Sleepwalking in the dead of winter.

Sometimes Henry went sleepwalking in the dead of winter.

It started when he was seven when Angela would find him halfway down the hall, slumped over the stairwell and wobbling over the banister, half caught fish, half baby bird on his first attempt at flight. She would shake Henry’s shoulders until he opened his glassy eyes and woke alarmed and disoriented. Angela would fold her son into her fleshy arms, burying his head in her armpit, rubbing his back and demanding her son to explain where he was going. Over and over her fingers traced over his lumpy spine and she breathed, “Where are you going? What are you running away from?” Henry’s head would rest firmly on his fat neck, his chubby fingers wiping at the crust on his lashes. He thought his mother had stolen him from his slumber, and he would grow confused and cold, like a child pulled from his mother’s womb. Enrobed in Angela’s arms, he would cry, and Angela would breathe harder, pressing her fat son against her until his throaty sobs were muffled in her red terrycloth rob. She would lead him to the kitchen and feed him chocolate ice cream, and Henry would inhale the scent of cocoa eagerly as it melted slowly on his spoon.

Now he would sleepwalk out of habit, strolling around his room at odd hours in the night, waking pressed up against a chair, or even worse, leaning on a bookshelf that had broken over the course of his stay throughout the night. His cheeks would be lined with wood grain, his forehead bare the solitary knot from his great oak desk, the thinking man’s mark of Kane.

It didn’t happen every night, just those when he felt particularly sad, or hungry. They were one in the same, hunger and sadness. Both registered in Henry’s stomach as a painful emptiness that he was unable to fill. He was prone to over eating, though if his eyes really were bigger than his stomach he would surely be mistaken as an emaciated mosquito. Yet, for such a fat man, one would assume Henry based his days and nights on eating tubs of butter. Henry, like most Americans, liked eating, enjoyed the texture of the food, the way the tastes bloomed in his mouth when he chewed and the feeling of a savory meat under his teeth.

Not a single pair of underwear.

For the past year, Henry had slept in a different bedroom each night. He kept his clothes neatly folded in a smallish room on the third floor. The room acted as his own majestic walk in closet. It housed his collection of solid colored t-shirts, a tub full of white tube socks, seven drawers of trousers, one pair of nice dress slacks, and a faded pair of blue jeans that had never once fit him. Lazarus had given Henry a tuxedo, which was draped over a chair, unworn under its original sheath of plastic. He owned two pairs of shoes, a sturdy set of boots for the winter and spring, and plastic thong sandals that he replaced every June. Henry did not own a single pair of underwear.

He had retired to bed that night in one of the many third floor bedrooms, this one wallpapered in pinstripe lavender and taupe. There was a framed world map on one wall, and a collection of porcelain figurines on the desk under the window. The room smelled musty, and faintly of mothballs or baby powder. The shelves on the other wall were covered in dust. He traced his fingers over the bindings of his wife’s book collection. They were multicolored, but took on an overall beige tone when he squinted, a dominating yellowing not unlike that of old pages. Kate must have had thousands. Books lined shelves in rooms throughout the house. All four walls of the library on the first floor were covered with bookcases, hiding the windows and leaving the room perpetually dark. There were cases of them in the basement, and brimming cardboard boxes in the attic. Books in stacks of three or four were piled on coffee tables, countertops and even scattered around the kitchen. Hard covers were hidden in the linen closets, under tablecloths and on top of one of the two refrigerators. Some of her books had titles written in languages other than English, though Henry was unaware of Kate speaking any other language. Some of the books contained pictures, some recipes, some dictated distinct walking tours in Ecuador. There was no rhyme or reason to order of the books. They were stacked in random order, old ones piled on top of newer looking ones, ones with broken spines and ones with missing covers. Some were dry and cracked with age, while others looked greasy with their freshly laminated covers. They ruled the house; heaps of books burgeoning like overgrown house plants. Henry leaned into a shelf and allowed his nose to brush along the edges. He inhaled slowly, collecting a fine dust in his nostrils. His nose felt tickled now, and he waited for a sneeze to come. Squinting his eyes and bunching his lips together, the nervous feeling of a passing sneeze overtook his sinuses, his eyes watering with silent dissatisfaction.

The bed was lined with small pillows and a teddy bear that Henry didn’t recognize. Most of its fur was rubbed off, its little bead of a nose hanging by only a few loosely sewn yarns. He selected a particularly white book and shimmied out of his trousers. Stripping off his shirt, he wrapped himself in blankets and held the stuffed bear to his chin. He opened the book, and began to read:

“On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Etrangers and Cannes, five miles away.”

