Unquiet Dreams
The doors along the corridor at the sleep clinic were all closed as Andrea walked slowly from the elevators at one end to the monitoring station at the other. It was dim and she felt the merest breath on the back of her neck, just a touch, gentle as a cobweb. Leon sat straight ahead behind the glass-partitioned monitoring station. He turned his head and smiled at her. But little by little, his smile disappeared, and then his head disappeared. His hands continued to tap on the keyboard, and Andrea could see the light shifting as it reflected off his screen. It was, no doubt, the images ganging up: the glass partition and the screens of the monitors, all reflecting different angles of light.
She heard rustling and glanced away from Leon and then back again. He was solid now and had a slight frown on his face.
The door to the monitoring station was always closed, in case a patient became violent. She opened it and he said, “Are you all right? I saw you hesitate.”
“I’m all right,” she said automatically. Then, as he continued to look at her, she said, “I heard a sound in the hallway.”
His eyes flicked back to the monitors. “No one’s gotten up. They’re either asleep or reading. That’s 3A, reading a novel. What did you hear?”
“Breathing,” she said. “Probably just my own breaths.”
He shrugged and went back to making notes about oxygen levels. “Fresh coffee,” he said. “If you’re interested.”
*
Her next shift started with a client who was having trouble adjusting to the electrodes they attached to each patient. She claimed they made her itch. She said she had no allergies. She said she thought she had glimpsed someone standing in her room, in the dark, over in the corner. Andrea carefully walked over to the corner, looked, turned around, and said she saw nothing.
She used a different gel and reset the electrodes. As she walked down the hallway afterwards, she felt a kind of electric shiver. Not much, just as if she’d held something with a faulty wire. It spread from her hands to her arms, all along her skin and up to her face. She raised her hand to touch her face. It felt, for a moment, like there was another face there, in the way, but then the sensation drew off, releasing her face, her neck, her arms, her hands, her fingers. She had felt that before, that sensation of having two bodies. Was there a name for it? A sleep double, perhaps? But she was awake.
She turned in to the break room, lay down for a while and closed her eyes until her face felt like one face again, until the tingling stopped and she relaxed.
“Wake up,” Leon said, shaking her shoulder gently. “Wow, you were out.”
She sat up slowly. “Just closed my eyes,” she said. “Just for a second.” She blinked and stared dully around her.
“Don’t panic. Everyone needs a shut-eye every so often. You were on a break, anyway, and what you do during your break is always legal. That’s what I think, anyhow, sue me if I’m wrong.” He yawned. “I was thinking of a break myself. Okay?” He turned the lights on.
“Okay,” she said. When Leon went to the break room, he always turned the lights on. She had already noticed that about him.
*
Leon liked to tell stories about the clinic. He’d been around close to five years; she’d been there a few months.
“Right before I started here, there was a patient who suspected he walked in his sleep, but wasn’t sure. He kept finding things in the refrigerator. His wallet, his keys, his toothbrush. And yes, it turns out he did walk in his sleep. While he was here, he would go into the other rooms and take things sometimes. Once he crawled into bed with a patient, a guy with sleep paralysis. Our sleepwalker woke up, thought he was in his own bed, and found this other guy next to him and started beating him up. He was disoriented. Unfortunately, he was also very strong. The sleep paralysis guy stopped breathing. There was only one person on shift then, and he got fired. After that, they upped it to two per shift and then I was hired.”
“That’s awful,” she said. “What happened to the sleepwalker?”
He shook his head. “It was ruled an accident and most of the blame was on the clinic.”
“Terrible.”
“They banned sleepwalkers here, for one thing,” he said, agreeing. “Otherwise it might have been a question of whether anyone would want to work here, if someone could go around killing people in their sleep. Gave me the willies for a while. Always afraid someone who looked asleep was actually dead. I don’t really know what’s worse—sleepwalking or that sleep paralysis thing. You know, where you know you’re dreaming and something bad is happening but you can’t wake yourself up. Imagine what it felt like to that guy with it. I mean, he has this terrible problem where he can’t wake up from a dream where maybe he’s about to die and then he wakes up to find he’s being beaten to death. If he did wake up. It might have all happened while he was dreaming. He wouldn’t know the difference.” He raised his eyebrows.
