Slippin' into Darkness

2:15 A.M.

It wasn’t a matter of record, not with The Six Million Dollar Man’s doctors, not with his employers. April Destino was the only person who shared his secret. But April was dead, and The Six Million Dollar Man wasn’t making any new confidences. So no one knew that his conscious mind fired like an eternal machine, twenty-four hours a day.

Simply put, Steve Austin had stopped sleeping when he was seventeen years old. And, like so many paths in Steve’s life, this one led back to a certain dead cheerleader.

Steve had had an art class in his junior year. April Destino was in it. The class had been doing watercolors on a September day that sang of Indian summer. Simmering heat broken only by an occasional sea breeze that slipped over the dry, weed-choked hills to the northwest. Venetian blinds rattling with each breath that whispered through the open window, the sound of a playing card tickled by bicycle spokes.

Each student wore an old shirt-something loose and sloppy enough to ruin with paint. That meant, in most cases, a shirt dad had grown tired of wearing. April’s dad worked at the shipyard, and her shirt was one of those dark Ben Davis numbers that had been the uniform of blue-collar guys back in the sixties. Steve’s dad worked on the docks in nearby Oakland, and he was more than familiar with the uniform. But it had never looked as good on anyone as it looked on April. Once seventeen-year-old Steve Austin saw April Destino in that Ben Davis work shirt, he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. Her blonde hair overflowed the worn collar, the perfectly curled strands a brilliant white-yellow against the dark, olive-colored cotton, her hair still holding the highlights that came from a summer spent in the sun. Her skin was golden and alive, and her perfect fingers were wrapped around a paintbrush.

There were other memories, too. The flash of embarrassment in April’s eyes as she laughed at her awful painting of the Destino family dog. The little smudge of white paint slick and wet on her cheek. The way she turned to Steve with a friendly sigh as if to say oh well, the empty working-man shirt’s shoulders sagging over her small frame in a way that made her seem completely vulnerable.

The big pocket of that Ben Davis shirt empty and gaping.

The images laced Steve’s dreams that September night in 1974, the last night he really slept. April Destino. Her dad’s shirt. Her dog. But in his dream they weren’t in a classroom. They stood in a meadow ringed with black pines. Doves nested in the deep shadows of the trees, their cooing music riding the warm breeze. April’s dog burrowed through stands of wild cosmos. The dog’s name was Homer, after Homer Price. But in Steve’s dream the mutt was a crazy-quilt version of a dog, just as it had been in April’s painting-out of whack, legs too short, head too big, impossibly yellow eyes crossed. A weird dog-clown, but not at all scary.

Slobbering, Homer charged through a net of poppies and cosmos. April laughed. The little smudge on her cheek bloomed, and when Steve worked up enough courage to move closer he smelled honeysuckle and felt the cool petals brush his cheek as he buried his face in April’s perfect curls.

Then came the longest wait in the world, in dream or in reality. Standing there with his arms around April’s waist, trying not to shake, trying to breathe.

Her golden hands settled on his shoulders. Her grip tightened as she moved closer. He kissed her and she kissed him. And he knew, instantly, in that way that only seventeen-year-olds can know, that April Louise Destino was the only girl for him. That this was a wonderful thing, and that it meant they would be together forever.

The meadow was their bed. April wore no pants, no skirt. Only the Ben Davis work shirt. No bra, no T-shirt. She undid the small green-black buttons and slipped the shirt over her shoulders while Steve took off his clothes. They lay together, the bright sun looming overhead, and it wasn’t like a meadow would be in real life because there weren’t any bugs and the wild grass beneath them didn’t make their skin itch and it wasn’t too hot or too cold.

Everything was perfect.

It was a dream.

Steve was still a virgin at seventeen. The result of an almost terminal case of shyness. But he dreamed what it would be like to enter April. To be inside April Louise Destino while his breath tickled her neck and his fingers danced over her dark nipples, lightly, the way the Playboy Advisor instructed. His hips moved slowly when he really wanted to move fast-more advice from the World’s Most Eligible Bachelor-and he didn’t surrender to the impulse to move faster until he couldn’t hold back any longer. April moved with him, her flat belly heaving against his. She sighed in a way he had never heard but accurately imagined.

