No Sleep till Wonderland

by Paul Tremblay

  We both move our hands faster and we’re clumsy about it, missing our marks on occasion, but we’re still effective. Jody pulls me toward her thighs, and my orgasm starts in my toes, and I want to stop it but can’t. It’s beyond me, and there’s a deep disappointment in my inability to last longer underneath the current of ecstasy that ends in small lights exploding in my head. I shake and groan and come all over her hand, her shirt and thighs, my shirt, my legs, the floor, the apartment.

  I turn my head away from her mouth and mutter “I’m sorry” repeatedly into her ear.

  “Ssshh, it’s okay. It’s all right. Just keep going.”

  Jody keeps squeezing and pumping with her hand, sending aftershocks through my already crumbling body. My lights are dimming, and I’m really sorry. I stumble forward and lean into her, my head resting on her shoulder. Maybe I could close just my eyes and imagine and dream…

  “Please, don’t stop.” She twitches her shoulder and bounces my head upright. Her right hand readjusts my hand between her legs. She doesn’t want me inside her anymore. “Come on. Just move your fingers. Right there!” There’s no more please.

  We sway like it’s the last dance of the night. Her eyes are closed, and she’s concentrating. I’m blinking, trying to stay awake, wanting to stay awake. She says, “Almost there, almost there, almost there,” but I don’t know if she’s telling the truth or trying to convince herself. She continues to pull and tug on me like my penis is a piece of gum stuck in someone’s hair.

  Yeah, she’s hurting me, but I laugh a little because it’s funny. And I laugh a little because it’s sad. If we were a new couple, or even an old one, we’d hold each other after and giggle uncontrollably about her almost ripping my penis off. It’d become our little private joke (though I’d maintain no pun intended with the little private crack), the kind of intimate secret that I imagine lovers keep to themselves, cherish through the years, to use as winks and nods in mixed company or just before they go to bed at night.

  “Mark, come on, don’t stop!”

  Goddamn it, stay awake. Her thigh muscles clench around my hand, her breathing increases, then stops, and her mouth drops open, a trap door. Color rushes into her face, and she comes. She’s quiet and reserved compared to my outburst, but her legs give out and I hold her up with my other hand until she pushes all of me away.

  Jody lets go of me too, finally, and we kiss one last time, a chaste kiss, two teens on a doorstep just touching lips, or two people saying an awkward goodbye. Jody pulls up her shorts and takes the sheet off the couch and wipes her hands, thighs, and stomach.

  “You need this?”

  Feeling more than a little ridiculous, standing in front of her TV with my pants down, on display, I take the sheet and wipe my crotch and my legs. The sheet isn’t very absorbent, and I’m just spreading wetness around. I give up, ball up the sheet, and toss it to the floor. I bend to grab my scrub pants, and my head goes anvil-heavy. I fall to my knees, ass in the air, waving it like I just don’t care.

  Jody says, “Whoa. You okay?” She loops one of my arms around her shoulder.

  “I’m fine. Just a little dizzy.” I’m not fine. I’m far from fine. My voice is coming from another room somehow. Dark spots fill my vision, and my nervous system hums and pulses. I’m about to go out, and hard.

  Jody helps me and my pants up. We shuffle over to the couch. She and I sit together, and she guides my head into her lap. The skin of her thighs is cool against my cheek.

  I say, “Tell me something, anything. Just talk, please.” I close my eyes, and I’m falling down a well, not a rabbit hole.

  Jody strokes my hair and starts to talk, telling me a story about her and her son JT. Or I might be dreaming the whole goddamn thing. The truth is somewhere in the middle, the mean, the median, all places foreign to me, the outlier.

  There was this time when JT was only a toddler, maybe two years old. He was old enough to have a few sentences in his pocket, all beginning and ending with the word Mommy. Jody was working two jobs, cashier at the local supermarket and part-time, seasonal telemarketer for a heating oil company. Both gigs were minimum wage, and both gigs were never enough. Jody was just another Bob Cratchit, and everyone else was an Ebenezer.

