilada

  Almost four years after they first met, Alchemy insisted they have dinner at the Don’s, a local Mexican restaurant in Culver City. Moses was already seated in a booth and reading a book when Alchemy slid into the seat across from him. “Sorry to interrupt. You look engrossed. What is it?” Moses held up the cover that read The Disinherited Mind and then placed it down on the table.

  With the exception of a few goo-goo-eyed glances or thumbs-ups, the customers couldn’t have cared less about the famous guy lounging in the crusty booth in the darkest corner of the room.

  Alchemy ordered a large guacamole, three tacos, a shrimp fajita dinner, a
beer, and a margarita all for himself. Moses was always impressed with his gargantuan appetite and his ability to remain damn near skeletal. Alchemy finished crunching down a chip with hot salsa and guac. “I do my best to keep Salome and Nathaniel away from L.A. because I don’t want to tempt you without knowing what you want to do.”

  “Still nothing.”

  “You sure?”

  “Butterworth says I have to do what feels right for me. I’m still healing, and then the real battle will begin. Ruggles has no idea how Salome will react. And I have no idea how I will react to her reaction.”

  “Sounds right. How’s it going with Ben?”

  “Eking along. The middle-of-the-night calls freak Jay out, and then she’s cranky in the morning. I’ve started frequently sleeping on the futon in my room.” Moses, thinking that might sound suspicious, quickly added, “Not that often. I mean we’re … you know.” He wasn’t about to admit that their sex life had diminished considerably, a fact he skirted around even with Butterworth. “She supports the therapy. He and I are doing some traditional in-office work, too.”