Emily Mitchell - Viral - Stories

Now, when she looks over toward the window, there is a blue glow seeping in beneath the blind. She does not know if she is angrier with her husband for calling her and unsettling her so much or with herself for allowing something as trivial as a phone call to make her come unhinged. She sighs. She looks over at the numbers on the alarm clock on the nightstand. Soon it will be time for her to get up. She might as well go and make some coffee and get ready to start work.

Since counting didn’t work, the next night she tries imagining the sound of ocean waves. This is what it said to do on a website she found called Overcoming Insomnia when she should have been working on her most recent project, a book instructing engineers on the maintenance and repair of machines that shape the steel exteriors of cars and trucks on the assembly lines of the European subsidiaries of American car manufacturers. But she was too tired to concentrate and had drifted into looking online for answers to the question of what to do if you cannot get to sleep.

Imagining the sound of the sea seemed like a good exercise when she read about it, even though she is extremely suspicious of the whole idea that you can “overcome” insomnia, which sounds as if you are supposed to triumph by an act of will, wrestle your sleeplessness into submission, and which evokes intense concentration or brute force or both, when really what she needs is the exact opposite of this: a kind of soft dissolving of herself during which she turns from a person into a cloud of gold dust that hovers shimmering for a minute before dispersing into the dark with a sound like someone blowing out a candle. Insomnia is more like something you have to sneak under or find a hole in the fence of or find a way to flow around than something you can “overcome.” Also, the man who produced the website, Howard Francus, MD, whose smiling photograph appears on many of its pages, has written a book with the same title as his website, Overcoming Insomnia , and the site is really a promotional platform for his book. She can’t help suspecting that the information that Dr. Francus put on the website for free is only the peripheral stuff, the least effective and therefore least valuable insights and techniques he has to offer, because wouldn’t he want to keep the really good stuff, the real secrets, the magic surefire answers to himself so that you had to buy his book? What would be the point of using the website to promote his book if everyone just read the website and was immediately cured and no one needed to pay $24.99 plus shipping and handling to find out how to go to sleep at night?

Nevertheless, in spite of her profound misgivings, lying in the dark, she tries to imagine the sound of the ocean. It has been a long time since she went to the ocean. As a child she used to live near the coast. Now she lives in a city that, although it is on a lake, is very far from the ocean. There are hundreds of miles of dry land in every direction. Before he left, she and her husband had been planning to go to the beach as soon as both of them could find time for a vacation. In fact, she loves the sea, the smell and sounds of it, the way it throws the light back up into the air so that all the objects near the shore, the houses and the people and the trees and the grass bowed over on the dunes, are tossed around inside a storm of light. How she misses the sea! And she and her husband never did get around to going there together because it always seemed like there was some reason to postpone the trip — either they needed to go and see his family or hers or there was some reason why he couldn’t leave work or she had taken on too many projects to go away from home for an extended time — and so they delayed and delayed and sometimes when they were in bed at night and felt close to each other either because they had made love or just because some of the cold distance between them seemed to give way a little, they would talk again about going to the ocean, they would promise to make the time, they would get down the calendar and mark off a week and determine that the next day they would each do what was necessary to ensure that they could go away. But then something would come up and it wouldn’t happen and after a while they stopped talking about it and then they stopped talking about anything at all.

At some point she realizes that she has said to herself that “they” felt close to each other and “they would determine” to finally take the time to spend together, but in fact she doesn’t know whether it was only she who felt these things, the closeness and the renewed goodwill toward their marriage; she supposes that her husband shared these same emotions. But it is just as likely, given what happened later, that he was feeling and thinking something entirely different, although what it was she cannot know. He is a sealed box to her now, his mind and heart entirely opaque, and what is worse she understands that he always was this way; it only seemed that she could see inside him, all the way to the bottom of him as it is possible to see through shallow water at the edge of the sea.

Is she still concentrating on hearing the sound of the ocean, as Dr. Francus suggested? When she tries to call it back, all she can get her mind to produce is the grating sound of different kinds of engines, the hyperactive shrieking of a leaf blower or the nasal buzz of a lawn mower or the slicing, snorting sound of a motorcycle. Now the motorcycles multiply, there are many motorcycles all driving slowly through her head together. They rev their engines. There must be ten or twelve of them at least. She turns on the bedside light and fumbles on the floor for her glasses. The light coming out of the lamp is like a bouquet of knives. Is that too overwrought? How else to describe how piercing it is? It is made of levitating shards of glass. Tomorrow, if she still can’t get to sleep, she will make an appointment to see her doctor and get some sleeping pills. She doesn’t want to do this quite yet. Because what if the phone rings again, late at night, and she is too sound asleep and she misses it? Maybe she will give it just one more night before she gets the medication. Or maybe two.

The following night, she cannot get the idea out of her mind that someone is going to come into the apartment. She cannot picture the person’s features, only his unusual height and bulk, which is masculine in a general way without taking on the concrete features of an individual man. He is not white or black, but he does appear to be wearing her father’s favorite old cardigan, which was gray with round leather buttons and leather patches on the elbows. This is his only distinguishing characteristic. She doesn’t know how he is going to get into her apartment. She has already checked that both doors and all the windows are locked. And yet, every time there is a noise close by, either from out in the street or from somewhere inside the building, she starts, convinced absolutely that it is the footsteps of this man. She can hear him coming down the corridor, approaching the door of her apartment. Now, somehow, he is inside her apartment. He is right outside her bedroom. He waits in the hall outside her door, until she has almost forgotten he is there and then he makes a noise.

She tells herself that there is no man, but the more she tries to convince herself of this, the more clearly she can picture him. His eyes are green and one is slightly higher than the other. His nose is flat and broad at the bottom, so he looks like a figure in a painting by Picasso. He does not appear to have a mouth at all, as though whoever made him forgot to give him one, but rather than being horrifying as you might imagine a person with no mouth to be, this gives him a quizzical kind of expression like he is listening with genuine curiosity, his head tilted slightly to one side.