  JT didn’t need a crutch but had a nasty case of conjunctivitis diagnosed by the free clinic. Jody was supposed to put an antibiotic ointment in his eyes. Her insurance paid for only half the prescription.

  She thought administering it was going to be easy. She was Mommy, and he would trust her. She would explain to him that he needed the medicine to get rid of the red and itch and sick, and his eyes would be all better and she wouldn’t have to take any more shifts off work, wouldn’t have to stay home another night.

  JT didn’t listen, didn’t trust her. He shouted, “Nononono!” and he screamed and cried, gumming up his eyes worse. He kicked and punched, and he blocked his eyes with his pebble-sized fists.

  I’m falling deeper into the well, but I’m still listening to her story. I hate that word, story. But we knew that already. So this is Jody’s story that is not a story, and during the telling, Jody’s voice changes into my voice briefly, and then changes back to her voice, and then a child’s voice. It’s the kid’s voice that frightens me, fills me with dread, as if nothing is scarier than a child.

  Jody tried bringing JT into his bedroom. She had him watch her patiently put the medicine into a stuffed animal’s eyes. Jody tried consoling and soothing and hugging and petting and kissing. At least, that’s what she remembers happening before the drinking, before the inevitable shame and regret. She remembers the trying.

  She tried and failed. It was the failure that egged her on. If she couldn’t even get her kid to take this most benign of medicines, how could she possibly do this doomed kid any good?

  She took a break, had a few drinks, and then a few more. She tried giving the medicine to JT again, and he still resisted with tantrums. Jody yelled at JT. Told him to stop it. Stop the crying. Stop the fucking crying! Stop moving! She scooped up her wailing son, the one with the brown straight hair just like hers, and laid him on his back, on the rug that needed to be vacuumed. Stop it, JT! Listen to me! I am your mother! She sat over him, on him, holding his squirmy arms against his sides with her knees. She was trying. And yelling. Still she couldn’t get the medicine in his eyes. JT squeezed and clamped his eyes closed, and they wouldn’t open. The medicine smeared all over his cheeks. She only had enough ointment, the minimum for his proper dosage. She couldn’t waste any, couldn’t afford to pay for another prescription. She couldn’t miss any more work this week.

  Jody’s hand gently strokes my head. And I’m still here, or there, at the bottom of the well, but I can see everything. JT’s bedroom scene plays out in front of my closed eyes. I see everything and know everything, and everything is happening right now.

  Right now, Jody picks JT off the floor and places him into his crib with a gentleness that she’s not feeling. JT is in a time-out. Jody throws the small and expensive medicine into and through the wall. The hole in the sky-blue paint bleeds red. Jody swears and yells and bellows and pulls out her hair. He’s going to take the medicine, and he’s not leaving the room or eating or playing or fucking doing anything ever again until he does. Jody yells louder than she thought possible. She knows she’s out of control and that she’s not a good person; she’s not Bob Cratchit. She wants another drink. The yelling isn’t working; it’s only making her hate herself more, if that’s possible, but there’s some part of her that has to yell more, to make him cry, to make him know she’s serious, to make him listen even if he’ll hate her for the rest of his life (why should she be the only one?). So she yells and screams, and JT isn’t crying anymore. He stands in his crib, wide eyes and blank expression, a small totem to silence.

  If this were a story, it’d be the worst kind, the one without an end. We’re all there in that bedroom, the one with baby blue walls. Jody cries until the paint and plaster peel away, expos
ing the studs, the rotting skeleton of the apartment building. JT stares out at no one, at everyone, at me, and he doesn’t blink and he won’t blink.

  We’re all there, in that room. A fire erupts, and the remorseless orange flames will burn everything. Me. And you too.

  Twenty-Four

  I woke up in Jody’s lap. She was asleep too, slouched and head slumped into her chest, hair fallen in front of her face, a sleeping position right out of the narcoleptic’s handbook, a position I like to think I’ve perfected. She gave it an amateur’s attempt. She’ll wake later with a crick in her neck and a laundry list of regrets.