But despite this, it was usually pretty boring. Putting on and taking off the electrodes that monitored their heart rates, oxygen level, twitches and groans; checking the charts. Unhooking patients to escort them to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Getting another pillow, another glass of water. Telling them where they were if they woke up confused. She kept her voice low, slipping into that half-world where the patients lingered, watching their eyelids twitch as they wandered back into sleep.
Leon never mentioned the breaths and whispers in the hallways. Maybe he didn’t hear them; maybe he disliked them. She, however, loved that hallway and all its rustlings. She loved the nighttime and she loved the world of sleep. Softness, allure, that little doorway between her world and another. There were always shapes in the hall, and the sound of footsteps. The brain, she had once been told, made up stories while in a foggy state. If so, she liked this borderline world, this strange watery existence, looking through it to Leon down at the end of the corridor. The darkness around him often shifted, like waves, with insubstantial Leon trading places with the substantial one.
She went about her duties, going to check on a patient who was gasping for air out of anxiety, but she was indifferent to this patient, still feeling called to the corridor, with its soft texture and its pleasant murmurings. For all she knew, she could be dreaming the patients’ dreams for them, and they could be dreaming hers. Did what they were dreaming affect her? She asked Leon about that, just to find out what he thought, and he told her about a patient who came to the lab because he couldn’t dream. “We need to dream,” Leon said. “He couldn’t, which meant his brain never relaxed. Not the technical term, I know, but he was haggard and all eaten up. His face had heavy lines, his eyes were shrouded by his lids. He was only 40 but he looked over 90. Stooped. Shaky hands. And you know, we put him on the monitors and it was true, he never dreamed. He slept, we saw that, but no REM patterns. He died a month later. No one could make him dream, and so he died.”
A patient called out in her sleep while Andrea walked the hallway, and she felt it again, a hand on her shoulder, a face next to her face. She stopped only for a second, forcing herself to go on to the anxious patient, clicking open her door, sliding in beside her in bed, whispering to her, telling her she was in a sleep clinic, it was all right, nothing was wrong, but it was a lie of course, she was here because something was always wrong.
*
The daytime world had sharp, pushy edges. At night, everything had comforting, plastic edges, floating together in a soup, in a river, in a garden. She liked walking up and down the corridors knowing that people were sleeping in each room (most of them, anyway), that silence was expected, that her tasks were routine and quickly done, that Leon kept to himself, pretty much. And besides, there was always something in the darkness near her; that was really why she loved the job. She loved what rustled, shivered, waited in the hall.
*
“Room 4 is calling out,” Leon said. “See what it is, will you? I’m watching a patient on the monitor, can’t tell if it’s just an aberration.”
She stepped outside the office and she could hear the cries, even through the patient’s closed door. She walked slowly, her eyes sweeping the corridor, her feet treading lightly. She was not alone in the hallway. “Not yet,” she said quietly. “But soon. I promise. Soon.”
The cries reached a crescendo, and she began to hasten. Leon tapped on the window. “Hurry!” he urged her, his voice small through the glass. “Hurry!”
The patient was sitting upright in bed by the time she reached him. He had turned on the lamp. She turned on the overhead light as well. “There was something in here,” he said. “I felt a hand on my throat. It was pressing down, getting heavier.”
“It wasn’t real,” she said gently. “A lot of people experience that. You’ve moved out of REM but your body hasn’t, so your mind thinks you’re still dreaming. You become aware of things but you can’t interact with them.”
“It wasn’t a thing,” he said bitterly.
“You’re here for sleep paralysis?” she asked. She knew there was one here this night, but she had lost track of which room.
“Apnea,” he said. “My doctor wanted me tested for apnea.”
“Oh. Well. Has this happened before?”
“Never.” He let out a huge breath of air.
