Sleep No More

The anxiety Waters had felt in the cemetery returned like a shadow falling over him. She spoke lunacy with absolute conviction. Yet what was the harm in listening? An absurd parallel came to him: it was 1955, she was a communist agent, and he had already slept with her. The damage was done. What difference could it possibly make if he listened to her crackpot manifesto now?

“Everything went blank after that,” Eve whispered, oblivious to his thoughts. “It was like being in a coma, I guess. Or a drugged sleep. Now and then I would wake up and see things-rooms, furniture, the interior of a car-but they were alien to me. It was like a nightmare where you’re trapped in someone else’s body. The things I saw…I eventually began to make sense of them. The man who raped me led a double life. He had a wife, a house in Marrero, a mindless job as a technician in a plant. To the people he worked with he seemed like a normal person. But inside his head, it was like…Hell. There was so much anger and pain, so much hatred. I knew all his thoughts, his memories. They would ambush me in the dark, things that were done to him as a child. It was sickening. The way he treated his wife…the way she cowered and took it. Sometimes I shut down my consciousness-went back to sleep-just so I wouldn’t have to see or feel any of it. But as time passed, that became harder to do. When I was awake, I tried to think. I didn’t understand how it had happened, but I was alive in this man. And I was growing stronger. Sometimes I’d be awake for an hour or two. And he wouldn’t know it. He didn’t remember any of it. I could tell by people’s reactions. It was like he blacked out during those times. He became terrified of the blackouts. I had no idea what I was going to do.” Eve swallowed, as though trying to keep her vocal cords working. “Then he raped another woman.”

A ball of ice formed in Waters’s stomach.

“He raped and killed her…exactly the way he had done it to me. I had to experience that, Johnny. As if I were doing it. She wasn’t as strong as I was. She just lay there, praying it would be over quickly, hoping she would be all right in the end. But she wasn’t. He strangled her. I knew he was going to do it. I knew all along, Johnny. And there was nothing I could do to stop him.”

Waters pulled the covers over his chest.

“I nearly went mad. Maybe I did, a little. I don’t know. I wanted so badly to get out of him. I imagined killing him during one of the times that I was in control. I knew I could stop him from hurting women if I did that. But I didn’t want to die. I’d seen my dead body. I’d seen that other woman, lying there like a candle someone had blown out. God forgive me…I didn’t want that to happen to me, Johnny.”

Eve wiped her eyes. Waters reached down and took her hand, and this seemed to steady her enough to go on.

“His wife was a pathetic creature, totally dependent. He abused her, but on some level she seemed to need that. He didn’t have sex with her very often. Sex to him was what he did to his victims. But when he was with his wife, it was very rough and seemed to satisfy something in her, some yearning for punishment. It was so twisted. Once, while I was thinking of suicide, he had sex with her. During the act, I started to feel like I had when he had raped me. Not the same feeling, but the same intensity of feeling. I wanted out of him so badly. And I was so near to this other person, this person who was not a monster. I was physically inside her, you know? As they thrashed against each other, she started to climax, and I felt…”

“What?”

“Like a door was opening. As she started to peak, the person she was-the individual part-began to fade away. All thought and memory was vanishing into this…nothingness. The ecstasy of her climax wiped out her individuality. Do you know what I mean? In those seconds she became like a shell-a body without a soul-and in the instant that I understood what was happening, it was over. One moment I was looking at her, the next I was looking at him. I was inside her, Johnny. In her mind. And it was like being released from prison.” Eve looked at him, her eyes begging for understanding. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“You’re saying that your soul-”

“I don’t know if it’s my soul! That’s beyond me. But whatever we are-whatever human consciousness is-that part of me moved from him into her, just as it had gone into him when I so desperately wanted to survive.” She squeezed his hand. “Please tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Don’t stop. Tell me the rest.”

She looked up at the canopy. “That was ten years ago. The time between then and now…I don’t want to think about.”

“Tell me.”

Eve closed her eyes and spoke in a detached voice. “The woman’s mind was much less crowded than her husband’s. She’d endured terrible things as a child too, but she hadn’t reacted the way he had. She’d turned the anger inward, against herself. That’s why she responded to his abuse. She thought she deserved it. Once I was inside her, I understood that. I could control her much better than I could him. I could stay awake for much longer periods. I could think. And the more I thought, the more I realized that I had been given a unique chance. I had no idea how, and I still don’t. But I had to do something with that chance. It was as though I’d been lost in a shipwreck. Everyone I knew thought I was dead, so the old obligations didn’t apply. My husband, my children…I was dead to them. And all I could think about was what had happened when I thought I was going to die. What I had thought of. I decided then that I would do whatever I had to do to find you.”

For the first time, Waters truly felt he was lying beside Mallory Candler. The single-minded possessiveness that had led Mallory to insanity was there in Eve’s voice. She opened her eyes and rose up on one elbow.

“I mean, I knew where you were. But I had to come to you in a way-in a form-that you would listen to. Someone you could be attracted to. Someone like I was when you knew me before.”

Waters felt her gaze upon him like heat from a candle. “Are you saying you went through many different people to get to where you are now?”

“Yes.”

He felt a manic compulsion to jump out of the bed, but he didn’t trust her to stay rational if he did.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, her voice edged with anxiety.

“I’m trying not to think. I’m just listening.”

But he was thinking. He was thinking he had read that paranoid schizophrenics were capable of constructing incredibly complex delusions, filled with detail and interwoven with reality. If it weren’t for all the secrets Eve knew about Mallory, he would be positive this was just such a delusion.

“How many people did you go through to get to Eve?”

“Nine.”

As the implications of her words hit him, his face felt cold. “And one of them was Danny Buckles? That’s how you knew about the molestation at the school?”

“Yes.”

Jesus God….

“I know things about those nine people that no one in the world would ever believe. Things they’d kill themselves over if people discovered. Human beings are corrupt creatures, Johnny. I remember you talking about Thomas Hobbes when you were taking political philosophy. Well, Hobbes had human nature right.”

Her easy reference to a class he had taken twenty years ago pierced him like a blade. In this empty mansion, logic held no sway. On one hand she was telling him a story that could have been written by Poe while on opium; on the other she was casually bringing up things only Mallory could have remembered, thus lending credence to her hallucinations.

“And you can move through people at will?” he asked, not believing his own voice.

“No. Only the way I described.”

“Only during sex?”

“Not just any sex. The other person-the person I move into-has to climax. Their individuality has to be wiped out by that. So, as you’d imagine, it’s very easy for me to move into a man, but harder to pass into a woman.”

“But how could it take nine years?”

“I made some mistakes.” Bitterness had entered her voice. “I was trapped in a prison for a while. Literally in jail. In a man. There was sex there, but”-she shivered-“not with anyone who could get me out.”

Who could make up this insanity? he asked himself.

“The farther along the chain I got, the easier it became to move closer to you. But still, it was hard. It took me a long time to learn to control my…”