  I stood up without disturbing her, without wiping my drool off her thigh, and I watched her breathe. If she had woken up before I left, I don’t know what I would’ve said. Leaving was so much easier without having to say anything.

  I say I woke up, but even when fleeing the apartment I wasn’t fully awake. The fog hadn’t burned off. My thoughts and decisions occurred at a Bronze Age pace. I called a cab and came straight here, to the Wellness Center, instead of going home and cleaning myself up. For some reason, not wanting to be late for my therapy appointment was the highest priority for the foggy me.

  I am late, though, and coming here was a mistake, a mistake I keep repeating. I carry with me an aura of stench, a potent mix of vodka, sweat, and sex. But, hey, we’re all friends here. My compadres are already seated in the circle (minus one Gus, of course), journals on their laps and pens in hand, so eager to please someone else in the name of self-improvement.

  I pull up a chair. The circle widens around the force of my antigravity, and they curl their collective noses at me. It wasn’t something I said.

  Dr. Who gives me my journal, and the circle pretends not to watch. The weight of the notebook in my hands is oppressive. It’s a B-grade responsibility that I no longer want. He tells me that today’s journal assignment is open-ended, to do or write or draw whatever I want, but I’ll have to explain whatever it is I chose to do.

  Nice. The lazy quack isn’t even giving the directionless a direction today. I think about drawing the good doctor’s violent demise at the hands of a zombie horde, but that’s too obvious and campy.

  Not in the mood or condition for deep thought, I think about settling for a catchphrase. I open the notebook, and my words from last week, the ones I ate, the ones I rewrote at the doc’s request are still there. It’s my fault. It was always my fault. They’ve been circled in red ink. Dr. Who and his frigging circles.

  I turn pages quickly, letting my fingers do the running. On the top of a clean white page, I write in large block letters:

  I scribble it out, turning the angry letters into unrecognizable loops and blobs of ink, my personal Rorschach test. Instead of filling the page with my signature or the names and symbols of my favorite punk bands like I did when I was in high school, I continue the scribble-doodle on the perimeter of the page. I stay outside the margins. The living sum of the chaotic swoops and swirls is an ink frame for a blank page. That’s probably appropriate and as meaningful as can be expected.

  Of course, I’m going to ruin it by writing something inside the frame.

  I try this:

  I center everything in the scribble-frame. The new words have built off the old ones. These words are pins waiting to be knocked down. But those phrases, the ones I would’ve lamely offered Jody were she awake when I left, they decrease by one word. Four, three, two, one. Zero. I didn’t do that purposefully. I’m a poet, and I didn’t know it.

  I can’t show this to anyone, but I want to know what the loss of words represents. Am I losing something more with each guess? Does it mean I would’ve said all four phrases in descending order, or am I just supposed to choose one, an either-or situation?

  Maybe those phrases, or the choice of phrases, are what Gus would say to me if he were here. Maybe it’s what he’ll say to me when I find him. I stare at the words and marvel at their secret double life, at how they exist in my maybe-past and my maybe-future.

  “Mark? Hey, Mark? Are you awake?”

  Dr. Who taps my shoulder like a woodpecker. Those birds have always creeped me out with how they maniacally smash their faces into trees.

  I brush his hand off my shoulder, swivel my head like I’m an owl, which is a proper bird, and Christ, I’m caught midsnore. It’s a loud, uvula-rattling snore too, like I’m choking on my own esophagus. There’re few things more embarrassing than being caught snoring. The snoring fool always gets the cheap laughs. The snoring fool is always vulnerable.

  “Yeah, doc, I’m awake. I’m practicing my Bigfoot call, using my sinus cavity.”

  No one in the room laughs at Sir Snore-a-lot. No one else is in the room. Is there anything lonelier than a room full of empty chairs? The circle is empty. There is no circle. The chairs lost their shape, and it feels like an indignity. I try connecting those chair-dots and get lost in an amoeba. I’m still groggy, and the shades of my eyes are slanted and uneven.

  “You fell asleep, Mark, and we thought it best not to wake you up.”

  Can’t help but feel like my trusted circle mates abandoned my sinking and snoring ship. The rats!

