Sheep laced his eyelids as he chased them with a rounded staff. It was 30 May in a sweet, breathy time of 1965. Summer had held its door open for the other three seasons, and now it simply awaited its turn at the threshold. Air was saturated with its arrival, and in rooms above and below the man's room children could be heard and seen. A happy time for all, and a happy time for the healthy. For the ill and their friends, the summer seemed as nothing but a warmth to put one to sleep. Crickets still hummed at his windowsill, and he choked down the desire to swallow a sleep pill of summer spring morning, and assembled his frame to stumble into the morning. Unbearably half asleep, his eyes could not contrast the images of his dreams which still played with the stark images of reality. He turned on his car, and on his radio, and hummed a silent cricket hymn all the way to the hospital parking lot.
A usual pity spot was vacant for his arrival, and nurses could be seen up the width and length of halls with eyes fixated on their watches, then on him. He was a regular.
A cricket fanfare still replayed in his mind by the time the elevator reached the fifth floor. The trumpets were really swinging, and those bass tones were perfectly tuned. He rushed his stroll a bit and reached a white room in the midst of a hundred other white rooms.
"What'll it be today?" A familiar voice called from a pair of eyes focused solely on Silias Parkway.
"Sonatina in F, Clementi. Second movement." From below the glassed eyes, a smile formed where there was once none. She came into full view very quietly, much like a horrendous mirage of illness and malady. Her grace and acceptance could balance and neutralize the mutest of malicious fates, though, and it enveloped the room and even the corners. It somehow managed to miss her, though. Every time he tried.
"Tell me of your dream."
"I was in the sea, and I was drowning. You slept at the bottom, but you weren't drowning. Just alive."
"How could I be alive, asleep, underwater, and not drowning all at once, dear?"
"Once you sleep, you will understand the nature of dreams." He sighed and wrung his towel-mop hands. Moping the floor of his forehead from a summer splash of dew, he continued with a wearier tone than before, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could recount such tales to me? If the story could be switched and the tables turned? I would love to hear the pages of your mind."
"I'm much too preoccupied to sleep."
"You're ill. Your main occupation is health, and I think sleep will aide that."
A quiet hum of the sink next door filled in a quieter void. The left unsaid hung there like a presage: the couple knew of the woman's fate. Sleep nor dreams could not serve her well, for they knew all too well that her hospital bed was indeed her deathbed. Now they just gambled a game called "waiting."
When the night had beckoned in an azure of the saddest and most absent sun, she asked him to take his leave. She ushered him out the door with her stern voice, void of wonder of anything save a starving death of living. Back on the streets, the alive looked dead as well. Those without beds or a place of rest wandered without purpose on the streets in the summer, basking in an antithesis of summer meaning. He quickly sidestepped them all, but even more quickly glanced a minute view to their eyes. Glazed over and deprive of sleep, a human could only appear alive in the least sense. Rather sad, he thought, that they were left uninvited to the land of Nod, to lay upon the breast of sleep and dream and the mind at its least unshed of reality. How sad, how sad, he thought again, that they would spend 24 hours in reality while he would only spend 18 in the spiteful state.
Summer drowsiness awoke him the next morning, just as the last 237. Just another tick in the final count of the days it took to decay her soul and body of a deathly life.
"What'll it be today?"
"Nocturne, Chopin. Second."
"Now you're just teasing me," she simpered. Always so good-natured, always so naive. He took a seat next to her and studied Silias Parkway. A large school obstructed most of the view of the pier, but a small skyline of water and wood could be barely seen. A child hopped into school, backpack slung over her shoulder, and he watched her as she appeared in intervals at the school's windows. Like little frames of a camera film, he watched her voyage from the school yard to her teacher's room. Turning to the woman, he gave a side grin of victory.
"No dream last night. Pitifully black, and sorrowfully silent. That is all I can recall."
"Now I know you're teasing me."
"I want you to see for yourself."
"You know that my days are short." Her voice was suddenly small, childlike. She couldn't face him, and instead intently studied the lamppost on Silias. He felt as though he had reprimanded her, for she looked guilty of an imminent but unwanted fate. "I cannot spend days asleep when soon that'll be my only way to spend them."
"You're already dead, damn it! Look at yourself!"
Ashamed, he found himself in the middle of the parking lot.
Asleep, he found himself on the kitchen table next to a small wallet that was not his own. The wallet's contents soon were splayed by his hands, and carefully arranged on the illusion floor. Pictures, all a deep shade of tungsten and flash, covered every inch of the floor until he felt as though they formed a sea of frozen memories. He had to escape them; he was drowning in her even in his sweet nighttime memories and moments. Images mirrored on the walls of every room in the apartment, and his closed eye grew sleepy with drunkenness. Tired and willing, he awoke in a pallid pearl sweat of the same summer that greeted him the night before and the 237 before that. Tick, tick.
She didn't want to talk about anything this morning. Anything but Silias parkway, anyway. She expatiated in great detail the emotion that the playful school children led her to feel, and the contrast of a summer scene of sea behind the fall and spring staple of school. She spoke, eloquently and in painstaking detail, of the contrast of hues and skies and the different episodes and stations the weather seemed to teeter between. She showed him short stories she had written, in a shaky hand, the night before of what she thought dreaming must feel like.
