Sleep Disorder

something. The things you say…”

“What. What do I say?'

She looked at him.

'God, Bill, don't you know?'

'How the hell could I know!'

And then she wouldn't speak to him hardly at all. He tried to convince her to stay, to give him another chance. But she wasn't buying any. 'You talk, you snore, you moan, you get up and take a walk…'

'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 much in the brains department but she wasn't half bad otherwise and he liked her poulet gumbo.

He stayed home from work.

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

Between financial reports on CNN he got up and checked his mirror. His face still looked rotten but at least it hadn't gotten worse. From what he could see it hadn't changed at all.

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 Hassidic Jew sold him a Realistic Micro-25 Voice-Actuated Microcassette Recorder at half price. He cabbed home. He set it up and taped it to the headboard of his bed. He switched it on.

And fell asleep halfway through Nightline.

His phone rang.

Not his real phone this time but the building's intercom. What time is it? he thought. He got up in the dark 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 to the elbow.

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

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

'Hammering?'

'Yes. I'm sorry.'

'That's…yes. That's okay.'

He cradled the receiver and 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 already 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 and saw the smeared stains, the bruised wood and gouges.

There was no pain. Not even under his long, split, newly manicured fingernails where splinters of wood protruded. He couldn't feel a thing.

He ran to the bathroom and turned on the water. The right hand was worse so he scrubbed it with his left.

The flesh felt soft. Like touching a burn. Like pus rising just beneath the surface.

He looked up into the mirror. The face that peered back at him through swollen eyelids looked bruised and sore. He opened his mouth and saw graying teeth, milk-white pustules lining his gums and palate.

The base of his tongue was black.

And now he was sweating.

He stripped off his pyjama top. The rash looked almost like a gleaming red t-shirt spread all across his back and upper body.

He felt the urge to scream, to run raging through the room smashing things.

What was it? AIDS? Cancer?

How dare this happen to him?

Overnight.

He pulled out a fistful of hair. The scalp was so soft he hardly felt it.

All right, he thought. Control. You're awake now. Take control.

He went to the phone, flipped through the Rolodex until he found his doctor's name and dialed. He told the answering service it was an emergency but that, no, he was not about to go to the hospital thank you very much, just have him call the minute he gets in. And yes, he knew it was four in the morning. I pay him for four in the morning, he said. Just have him call.

Then he turned on the recorder.

Playback.

At first there was only snoring.

Lots of it. Deep, sonorous breathing sounds that repelled him, disgusted him.

And then there were moans — my god! he did moan. As though something or someone in his sleep were squeezing him, hurting him, making him sound old and weak and whiny. It was nearly as bad as the snoring.

And then some kind of bubbling sound. Breathing, he thought. It must be. It's loathsome.

Finally he started talking.

'I heard you got it all figured out,' he said. And then something that was much too soft to hear or for the recorder to pick up, unintelligible. Then he said, 'You should have seen it coming.'

The tape only rolled when he spoke or when there was noise in the room so it was impossible to tell what the interval was.

'You should have heard the Grateful Dead,' he said, 'they played that Peter-and-the-Wolf song. You know the one. ’All I said was come on in.’' It made no sense at all.

Then suddenly he started howling, bellowing, slamming at the headboard so loud he had to turn the level down. Bits of words and phrases came flying though like shrapnel.

'Ahhhhh!..you don't not to me you don't…dammit! Dammit!..frrrrragggh!..break him!..break him up!..get even!..mmmmmmmmm…break him utterly!..'

And then he had to turn it up again. Because what he was saying was so much softer than the rest of it — he had to hit rewind twice to hear it all. 'Tell Millie not to die until the divorce comes through. It's going to get messy.'

Not buy. Die. Annie'd got it wrong.

He wasn't trading.

It hardly even sounded like his own voice. He listened again. Something too…musical about it. In the tones. He couldn't say what.

Almost like a woman's voice. It was low and hard to hear. He decided to go on. But the rest of the tape was just more roaring. More pounding. No wonder the neighbors complained.

He went back to that line and listened again. 'Tell Millie not to die until the divorce comes through. It's going to get very messy.'

He took a stiff shot of scotch from the bottle on the sideboard and then another and another. Where the hell was that doctor?

He curled up in the bed, shivering, the recorder held in both hands like some sort of shiny metallic teddy bear. Except that it wasn't very comforting. He played the tape over and over — and just before he drifted off to sleep again he thought it's not Millie it's Willie, and Willie was what Laura called him sometimes.

Laura. Who'd just got her divorce.

Tell Willie not to die before the divorce comes through. It's going to get very messy.

And for the first time in memory remembered what he dreamed. In the dream he was glutinizing.