Sleep Disorder

wall and more coming in all the time.

Annie was in the bathroom. He could hear water running. He could hear her coughing. Deep. Lung- coughing.

He looked at himself in the mirror again. Same old face, all right — but there was something gone soft about it somehow, a slight almost imperceptible jowling effect at the edges of the chin, a puffiness to the cheeks. If he hadn't shaved that face every day for twenty-five years he probably wouldn't have noticed. But he did.

He didn't like it.

It scared him.

It had happened overnight.

By the time Annie came out of the bathroom in her robe and slippers he'd started to shake.

'Sorry,' he said. 'I don't know what the hell…'

'I'm packing,' she said.

'Come on.'

She turned on him, fuming. 'Look, I don't know what that was about and I don't want to know. You could have killed me. You're crazy or something. The things you say…'

'What? What do I say?'

She looked at him. 'God, Bill, you don't know?'

And then she'd barely speak to him. He tried to convince her to stay, to give him another chance. But she wasn't buying.

'You talk, you snore, you moan, you get up and take walks…'

'I moan?'

'…and now you try to strangle me. Get some help, Bill. You're falling apart.'

And then she slammed the door.

Too bad. Annie wasn't all that much in the brains department but she kept the place clean, did the laundry, and he loved her poulet gumbo.

He stayed home from work.

Why not? He could afford to. If you didn't get caught, insider trading was extremely profitable.

Between financial reports on CNN he got up and checked his mirror. His face actually looked a little better. Then he checked his blood pressure with the machine, and it was 135/75, well within the normal range. He actually felt kind of perky, he was actually half-close to a good mood, until he remembered…

The things you say.

The phrase kept haunting him.

So what did he say?

Around four in the afternoon he showered and went out. He took a cab to 47th Street Photo, where a bearded young Hasidic Jew sold him a Realistic Micro-25 Voice-Actuated Microcassette Recorder at half price. He cabbed home. There was no setup, really, just an on-off switch, a playback and a rewind. The microphone was built in. The kid in the store said it only recorded when sound was being made, some sensor or something. He turned it on and went to sleep.

His phone rang.

Not his real phone this time but the building's intercom. What time is it? he thought, and then Christ! You've gotta be shitting me! Had ten gallons of water been dumped in his lap? His groin was drenched, the sheets and mattress beneath him saturated, and the smell told him the rest. He'd wet the bed, in a monumental volume. It's the damn diuretic! he thought but the intercom buzzer kept nagging, screaming at him. He got up in what seemed early-morning darkness and groped his way along the hall to the kitchen and picked up the receiver, aware of how wet his hands felt, sweaty, almost all the way up the elbow.

'Yes?' And his voice was really wrong again. Like he was coming down with a major cold or something. Almost a full octave lower than what he was used to.

'You're going to have to stop the hammering, Mr. Dumont. We're getting complaints down here. I'm sorry.'

'Hammering?'

'Yes. And the shouting, too, I'm afraid.'

Bill's joints locked up. 'Shouting?'

'Yes, sir. According to the neighbors' complaints. And there were quite a few of them.'

'What was I shouting?' Bill insisted.

'Something about blondes, I think one neighbor said.'

Terrific. Millie was a blonde, one of many in his life. God knew what else he'd been bellowing about.

'Anyway, Mr. Dumont. It's a little early for things to be so loud. If you don't keep it down I'm going to have to call the police. And whatever you're hammering — are you building furniture or something?”

Think, think. 'A knickknack rack that my sister brought me from North Carolina. I had to put it together. She's a blonde, by the way. I guess I got a little pissed at her when the joints wouldn't align. Sorry.' Pretty bad comeback he supposed but it would have to do,

'Sure, Mr. Dumont.' A pause. 'Is everything all right?'

'Yeah, fine, and I'm really sorry about this. It won't happen again.”

“Okay, Mr. Dumont. Have a good day.'

He hung up, careful not to slam the receiver down. Fuck! Shouting? Hammering? He switched on the hall light, thinking okay, now we'll see and walked back into the bedroom, switched on the light there too and pressed REWIND on the recorder.

And for the first time saw his hands, his forearms.

Covered with blood. Not sweat. Blood. Some of it crusted over and some of it fresh, especially across the knuckles — and then he looked at the headboard where the tape hissed its way through the recorder. Then he looked a few feet left of the headboard, above the night stand. Something was missing.

What was up there? What was gone?

The picture. On the wall above the nightstand, there'd been a photo of Annie he'd taken on the ferry. Big smiles, big boobs, big happy love-eyes. It was gone, replaced by bloody knuckle marks in the sheetrock. Christ, even the nail the picture had been hung on was driven into the wall — no wonder his hands were so savaged.

His eyes went to the floor. The photo lay face-up on the carpet, frame destroyed, glass shattered. Annie's smiling picture torn and ruined.

I'm losing it, he considered. And at that precise moment he really felt he was. He'd never been like this in his life. He'd always been in control, always. You had to be if you wanted to accomplish anything in this world.

He ran to the bathroom and turned on the water. The right hand was worse so he scrubbed it with his left. Calm down, calm down, he kept telling himself. He had to maintain control. What happened? What the hell happened?

He'd got pissed off at Annie, so he'd got up in his sleep and started beating the daylights out of Annie's picture. Shouting at it. As if it were her.

Had to be that.

He looked up in the mirror. The face peered back at him through swollen eyelids. He looked…

Bill had to admit it. He looked insane.

His heart was thudding; it felt like something dying in his chest. Slow, hard beats. His chest felt tight, twingy. He thought of cords all twisted up, and then he remembered what Annie'd said about heart attacks and strokes. He sat down on the bed — the urine-soaked bed — slapped on the cuff and began to pump. His blood pressure was sky-high.

The sun was just coming up in the window. He took deep breaths repeatedly, then went to the kitchen, opened his plastic pill box and took his morning medication. Closed his eyes, took more deep breaths. Relax, relax, he kept telling himself. Then a big glass of orange juice, which definitely hit the spot. In a few minutes he began to feel better, less tense. The cords began to unwind.

All right, he thought. Take it nice and easy. You're together now. Whatever the problem is, fix it. Take control.