No Sleep till Wonderland (5 page)

I’m suffocating. I try to cover up my gasps with some fake coughs, but I can’t cover any of it up. It goes without saying I shouldn’t have taken the second little pill. What a drag it is getting old.

Ekat sits pressed up against the passenger door, as far away from me as possible. I wish I could sit far away from me too. Her posture is granite hard; a statue could take lessons from her.

We’re in the cab for days, and then she turns to me and asks, “What’s your name again?” She’s as formal as a free clinic doctor.

“Mark Genevich.”

“Do you know who Eddie is, Mark Genevich?”

“He’s the shady bouncer at Gus’s shady bar.”

“Does that make Gus shady? Or me?”

Good questions, ones that I’ve been too compromised to fully consider. “I think everyone is shady. Sorry, that wasn’t very nice of me.”

That last bit teases a smile out of her. She’ll probably regret it. “How much is Gus paying you?”

“Enough.”

Ekat shakes her head, expels her disappointment as a sigh through her nose. “I can’t believe he did this. He should’ve asked me first. I’m very mad at him.”

It’s not my job to defend my employer, new drinking buddy or not. “How do you know Gus?”

“We’re both from Hull, been friends since middle school.”

Hull is a coastal town on the south shore, and Hull to Southie is a common migratory path for wannabe urbanites. I say, “Isn’t that sweet?”

“You’re not funny.”

Maybe loss of humor is a symptom of narcoleptic speed freaks. I’d write that down on my list of side effects, but my hands are shaking too much. “I was only hired for tonight. What’s your plan for tomorrow?”

“You mean besides sleeping in and going to the gym?”

“What are you going to do about Eddie? You can’t leave work early every night.”

“I can do whatever I want.” Ekat crosses and uncrosses her arms, then her legs. Her anger is making everything uncomfortable. She pivots in her seat, turning to face me head on, as in the collision. “I might look into getting a restraining order. Or I might just buy a gun and shoot him in the face if he ever comes near me.” I don’t know if she’s giving herself a win-one-for-the-Gipper pep talk or if she’s serious. I don’t think it matters, because right now, when she says it, she is serious.

She turns away and asks, “Are you feeling okay?”

“I’ve been better. Has Eddie confronted you, in person, since that night you met him?”

“No, only the phone calls.”

We don’t speak for the rest of the ride. We’re in Sartre’s
No Exit,
only we’re in a cab, which adds the elements of potholes and random acceleration and deceleration to our quaint Hell. I wish I could smoke a cigarette, even if my chest is getting tighter with each breath, each strained heartbeat.

Finally, and right before the walls implode, we stop and idle in front of her I Street apartment. Ekat jumps out. I’m blinded by the interior light but manage to scrape together twenty-five dollars of Gus’s money for the cabbie.

Her building is a well-kept two-family house with yellow vinyl siding. It’s between Fifth and Sixth streets, and about the halfway point between Carson Beach and East Broadway. New and trendy cars and SUVs fill the street parking spots on both sides of the one-way.

Ekat is already past a chain-link fence, the basement bulkhead, and stands on a small wooden staircase, key in the side door lock. She says, “What are you doing?”

I stand outside the fence on the sidewalk, in the shadows. “Just making sure you get inside.”

“Don’t be an asshole; I’m fine. Seriously, why didn’t you just stay in the cab? You’re not staking out my apartment. I’m dismissing you, Mark. Say goodnight, tip your hat, get a cab, go home.”

I like that she used the term
staking out,
but I won’t tip my hat for anyone. I don’t say anything and only give a slight nod of my head. I’m too far away and out of focus for her to see it. She doesn’t wait for my long slow goodbye and disappears into her apartment.

Hostile client notwithstanding, a gig successfully completed. I’ll reward myself with a midnight trek home. As much as I hate walking—and I’ll probably hate it more in the morning—the outside air cools down my melting reactor core. That’s how it works, right? Simply walk off the speed like it was a big meal.

I make my way up I Street and take a left on Fifth. I turn on my cell phone, and there are no messages. Maybe I’ll call Gus when I get back to the apartment. He’s probably still at work. I walk behind a church, Gate of Heaven. It’s a big gate, taking up most of the block, its restored spire and turrets propagating the lie that they’ll forever point skyward.

Something’s off, and it’s not me for a change. The spire. There’s a light at its base, but there’s a dirty fog obscuring most of that holy pointing finger. Wait. It’s smoke, and I smell it too. I turn and stumble around, an aimless weather vane, and there, up ahead, at the end of the block, on the corner of H and Fifth, is a two-family with bright orange lights dancing in its first-floor windows, smoke billowing out of the second floor, and a stick-woman staggering around the street screaming for help.

I call 911. The presumably interested operator listens to my
Timmy’s in the well
spiel, then requests I stay on the phone. I hang up because I was never good at following directions.

