Authors: Kenneth Calhoun
He repeated this as he approached a cluster of abandoned cars in a parking lot. Out of habit, he peered in the windows, hoping to see a key jutting from the ignition. He could try each door, search the under the seats and floor mats, check the visors and glove compartments. But he had learned that this was an unrewarding and time-consuming endeavor, especially with deliberately parked cars. Chances improved when the cars had been abandoned on the road, but because they had been ditched by sleepless drivers with the engine running, it was likely the gas had already been burned through.
He walked on, making his way to a wide avenue that extended
up into the foothills, where large homes lined the ridges. Power line towers stood like skeletal sentries, positioned at receding intervals up the grade, arms burdened by the endless dead lines that sagged toward the earth.
The once impeccably landscaped lawn of the median had gone feral and was now up to Biggs’s chest in places. He could see trails pressed into the grass by other walkers, maybe coyotes. Overhead, palm fronds clattered and creaked in the wind. Doves cooed. He was tempted to curl up in the grass and reclaim some of the many lost hours of sleep, since he was still in the red. To dream again, to maybe see Carolyn—to draw her out of the dark margin of his eye. But that would be reckless. After all, it seemed to him that the sleepless were now drawn to him when he slept, moths to flame.
He walked on. A short distance up the avenue, he caught sight of a billboard. It was suspended on a wide trunk of steel, sitting three stories over a used car lot—an ad for a vacation getaway. The graphic was an expansive white sand beach. The impossibly blue water sat beyond, framed by an arch of coconut tree trunks. The copy read:
INSERT TOES HERE
. An arrow pointed to a spot in the sand. It was a campaign he had worked on. In fact, the line was his. This was his creative legacy, this sign.
When Biggs saw that its retractable ladder was lowered, he headed toward it. He had become attuned to possible safe havens, like the cage in the warehouse or the abandoned Humvee he had inhabited for a short nap what seemed like years ago. Yes, the danger was that a safe place could easily become a trap. And he wasn’t great with heights. But if he was able pull up the ladder behind him and somehow sleep out of view—maybe on the floor of the catwalk along the sign’s base, if he laid down some cardboard—the billboard’s location would be worth noting.
He picked his way through the used cars. As he neared the
ladder, he realized it was suspended higher than it looked from a distance. He stood under it and leapt for the first rung, grazing it with his knuckles before dropping back to the hot pavement. He looked around for something to stand on. Come on, he told himself, you can reach it. He took a few running steps and jumped. This time he caught it with one hand, then, after a wild swing, the other. He groaned and lunged for the higher rung, and the next, until he could bring his feet up onto the lowest rung. Now able to stand, he climbed up the ladder to the iron grate landing of the billboard.
He saw that the ladder could not be prevented from dropping back down. The crank lock was broken. He could, if necessary, use one of his locks to hold it up.
He was pretty high up. It looked higher than it did from the ground. Maybe four stories. He felt the altitude in his knees and wished he had Carolyn’s fearlessness when it came to heights. How she insisted on checking the weather by leaning far out of their sixth story window. How she once sat in the window frame, one leg dangling over the alley far below, as she snapped pictures of a nearby fireworks show. Just seeing her perched there had given his stomach a turn.
And yes, there was the skylight. She had climbed through it at least once, maybe more, pulling herself up the frail hook pole. What had she done up there on the roof, where no one goes? She had gone up and out of view, into a blind spot. She returned to earth with her bare feet blackened by tar. Of course he was reminded that there was another time, a longer stretch of time, that she had once disappeared into. A more significant blind spot—a cave of darkness that had once held her for six weeks. Even now, standing in the shadow of his sign with the foothills of her family home in sight, his mind tried to peer into the opaque fog of that lost chapter.
She had barricaded herself there in her childhood bedroom over a year ago. She wanted isolation, she had explained, to get fully immersed in a new project. Biggs had reluctantly endorsed this abrupt residency, having witnessed her mounting distress at being unproductive for weeks. It was a block, she insisted, attempting to explain her sleepless nights and mood swings. She just needed some space to work through it. The literal space she had in mind was the studio she had fashioned in her walk-in closet during high school, when she made stop-motion cartoons with repurposed Barbie dolls and hacked action figures.