He turned to his side and pressed his cheek against the teddy bear. He knew Kate was sleeping in a separate bedroom, locked behind a door to a home he bought on impulse. He thought about how she would look beside him on the French Riviera, her finger donning the ten-karat ring she had picked out herself, her teeth framed by a heavily lipsticked smile. He wanted desperately to spread tanning oil on her shoulder blades, to think of them as angel wings, to think of her as a goddess. He wanted to love her. He fell asleep in a fit of panic, stroking the bear’s ear and feeling the ghost of another woman beside him. He could feel her slipping away, evaporating from his arms, from his dreams as he kicked the blankets around the bed, searching for her with his bare feet. When he awoke, the bear was under him, suffocated, its nose a bit looser than before.

Wrapping a sheet around his torso like a toga, Henry propped the teddy bear on a shelf and eased the practically unread book back into the collection. He relieved himself in the toilet across the hall, gleefully deciding not to wash his hands this morning. Still, he brushed his teeth furiously, enjoying the taste of toothpaste mingling with the dabs of blood that formed on his gums near his molars. Henry did not floss. He made his way across the winding hall towards the room with his clothes, where he dressed himself in fresh trousers, and a red t-shirt. The sheet was left in the corner, along with a few other soiled items that Henry had neglected to put in the hamper. He walked towards the nearest staircase, and made his way to the kitchen. The clock above the sink read ten-oh-ten, and Henry bated his curiosity by eating one of Kate’s plums. It was unusual for his wife to be sleeping so late. She usually positioned herself at one end of the kitchen table in the morning, slicing fruit in front of a book or the newspaper. Henry checked the microwave clock to make sure he had the time correct before sitting down in her seat and slicing a plum.

By noon, Henry began to twitch. His fingers shook a bit, and he had grown sick of the fresh fruit and had begun stuffing himself with alternating spoonfuls of raspberry jam and peanut butter. His forehead ached, and he pressed four fingers against his temples, squeezing hard enough that his jaw cracked. When he checked Kate’s room, it looked perfectly normal, save the absence of the woman. Henry’s stomach fell towards his knees, and he suddenly felt nauseous. Leaning over himself, he vomited on the carpet, emptying his insides of the unbearable sweetness he had eaten all morning. His heart valves began snapping angrily. He was turning red, and beads of sweat dripped into the brown vomit, salt mixing with the sweet. He threw himself on her bed, whimpering like a child, wiping his mouth on her pillow, lying like an embalmed corpse. Henry lied there for nearly two days.

Lazy

There’s lazy and then there’s me, darling. There’s the way you sit upright when we talk to one another and I lean back, my chin out, my shoulder rolled clockwise, slack jawed and on my haunches.

“That’s lazy,” you say. “That’s the laziest thing I’ve ever see you do.” You say this as you run your thumb up the arch of my foot and wait for my smile to expand and collapse, my leg to jerk forward and catch between your knees.

“I’m not,” I say, coyly.

“You’re the laziest.” And with a kiss you are on top of me, and it’s true that I’m lazy, that I lie there for extended amounts of time and let your lips crawl on my skin, on my neck, on my impossible collarbone. It’s true I lie there, my eyelids fluttering, like some paraplegic movie star.

“I’m not.”

“The only thing lazier than you are the bedsheets.” You grab for my hair and kiss my eyelids. I stay on the pillow. I stay in first position, my knees shifted only slightly apart, unsure of what you mean by lazy.

“I don’t know what you mean by lazy.”

Twelve Shots

She sat him down over twelve shots of whiskey.

“Each drink,” she said, “is a new subject.” She smiled, and they took the first shot. “What do you want to talk about?” she asked. He shrugged. “How about jobs?” So they talked about what they did all day, how they hated their boss, how they needed raises and all of the normal conversation. It didn’t last long.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s take another.” They clinked the glasses together and took the second shot down, this one smoother than the first. “That warmed me up,” she said, and told him that summer was her favorite season. He told her his was fall, but summer was nice, too. She spoke about past memories of summer camp. He was a boyscout.

They took the third shot. “You know,” he said, “my parents are divorced.” “You know,” she smiled, “after 35 years, mine are not.” They laughed but she felt terrible, like she made a joke about his life. She touched her hand to his wrist and said she had a very lonely, unhappy childhood. He understood why, though he admitted maybe he did not understand how. She thought hard and told him she always felt alone even if she wasn’t. “This,” he said solemnly, “I understand especially.”

