Sleeping Equinoxes Part 4

:: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 1 :: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 2 :: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 3 :: Sleeping Equinoxes Part 4 ::

My doctors, my mother, and my wife have told me that my seizures are related to stress, and lack of sleep. It would be so relieving to believe that was true.

Not only would that ascribe meaning and predictability to seizures that come with the random logic of death, but it would mean that my general incompetence in life could be graphed by the nights I haven't slept well.

If my seizures are the source of a special, above average incompetence, and my seizures are caused by night worries, or the seasons, or sine waves, or light bulbs, or octopus dreams, then I could have some sort of confidence.

And yet, there seems to be something to what they are saying.

xxx

Joey had a small truck. He had a radio. He had a cousin named Seth, whom he loved. Seth had a sister named Morgan. Morgan was my future wife.

Joey and Seth were driving south down Virginia State Route 288, otherwise known as World War II Veterans Memorial Highway.

The air conditioner didn't work that well in the car. Joey cracked the windows slightly. It caused a great deal of noise in the car. His dirty blonde hair moved just slightly in the wind. He kept talking, grinning at Seth, who was laughing, drinking a bottle of orange offbrand soda. Joey turned up the radio several times.

The cops say they were speeding, according to the marks on the highway.

Joey looked over at Seth, and reached down to adjust the radio. While he was looking down, the car ran off the road, on the left side. Joey realized his mistake immediately, and gripped the wheel, swinging it just slightly to the right, clenching his jaw.

The right wheel caught on the ground.

The truck launched sideways into the air, and contacted the ground between seven and ten times on different corners.

Joey saw it in disaster-slow time. Things were flying around in the car, losing their familiarity with great acceleration. During the third contact, he said he thought Seth's seatbelt might have come undone.

He lost consciousness for a brief time. He woke up upside down, and immediately realized that Seth was not in the car. That's how he knew that time had passed. He hung upside down for a second, and then unbuckled his seat belt. He smashed into the destroyed ceiling of the car.

He tore the inside of the vehicle apart, thinking Seth might be somewhere inside. Seth was a small kid.

He broke through one of the windows and crawled out of the car. Seth was lying, near the drivers door, in front of the car.

When the police came, Joey was holding Seth. They cleaned Joey off, strapped Seth to a gurney, and took Joey to the Police Department, and Seth to the hospital where Seth died thirteen hours later.

They charged Joey with involuntary manslaughter. Seth's parents refused to press the charge.

For a week, the house was wrapped in mourning. Nothing moved in the entire world. Just people bringing food to the house, and people coming in and going out. I stood by the door. Then I stood by Morgan's bed, while she cleaned dishes in the kitchen. I thought she was going to go insane. She never cried the first few days. Then she began singing, deep in her throat, a kind of warble.

xxx

I was standing in my dorm room when it began to snow. It had been years since I saw it happen. The flakes brought a smell of escape, like crystal magical doors, each one a different option. I ran outside, yelling to my room mate that it was snowing.

Stephen, my room mate, had lived in the mountains of Virginia too long to be excited in any way.

I ran into the trees on the lawn, and tilted my head upwards. My parents had just driven off in the cold blue jeep. They weren't ready to let me keep it at Bridgewater, even though there was no freshmen restriction against vehicles. I was a deeply incompetent driver.

It didn't matter to me, I understood. Plus Stephen had an '80 tan Volvo that wouldn't get out of third gear until it was well heated. It was glorious.

I breathed in. Then again. The last week of sleeping in my girlfriend's hallway for brief half hour stints, before going back on suicide watch faded in my heart. Morgan's weird singing vanished, torn by stiff wind across the campus. I looked across the mall, at the senior's dorms, and sprinted off as fast as I could, trying not to spread my arms.

By the time I made it back, a lot slower, I was sobbing.

xxx

Seth had a giant shirt on, went well past his waist. It had a woman with a straw in a bottle of perfume, drinking. It had the word Maraschino on it. It was a really strange shirt, but it was my favorite of the collection of odd, extra large shirts that he owned.

He was walking up the stairs, and I was walking down them. He had a sly smile on his face, weirdly echoed in a picture of him that was on the wall behind him.