She had asked him not to visit her, and she never showed him the work she had done there. When she returned to the city, she refused to discuss her time away. She seemed drained of her desire to create. He was perplexed by her sudden lack of drive, and by the unceasing agitation that lay just under the surface. She had long suffered bouts of insomnia—a pioneer of sleeplessness whose struggles reached new heights over a year ago, when she returned from her father’s house. What had happened there? What did she find in that darkness—tumbling in that void—that seemed to hang like a dark veil in front of her face?
He believed it was possible that he’d find her there now. Maybe whatever it was could somehow be their salvation now that the world had been turned inside out.
He took his bearings, sighting his path onward from the mountain ridges. He looked over his shoulder at the blue wall of motionless and silent ocean—the massive decal of colored dots smoothed over the backboard. Maybe, when he found her, this is where they would come. Away from the cave. They could live out their days on this narrow metal ledge, the two of them, sheltered by one of his bright ideas. Beachfront property, he thought. It was a peaceful scene, a dream vacation. An empty, two-dimensional
dream he had authored. Nothing like the turbulent dream sea that had brought them together, but real in its own way.
As he stood there looking at the vast arrangement of tiled rooftops, a sleepless policeman passed underneath with no awareness of his presence. Carolyn was right, Biggs observed. No one ever looks up.
HE
reached the house by late afternoon. It loomed above him, a sprawling, modern compound that Carolyn’s father had designed himself—an institutional-looking building with broad windows and glass bricks, a flat roof with cantilevered eaves. The front door was wide open. A bad sign, Biggs thought.
There were people in the house, but they were not Carolyn’s family. They were most likely neighborhood people who had just wandered in, confused. Biggs observed how they seemed baffled by the position of the walls, the location of doors, the height of the ceiling. The carpeting confounded them, as did late afternoon views out the window and the elegant mahogany furniture. They murmured to themselves as they picked through closets or stared at family photos, trying to situate their own dim histories—memories now distorted by the forces of exhaustion and hallucination—into the storyline that surrounded them. They were insomniacs under the impression that they were home, yet home had somehow disowned them.
Biggs was ignored as he moved among them, employing their shuffle, their twitching mouth and eyes. He counted at least fourteen people in the sprawling house. They were in various states of dress—men, women, some college-aged kids, a small child peeling off wallpaper in the dining room. They, and others before them, had toppled the furniture and flipped the beds. The hallway smelled strongly of urine. The family’s possessions were
now a chaotic tumble that crunched underfoot. He found the flat surfaces of his father-in-law’s office brittle with the obsidian fragments of the man’s fabled vinyl record collection. The ground was littered with papers. Biggs kicked at them—business records, tax filings, ancient spreadsheets, letters.
He moved on to the far wing, toward Carolyn’s room, where he too had lived one summer. The walls of the corridor were hung with family pictures. Some had been knocked to the ground by the heavy swipe of an insomniac’s arm or the drag of a shoulder. Others were askew. A large picture of her mother served as a centerpiece. He remembered it from the memorial service. There were pictures of Carolyn and her sister, Mary, as children, wearing stiff dresses, socks bunched at their thin ankles.
He stopped before a picture from his wedding. He and Carolyn smiling into the camera. Behind them, a glimpse of the meadow. Nearby, he knew, just outside the frame to their left, was a long table where all their family and friends had sat for both the short ceremony and the all-night dinner party that followed. There was a series of smaller images taken that day as well. Carolyn lifting her dress and running barefoot through the grass, chased by children. Carolyn standing on his feet, his chin resting on her head. A shot of him, knee-deep in a pond in his wedding suit, holding Carolyn in his arms over the water. The whiteness of her dress like a cloud reflected on the pond’s surface.
It struck him, standing in her house and staring at these pictures, that he didn’t think he could live without her. He needed to find her. Nothing else made sense. He tore himself away from the images and continued down the hallway toward the bedrooms. The rooms had been preserved for the daughters, should the world send them running home. Carolyn had done exactly that over a year ago, so why not now?