“It has to other people,” she said. “It’s a known phenomenon. In all societies. Sometimes they call it a sleep witch or night hag because of the sensation of a body pressing down on you.”
He shook his head. “Hands. On my neck.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll make a note of it. I just want you to remember that we’re monitoring you. We’ve got a camera and an intercom. If you need anything, just call out and we’ll be here right away.”
He glared at her. “That was a long time for ‘right away.’”
“I’m sure it just seemed long. Stay up until you feel comfortable, but I can tell you that it very rarely happens twice in the same night.”
She left him sitting upright, his eyes darting, and returned to Leon.
*
“You sleep with your eyes open,” she told Leon one night. It had suddenly occurred to her, after all those nights with him sitting at the end of the hall, overseeing her walks, the shadows in the hall.
One side of his mouth stretched up a little. “I do,” he said. “My terrible secret.”
“Do images burn themselves on your retina? Because you don’t close your eyes? Or do you blink while you sleep?”
“I blink,” he said. “It’s an automatic thing.”
“Do you dream like everyone else when you sleep with your eyes open?”
“I do.”
“Are your dreams the same when your eyes are closed?”
“Dreams are like snowflakes,” he said. “No two are the same.”
“I hear that isn’t true, about the snowflakes,” she answered. “I hear that was a mistake.”
Her raised his eyebrows.
“A great many things are not what you’ve been told,” she said. “Maybe all of them.”
*
One patient was afraid to sleep because he always dreamed that he died—falling from great heights, drowning in a shipwreck, being crushed by a truck. How many times could he die? he asked. Why was this happening? What had he done? Was he about to really die, was his mind preparing him for it? Leon told him there was no correlation. He could live to be 100. “And die every night?” the patient asked, his voice strangled. He dreamed of being strangled, too. When he dreamed of fires, his eyes watered. When he dreamed of falling out of an airplane, his voice whistled like the air.
*
She wondered about Leon: did he feel cloaked by darkness, as she did? What drew him to this place? Something did.
She liked preparing the patients for sleep; she liked watching over them. She felt she was in her realm; she was home. What about him? Was it home for him?
Occasionally her hand brushed up against a thing both soft and yielding, and sometimes a hand brushed up against hers, also soft and yielding. She had to keep herself from singing when it happened.
*
Although it was forbidden, she sometimes climbed into bed with the patients, always after 4 a.m., when sleep cycles were deepest and when Leon’s staring convinced her he was asleep. She would enter quietly and slowly, stand for a moment, listening to breathing and occasional murmurs. She would creep up to the bed, pause, then sit on the very edge, pause, then put her full weight on the bed, slide around and lift her legs up and lie beside him. After a few more minutes, she would spoon him. The lights were out, and of course she knew exactly how to get around the cameras in the room. She would eventually lay astride him, arms out, matching her breaths to his, inhaling as he inhaled. She would feel the moment when he noticed, even inside his dreams, that something was on him; she would feel that first tensing, subtle, shimmering and small, and then she would slip off him, sliding silently to the door. If he called out, she would open the door and say she had just arrived. The light from the hallway confused him; he believed her.
“You never married and had kids?” she asked Leon one night.
He shrugged. His body seemed particularly heavy that night, hunched next to the monitors. “Got married once and didn’t really like it that much. Never seemed to be exactly what I thought it would be.”
“Someone spoiled you for marriage,” she said, grinning. “I can tell that right off. You were in love once, weren’t you? It drove you crazy.”
“I hate when people make things up about me.”
“Oh, don’t say that. What’s life but stories? Look at where we work. People come in with their broken stories and all we try to do is get them working again.”
“What broken stories?”
“Why can’t they sleep? Why can’t they dream? What happened to them in the dark?”
His jaw dropped open, then he clamped it shut. “They just have trouble sleeping,” he said gruffly.
*
A patient was screaming. Andrea moved to him swiftly, turned the light on, spoke gently to him until he fell asleep again. She waited until his eyelids trembled, then went back to Leon and told him about it. He sat at the end of the hallway like an oracle. He rarely made the rounds.