"Cha doing tonight?" I said.

"Your hair is awesome, I mean, it's amazing," he said near the bottom of the steps.

Two days before, I had Morgan give me a shorty Mohawk. I had dyed my hair dark brown, so it would be like Deniro in Taxi Driver.

"Yeah man, turned out pretty good. Too bad my head's so misshapen," I said. My scalp was actually a marvel of geometry, except for the part under the remaining hair, part of what convinced me to do it. I have a large bump on the back of my head at the point that that spine meets the skull. "So whatcha gonna do?"

"Dunno, gonna go pick something up with Joey," said Seth. He pushed me a little bit, playfully, as he passed me on the steps.

"Weed?" I said, and laughed at him. It might well have been.

"You know I don't do that. Too young," Seth said.

"Can't you drive yet?" Seth was only fifteen.

"Not without one of you old folks. Or my parents, and I don't think I'm gonna ask them or anything. Plus Joey's good," Seth said, and laughed.

"That he is," I said. Joey had been driving since he was about 10, and was proud of his expertise. Made a point to teach anyone within earshot how you were supposed to do it.

"Hey, before you go," Seth said, standing right next to me. He suddenly wrapped his arms around me. I twitched. "You know, I love you like a brother. Hope you marry the bitch," he said the last part loudly, ensuring that Morgan would hear. He walked off into the kitchen, laughing.

xxx

I knew it was going to take a long time to find the ring. I also knew that she was going to say yes. She seemed all right to me sometimes. She seemed to be spinning out of control, her own control, in another way.

It seemed like the right choice, to get engaged with her, even though I knew we'd wait until the end of college to make sure that we were making the right choice one way or another. I didn't want to see her slipping. I thought, foolishly, that I would be able to provide her with the promise of a future stability at the very least. It was the only single move that I could make that would ever make any difference in her life.

I loved her.

xxx

Through all of it, I didn't have a single seizure. It almost bothers me that I didn't during one of the most difficult times of my life. It took me another year before another one happened. What does that mean?

xxx

Morgan's dad was sitting in an old computer chair beside his bed in the bottom floor of his house. The room was dark, and damp, like a cave. I knocked on the wall so that he knew I was there. He was staring at the floor when I came in, and I was surprised to see that his wife was not lying in bed.

"Ron, can I ask you something?" I said, hesitantly.

"Oh, hey, I'm glad you're here, I wanted to ask you something. How are you doing?" He said. He was very warm toward me. He had taken me under his wing, when I was first dating his daughter, and I provided an open ear for what it was worth, as he wended his way through the death of his son.

"I'm really good. The school is going well. How are things here?"

"Josh, I just don't know. There are days I wonder why I'm still... You know? I used to wake up. I used to want to live forever. I thought. I don't know, Josh." He looked up at me. A gray hair fell off his head, and landed in the dust.

"I'm sorry, Ron," I said. I began three sentences, and then just walked over to him.

"How do you think Morgan's doing?" I said.

"Honestly, she seems strong at school. It's hard to tell, you probably know more than me," he said.

I put my hand on his shoulder.

"Well, I had a thought. Ron, may I ask you for your daughter's hand in marriage?"

"I thought you were going to ask me that. There's nobody else in the whole world I'd be more glad to make part of my family, you know that. The only thing I ask is that you wait a while. I'm not sure that right now is the best time."

"That's what I thought too. I wanted to ask you before I started to seriously make plans about this. I wanted to get your blessing. I haven't bought the ring yet, and I was thinking it might take me six months or so to do that. Do you think that would be a good time?"

"I think that would. I just want to make sure. This is a lot for her. This is a lot for both of you."

"Thank you, Ron. I can't tell you," I said, and then I began crying. He stood up and hugged me.

"This isn't going to help her be better. I want you to think about that. But it's also probably the right thing to do. Nothing is going to help us be better. She might be stronger than me. But her wound is different than mine, and I just... I don't know what it's like for her."

"Okay, man," I whispered.

"What did you want to ask me?" I said, after a long silence.