He knew that she felt she had something to prove.
She was trying to prove that she wasn't dead yet, and she could try her hardest to observe and record what she had left of her minutes. She scrunched her limited time like an alloted ink pad, composing verse and mathematics of the chaos theory that is life. Sickened and saddened, he abrogated her proof.
"I had a dream about you last night."
"A dream of the dreamless one? Ironic, isn't it? Are you beckoning me teasingly again into something I cannot have?"
He left no detail suspended and left a space of silence and listening for her to fill as she wished. Again, the sink next door, seemingly omni-running, spilled out a solo of droplets until she had heard enough and wished to talk of her own accord.
"What'll it be today?"
He already had a reply in his mind. "Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin."
"I'll have none of that." She took his hand and tried to appear as though she had forgotten the past day's comment.
Once she saw to it that he had left and driven off of Silias Parkway, she leaned against the dark glass and closed her eyes. She filled the blank canvas of her mind with paint, and tried to arrange them into an image with form and line and color and shape, but they just remained the haphazard guts of thought and wishes. She closed her eyes tighter, and could see a deepest shade of sea glass, warm in hues of winter and frigid in its summer pallet. Why, she conjured within her mind, what a ridiculous view of life. She scoffed and lifted her eyelids and peered some more into the night life of an empty street.
When the pair of angel eyelashes met, in the frame of a fifth floor window overlooking Silias Parkway, the other half of the story lay like a welcoming tomb of thought on his bed. On the streets and in homes, true life asphyxiated the life that lay beneath those eyelashes, beneath the dense and dull skull frame of men. Beneath the flesh and pity and guns and money lay a world unfettered by the fates or the sun, in which only the moon could drench so generously in an appropriated span of hours. And in the frame of that fifth floor window, Silias Parkway watched her unlatch the door of her mind, and allow a free strangling of her dying soul.
He needed to make her see that the only murderer in her hospital room was life, that sick variation of life that lay awake like strewn parts of a human on the streets. That sick life that found homes within strangers' eyes, homes among soft moonlight, a home in the heart of a stranger in a white room.
On the 240th morning on the sunny sidewalk set on June 2, 1965, he set out into his car and radio and cricket symphony routine with a purpose. When he met her in the room, he began to speak vehemently before filling her ears with the foolish nonsense of a song.
"I didn't dream last night. I didn't even sleep. I read an old book I found in the closet that belonged to your sister. She had given it to you as a present and you tossed it among the old photos and yearbooks." Staring still, her voice was taciturn and controlled as she mumbled an appropriate response to the outlandish greeting. He did not know her well, but he understood that this meant to continue. "It was about a little boy who was abused and beaten by his father, but the mother loved the boy very much but couldn't tear the family apart. The mother wished to keep the integrity of a family image, even if it hurt her and the boy. Besides the point, yes, that it. Anyway, one night the boy was feared the be growing old enough to understand the reality of his father's beatings and temper. He found that, for the first time in his short and single digit years, he could not sleep. His mother walked into the room at around 1 a.m. to check on him and asked him why he was still lying awake and so still. He answered that he began to have spells of memories in the past few nights, and they were so entertainingly real and violent that he could not bear to enhance them with the lenses of sleep. His mother told him that sheep grazed in peaceful rows of 10 each night in the minds of every sleeper, and a fence was constructed next to them. She told him that if he closed his eyes and counted the sheep jumping over the fence, they would herd him into a gentle slumber full of silent and still dreams. She left, and he closed his eyes but saw nothing. The poor boy trusted his loving mother so much that he stole away from the house at that nighttime hour and wandered into a neighbor's farm to count the sheep. He began to count them one by one, and noticed a row with only 9. And then a row with only 4. And several with numbers far from 10, in either direction. He began to grow frightfully worried and fretted that his dreams would not be as peaceful without the grazing herders in proper rows. He ventured into the forests in search of the sheep so that he might sleep, and his wish was granted upon a soft and damp stone where he lay his head a few hours after searching earnestly. When he awoke, a spot in the overhead foliage exposed his young eyes to the sun all too quickly, and the morning sight erased the memory of the night before or any night or day before. He quietly and politely cursed the sun in a way only young boys can do, and headed West in search of an answer to his confusion. No one knows what became of the boy, but he never returned to his mother and father. His mother was martyred for her efforts a short 4 years later, and buried under the floorboards." He breathed that little gulp that came with every ending.
She was asleep, head still propped up as if to view Silias Parkway upon awakening to a cruel world of hospitals and sleepless sleepers.
Irony and sleep share a surname, he whispered into the moon on the night of June 2. Dream.
He joined the ranks of the sleepless that night and felt that his deed had been done. When he stumbled up the elevator into her room the next morning, he took a seat next to her and studied Silias Parkway.
"The children are no longer in school, love. They got out yesterday, and now they're all down at the pier and behind the view. You wouldn't be able to see them anyway. You wouldn't like it anyway. Not here, love."
He crept silently to the threshold of the white room a good three hours later, but stopped as if he had forgotten something. The nurses down the hall halted in the moment with him, and even the cricket symphony politely muted the tenors as he turn on one heel and said, "Yesterday was Waltz in A Major, Alexander Gretchaninoff. Today would have been Etude in C Major, Stephen Heller."
Silias Parkway smiled in response.