He nodded as he often did, looking grave beyond his years. “In some societies, the tribe gathers in the morning to discuss their dreams,” Leon said. “If anyone had a nightmare, they would consider all the possible ways that the nightmare could be defeated.” He gave a soft chuckle. “It works, apparently. Defenses against the armies of the night.”
“Seems a shame,” she said absently. She was thinking of something else.
He studied her. “Ah. You consider it from the nightmare’s point of view. You want the nightmare to win?”
He took a long time to laugh.
*
Leon lowered the lights gradually as Andrea walked the corridor along with the shadows. This was the point—early night, after the patients all went to their beds and some lay there, eyes open, waiting to get tired enough to sleep—it was at this point that she felt most at home with her life. She waited, along with those shapes gathering around her, for everything to grow quiet, for the breath of sleepers to creep out into the hallway, as she always felt it did. She would stop and listen, hearing the faintest sounds. The sounds of breaths behind her, not the patients on the other sides of the doors, but an inhale, an exhale, occasionally a sigh.
*
“Have you ever wondered what happens to the children?” she asked. It was a quiet night. Leon tapped his fingers on the desk every so often; she thought he might be trying to stay awake.
“What children?”
“The story is that these succubi—these night hags—can steal the sperm of the man they lay on. If they do that, you can assume they have children, half-hag children. Wouldn’t that make sense?”
It took him a moment to answer. “Never thought about it.”
“Well, of course,” she continued, “there are incubi as well—men-hags who lay on top of women. Traditionalists,” she added, smiling. “Romantic, forbidden love. Don’t you think so?”
“They’re just stories. You’re being silly.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “I’m just thinking out loud.” She let some moments pass, then asked, “Have you ever felt it, that sleep paralysis thing? Aware you’re asleep, and afraid, unable to wake up? You think you’ll never wake up.”
He wet his lips. “I have. Yes. Not lately, though. For a while, when I first started here. The power of suggestion, maybe. I was asleep and I knew it was time to wake up, that my break was over, but I couldn’t. There was a weight on me. The typical sensation. People often feel a weight on them.”
“Like a body,” she said quietly. “People panic.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t feel any danger. It felt like a cat sleeping on my chest, a soft weight. I knew what it was, so I told myself to wait. Just wait.”
“A soft weight? Sounds like something I’d like,” she said.
He looked at her for a long pause. “You’re starting to creep me out.”
She allowed that statement to hang in the air. “What do you think it is?” she finally asked. “It’s kind of universal. Every culture has a story about it. Demons, mostly, coming to steal something.”
He was more comfortable talking about it in the abstract. “It explains nocturnal emissions. Also pregnancies without marriage,” he said. “You always need someone to blame when something’s a sin.”
“Of course, it could be true, though,” she murmured. “Hence, universal.”
“Demons? Coming along at night and what, laying on us?”
She smiled faintly. “They see an opportunity. What if they fall in love with us? No one ever says that, I don’t think.”
He stared at her, unblinking. Maybe he’s asleep again, she thought. Maybe this is why.
*
“Get off!” Leon yelled, and he yanked her up to a sitting position.
“No!” she cried. “Leave me alone.” She sat up and slapped him, hard. He was surprised and took a step back.
“Get out of here,” she hissed.
He wavered. “What are you doing? Is he all right?” he motioned to the patient, who remained asleep even in all this noise.
“He’s all right. He looked like he was going to fall out of bed, so I crawled in to pull him back.” She got out of the bed and followed Leon into the corridor. The patient was still asleep.
“What is it with you?” he asked harshly. “You know there are cameras. You know I can see you. Are you doing this for me—some kind of weird performance for me? What is that, voyeurism?”
“You can check the tape,” she said. “Check the tape and you’ll see I was right. Did you want him to fall out of bed? Have someone else get injured on your shift?”
He was startled.