"I can't even remember, Josh," he said. He smiled at me.

xxx

In my mind, we had done a good job of maintaining a second abstinence for a year or so. I reviewed everything I could remember, every detail in my memory, sitting there in the tiny room in the back of the Longwood College clinic.

The florescent room must have been built to stimulate the analytical portions of boyfriends' brains. There were signs on the wall about the dangers of venereal diseases, and getting help for abuse. I calculated the advantages of her obvious pregnancy.

It had taken a long time to convince her to take this step, and the distance between us, of around 300 miles between Bridgewater College and Longwood made it difficult to pressure her to get tested. Her violent morning sickness made her miss classes. She finally gave in to the possibility that she might be pregnant.

The whiteness of the room reminded me of her hand in my pocket at Maymont park. She kept trying to shove her hand in it, where my warm hand was, wrapped around a tear shaped diamond ring. I thought of the chicken salad sandwhiches I packed, spreading a blanket on the snow in mid January. It was bitter cold, but it was our anniversary. We had been dating for two years.

As I pulled those sandwhiches from the bag I packed, knelt in the snow, facing her where she sat on the bench I pulled the ring out of my pocket.

That's when the nurse opened the door. Her face was a stern mask.

"I'm sorry, but your friend is pregnant."

I was elated. We were going home.

xxx

My roommate at Bridgewater listened to me tell him why it was a good thing that we were pregnant. He radiated incredulousness like a kind of fission.

"So you're saying you're happy that she's going to have to move back in with her parents, and start school at a community college? Do you even know how many credits you're going to lose in the transfer, man? Do you understand what you're giving up here?" said Jeremy. His red hair glowed with indignation.

"Yeah, of course I know what's gonna happen, and what I'm giving up. But consider the trade. I'm leaving this college. If I graduated from this college, I'd be very likely to make a lot of money as a writer, or a journalist, or something like that. I know that I probably won't be able to do that now. But this brings us together. I'm trading this for her."

"True, Josh. But it's like you're taking her hostage in a way."

"No, no, no, man. She wants to do this too, right?" I said. I stood up in the dorm room, walked over to the window, and began thumbing tobacco into a ridiculous pipe.

"Stockholm syndrome of a kind then," said Jeremy, "and even in these circumstances, you can't smoke that in my room. I can't believe that you're not going to be here next semester. Does that mean I'm going to have to drive to Richmond next week with a tux?"

"Okay, I know how hard this is going to be. I know I'm going to have to work really hard, probably get a job as soon as this semester's done, probably work all through college. I know I'm going to have to figure out how the hell to be a dad. I know this is like the worst possible time for Morgan for this to happen, especially because she's so sick. But isn't it some kind of coincidence, or something more, that he's going to be born almost exactly a year after Seth died?"

"Oh, now wait. I don't even know how to respond to that, Josh. I'm glad you're saying this bullcrap to me instead of to someone else. Let me suggest that you not say that to any of her family. I'm sure the idea will come to one of them, but... My God," Jeremy paused.

I turned around.

"What do you think God wants you to do?" he asked.

I stood in the doorway, shoving my meal pass into my pocket, staring back in.

"I think God wants me to take responsibility for the choices I've made," I said, and set my jaw. A couple of kids ran down the hall behind me, like elephants. They were wearing Natural Ice boxes on their heads.

"You should write Hallmark cards."

The slightest smile registered at the corner of my thin set lips.

"Oh!" Jeremy said, and slapped his forehead, as if to smash an annoying idea there. "I've just got one. We should totally take one last trip to Reddish."

Reddish Knob is a small mountain, popular with the college students of western Virginia. There is a parking lot at the top with a clear 360 degree view. My roomate and I, along with some friends had been out there a few times.

"That's a great idea. Who's car? Think we can make it up there this time of year? I hear it stays icy for a long time after winter. We can hash this out some more up there. Let's go tonight."

"On it," Jeremy swiveled back to his computer, and began rapidly typing into instant messenger.

We were going to spend the night out there, and even though it was April, Reddish Knob was essentially an Alpine climate. Jeremy couldn't scrape up anyone to come with us, unprepared as we were.

We packed a few sleeping bags in the car, no food, no tent, and a few bottles of water, along with our pipes and plenty of tobacco for intended all night conversation.

