Night Visit

She had taken to simpler bedtime reading--magazines and newsletters from environmental organizations, from the glossy layouts of photo contests in the Audubon and Sierra magazines to the no-frills eight-paged stapled and folded EDF Newsletter. Her theory was that looking at soothing pictures of nesting birds, rare wildflowers, and newly acquired and saved parcels of land would make it easier, eventually, to sleep.

She had also begun sleeping with her reading light on--not on purpose at first--but merely falling asleep while reading into the night. Simply turning out the light became a more daunting challenge as the weeks of early summer went by; she could not deliberately separate the wakefulness she associated with light and safety from the unconsciousness and vulnerability she associated with darkness. Finally, she admitted that she was defying the dark.

Once dawn came, she could awaken from an unsatisfying sleep, turn off the light, and feel the kind of physical and mental peace that comes after a fever has broken. Only then did the tightness in her muscles unravel and the tension between her eyes smooth out. Only with the coming of daylight could she anticipate the kind of sleep she suspected other people had every night. Witnessing the return of sunlight and hearing the noisy routine of the world outside her apartment--the garbage trucks in the parking lot, cars heading for the expressway with radios tuned to the morning news and traffic reports--only that restored what she lost every night in the dark when she closed her eyes.

Immersed in nature photography, essays, and environmental rhetoric at bedtime, she tried to circumvent her nightly ritual. To escape--that alone had become her body's imperative. Nothing more than that fact demonstrated to her the idea that the body has an intelligence, a will all its own. In her erratic sleep each night, that demand to escape hammered her painfully awake just before she made it into the territory of sleep. Large palmetto bugs with feathery, silky wings and delicate, fast legs brushed her body nestled in defense. Or, a hand moved up her thigh or stirred the hair lying, like antennae, over her ear, and then sent her out of bed before her mind, lagging behind her body, could comprehend her own fear.

One night a feather touch just above the inside of her knee awoke her. Attempting flight, she tangled her foot in the sheet and landed on her knees. At first she felt only the dull impact of kneecaps and flesh on concrete covered with a carpet and padding too old to provide cushioning. In the seconds following impact, she envisioned with detachment the flesh surrounding her knees as a bloody sponge suddenly and forcefully compressed between stones, squeezed dry even of pain.

Then she was standing naked and still asleep--really--by her bed. Fully opening her eyes hurt, and the soft light she had left on for comfort now collaborated against her. She did not look at her knees, although the pain now felt like water sucked back into the compressed sponge of her flesh. She slid on glossy photographs and crumpled newsletters as she ripped the sheet off the bed and threw the pillows on the floor. She searched in the space between the mattresses and the wall and edged the bed out another couple of inches, just to make sure that they could not touch.

Spent and awake, she felt her knees swelling and suddenly wondered if she could have broken a kneecap. She put on her nightgown and read Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night in the brightly lit kitchen, her legs elevated on the table and her knees packed in ice. When she saw dawn through the window over the sink, she turned off the florescent light, went to bed, and slept deeply to the lullaby of a whirring fan.

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