The Night I Lost

The Night I Lost

"I asked them to stop!" Emily took another step toward me, both hands out in the air between us, not touching me.

"I filed to end the project. More than once. I told them you had recovered, that you weren't a risk to anybody. I wanted you to get to live like a normal man, James. Do you know why you went all those years without the nightmare? Because I shut it off. I stopped because I wasn't going to let them keep you in it one more day."

Her voice went through the middle of everything I had built in the last hour.

Of course.

My rotted brain started putting the broken stretches back in order. There had been a long run of years when I was fine, when the damp basement and the Parcheesi board and the smell of blood were nowhere near me. I thought I had gotten better. I thought I had turned into a normal man.

What I'd had was a sleep she was keeping up by hand. In April she stopped on her own, the massage and the oil both. She carried her pillow across the hall, the weight came off the lid, and the old dreams came back up harder than they had ever been.

April 9. The oil went off the nightstand that night, and I found the bottle two weeks later in the cabinet under the bathroom sink, behind the extra towels, the cap on tight and the level down an inch from where I remembered it.

Her reasons fit. They filled every gap I had in me. She had hidden things from me and she had lied to me, and underneath all of it there looked to be one motive:

She wanted to keep me out of what my family had left me, and to let me live like a person.

I watched the tear hanging on her chin under the yellow lamp. Half of me said this was careful work by somebody trained to do it. The other half, the half that had leaned on her for 20 years, wanted the love to be real, because that was the only thing left that would save any of it.

The front window behind her held the lamp and the room back at me, and past the reflection the street ran down to the corner. A dark sedan stood at the curb short of the streetlight, parking lights on, engine off. It had been in the same place the night before. I looked at it a while and then I looked at her chin again.

"James," Emily said, softer now. "Look at yourself. You haven't eaten in days. You haven't slept. Your eyes are shot and your hands are cut up. How long are you going to keep doing this to yourself?"

The headache came down all at once. A hum started behind both ears and stayed there. The edges of the room went soft and I couldn't pull in a whole breath.

I was finished. The hour I had just spent fighting had used up whatever I had left in me. I needed to sleep. I needed my head to stop, even for an hour.

"Just this once," I said, and my voice had gone to almost nothing. "Please. Let me sleep."

Emily didn't say anything else. She came toward me slowly.

I went down into the chair by the desk and shut my eyes. I heard the glass cap turn, and then the smell came out into the room, warm and thick, musty herbs and cold mint, the smell that had been in our bedroom for 11 years.

The cap went down on the desk beside me, rolled a half turn, and stopped. She rubbed her palms against each other for a count of eight. I kept my eyes shut and let her.

Her hands came onto my temples, cool.

Then her hands started moving. Slow and light, pressing at the crown of my head, drawing down long behind my ears.

The same rhythm.

The rhythm I had taken for 20 years as the plainest proof that somebody loved me. All those nights she sat on the edge of the bed and worked on my neck. Where her fingers touched me the numbness came up fast and went deep, heavier than any night I could remember, and it lay down on every nerve it reached.

It closed over the top of my brain, took my awareness away in strips, and pulled me down.

I came awake.

The sun was low and coming in flat through the window, straight into my eyes, and I had to squint against it. Birds were going outside, far off and strange.

I got up out of the chair. My neck was locked, and my whole body hurt the way it does after a beating.

My head was empty.

There was a clean blank where the last stretch of my life should have been. I put a hand to my forehead and went looking, and nothing came back. I couldn't find the night before, and I couldn't find the day that had gone with it. The clock on the mantel said 4:40, and I had sat down in that chair a few minutes before midnight.

I looked around the living room fast.

The room had been cleaned. The broken brick and gray mortar in the corner were gone, swept up and carried out. The desk was wiped down to the grain, and at the edge of it a plate held half a sandwich, hard and curled at the crust. Out the front window the mailbox at the end of the walk stood open with the mail still sitting in it.

I went out and brought the mail in. A water bill, a county notice postmarked the 14th, two supermarket circulars printed for different weeks, and under all of it a plain white envelope with no stamp and nothing written where the address goes. Two letters in ballpoint on the front, T.K. It had been slit open along the top edge and there was nothing inside it.

The black leather notebook, the one I had written those terms into in my own careful hand, was gone.

The four gray plastic cassettes and the old player. Gone.

I turned my right hand over and looked at it. Three long scratches ran across the back of it, wrist to knuckles, still wet. I had nothing at all about where they came from.

I put the hand flat on the desk and held it there. Somebody had taken a whole piece of my life out of me while I sat in a chair.

On the sideboard the glass I had filled before any of it started stood with the water down by a third and a dry ring on the inside where the line had been. The phone in my jacket was dead. It had read 71 percent when I put it in the pocket.

My shoes were by the front door, set square and side by side against the baseboard, the laces pulled through and laid flat across the tongues. Both soles were wet. A line of grit ran from the door across the hall floor to about the middle of the room, and stopped there.

Then I stopped on the middle of the oak table.

A small square of white paper sat there in the low light, folded in four.

I crossed the room and my fingers knocked the edge of the table. I opened it.

One line inside. Hard, narrow letters, slanted right, the down strokes pushed hard enough to tear through the paper. My own handwriting.

Written in the last clear second I had before it went:

"DON'T LET HER TOUCH YOUR HEAD."