Emily Mitchell - Viral - Stories

What would she do, she wonders, if there really was a man outside her bedroom door? The door has a lock on it, but she does not usually lock it at night because there is no one else in the apartment and because she worries about what would happen if there was a fire in the middle of the night, whether if she locked her door it might not make it more difficult for her to escape or for the firemen to come in and rescue her. She has to balance the concern that someone might get into her bedroom with the concern that she might not be able to get out in an emergency. She imagines the fire chief shaking his head sadly as the local news reporters hold microphones out to him in front of the burned-out husk of her apartment building, and talking about how they managed to get everyone out except for one woman up on the seventh floor who had locked her bedroom door and they couldn’t reach her in time. Asphyxiation, the fire chief says. People don’t think about these things. Why would she lock her door like that? Was she worried about someone coming in? That is just ridiculous.

But is it so ridiculous? These things do happen, men breaking into women’s homes and stealing things or assaulting them or worse. If she heard someone outside her door, what would she do? She could call 911 and hope they arrived fast enough to rescue her. She could try running out of her room suddenly, hoping to surprise the man so much that she would have a chance to get away, run out of her apartment, sound the alarm. She could try talking to the man, finding out what he wants, trying to appeal to his human side not to hurt her.

Outside her door, there is a sudden, loud, creaking sound, like the noise made by a stomping foot. He is right there. She sits up in the bed and turns on the light; the part of her that believes there really is someone in the apartment screams at her not to do this, that she has just given away her presence and now, surely, he will come in and — what? Kill her most likely. She tries to reason with herself. There is no one there. She needs to go out of her room and make certain of this. Maybe then she will be able to go back to bed and get some sleep.

She goes to the door. She takes a deep breath. She opens it, quickly, and sees that her hall is empty. But of course he could have withdrawn into another room, be hidden right now somewhere out of sight but watching her. She walks around her home, turning on the lights in each room, opening the closet doors. Soon the whole apartment is bright from end to end. She sits down at the kitchen table and remembers that when she would get scared like this in the past, which didn’t happen very often, her husband would do what she herself has just now done. Walk through the house, turn on the lights, prove that there was no one hiding, no ghosts, no people, no one there but the two of them. Sometimes he would do it impatiently: stop being so silly. But sometimes he would do it gently, quietly, showing her the rooms with nothing in them to be frightened of. When he did this, she would calm down immediately. She would sleep happily and without interruption for the rest of the night. She would be aware of his body stretched beside hers in their bed, appreciative of its presence, because who else would have cared for her in this small, absurd way, even some of the time, except for him?

Now she sits down at the table in her dining room, with all the lights blazing around her, feeling extra bright as they do late at night. She puts her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. No one comes either to comfort her or to harm her. She is all alone.

She tries, in this order: valerian root tea, which makes her lose feeling in her tongue so then she is lying in bed awake with a numb tongue in her mouth that feels like something someone else left there promising to come back and get it at the end of the day but then forgot to do so; melatonin, which makes her more wide awake through the night so that even the fitful sleep she has been managing to get evaporates; a strange kind of herbal tea that she buys from a hippy herbalist store near her home that smells like armpit and looks a bit like armpit hair but that cannot, she tells herself, possibly be in any way really related to armpits. None of these things works. She keeps her phone in the same spot on the counter in her kitchen where it was when she got the first phone call from France, but it does not ring.

Then, one night, about a week later, she is lying in bed thinking about global warming. This is a topic that she has been returning to at night quite often, thinking about how the difficulty with trying to solve global warming is that anything you do, any effort human beings make, whether it is holding a conference or publishing a book or making a movie to try to spread the word and convince people that global warming is real, only adds to the problem. Almost everyone, in America at least, who goes to see the movie will have to drive a car to get there, or if they watch it at home, they’ll watch it on a television that was made in China in a factory that uses fossil fuels and then sent to the United States on a freighter that also burns fossil fuels, and while they are watching the film they will be using electricity that also probably comes from fossil fuels. Similarly, if they hold a conference, all the people who travel there will have to fly and stay in hotels and use taxis. Basically, the only thing you can do that will have a positive effect on climate change, unless you are a scientist who is working to invent some brilliant alternative to gasoline and coal, is nothing. If you do nothing, travel nowhere, eat nothing, use no light and don’t drive, you will not be contributing to the problem. Otherwise, you will be. Is there anything I do, she thinks, actually worth the damage that I cause just by being alive in this time and place? Really, the only time when we aren’t damaging things is when we are asleep, in the dark in our beds, and now she doesn’t appear to be able to do even that. Maybe it would be better not to exist, to disappear.

What if no one was able to sleep anymore? What if we created a world of such uncertainty and such loneliness that one by one everyone in America found that they were unable to fall asleep? Each one of us is awake in our separate apartments, which we don’t share with anyone else because we didn’t want to stay with our parents and we couldn’t get along with our spouse and fewer of us than ever have children and even then, our children don’t stay with us for very long. Each of us is wandering around our lit-up rooms, our minds scurrying down corridors like mice in a maze, unable to find our way to the soft place where we feel blessed, able to stop striving and allow ourselves to float along for a while on the currents of the world, which is so much bigger and more mysterious than we can imagine. Maybe we are lonely for a world that we do not and cannot understand, that swirls around us in a beautiful storm and for which we cannot be held responsible.

She realizes that she is falling asleep. She feels her body softening, her bed starting to sway gently like a boat on a lake. Her room is filling up, flooding, with a substance that looks like dark ink but that she knows will not drown her. It is up to the edge of her bed. Then it spills over, traveling down the channels in her sheets and bedspread, buoying her up so she starts to float away.

And then the phone rings. It slices through the softness of her dream with its hard, bright, electronic sound. She is not surprised to hear it, however; she has the sensation that she had been expecting it would ring just then, just at that moment. She gets out of bed and feels light and certain. The leaden haze of the last week, brought on by sleeplessness, has gone and her head is clear and her movements are sure and graceful. Even though she is just walking down the hall in her apartment she can feel the swish of her nightdress against her legs in a way that is pleasant and sensuous, her bare feet on the cool floor. She reaches the kitchen as the phone is on its third and final ring and she plucks it off the counter and answers it.