He pushed the door to her room wide open. She would be
there, he hoped, reading in her bed. The Carolyn he knew from years ago flashing that mischievous smile at being discovered. Mysteriously recovered and reaching out to him, erasing the images in his head, burned there the last time he saw her—a snarling, red-eyed insomniac tied to a chair—and even those from just before, when she moved with a weary yet beautiful sadness.
He took in the ransacked space—her clothes, papers, books cluttering the floor, the bed. The collage that each life produces, arranged by the artless hands of sleepless strangers. Light sliced through the vertical slats of the blinds, striping the otherwise dim room. No Carolyn.
“Well,” he said with a sigh, “of course not.”
He could hear glass breaking somewhere in the house, followed by the toppling of something heavy. People moving about. It was desperate to come all the way out here. But he had had no choice, he told himself. He entered the room, stepping on books that littered the floor. What else did he have to go on? She had vanished without a trace. This was the only place she would have gone, if she had the presence of mind to steer in a specific direction.
The disappointment, though not unexpected, washed coldly through him. He knocked aside the clutter on the bed and sat down heavily. They had made love in this bed many times, early in their relationship. Silently, so her father wouldn’t hear. It was the summer she came home to help with her mother’s hospice. Biggs had joined her, since wasn’t that what The Dream suggested?
With a sweep of his arm he brushed all the remaining items off the bed and lay down, face pressed into her pillow. The sweet odor of her was faintly held there. He recalled her skin, the goose bumps that appeared when he touched her. The hunger of her mouth when she forgot herself: the light electric scrape of her
teeth, the erotic shock of her tongue. She was like that about everything. Either intense to the point of hurting herself, or overly self-conscious and constrained. There was no middle ground with her, and he loved this about her, once he got used to it. How many times had she refused to talk to him on the phone, saying “I can’t talk now,” then hanging up? It took him several years to learn not to take this personally, to understand that her mind was just savagely engaged in something else.
He turned and, lying on his back, stared up at the ceiling. This is it. The exhaustion of his very limited ideas. Two places on the planet where she would most likely be, and yet she wasn’t. He felt the frightening range of maybes open up beneath him, the vast expanse of anywhere. He pressed both hands against his eyes, blocking out all light, holding everything in. Creating a vault of darkness. This, he thought, is where she lives now. Here but hidden.
As he removed his hands and his eyes adjusted, he saw a dark flutter again in the far right corner of his eye. He turned his head—half expecting to find someone standing there—and found himself staring at the door of Carolyn’s walk-in closet.
Biggs stood and stepped over the debris on the floor, then slowly pulled open the door to her makeshift studio. He squinted as he peered into the small, dark space. Could she be there, blending into the black backdrop? He needed more light. He went to the sliding glass window and opened the vertical blinds with a tug on the beaded chain. Late afternoon light pushed into the room and seeped faintly into the closet. Her dream chamber, he remembered her jokingly calling it.
The room had been outfitted for stop-motion shooting. Carolyn had mounted lights on the ceiling and draped the walls with black. A drafting table, which served as the production stage, sat against the far wall behind a cluster of tripods, portable dolly
tracks, and light stands. He knew how the backdrop could be quickly switched from black, for puppetry, to a green screen for chroma-key work, depending on the film or scene, or the look she was after. The camera could be suspended over the table on a jib, shooting directly down, for flatwork, drawings. It was a scaled-down version of her studio at home, but fully functional on its own.
The room even came equipped with a computer—a laptop that she used to edit the files, set on a small desk. The desk was lined with metallic external hard drives. Filled, he knew, with projects dating back to her earliest attempts at filmmaking.
Biggs sat down at the desk and opened the laptop. He pressed the power button and, to his astonishment, the machine stirred. He heard the whine of the drive. The monitor lit up. First blue, then gray as the machine cycled through the start-up. Then he found himself staring at her cluttered desktop—the file icons nearly concealing the desktop image—and it was something like being in her presence. The files were mostly video clips, but he could also see documents for grants and scripts.