She kissed him in a way no one ever had, with her mouth open, her tongue dancing with his. She didn’t talk dirty or wear leather or have a whip or any crap like that. This was a dream, but the girl in the dream was still April Destino at seventeen, not some weird doppelganger.

For Steve, in the dream, she was the real April.

As real as real could be.

Steve awoke from the dream spent but with a numb hard-on, wanting nothing more than to have the dream again. He stumbled through the next day in a daze. When he saw April in the hallway at school he stared at her until their eyes met, and then he almost lost himself in her open gray irises. Shaken, he blushed and hurried away, books and Pee-Chee folder held over his stiffening cock.

Home after school. Geometry. Biology. TV Dinner. Early bed. Lying in the dark, in his single bed, he couldn’t slow his thoughts. His heart thumped a frightening rhythm. He jacked off thinking of April, but it wasn’t as good as the dream. It didn’t seem real. And it seemed stupid, like something a kid would settle for, because even though he could recall every second of the dream in minute detail-the meadow, the dog, and, most especially, April-even though he could play it back in his mind, it wasn’t real the way it had been when he was asleep.

He started to worry that having the dream had been wrong. This feeling wasn’t new- it was the way Steve felt sometimes after imagining a certain girl while he masturbated. But the fact that his encounter with April had happened in a dream seemed to make it worse, uncontrolled somehow. It was as if he had slipped into April’s room and raped her while sleepwalking or something.

It was sick.

Wasn’t it?

Was it? Maybe that was the proper question. Because in the dream, April enjoyed it. In the dream she was with him.

It had all seemed so real.

Lying in his single bed, legs wrapped in tangled sheets, the evening breeze dying just short of the open window. Sweating. Frightened. All alone inside himself. The old joke playing over and over in his head: The first time I had sex I was terrified.

The punch line: I was all alone.

But maybe he hadn’t been alone in the dream.

He wondered if April had dreamt with him. He lay there that night, running the thought down, searching desperately for a solution that was as elusive as sleep. There was a simple way to find an answer, but Steve couldn’t imagine asking April. He would never approach April Destino and say, “Uh, April, did you dream that we…uh, that we, uh…made love in this meadow…while your dog Homer was running around?”

He would never talk to April Destino like that. He would never talk to April Destino at all. Christ, what could he say to her? Him, Steve Austin, the farthest thing in the world from The Six Million Dollar Man, who didn’t even know what to say to himself in the privacy of his own stupid head?

But maybe April had shared the dream. It was the kind of thing that would happen on Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, sure, but maybe it could happen in the real world, too. And maybe he could make it happen again.

If only he could get to sleep.

But that Steve Austin could not do. Not that night, and not on the many nights that followed. At first he dragged ass and his mom threatened to take him to the doctor, but he was sure a doctor would pronounce him insane once he discovered that the insomnia was connected to the dream. He would end up in a nut ward at Napa State Hospital, spending his days with the other perverts engaged in a life of round-robin slobbering and one endless circle jerk.

His fears made him more introverted than usual, in the wake of the dream they grew to almost unbearable proportions. The only thing that got him through was thinking of April, and the meadow, and the dog named Homer Price. And imagining that maybe, just maybe, April had actually been there him in the dream.

Junior year passed. Watercolors gave way to pencil sketches, followed in short order by sculpture and portrait work. April’s shirt was dappled with paint and smears of gray clay and Steve knew that charcoal shadows would soon be added to the blend. Once in a while Steve would intercept a probing glance-April’s face without expression but her eyes somehow hungry-and he would wonder if she was mad at him for not sleeping, for not sharing the dream. When she looked at him that way, he was certain that she knew.

April never said anything, but that was what Steve imagined.

And that made it all the harder when he tried to sleep.

Intercepted glances. Steve was good at catching things like that, but he couldn’t figure out what they meant. He couldn’t see them the way other people did, and that bothered him. It made him feel like he really was some kind of machine.