Of course, the gates were closed to the road that ascended to the peak. Jeremy was driving, so I hopped out of shotgun, and ran to the gate. It wasn't locked, but it wasn't oiled either, and it squeaked like a dying heron, as it swung open.

"Loud. Sure someone's gonna come stop us."

"Not likely, I'll bet at least one other car has driven up here today. Plus, the road's not frozen, at least this far down," said Jeremy.

I buckled my seatbelt anyway. Nobody spoke for a while, letting the unease of the dark, heavy forest fill up the Taurus we were driving like a candle wax in a tin canteen.

We hadn't made a full curve around the mountain before we ran onto the ice. There was only a long patch at first, broken up. Then, we ran over another ridge of ice that sheathed the road beyond the next curve.

"Oh, crap, I knew this was going to happen," said Jeremy. "Think we should turn around?"

"I dunno, maybe the car will make it. Maybe it stops up ahead," I said, but I was nervous.

"The tires are already slipping," he said, "feel that?"

The tires made a split second slushing noise, and the front end slid to the left a fraction of an inch. There was no guard rail. There were bare deciduous branches hardly barring a clear view to the valley below.

"Whooo. Let's push it. I mean the peddle. Gun it, and see what happens." I looked over at Jeremy and grinned.

"Man, that's a really bad plan," He said.

"C'mon. Our other choice is to keep slipping till we lose all momentum. And then what?"

"I don't think so, brother, it's my car anyway."

"Dude, this is Shane's car," I said.

"So, it's my responsibility or something right now." Then, he clenched his jaw, and pressed the accelerator.

The engine woke up under the hood, and went zero to 100 in 2.4 nanoseconds, bouncing a roar against the cold mountainside and out into the valley. He held it down. The car lurched for a second, slipped, and began rolling forward as he let it off. Then it slid backwards.

He jammed the breaks, and then alternated with the gas.

It continued a slow backwards slide, regardless of the speed of the tires. We were clearly in god's hands.

"Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck," I muttered.

"You sound like a chicken. Get out of the car right now!" Jeremy said, calm at first, then angry.

I jumped out of the car, it seemed to slide faster. It was clearly headed towards the edge, rear end first. I skittered to the back of the car, feeling the cold ice through my shoes. I put my hands on the bumper, yelling at him to roll his window down. But he turned the car off instead. I heard him pull the emergency brakes. I wondered, while I put my shoulder against the car, whether any large four wheel drive trucks were going to come from above, and smash into the car, while I was uselessly pushing against the back.

My feet slid in perfect tandem with the car when I put any muscle into it. The car was nearing the edge of the road, maybe a foot to the edge of the cliff. I wondered what it would look like, crashing through the trees.

I slammed my hand flat against the hood, and heard the door open.

"What? What? Stop the car man! Push harder, get on your knees, make some friction!"

"Your steering is worse than useless, get your ass back here."

He thought about it for an interminable second, and then decided I was right. His feet hit the ice, and followed shortly by his ass.

I didn't even laugh. We were nearing the curve behind us. It looked like the only reason the car wouldn't slip off the side, was because it would slip off the curve behind us. The tires crossed over the road. There was no ice in the dirt and weeds on the narrow shoulder. Jeremy and I both got traction with our feet. The car slowed a bit, but we were being pushed back nontheless.

"Think we can stop this thing?" He yelled.

"Naw man, it's going over," I said. I laughed a pathetic short 'Ha!'

The back end was sliding on the remnants of last year's grass. Slower, but not slow enough. One of my feet slipped over the edge, and then my other, at a forty degree slope. I was glad that there was some slope, but now my head was at bumper level.

Then the car stopped at a crazy angle, both front tires still on the ice. The front end slid all the way down in a big arc towards the side of the road. I watched the back tires tear up the earth on the shoulder. My heart was pounding.

Finally, all motion stopped. The car was not near the edge at all. It was nearly pointed in the direction we needed to go.

Jeremy stood up and brushed off his stained jeans. "So we go?" he asked. His face was serious for a second. He laughed.

"Yeah, that's a good idea."

xxx

It was nearly midnight by the time we got back to the dorm. We left the scanty supplies in the car.