He motioned to the fourth shot, and smiled. They raised the drinks at each other and tipped their chins back, letting the smooth whiskey burn down their throats. “What now?” he asked. “Why are we out here tonight?” she asked him. “Is this a date?” “No,” he said. “But it could be if you want it to be.” She frowned and smiled, then frowned again and looked at her empty drink. “You’ll have to forgive me,” she mumbled. “I didn’t really eat dinner.” “It’s okay,” he said, and this time touched her hand with his: “Do you think this is a date?” She turned to him, squinting. “I’d rather not say.” “Not say,” he asked, “why not say?” “Because I’d rather not know. Not yet anyway.” “Fair enough,” he agreed, “but then we may have completed that subject.”

“Okay,” she agreed and took the next shot and waited as he, surprised, took his a moment later. “Would you mind if I played something on the jukebox?” she asked, and stood up. He sat on his bar stool alone and watched as she walked, all hips, to the jukebox across the room. Her ankles seemed to tug at her shoes as she walked, dragging spiky heels across the hardwood planks. She took a few minutes to choose music, and eventually settled on a popular Rolling Stones song. He walked over to her with the last set of glasses, her two hands placed wide-set on the jukebox, her hips swaying softly. “I think that was a subject onto itself.”

They took the last drink down and he brushed hair out of her eyes, his fingers lightly dragging against her cheek like her heels on the floor.

An American Aquarium Drinker

The group and the prayer and the behavior modification stop working eventually and then you will revert, you know this ahead of time, so you do what you always do when you’re lectured about drinking so much: you pour yourself a tall glass with one ice cube and stir it around with your finger before transferring it into a Dixie cup and then you leave, you walk out, into the piss-pour parts of the city late at night because everyone else is drunk like you, tongue-tied like you, frustrated like you, alone or very well could be like you, but before you get to the end of your drink your foot catches in a grate, your knees buckle and your wrists flap again the rough sidewalk and you’ve got yourself a fine set of cuts and a bloodied chin and what’s left of the drink is puddled around your ass like you’ve gone and pissed yourself, so you sit there, licking ribbons of blood off your hands like a wounded cat and wait for the rye to dry and the pain to subside and you imagine how nice, how really goddamn nice it would be for the sun to come out in this black dead of night, just this once while the rest of the big city sleeps, so you could make your way uptown and dig out your keys and get back for one more dose and the dizzy spell of those goodnight dreams.

Under the West Side Highway

In the summer, the city smells like dead fish, even more so now than before. The trees, especially the hirsute ones uptown, are to blame. It gets colder—just like it always did—in the fall, except now when the trees shed leaves, they develop a fine coating of hair. In the spring, the thin strands molt off the branches and trunks and the street cleaners sweep the streets like a barbershop floor. By June, there are a few stray hairs left in the city. Most of them end up in the Hudson where the scaly fish choke on them and drift under the West Side Highway. The hookers have since vacated Tenth Avenue.

Little girls and hungry rats.

The neighborhood was full of blonde braids and balloon animals on leashes. Little girls sat on stoops throwing pieces of bread at the sidewalks below. One by one and one by one, the little girls tore uneven pieces off loaves of challah and dark seeded rye. They tossed pieces until the rats grew full and scurried away into the gutters, leaving the sidewalks strewn with uneaten bread and pale, yellow leaves. Soon, the little girls were called in for lunch. It began to rain. The bread became bloated and the sidewalks turned spongy. The city smelled like yeast. Later, the rats emerged from the gutters, their eyes shining bright. The little girls were sent to bed without supper.

The Delivery Boys Have All Gone Missing

New York was homogenized, cleaned out by Giuliani and his karma police. We were bequeathed the expensive shreds of what was left. This was all in the last will and testament to Manhattan, articulated in the free pamphlets piled high next to subway ticket machines. The fine print about credit cards and one speed bicycles and bomb-sniffing dogs is in there. It reads like poetry if you are, and you should be, a lawyer. It reads like an admissible villanelle. But no one reads the fine print, and no one notices the delivery boys have all gone missing. The hard boiled detectives are all sleeping in. Old cigarette smoke is bottled and sold on side street bodegas. Skyscrapers buckle in the deadening wind while handymen fix New York from the gutter on up. We take what was left for us and try and remember to leave a suitable tip if the delivery boys ever return.