“I know you were here when that man died. Your first night on the job. There were two of you, not one, and they let you stay because you were new. You were being supervised. The other worker took a break and when he didn’t come back on time, you went to find him. That’s when it happened. I was protecting you right now. You’re the senior worker, you’d be blamed if he hurt himself.”
He pursed his lips. He looked back and forth from her to the door. “What will I see on the tape?” he asked finally.
“You’ll see him on the edge of the bed and you’ll see me climb in and grab him.”
“There’s something about you,” he said slowly. “I can’t place my finger on it.”
“There’s nothing about me. I was looking out for you.” She crossed her arms and held his gaze. “I like you,” she said. “You’re one of the ones I like.”
He frowned, looked away, looked back. “I don’t get it. Maybe you’re just a little loose. Just don’t do it again.”
*
One night Leon woke up and found himself down the hallway, near the elevators. Andrea was right in front of him. “I think you were sleepwalking, Leon. I called your name and your hand twitched but that was all. Your eyes were open.” She smirked. “But that’s no proof, is it??”
He ran his hand over his face and shook his head. “I’m just tired. I don’t sleep when I get home. I don’t know what it is.”
“Why don’t you take a break?” she asked. “You can sleep leaning up against the wall if you’re afraid to lie down.”
“What a strange thing to say. Why would I be afraid to lie down?”
“I thought maybe because of the whole night-witch thing.”
His eyes looked over her shoulder, down the hall. “No one’s watching the monitors,” he said.
“They’re all asleep, Leon. It’s one of those magical nights when all anyone has to do is close their eyes and they’re dead asleep.”
*
“What are you afraid of?” she asked. “I mean, in general. I don’t like being confined, for instance.”
“Most people don’t,” he said. “Too much like coffins.”
“Yes. Well, that’s me. What about you?”
“I don’t like the dark.”
She laughed. “But you work in the dark. Why did you choose to do overnight shifts?”
He looked at her thickly. “No, there’s always light here. At worst it’s dim and I’m not talking about dim. I mean complete darkness. The darkness behind our eyelids, for instance.”
She nodded. “I see. I get it.” She closed her eyes tentatively and seemed to be testing the darkness.
“We all have things we do that are strange to others,” he said.
“Yes.” They sat companionably together for a few more minutes, until she said, abruptly, “I would have thought you were afraid of sleepwalking, actually. Considering your history. After all, I found you in the hall. Near the elevators. It’s like you were trying to get away.”
*
It was a slow night and Andrea tapped her fingers on the desk, looking lazily beyond the monitors. “Are you afraid something will get you, get behind your eyelids and get you?”
“That’s a terrible thing to say. Creepy as hell. Why would you say a thing like that?” He looked at her, aghast.
She glanced up from entering data in the logs. “I heard once there are things like that. Sippers. They get behind your eyelids and look around. Like rummaging. Seeing if there’s anything they want.”
“I don’t like that kind of talk. You know, there are rules here, codes of conduct.”
“Sorry,” she said and sighed. “I got used to telling stories in the last place I worked. I checked bodies in at the morgue on the overnight shift. Didn’t last long, as jobs go, but everyone dealt with it by telling the worst stories.”
“Huh. Well, all right. I guess I can understand that. Like whistling in the dark or something.”
“That’s a mistake. Don’t whistle; listen. If you whistle you can’t hear what’s coming closer.” And then she grinned.
*
“Where I come from,” she said, “there’s a legend about dream walking. You have to be careful not about your physical body but about your mental one. You could go dream walking and leave your body and someone else could grab it. And you’d be left out there, waiting to come back to a body.”
“A ghost,” he said. “You’re talking about ghosts.”
She nodded. “It explains a lot, doesn’t it? Why they keep lingering, why they won’t move on. They want to get back to their bodies.”
“Where do you come from? I haven’t heard about this.”
“I’m from the Midwest.”
“Where exactly?”
“Sunset, Iowa. We like to say it’s a small town that gets bigger at night.”
His eyebrows rose.
