Sleep No More

“What? Your what?”

“My host, I was going to say.”

Icy fingers closed around his heart. The “soul transfer” she had been describing had a direct analogue in the real world: viral infection. In Eve’s world, souls moved through people in the same way a sexually transmitted disease did. Could her whole fantastic delusion be some paranoid response to contracting the AIDS virus?

“Is that what you’re doing now?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady. “Controlling Eve?”

“Yes.”

“Is Eve ever really Eve anymore?”

She bit her lip and turned her face away. “Sometimes.”

“What does she feel like when she is?”

“She’s afraid. She went to a doctor about it. He referred her to a psychiatrist, who put her on medication. That didn’t work, of course. Eve’s confused, and sometimes she breaks through when I least expect it. She’s a strong personality. Some people are easy to dominate. Others…it’s exhausting. I’m never quite myself-not completely-because part of my energy is always devoted to maintaining control of the person.”

Waters nodded as though it all made perfect sense, but there was a scream behind his lips.

Suddenly Eve turned back to him and squeezed his shoulder. “Johnny, what are you feeling?” She clung to him as though sensing he wanted to leave. “Tell me.”

As he searched for some innocuous lie, he suddenly realized that deception was ridiculous. He looked her in the eyes and took her hand. “Eve, are you ill? I want you to be completely honest with me. You said you were tested before. You didn’t tell me the result. Has someone made you sick?”

She pulled away, her eyes filled with hurt. “Do you really think I would do that to you? Put you at risk like that?”

“I don’t know. Think about everything you’ve just told me.”

“I know it sounds crazy. But think for a minute, Johnny. Millions of people go to church every Sunday and profess faith in their immortal souls. Christianity is built around that. Do those people believe what they say or not? Because if they do, they’re admitting that something exists apart from the body, some force. And if that’s true, then why is what I’ve described so crazy? Are you only your body, Johnny? If during the good times between us, I’d been paralyzed in a car wreck, would you have left me?”

She had clearly thought about this much more deeply than he had.

“You know you wouldn’t have. I know it. Well, this is like that. My old body is useless now, it’s gone. But I’m still here. And I need you.”

He sat up in the bed.

Eve got onto her knees and grasped his arm. “Are you leaving?”

He looked at his watch. “I need to.”

“Don’t go yet. Please. I don’t know how you feel. Where you are.”

“I don’t either.”

“Will you see me again?”

He looked toward the corridor. His clothes lay strewn on the antique rug outside the door. “I don’t know.”

Eve closed her eyes tight, as though suppressing panic. “Please don’t say that, Johnny. Please.”

Her reaction threw him back twenty years, to the worst times with Mallory. This yo-yo journey between present and past had been happening ever since the soccer field, and it left him dizzy, like a man trapped on a carnival ride. As soon as Eve opened her eyes, he would calm her down, then make his exit.

While he waited, she raised her right hand to her neck and twisted a lock of hair around her forefinger. Instead of releasing it, she pulled tighter and tighter, clearly hard enough to cause pain. With deep shock spreading through his chest, Waters reached across her body and took hold of her left wrist, exposing the inner forearm. Eve’s eyes popped open, but she did not release her hair. He scanned the length of the forearm but saw only smooth skin. Eve gave him an eerie smile.

The watch, he thought. She wore a large watch for a woman, a platinum Rolex. Before she could stop him, he grabbed the watch and yanked it two inches up her arm, keeping his fingers beneath the band to hold the arm still. Where the face of the watch had been, he saw four parallel scars in the skin. A cold wave of dread rolled through him. The scars were not fresh, but deep cuts had made them. Not just four, but cuts over cuts. Repetitive lacerations and scratches in the same place, a spot no one would see.

As Eve watched him with a mixture of shame and triumph, he jerked the covers off her nude body and looked at her legs. She didn’t try to hide. On her inner thighs, a few inches below her vulva, he found a crosshatched pattern of scars. Some were old, others made perhaps a week ago. He pulled the covers back up and sat motionless on the bed.

The scars were not evidence of suicide attempts, but part of a complex coping phenomenon of self-mutilation practiced by many adolescent girls. Mallory had cut herself in secret for much of her life, but Waters had been her lover for six months before he discovered this. At the time, he could find no information on the subject. Now he knew that self-mutilators inflicted pain on themselves to drown out a deeper pain, something inexpressible in any other way. Cutting was usually a later phase of the phenomenon. It often began as scratching, banging one’s head against the floor, or even hair-pulling. Mallory’s had begun that way, but even after she stumbled on cutting, she continued her hair-twisting as a public substitute for the bloody ritual that gave her relief in private.

“I didn’t want to show you that,” Eve said quietly.

Waters could not speak. The implications of the scars had shut down part of his nervous system. He simply could not process what he had seen. A man with any sense would run, but how could you escape from something in your head? Knowledge was inescapable, irrevocable. The sight of the scars had scrambled his sense of time, of history, of identity.

“Johnny?”

He turned and slid his legs off the bed. Before he could get up, Eve draped her arms around him and laid her head on his shoulder. Her breasts compressed against his shoulder blades, and her voice sounded in his ear.

“Do you really have to go?”

“Yes.”

She licked the back of his neck, then slid her tongue up behind his ear. “Do you want to go?”

Her tongue entered his ear, then disappeared. Despite the insanity of the situation-or perhaps because of it- he felt himself stir again. She let go of him then, and backed away on the bed. Turning, he saw her kneeling three feet behind him, her eyes glowing with heat.

“Come here,” she said.

“I have to go.”

“No. You need me.”

Her body seemed to generate some sort of magnetic field. And though he tried not to see them, the small scars on her thighs seemed to blaze like fresh wounds. “I can’t do this.”

She reached out and took his hand, pulling until he lifted his legs back onto the bed. “Get like me,” she said, tugging his wrist.

He got up onto his knees.

She leaned forward and kissed him, lightly running her fingers across his chest, down his stomach. He felt himself swelling again.

“Eve-”

“Don’t say that,” she whispered, enfolding him in her hands.

“Don’t say what?”

She closed her eyes and squeezed him. “That name. I listen to it all day. Not from you…please.”

Suddenly she turned away, leaving him staring at her finely muscled back and the cleft of her behind. The sudden disappearance of her hands left him quivering with desire to be inside her.

“Remember?” she said to the wall.

His face felt hot. He could not move.

Eve slid backward, reaching for his hand as she neared him. “You know what I like.” She caught his hand and