Sleepwalking Read Online Free PDF Page B

home from the hospital, “is get real high. Like I used to in high school, when Jimmy Katz and I went out behind the basketball courts during Phys. Ed., and did up two bowls of Acapulco Gold. Get me nice and high, Claire.”
    She remembered the day very well and her own fingers putting together a joint, clumsily and wetly. She was fourteen then and had done this only three times in her life. She scratched a match to the joint, and brother and sister smoked quietly until there was nothing left. Seth inhaled one last time; he seemed to be smoking his fingertips. Later, high, he said to her, “I just thought I saw things in black and white for a second. I guess that’s the way dogs see. I wonder what they dream about—maybe visions of Milk Bones dancing over their heads.” He giggled to himself.
    It rained all that afternoon, and Claire could hear the tin buckets her father had placed in the leaky basement clank with water. It was warm and damp inside, like a sick child’s vaporized room. The smoke and the rain and the August heat were soporifics; Seth lay down on the tweed couch, his eyes blinking slowly, like a lizard’s. He was falling asleep. Good, Claire thought, good. She felt relieved when her brother was asleep. When he was awake there was that constant knowing look, the expression common to all martyrs—Iphigenia, walking barefoot up the incline, fire sprouting up around her ankles likechickweed, that same expression on her face:
I know, I know
. Claire could not bear that look. When Seth slept he was just like anyone else.
    Claire had read in some magazine that you could never have a dream in which you actually die, because the impact of it would be too much of a shock to the system and would cause you, in real life, to have a coronary or a stroke or something equally fatal. The mind and the body, working together in glorious synchrony, drag you up from rock bottom of sleep, so that you twitch and blink into consciousness before your falling dream body has the opportunity to make contact with the pavement below, or before your drowning dream body has the opportunity to swell its lungs with dark salt water and sink slowly and finally into the deepest regions of the ocean. Not even Seth could die in a dream. The sleep psyche is as innocent as a child, as protective as a mother.
    In the beginning, they filled vials with his blood. There was an entirely new vocabulary to be learned; its words were odd and vaguely familiar, in a tongue that seemed as artificial as Esperanto:
Basophil. Leukocyte. White count. Platelet
. Claire’s mother recited them on the telephone, and the words jumbled together made Claire giddy as she listened.
Platelet
: a tiny piece of dinnerware used at Lilliputian banquets, easily mistaken for a chink of green bottle glass on a beach.
    Seth’s remission, that most desperate of furloughs, had ended. Her parents phoned her at Buck’s Rock Camp, where she was spending the summer on scholarship, taking classes in batik-making. “I think you should come home early, if you possiblycan,” her mother said, and the long-distance connection crackled and spat as though to convey the urgency her words could not express.
    —
    S eth had slept heavily all that afternoon, and when he woke up there was a patina of sweat on his face and neck. “I’m so tired,” he said, “and so stoned.” He propped himself up on one elbow and smiled, patting the couch. “Come sit here.” Claire sat down lightly. It was routine; every day she had visited him in the hospital she had sat on the edge of his high, wide bed, barely resting her weight on it, not wanting to change the balance of anything.
    Seth looked up at her, his face flushed, his pupils as full as gourds. “I want to ask you something,” he said.
    “Go ahead.”
    “Are you afraid of me? I mean, I read in a book by that woman Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, that people are scared off by people with diseases because it reminds them of their own mortality