*
Leon woke up in bed, with a start and a gasp. He was in the break room. “Shh,” Andrea said. She was sitting across from him, in one of the two chairs provided for the staff.
“I hated to wake you,” she said. “But it’s time for my break.”
He sat up, one side of his face creased from her shawl, which had been on the cot. He gaped a little, trying to sort things out. “How did I get here?” he asked finally.
“You walked. You said you needed to take a nap.”
“I don’t remember,” he murmured. He got up and stood unsteadily. “Sorry. I’m a little confused.”
“You’re just tired. You need more sleep than you’ve been getting. One day you just won’t be able to fight it, you know.”
He looked at her blearily. “Fight what?”
“Sleep,” she said. “That’s all it is. Sleep.”
*
Leon was looking increasingly haggard. “These dream walkers of yours,” he said. “They steal someone else’s body to do what?”
“Food, sex, running, swimming—anything that the body enjoys. Ecstasy is a thing of the body, not the mind. Music is enjoyed by the body; that may surprise you. It thrills through the blood. Music grabs the blood. I don’t know how else to describe it. And touch. You forget what it feels like to be touched.” She raised her hand and it hovered over Leon’s arm. “If I touched you,” she said quietly, “your skin would respond. Your skin would warm up, the cells would react. The hairs would spring up. You couldn’t resist it, no matter how you felt about it. Your body wants to reach out to the touch.” She let her hand rest briefly, for a second, on his arm.
“Don’t do that,” he said gruffly.
She smiled. “Sorry,” she said. “But it’s so interesting. It’s such an interesting story. When you hear about something that no one else knows, don’t you feel superior? These dream walkers, they know what it’s like to be male and female, black and white, smart and strong; they can steal those bodies. If they come across someone interesting, a man or a woman, they can wait. They can watch. They can take that body.”
“I still don’t understand—the ones who take the bodies? How come they don’t have bodies? It sounds like musical chairs, almost.”
“Incubi and succubi, do they have bodies? They have existence and weight or they couldn’t lie on top of us, but do they have bodies? The world where all these stories are set—it’s a transitional kind of world. It’s a dream kind of world. It’s right on the edge of our own world, but it has its own rules, though I’m not sure we can call them rules. Morals, maybe. They have their own morals.”
He shook his head. “You keep telling stories,” he said. “And to me, they don’t make sense.”
She leaned in close to him. “You’ve never felt it? Late at night, when you’re alone, when it feels like objects are looser, that they can shift, that the clock ticks slower, like it’s waiting—you’ve never felt things slip a little, become unanchored for you? You’ve never felt a presence in the room, a figure lying on you, hot breath on your neck, maybe a footstep or a heartbeat when no one else is there?” She moved back a little, feigning surprise. “But wait. You’ve felt it. You’ve lain with a succubus. You told me. That time when you couldn’t wake up; when you couldn’t move. That was a night witch weighing you down.”
He held his head steady, his eyes pivoting towards her. “Stop it.”
She straightened up. “All right. I can see I’m making you uneasy. But it happens. It’s not your fault. Where I come from—”
“Sunset, Iowa—”
She smiled. “Where I come from, we say the town gets bigger at night because we can feel these people slipping in from their side, slipping in and filling the space around us. We’re not so brave that we ignore them or think there’s nothing else in the world but us. We allow for an enlargement of life in Sunset, Iowa.”
His lips stretched over his teeth, a forced grin. “You tell quite a story. A bit hard to believe.”
She crossed her arms and leaned against the doorway. “Oh yes,” she said. “Stories. Not believable at all. Thus said the man who’s too afraid to close his eyes while he sleeps.”
*
“Leon,” she said seriously, “I am concerned for you. You look terrible. Why don’t you lie down? I’ll cover for you.”
“I bet.” He held his arms across his chest.
“I mean it, you can trust me. Have I ever let you down?”
He gave a short laugh, a snort. “I’ll sleep when I get home.”