So, ultimately, he fumbled the ball. But he adjusted, at least to the sleep disorder. He read some scientific articles in the library but they didn’t help. And then he ran across a series of stories in a trashy tabloid that detailed the lives of people who didn’t sleep at all and who got along just fine.

His body adjusted. Or, perhaps, he adjusted to his body. He lay in bed each night, thinking about the dream, and April. Or the cheerleading squad, and April. Or art class, and April. But always April, in one way or another. Not really trying to get to sleep anymore. Not in the dream, but still with April.

That was how Steve Austin, teenage cyborg, passed his nights. In careful concentration, while his days faded. And the things he did, and the things he said, became unimportant when measured against that one cherished dream.

But he went on.

Life went on.

Years later, Steve got to know April. He was older and not so afraid anymore, and she wasn’t as imposing as she had once been.

He told her about the dream after their first time together. “It was the weirdest thing,” he said, lying in her arms. “I never forgot it. I’ve thought about it…a lot. I mean, it was so powerful that I thought maybe we’d actually been together somehow. That we shared the dream.”

April only smiled. Over the years, her eyes had lost that special shine. They had come to resemble silver coins that had passed through too many hands. “I had a crush on you in eleventh grade,” she admitted. “Junior year. Remember Mr. Parker’s art class? You were cute, wearing that shirt with your dad’s name stitched above the pocket. Cute and quiet…real quiet. Maybe I had a dream about you. I dreamed about a lot of guys. But you know-good girls, we were never supposed do more than dream.”

Her eyes darkened to a gunpowder gray and her smile became as thin as a fuse. “I wish I could remember my dreams. I wish I could tell you about them, because I know that’s what you want to hear. But I don’t have dreams anymore. I only have nightmares.”

That was all she would tell him that first time. But he didn’t need to hear any more, because he still noticed little things, and sometimes he could even figure out what they meant. April’s bookshelves made an interesting study, for instance. Worn paperbacks on sleep and dreams wedged in with books about psychic phenomenon and ghosts and UFOs.

Months passed before he found the strength to tell April that the dream still seemed real to him, and that life didn’t seem real at all. He didn’t want to hurt her, so he kept that to himself until she pulled it out of him. Even so, he hated himself for telling her. After all, what could someone say if you told them that you had made love to them in a dream when you were seventeen years old, and doing it in that dream was more meaningful than doing it at thirty-something, in real life? How could you say that to a woman without cutting out a piece of her heart?

The whole thing was more than a little crazy, but Steve had decided long ago that he was more than a little crazy. Many years had passed since high school. It seemed forever since he had struggled with a test, or caged beer from a 7-Eleven clerk, or sweated over the numbers posted on a baseball scoreboard. But his mind still worked the same way. He knew that he was still crazy after all these years, if functionally so, and it was just too damn bad you couldn’t get something useful for that, a license plate that would allow you to park in handicapped zones or something.

But April was a little crazy, too, and that made it okay. She had horrible nightmares. Her nightmares, like Steve’s dreams, gave way to insomnia. One of her Johns was a doctor, and he settled his account with downers and uppers and birth control pills and whatever else she wanted.

She shared the sleeping pills with Steve. Most of them didn’t work. One kind, Halcion, did. A little white wonder, that pill. Steve swallowed one for the first time on a December afternoon, and he dreamed his first dream in nineteen years. He dreamed in April Destino’s bed, on a long winter afternoon, locked in April Destino’s arms. It was a drug dream, not a natural dream, but it was real.

He returned to the meadow ringed with black pines, and April. He dreamed away a season of afternoons in the arms of April Louise Destino. The April who lived in a cramped little trailer became his dreamweaver, leading him to the girl he loved with a trail of little white pills, lying with him in a bed with dead springs.

Even through the white Halcion haze, he knew that. Living and breathing, April Destino was there with him, searching for safety in the comfort of his arms.

Asleep.

Searching for his dream. Running from her nightmare.