Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

“Hannah, you feel all right? You look a little flushed.”

“Tired and understandably anxious. I think I’ve chosen the right time to retire.”

“You think it’s the right time to ‘retire’ this?” He placed a manila folder with the name “Malcolm Teumer” typed in the top right-hand corner on her desk. She assumed William didn’t know that despite her desperate desire, never once inforty-five years had his father and grandfather allowed her access to the “Malcolm/Moses” dossier.

“Your father wouldn’t mind?” Hannah pressed her hands between her chair cushion and thighs so he wouldn’t see them shaking.

“He hasn’t looked at it in years. When you’re done, into the shredder.”

She tried to control the quavering in her voice. “Can you leave it? I want to finish packing first.”

“I’ll be heading home in an hour or so. Bring it by my office before then?”

“Of course. We’ll retire it together.”

Hannah waited until William was safely down the hall. She stood up, a bit dizzy. She steadied herself, circled her desk, closed the door, and sat back down. She shut her eyes and exhaled. She opened her eyes and put on her reading glasses. Finally, she beheld her holy grail. Her breath and pulse quaked as the ghost ship of the no-longer-obliterated past arose.

She relived that final morning: By the time she woke, Malcolm was already out of bed. His pajamas neatly folded on the chair and bathrobe hanging in his closet. She stepped into her slippers and shuffled down the hall to Moses’s bedroom. She smiled at seeing Malcolm leaning over his son’s crib. He tilted his head toward her, his now all-too-common gaze glacial, and announced matter-of-factly, “I was just saying goodbye.” He walked toward her, barely grazing her cheek with a dry kiss. His shoes rat-a-tatted down the steps and he grabbed his coat. “I will see you at dinner.”

She picked up Moses and clutched him to her chest. She yelled after her husband, “Pot roast tonight. Try not to be late.”

Back in her present, she cursed aloud. Late? Maybe better never . Her anger at allowing herself to become spellbound by such a transparent rainmaker had never subsided.

Her hands shook above the pages, as if they were the flickering candles of the Friday night prayer service that she was about to bless. She took a cigarette from the pack on her desk and reached for the “secret” ashtray that she’d already put in the carton on the floor. She lit the cigarette and inhaled. She blew out the smoke. She coughed and put out the cigarette in the ashtray. Her hands and forehead gushed sweat. “Calm yourself, Hannah, calm yourself,” she whispered, and wiped her forehead. From her pocketbook she pulled out a tiny pillbox filled with aspirin and Valium — she swallowed only the tranquilizer. She exhaled and opened the file. Her chest began to tighten. She felt a throbbing in her forearm as she gripped the glass and took another sip of water. She stared down at Laban Lively’s notes. “As a member of the OSS advance cadre, I was among the first men to enter Germany and it is then when I first encountered the man we now call Malcolm Teumer …” The enormous pressure in her chest intensifying, she gasped for air, feeling as if a massive fist had punched her in the jaw. She struggled to reopen the pillbox to take the aspirin. Teetering on the edge of her chair, Hannah collapsed to the floor.

Forty-five minutes later, tired of waiting, William swung by Hannah’s office and knocked on the closed door. “Hannah, I hate to rush you, but I have to get home.” When she didn’t answer, he opened the door. “I know it’s so hard to lea — Hannah!? Oh, my God. Somebody call nine one one!”

Not since he was a brooding teenager had Moses contemplated life without his mother for more than five minutes. Now, five excruciatingly long weeks later, when the thought entered his head, he banished it. The hemorrhage of sadness over her sudden death was suffocating him. One thought, underscored by his daymares, pounded away: That a Faustian bargain had been made and Hannah died so he could live to meet his biological parents. It was irrational, he knew. With whom was this bargain struck? Some god? Some karmic force? A vision of the Virgin Mary on a potato knish? No, we live in the quantum universe, answerable only to the emotionless laws of science. To assign the timing of Hannah’s death an ascertainable logic was to find a grand design where none existed. His mother, finishing her last days of work, had suffered a massive heart attack. Simple as that. Years of smoking, no exercise, a simultaneously aggressive yet bound-up personality, and pernicious heart genes finally caught up with her. Her death had nothing to do with his survival.

When his tears stopped, no sermons could dispel his internal sobbing. His actions in the world of objects and people were those of a man drifting in a somnambulistic trance. On a good day, numbness prevailed. Already emotionally traumatized by Moses’s illness, Jay flailed helplessly to keep their spirits from succumbing. She begged Moses to go out more often with her. Or have their friends over. He refused.

Moses’s social interaction was limited to the Internet. He and Alchemy often e-mailed and IM’d about politics, books, music, and movies, the virtual locker room verbiage common even to nonathletic guys like Moses. Alchemy continually solicited Moses’s views on the national and geopolitical events of the day. Sometimes Moses answered. Sometimes he didn’t. Alchemy let Moses know he’d been elevated to the role of “chief history and current events adviser” alongside the ailing Nathaniel, who had suffered a series of disabling strokes. More intimate and delicate was the subject of Salome, whom Moses made clear he was still not ready to meet. Not infrequently, her “presence,” her madness, rattled through their conversations; they spoke of mood swings, bipolar disease, and the genetic basis of lifelong depression versus the postoperative form, from which both agreed Moses was suffering. One July middle of the night, as Moses surfed sites on psychosis and genetics, he tapped Alchemy’s IM moniker.

MThead23: Talk time? Yay, nay, or way dismayed?

Sctfree1: way dismayed, but still, yay i say. how’re you feeling?

MThead23: More so-so than yay-yay. You know my motto? What doesn’t murder me only makes me more tired.

Sctfree1: astutely mottoed.

MThead23: You just get in from carousing?

Sctfree1: carousing in the nightmare. woke up. sleep deprivation demon now lurking.

MThead23: Lurking here too. What’s worse the nightmares or the insomnia?

Sctfree1: i’m easy or uneasy with either.

Sctfree1: one is fear of sleep. the other is fear of life …

Sctfree1: in one you have no control. the other, you have the illusion of control.

MThead23: Both presume a fear of death. I’m afraid of the fear of the fear of death.

Sctfree1: the only thing we got to fear is fear itself? i fear anyone who buys or sells that can of bullshit.

MThead23: Yeah, with food lines stretched from the Hudson to the Mississippi, that was one good sales pitch. That fear was real and so is my fear of death.

Sctfree1: after what you been thru, damn right. my fear — the void is de void and then the big id panic hits and i get undid by my id.

MThead23: You got any ideas how to handle it?

Sctfree1: feed the id … fuck drink play music. do good works. try to avoid acting like a self-righteous nihilistic hypocrite.

Sctfree1: you?

MThead23: I fantasize about doing some of those things.

Sctfree1: i see this shrink, ben butterworth.