“But you’re so tired,” she insisted. “I don’t know how you stay awake when you’re this tired. You’ll break down if you don’t sleep. And I swear I’ll wake you up in ten minutes, if you want. Just ten minutes—with your eyes open—on your break—what could possibly be the harm? We’re allowed breaks. We’re allowed a dinner hour. You’re totally within your rights.”
“That’s not it,” he said gruffly, looking at her with eyes whose lids had drooped down, both bottom and top. “You’re just so damn strange. There’s something about you that sets off my alarms.”
“Me?” she said and laughed. “What could I do? You’ve got fifty pounds on me and I never learned how to fight. And I’m respectful. Have I ever been disrespectful?”
“That’s not it, though. There’s something about you. There’s the way you sometimes seem to disappear in the hallway.”
“It’s the lighting in here. Sometimes you disappear behind the glass.”
“You’ve never mentioned it.”
“It’s true,” she said earnestly. “You look like you’re drowning.”
He ran an exasperated hand through his hair. “See? It’s things like that that make me feel so . . . off-center.”
*
He was getting more and more ragged. He called in sick, twice, and she was alone in the clinic for the first one, but then they had someone from the weekend staff work Leon’s shift so she wouldn’t be alone. Nothing happened when she was alone. No one died, no one screamed more than usual, but the surveys the patients took after they left said they wouldn’t come back, they felt too uneasy.
She hadn’t known about the surveys until Leon returned and told her. They might replace both of them, to give the clinic a different atmosphere, he said. Or maybe just transfer them to the daytime.
“Everyone’s so touchy-feely,” she said sadly. “I have to practice being touchy-feely.”
“Not on me,” he said quickly.
*
Leon drooped in front of the monitors, slumping in his chair, his eyes open, his mouth open. His shoulders moved with his breaths. Asleep, she knew. She took him gently by the hand, as she had done before, and led him to the break room, where he sighed and lay down in bed. She slid in beside him, watching him for a moment, and then slid on top of him, her hands lifting his shoulders and then slipping under them. She pressed into his chest and his eyes flew up. “It’s time, Leon,” she said. He tried to move, but his efforts were weak. His eyes swung over to the door and then back at her.
He shivered. “You do such crazy things,” he whispered, though his voice was shaky. “I’m calling someone.”
“I’ve taken care of the phone. Don’t worry about the phone. And besides, your body is too heavy to move, isn’t it? It’s weighing you down. I know you can feel it.”
His eyes strained. His mouth opened a little, taking quick short breaths.
“You told me you’ve lain with a night witch, and I think you miss her. I know you miss her. It’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Working in the night. Looking for the one you lost. But it’s a complicated thought for you. You want it and you don’t. You miss her and you don’t.”
He groaned, unable to push her off. Then he sighed and settled back.
“There’s nothing to fear,” she whispered into his ears. “You just let go and then you won’t be afraid again.”
She nestled her head next to his. “Your eyes must be very tired, Leon,” she said softly. “Your eyes must want to close. It’s impressive, how much you’ve fought it,” she said. “I couldn’t do it. My eyes would be so tired.” Her voice was loving and gentle. “I would feel my lids get so heavy. Drooping, begging to rest. Sleep and rest. What happens when you sleep? You dream. You dream of someone to love you, someone to press their arms against your skin. Is that bad? To dream?” She turned her head and kissed him gently on the neck, just a quick feathery tap. He flinched.
She pressed all her weight on him. “Let go,” she said. “Can you feel that beautiful slide, that slip, that fall into sleep? Can you feel it coming to you, whispering how good it will be to let go?” She could feel him relax a little, fall a little. “There’s a dream coming towards you; it’s the dream you love, open your arms, your heart, it’s so rare to feel this way. Do you feel it?”
His head dropped forward, his body relaxed, and she could feel the twitch that signaled his move towards a dream and at that moment she sucked in his air as he breathed out; she blew her own air back into him. He had her breath in his lungs now, she had his. Their chests rose and fell, rose and fell, and down the hallway someone called out, but neither she nor Leon listened. “Let me in,” she told him gently, and after a while, he did.