Home Fires

REFLECTION 13: Sleep

When we need to be at our best, we’re always far from it. I could sleep now for twelve hours straight, or I feel I could, and rise refreshed. Instead, I walk through half the ship with a loaded submachine gun slantwise across my back and a pistol shoved into my belt. Both are much too heavy, and I much too tired. Would Chelle do this for me?

I would like to think so, and perhaps she would. God only knows what she did on Johanna. She did much worse, in all probability.…

Which is my cue to whine that she was younger.

As she still is. Much, much younger than I, and she sleeps on her side, always turned away. It’s clearly a defensive posture, but does she know it? On her back sometimes when she has had a few; she snores then, snoring so soft that it is almost purring. I sleep on my belly, a good reason for staying in shape, for not gaining another kilo. Does the ship have a handball court? I don’t even know.

I could walk around and around the Main Deck. A lot of people do that, but I have walked now until my feet are blistered and feel that they must burst through my shoes. Through canvas shoes I bought for comfort, visualizing much shopping on this island and that, see the fort, built in 1615 by the Spanish. “There are a hundred and fifty-three steps so perhaps the old people should wait here while the rest of us go up.” Me climbing the stairs to show Susan that I was still young, Susan climbing behind me to show that she was still loyal. Once Susan would have combed this ship for me, I know. She’d have combed it ’til she dropped, and I may drop soon.

Would I do this if Chelle and I were the same age? Yes, and if anything more willingly. Chelle has still the fire of youth, a fire I would control if I could. That’s wrong, perhaps. Wrong but right. Wrong but true.

Correct.

Why is it my dreams are never the dreams I would like? Other men have good dreams, or so they tell me. Dreams of success. Of flying without a plane, of flying like a bird or flying like a balloon. (But it is never the fat ones who fly like balloons. Am I the only one to notice?)

I dream of prisons, of windowless concrete walls and being locked in boxes. Prisons in which I never sleep and never eat, or drink, or defecate. Dreams of driving down doubtful roads that narrow and narrow, of driving a car as big as a bus across a footbridge that falls to bits behind me.

Of getting out of the car in a wilderness to shout at someone on the farther side of a gorge, someone who turns away with no sign of having heard. Soon I give up—and do not try the car door, knowing that the car cannot cross the gorge and that I have locked myself out.

In the future, I may dream of walking through this endless ship, of painted corridors that rock and pitch and lead only to more corridors, silent corridors lined with locked doors.

Once I dreamed of Chelle, dreamed that she was leaving me, going to the stars to fight a war from which she would never return, and I was old.

No dream, that last. I am. Fifty will be at my doorstep only too soon. Chet is what? Eighty-something. I have never hoped that Chet would die; now I hope that he will live. If Chet achieves one hundred, why Skip might, too. At one hundred, no one will care if I remain abed, or how long I sleep.