“No, it’s okay,” I told her. How could it not be when the towel clung so perfectly to her hips? On her left shoulder was a tattoo of a double clef note, its tip touching the folded rim of the towel as if coaxing me to throw the phone out the window, slowly unwrap that soft green fabric, and spend the rest of the morning worshipping that double clef.
I covered the phone, whispering “just a minute,” Kelly slipping back into the bathroom as if following stage directions to exit the scene. Years back I’d been a playwright, and sometimes I still thought that way.
“Look, I’ll even reimburse you for the ticket …I’ve got sixty-two bucks worth of pennies in a shoebox in the closet,” Amy said. “Come on, you haven’t been home in years. Your uncle would love to see you. Just for a few days …you promised, remember? You said…”
“…if you ever need me, I’ll be there—always,” I said, repeating the promise as if I were still seventeen, still radio pop-song in love with her, expecting our lives to be some long-playing lesson to all those timid hearts who knew nothing about the purity and passion of Amy and Duck. “That was centuries ago. We were kids.”
“When do promises come with an expiration date?”
There was nothing I could say because she was right. Twenty years earlier something terrible had happened and I’d promised to always be there for her. My life hadn’t turned out exactly as I’d hoped, but on this I’d never slipped: whenever Amy had needed me, I’d been there for her. I had kept my promise.
Suddenly I started yawning.
“Before I, you know, did what I did, I thought about calling you. I already checked the airlines,” Amy said. “There’s a Southwest flight out of Newark…”
I tried to listen, but I yawned again, and felt my body slipping away, my eyelids growing heavy as my head began to pound. Here we go again, I thought. It rarely happened in the morning, but sometimes, when my nerves were rattled, my condition struck hard and quick. The tips of my fingers began to tingle, as if my nails had turned into bees, and I knew what was coming, the warning signs reliable town criers. My legs became bags of wet sand; I fell back into the bed, my arms merging with the mattress.
I was falling asleep—but still had a few seconds left to fight it. Get out of bed and do some jumping jacks, I thought, which often bought some time before I shut down, but my body was a marionette without strings, a crumble of muscle and flesh.
“…if you catch the two o’clock, you can be here by sundown.”
The urge to sleep grew overwhelming, my blurred eyes catching glimpses on CNN of uniformed cops whacking protesters with heavy sticks, the protesters collapsing to the pavement.
I heard Amy’s voice through the phone, her frustration palpable and historic.
“Are you still there? Come on, Donatello, not now…”
The light drained from the room, and I must have dropped the phone because Amy’s voice drifted away, and the last thing I heard before everything disappeared was her voice, tiny and frightened.
“…goddamn it, not again, not now, Duck, I need you…”
And then the world, like a movie, faded to black.
. . . . .
Imaginary Interview: NPR Morning Edition (Sometime in September, 20XX)
Q: How old were you when you were first diagnosed?
A: Fifteen. I kept falling asleep at the strangest times. Most people thought I was drunk or a stoner but I was pretty straight edge, even back then. Finally, Uncle Dan brought me to the hospital for some tests. Narcolepsy—I had never even heard of the word before I found out that I had it.
Q: How did the narcolepsy influence your experience as a playwright?
A: Opening night we got a standing ovation, but I slept through it. Story of my life. Whenever anything big happens, I’m fast asleep.
. . . . .
“Welcome back,” Kelly said.
I’d wound up on the floor, face down, my lower legs under the bed, my head resting on an old slipper. This often happened after one of my narcoleptic funks. I’d wake up in weird positions, as if while sleeping God had rearranged my body as a practical joke.
I blinked against the light as my eyes focused on the television, still on CNN, where a freeze-dried blonde interviewed a fat guy in a black suit as commodity prices crawled across the screen like a trail of army ants.
“Hey,” I mumbled, the dust falling from my synapses.
Kelly sat on the floor beside me stroking my hair, the way a mother might, although this was speculation—I had no recollections of a maternal touch; my mother had skipped out when I was two months old. I flipped over so I could see Kelly’s face, which was warm and pretty and organically kind, unlike all those sculpted California faces, those actress-model-anchorwomen types with their perfect, professional looks, undeniably beautiful but a desperate kind of beauty, as if Satan were waiting around the corner with an invoice. But that wasn’t Kelly—her face reminded me of a wildflower that had popped up in the garden, more colorful and vibrant than all those designer flowers cross-bred so carefully to please.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m almost back.”
This was true, for part of me at least. I had a major erection, the bulge in my pajamas a frequent occurrence during the post-narcoleptic re-awakening.
“How long was I out?”
“The usual—about twenty minutes. You were on the phone when you fell asleep. I told your friend you would call her back. She seemed worried.”
My heart jumped. “You talked to her?”
“Briefly—she sounded nice.” Kelly flexed her bare feet, her stubby toes wiggling as her thigh muscles tensed. “Is she a childhood friend?”
Before she could finish, the room seemed to shrink to the approximate size of a thimble, the core
