Jack Ketchum - Sleep Disorder

Finally Annie bought earplugs too.

And every morning he'd wake up angry. Because he knew what he'd done the night before. There were nights he even woke himself — it was that loud.

Snoring. Like an old man. Like an old sick man who was failing, losing control. He was starting to look lousy mornings too. Tired. Slack. There was too much hair coming out on his comb.

Next I'll be wetting the bed , he thought.

It didn't work out that way exactly.

Next he woke on the street in front of his apartment in pyjamas and a raincoat, and he was kicking some old man's poodle and the poodle was trying to bite him through the pyjama bottoms and doing a pretty good job of it and the old man was shouting.

He went to work with a tic in his upper lip that just wouldn't quit. His eyes red-rimmed and swollen.

And next morning woke up with his hands around Annie's throat.

Squeezing.

It was a bright sunny morning, breeze wafting through his twenty-third-floor window, everything perfectly normal except that he was on top of her, choking her, so far into it she was already way beyond screaming. His eyes flashed open and he felt her fingernails claw his cheek, looked down into a face already turning blue with the tongue like brown meat, protruding like a fat, wriggling slug and heard himself bellowing, roaring, glanced up into the dresser mirror across from their bed and saw another face that was not any face he knew exactly red-eyed and gloating over her, gloating over his kill-to-be.

Then the phone rang.

He let go.

And for a moment just stared down at her shocked disbelieving eyes while she tried to fill her lungs again, her right hand fluttering to the deep red imprints on her neck.

He rolled off and answered it.

His voice sounded thick, strange, bubbling up through a film of mucus.

"Hello?"

"It's final," said Laura, icy calm on the other end. "As of Friday. They'll be serving you the papers. You're a free man. I just wanted you to know."

"How much."

"What?"

"What's it costing me?"

She sighed. "You really are slime, you know that? Are you at all aware that you missed Philip's birthday three days ago?"

"How much."

Click.

Not even a How You Doing , he thought.

Well, he wasn't doing too well anyway.

But then neither was she.

She didn't know it yet but he'd taken out a $500,000 loan six months ago, a second mortgage on the house, neatly forging her name. Now that the divorce was final the house was hers. And according to New York State law so was half the debt. Collection time was going to break her and the kid completely. Surprise, surprise.

Annie was in the bathroom. He could hear the water running. He could hear her coughing. Deep. Lung-coughing.

He looked at himself in the mirror again. Same old face, all right — but there was something gone soft about it, a slight, almost imperceptible jowling effect at the edges of the chin, a puffiness to the cheeks. If you hadn't shaved it every morning for twenty-five years you'd never have noticed. But he did.

He didn't like it.

It scared him.

It had happened overnight.

By the time Annie came out of the bathroom in her robe and slippers he'd started to shake.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't know what the hell…"

"I'm packing," said Annie.

"Come on."

She turned on him, angry.

"Look, I don't know what that was about and I don't want to know. You could have killed me. You're crazy or something. The things you say…”

“What. What do I say?"

She looked at him.

"God, Bill, don't you know?"

"How the hell could I know!"

And then she wouldn't speak to him hardly at all. He tried to convince her to stay, to give him another chance. But she wasn't buying any. "You talk, you snore, you moan, you get up and take a walk…"

"I moan?"

"…and now you try to strangle me. Get some help, Bill. You're falling apart."

And then she slammed the door.

Too bad. Annie wasn't much in the brains department but she wasn't half bad otherwise and he liked her poulet gumbo.

He stayed home from work.

Why not? He could afford to. If you didn't get caught, insider trading was still extremely profitable.

Between financial reports on CNN he got up and checked his mirror. His face still looked rotten but at least it hadn't gotten worse. From what he could see it hadn't changed at all.

The things you say.

The phrase kept haunting him.

So what did he say?

Around four in the afternoon he showered and went out. He took a cab to 47th Street Photo, where a bearded young Hassidic Jew sold him a Realistic Micro-25 Voice-Actuated Microcassette Recorder at half price. He cabbed home. He set it up and taped it to the headboard of his bed. He switched it on.

And fell asleep halfway through Nightline .

His phone rang.

Not his real phone this time but the building's intercom. What time is it? he thought. He got up in the dark and groped his way along the hall to the kitchen and picked up the receiver, aware of how wet his hands felt, sweaty, almost all the way up to the elbow.

"Yes?" And his voice was really wrong again. Like he was coming down with a cold or something. Almost a full octave lower than he was used to.

"You're gonna have to stop the hammering, Mr. Dumont. We're getting complaints down here. I'm sorry."

"Hammering?"

"Yes. I'm sorry."

"That's…yes. That's okay."

He cradled the receiver and switched on the hall light, thinking okay, now we'll see and walked back into the bedroom, switched on the light there too and pressed rewind on the recorder.

And for the first time saw his hands, his forearms.

Covered with blood. Not sweat. Blood. Some of it crusted over already and some of it fresh, especially across the knuckles, and then he looked at the headboard where the tape hissed its way through the recorder and saw the smeared stains, the bruised wood and gouges.

There was no pain. Not even under his long, split, newly manicured fingernails where splinters of wood protruded. He couldn't feel a thing.

He ran to the bathroom and turned on the water. The right hand was worse so he scrubbed it with his left.

The flesh felt soft. Like touching a burn. Like pus rising just beneath the surface.

He looked up into the mirror. The face that peered back at him through swollen eyelids looked bruised and sore. He opened his mouth and saw graying teeth, milk-white pustules lining his gums and palate.

The base of his tongue was black.

And now he was sweating.

He stripped off his pyjama top. The rash looked almost like a gleaming red t-shirt spread all across his back and upper body.

He felt the urge to scream, to run raging through the room smashing things.

What was it? AIDS? Cancer?

How dare this happen to him?

Overnight.

He pulled out a fistful of hair. The scalp was so soft he hardly felt it.

All right, he thought. Control. You're awake now. Take control .

He went to the phone, flipped through the Rolodex until he found his doctor's name and dialed. He told the answering service it was an emergency but that, no, he was not about to go to the hospital thank you very much, just have him call the minute he gets in. And yes, he knew it was four in the morning. I pay him for four in the morning , he said. Just have him call .

Then he turned on the recorder.

Playback.

At first there was only snoring.

Lots of it. Deep, sonorous breathing sounds that repelled him, disgusted him.

And then there were moans — my god! he did moan. As though something or someone in his sleep were squeezing him, hurting him, making him sound old and weak and whiny. It was nearly as bad as the snoring.