That night I woke up, falling. I was sliding through murky black, mottled with moonlight. I fell for distended seconds, traveling through a space slowed by gravity. I smashed into something. It sent me spinning. Suddenly, I smashed into a well bottom.

I woke up. I couldn't see where I was. Nothing was familiar. Under a long low cave, an octopus opened it's beak. I could barely make it out in the inky black. There was a smell of strawberry frosted pop tarts.

I woke up in a blinding alien light. After a moment, I realized it was the sun, but it was just coming up, right through the fan in the window, into my eyes. I got up, and tried to hoist myself back into the top bunk. An angry pain shot through my hips, and I collapsed on the floor.

The second time I got back up, and with the help of the ladder, and a sturdy wooden end table, I managed to make it back into my cold bed.

I woke up an hour or so later. I leaned over the side of the bed, wondering whether Jeremy had had any strange dreams in the night. He wasn't in the bed. I looked over at the door, and it was open. That meant he'd be back momentarily.

When he burst through the door, he was wearing a tennis hat, that had the word lifeguard emblazoned across the white fabric.

"Hey, you have any strange dreams last night?"

"Are you all right man?" He said. He wouldn't look at me. I got the creeps in a wave, reading his odd body language. A combination of embarrassment, and fear.

"Yeah, why? I had some pretty weird dreams last night."

"Oh, really?" He said, and sat down at his computer, with his back to me.

"Did something happen last night? Why are you acting weird?"

"You tell me," he said. The fan chopped in the window. He pressed a key on the computer, and it made a small plinking noise.

"I don't know, man. I just had a dream that I was falling."

"I think you actually fell off your bed last night," Jeremy said.

"Well, why didn't you help me up."

"I don't. I mean, I thought something weird was happening."

"What? That would be why you would have helped me, because you thought something weird was happening."

"Well, you were laying in the bed above me, you fell asleep very fast, while we were talking. Then not too long after that, after I started to go to sleep, I heard you breathing hard, very funny."

"Yeah?"

"And then, you started, um, shaking the bed. Like rhythmically."

"Well, what the he- Oh! Ha!" I thought about it for a second, walking over to the closet, pulling on some jeans.

"Yeah, I wasn't sure what you were doing. I didn't really want to interrupt or anything. And then you sort of fell on the floor. Are you okay?"

"I think I might have had a seizure."

"Oh, really? Holy crap man. Has that ever happened to you before?"

"Yeah, but it was a long time ago, and... I thought. I don't know. You didn't see me did you?" I asked. Suddenly I was very interested.

If it was the case that I had a seizure that meant that I was epileptic. It occurred to me that I should attempt to convince him that it was not a seizure. And anyway how could I have a dream about a seizure?

As I tried to button up my jeans, I brushed my hand against my hip and nearly collapsed to the floor. It felt like I had broken it.

"So I just fell from the bed?"

"I think so, yeah, but I was almost asleep, and it was really dark. Look, I gotta go to class, but I'll talk to you later."

"Okay, but do you think I hit something on the way down?"

"Actually, yeah," Jeremy said. "It sounding like you landed on top of the table and then fell on the floor."

"What? How the heck would I have done that?" The table was located at the far bottom right corner of the bunk bed. I would have had to crawl over the end of the bunk, not just over the side to have hit it, but it was certainly possible. My hip was certainly bruised from something.

Jeremy was up and out of the door. He never spoke to me about it again. He glanced at me when he was closing the door mortified.

I sat in the room through my first period class.

I had stopped taking my medicine almost entirely. I had begun to believe that the MRI and EEG had indicated epilepsy incorrectly over the past year, since I had not had more seizures.

I hated the medicine because I had enough difficulty keeping things straight in my head without lowering my cognitive ability. I had never gotten into the habit of taking it twice a day.

I got up from the two seat tweed couch, and looked in my bed. The covers were shoved to the bottom, crushed between the wooden railing and the mattress. It would have taken a huge effort to shove all the covers into so tight a space.

Then I walked out the door to the room, down the hall, and towards my next class. As I was hobbling across the mall, the sun burned down on my neck, and a bird flew by, one of the first of the year.