The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [104]
She had not really wanted pills lately. She found this strange and could only conclude that it meant she really did not want to sleep. Nor was she particularly restless. She did not toss or turn, had no urge to desert the bed and pace the floor or roam the darkened streets. It was easier to lie quite still at Peter’s side while the hours passed, while tonight inch by inch became tomorrow.
Except, of course, that there was no tomorrow. She thought of the song—“There’s No Tomorrow”—heard it in her brain in a rich lush baritone, and thought of the particular truth of its title. Tomorrows never existed. By the time you reached them they had become present time, and the whole concept of tomorrowness was merely a carrot held before the myopic donkey of the present.
The past, on the other hand, not only existed but with each passing day the past became a day larger and longer, another twenty-four hours more oppressive. It did not seem fair: There was no future, and the present kept turning into the past.
Not fair at all.
Her legs brushed Peter’s as she got out of bed. He slept on. She got her cigarettes, went into the bathroom. She left the door open, lit a cigarette, sat on the toilet, and let her water flow noisily into the center of the bowl. When she was done with her cigarette she put it between her legs and let it fall into the toilet. Its end singed the tips of several of her pubic hairs en route, and her nostrils wrinkled to catch the singular smell of scorched hair. Years ago she had read a description of tortures inflicted by French paratroops upon female Algerian insurgents, and still recalled how the paras had butted their cigarettes upon the private parts of the women. On occasion she had tried to make herself burn her pubic mound but had never been able to do it.
Now she remembered a man many years ago who had liked to burn her with his cigarettes. But she could not make herself remember whether she had enjoyed the experience or not. It seemed the sort of thing one ought to remember but her memory had been markedly uncooperative lately, and certainly not to be trusted.
She flushed the toilet and listened to the roar of the water. Peter and Robin slept on without noticing it. Often at times like this she itched to disturb their sleep but could not bring herself to awaken them directly. Instead she left the door open and peed and flushed noisily and clomped heavily around the room, but none of the things she did were loud enough to intrude upon their sleep.
She got back in bed, again brushing her legs over Peter’s, and lay on her back with her hands folded neatly on her flat stomach. Her eyes were wide. After a few moments she let her hands roam over her own body. She touched herself, not to excite but to explore. But her hands were barely aware of the skin they touched, her flesh barely aware of the hands that touched it. There was a partial numbness that had characterized every aspect of her life lately, as though all sensation were experienced through a veil. She could not really see or hear or smell or taste. She was not dead, but neither was she truly alive.
And around her they slept, and stole her sleep.
She seemed to remember a book, a spy novel, about a man who could not sleep. A part of his brain, the sleep center, had been destroyed, and he had not slept in almost twenty years. At the time she had read this as fantasy, but now she recalled it and wondered if it might not be possible. Of course, she was not entirely sleepless. At some indeterminate point after dawn broke she would slip under, and for a couple of hours she would be asleep. It was never good sleep, though. It was just a slightly deeper dream level than she experienced while awake.
So hard of late to know what she had dreamed and what had actually happened. To tell past events of the real world from past events of the almost as real world of dreams. Some