  I opt for the antacid of projected guilt. I say, “You should’ve got me up. I’m totally embarrassed and can’t face those people anymore. So I don’t think I can come back here again.” I almost ruin it by smiling. Although, the idea of the cat man thinking he is in any way superior makes me want to rip out fistfuls of my beard.

  “I’m sorry, Mark. That was inconsiderate of me.”

  I still have my notebook. It’s in my lap and open to a blank page. I lift it and flip through it, and all but one of the pages is blank. The words from last week are still there, inside the red circle. I could ask Dr. Who if he tore out the new page, collected my framed assignment, but I don’t think I want to know.

  Dr. Who prods with an elongated “Mark” and tries to drag us into the pit of a conversation about me. I stand up on cartoon legs, drawn too skinny, and push my empty journal into his chest.

  I say, “I need to change. I need to shower. I need to do both, in any order.”

  “Do you need to change, Mark? I can’t help but notice you said that first.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be deep, doc.”

  “I’m not saying you were.” He stops there. It’s an effective technique. I have to fill the negative space with something.

  I say, “Well, doc, sure. Change is why I’m here.”

  Dr. Who takes my notebook and opens it. “I also can’t help but think about what you wrote in here last week. About it always being your fault. Do you want to talk about what’s your fault, Mark?”

  Not really, but I might as well make this, my last night at the opera, a bravura performance. “It was an off-the-cuff thing, doc. Didn’t put too much thought into it, really, which was why I crumbled it up.”

  “You put it in your mouth and swallowed it, too, Mark. That’s going a step beyond crumpling.”

  “Eh, it’s crumpling with style.”

  Dr. Who doesn’t say anything, just stares. It’s kind of rude.

  I say, “Look, I didn’t want you to see what I wrote because it was too melodramatic. I only wrote it down the second time because you asked so nicely. When I first wrote it, I guess I was mostly thinking about my on-the-skids relationship with Ellen. How it didn’t need to come to this. And yeah, how it was mostly my fault.”

  “You wrote, ‘It was always my fault.’ That’s a strong statement.”

  “I only meant it about Ellen. And about this place. Me being here isn’t exactly voluntary. If I didn’t come to these sessions, Ellen was going to pull the plug on my business.”

  “She told me her contract idea to get you to come see me, and I advised against it. I’d hoped she didn’t go through with it and that you came here on your own.”

  “What else did she tell you?”

  “She loves you and is very concerned about you, Mark. With your business not doing wel
l, she thought you were spending too much time alone, getting depressed, and that you needed some help, or least some people to talk to. How she went about presenting you the idea of group therapy was wrong, but…”

  “If you say her heart was in the right place, I might rip yours out of your chest.” I try to say it like it’s an edgy joke between friends, but he winces.

  “I won’t make you talk about it anymore, Mark. I do think you should ask yourself why you wrote it, that second sentence in particular. I also think you need to accept yourself, the way you are now, and accept that it isn’t always your fault. It’s not your fault for having narcolepsy, Mark, nor is it your fault for having to experience the difficulties associated with the disorder.”

  I wonder how much Ellen has told him about my past. Did she tell him about the van accident? Did she tell him about my roommates leaving because of me? Did she tell him about all of my symptoms? Did she tell him about the giant fucking mess the narcoleptic me always makes?

  I say, “I know that.”

  Dr. Who nods, resigned to our finish, then says, “Your cell phone rang while you were asleep.”

  Happy to be done with the two-bit analysis, I’m ready to focus on who called. Could’ve been anyone, Detective Owolewa or Ellen, but I know it’s Gus just like I know I’m not coming back to the Wellness Center next week or the week after. My hand is afraid to go into my pocket, but I pull it out and bathe in the radioactive glow of the LCD screen.

  Okay, it wasn’t Gus. I missed a call from Ekat thirty-five minutes ago. She left a message.

  I say, “Sorry to be rude, doc, but I need to check this.”

  “Be my guest, Mark. I’m just going to tidy up.” Dr. Who picks up the chairs, rearranges them. I resist the urge to watch and see what he decides is their preternatural shape.