Norman Partridge - Slippin' into Darkness

If only he could get to sleep.

But that Steve Austin could not do. Not that night, and not on the many nights that followed. At first he dragged ass and his mom threatened to take him to the doctor, but he was sure a doctor would pronounce him insane once he discovered that the insomnia was connected to the dream. He would end up in a nut ward at Napa State Hospital, spending his days with the other perverts engaged in a life of round-robin slobbering and one endless circle jerk.

His fears made him more introverted than usual, in the wake of the dream they grew to almost unbearable proportions. The only thing that got him through was thinking of April, and the meadow, and the dog named Homer Price. And imagining that maybe, just maybe, April had actually been there him in the dream.

Junior year passed. Watercolors gave way to pencil sketches, followed in short order by sculpture and portrait work. April’s shirt was dappled with paint and smears of gray clay and Steve knew that charcoal shadows would soon be added to the blend. Once in a while Steve would intercept a probing glance-April’s face without expression but her eyes somehow hungry-and he would wonder if she was mad at him for not sleeping, for not sharing the dream. When she looked at him that way, he was certain that she knew.

April never said anything, but that was what Steve imagined.

And that made it all the harder when he tried to sleep.

Intercepted glances. Steve was good at catching things like that, but he couldn’t figure out what they meant. He couldn’t see them the way other people did, and that bothered him. It made him feel like he really was some kind of machine.

So, ultimately, he fumbled the ball. But he adjusted, at least to the sleep disorder. He read some scientific articles in the library but they didn’t help. And then he ran across a series of stories in a trashy tabloid that detailed the lives of people who didn’t sleep at all and who got along just fine.

His body adjusted. Or, perhaps, he adjusted to his body. He lay in bed each night, thinking about the dream, and April. Or the cheerleading squad, and April. Or art class, and April. But always April, in one way or another. Not really trying to get to sleep anymore. Not in the dream, but still with April.

That was how Steve Austin, teenage cyborg, passed his nights. In careful concentration, while his days faded. And the things he did, and the things he said, became unimportant when measured against that one cherished dream.

But he went on.

Life went on.

Years later, Steve got to know April. He was older and not so afraid anymore, and she wasn’t as imposing as she had once been.

He told her about the dream after their first time together. “It was the weirdest thing,” he said, lying in her arms. “I never forgot it. I’ve thought about it…a lot. I mean, it was so powerful that I thought maybe we’d actually been together somehow. That we shared the dream.”

April only smiled. Over the years, her eyes had lost that special shine. They had come to resemble silver coins that had passed through too many hands. “I had a crush on you in eleventh grade,” she admitted. “Junior year. Remember Mr. Parker’s art class? You were cute, wearing that shirt with your dad’s name stitched above the pocket. Cute and quiet…real quiet. Maybe I had a dream about you. I dreamed about a lot of guys. But you know-good girls, we were never supposed do more than dream.”

Her eyes darkened to a gunpowder gray and her smile became as thin as a fuse. “I wish I could remember my dreams. I wish I could tell you about them, because I know that’s what you want to hear. But I don’t have dreams anymore. I only have nightmares.”

That was all she would tell him that first time. But he didn’t need to hear any more, because he still noticed little things, and sometimes he could even figure out what they meant. April’s bookshelves made an interesting study, for instance. Worn paperbacks on sleep and dreams wedged in with books about psychic phenomenon and ghosts and UFOs.

Months passed before he found the strength to tell April that the dream still seemed real to him, and that life didn’t seem real at all. He didn’t want to hurt her, so he kept that to himself until she pulled it out of him. Even so, he hated himself for telling her. After all, what could someone say if you told them that you had made love to them in a dream when you were seventeen years old, and doing it in that dream was more meaningful than doing it at thirty-something, in real life? How could you say that to a woman without cutting out a piece of her heart?

The whole thing was more than a little crazy, but Steve had decided long ago that he was more than a little crazy. Many years had passed since high school. It seemed forever since he had struggled with a test, or caged beer from a 7-Eleven clerk, or sweated over the numbers posted on a baseball scoreboard. But his mind still worked the same way. He knew that he was still crazy after all these years, if functionally so, and it was just too damn bad you couldn’t get something useful for that, a license plate that would allow you to park in handicapped zones or something.

But April was a little crazy, too, and that made it okay. She had horrible nightmares. Her nightmares, like Steve’s dreams, gave way to insomnia. One of her Johns was a doctor, and he settled his account with downers and uppers and birth control pills and whatever else she wanted.

She shared the sleeping pills with Steve. Most of them didn’t work. One kind, Halcion, did. A little white wonder, that pill. Steve swallowed one for the first time on a December afternoon, and he dreamed his first dream in nineteen years. He dreamed in April Destino’s bed, on a long winter afternoon, locked in April Destino’s arms. It was a drug dream, not a natural dream, but it was real.

He returned to the meadow ringed with black pines, and April. He dreamed away a season of afternoons in the arms of April Louise Destino. The April who lived in a cramped little trailer became his dreamweaver, leading him to the girl he loved with a trail of little white pills, lying with him in a bed with dead springs.

Even through the white Halcion haze, he knew that. Living and breathing, April Destino was there with him, searching for safety in the comfort of his arms.

Asleep.

Searching for his dream. Running from her nightmare.

They were in Shutterbug’s bedroom.

Griz Cody stood before the dresser mirror. He raised his sweatshirt, exposing a startlingly white roll of fat dappled with a red welt that was roughly the same configuration as a beer can. Griz squirted a gob of Sportscreme into one large paw and massaged his jiggling flesh, moaning with pleasure.

Bat Bautista sat on Shutterbug’s bed, twisting his head from side to side, wincing at the little popping sounds made by sore vertebra. “Damn,” he said, “now I’m going to have to go to the chiropractor for sure.”

Leaning against the doorjamb with a beer in one hand, Todd Gould laughed. “Shit, you did okay when Shutterbug hit you in the head. It was the punch to the belly that gave you trouble. That cheeseburger wasn’t any prettier coming up than it was going down. You should try chewing sometime, Bat.”

“Cheeseburger ain’t what did it.” Derwin MacAskill pointed a thick finger at Bat. “You Filipino boys just can’t take it in the belly. Eat too much of that lumpia and shit, all those veggies that look like little worms.”

Bat Bautista only twisted his head in reply, listening to a private chorus of firecracker pops.

And Shutterbug drank it all in, thinking just a little wryly. So, this is what I was missing all those years. This is what it’s like to be one of the boys.