I can’t really run or jog. My best is an awkward speed-walk crossed with a follow-the-yellow-brick-road skip. I’m off to see the grand and terrible wizard. I almost fall down, my weaker right leg buckles a few times, but I stay up and make it to the corner.

The woman, she’s young and skinnier than the scarecrow. Tears and mascara form twin muddy rivers on her contorted face. She bounces around like a panicky electron, all angular momentum. She peaks too fast for complete sentences.
Alone
and
just a boy
and
upstairs
are her verbal shrapnel.

I mumble something noncommittal, I think, and it works. She takes off down the street, screaming. I hope I didn’t say “I can help,” because that’s a promise I can’t make, nobody can make. Sirens harmonize with her screams, but they’re still the backup singers here, and they sound Rhode Island far away.

I climb the short set of wooden front stairs, fully aware that the worst of my symptoms—cataplexy and the hypnagogic hallucinations—attack when my anxiety levels go toxic. The burning building in front of me is likely to present as a stressful situation.

But with the amphetamines, I’m the new me, Genevich 2.0. I’ve been a physical wreck at times tonight, but I’ve made it without any real narcolepsy symptoms, without any gaps or naps or missing time. But the list, the side effects, that bit about amphetamines only hiding or masking the symptoms. But and but and but…Screw it. I open the door.

A blast of heat and smoke lands a devastating one-two punch, and I have a glass chin. I swoon into a standing eight count. Goddamn, I actually feel my consciousness want to detach and hide like a turtle retreating into a hopelessly soft shell that won’t save anyone.

I hike up my jacket to protect my head. Cotton is just so flame retardant. The front stairwell looks like my own brownstone’s stairwell. I can’t see the second-floor landing because of the smoke. I’ve seen this picture before. Orange flames chew their way up the left wall.

On my direct left, the front door is missing from the first-floor apartment. I shuffle by and peek inside. There’s a body in the middle of the floor, on display, writhing and twisting, jointless; its movement is too fast to be natural, but it is natural because fire is the body’s puppeteer.
Dance, puppet, dance
, the fire chants, and I vomit into my mouth. The body stops gyrating abruptly, and the entire apartment, the TV and furniture and rugs and floors and the discarded puppet bubble and melt, everything made of wax or some material that yields the deepest black smoke when it burns. I’m not supposed to go in there.

Then I’m halfway up the stairs, and they melt too, pool around my feet and ankles, so I climb through a bog of wood. Upstairs. The air is too hot; my lungs are quitting, shrinking away from their duties, the bastards, and after all the smoking I’ve done for them.

On the second-floor landing the flames talk to me, but I don’t understand. They’re being too loud. Their ancient roars and commands stick to the walls of my head. This time, I’ll never be able to get them out.

The second-floor apartment is locked up, but my hands and body pass through the door like it’s a curtain. I can do this because I know someone is keeping a precious secret in here. I ghost around the apartment so the smoke passes through me instead of into me. I can’t see very well, though.

I’m in a kid’s bedroom, and on his walls are the pictures of me that I drew in group therapy. I’m embarrassed at first, then relieved as the flames burn it all away. I hear the boy. He’s inside some makeshift nightstand, which was made from other bits and parts of furniture that don’t quite match up. He’s asleep in the top drawer. Patches of his skin are charred and still burning. I blow him out like a candle, any kind of candle that is small and can break easily. I pick him up and wish I could cup him in my hands like a firefly, but that’s not right. The fire isn’t his fault.

The bedroom walls collapse, and now I have a perfect sight-line down Fifth Street, to Gate of Heaven, which looks old and useless. The building I’m standing in is its own church with its own turrets and spires, only they’re made of flames, and this building has its own gathering of folks below, watching, maybe even worshipping. I can feel them there, but I’m not the god of hellfire and I do not bring them anything.

I walk through walls of flame and down to the bottom of the stairs. The boy is now standing next to me, wearing powder blue PJs. He sits and wants me to sit next to him. That’s not a good idea.

Someone shakes my shoulder, and that someone says something from a science fiction movie. She says something about Soylent Green is people. Don’t know why that information is important. I’m not hungry, and besides, everyone knows that.

I think I’m still dreaming, but I open my eyes, and it’s Rita, a local homeless woman who usually hangs out in the bank parking lot across from my office. Couple times a month, I share lunchtime pizza with her in the lot and talk old movies. She’s anywhere between thirty-five and a hundred and five years old and is a Charlton Heston devotee. Who isn’t?

She slaps my cheeks, smiles, an infectious smile even if her eyes disappear somewhere into the bag of skin that is her face, and then she takes off, leaves me alone.

I’m in a stretcher, low to the sidewalk, oxygen mask over my mouth and nose. These are important details that take some time to verify, not that I fully trust the verifier. The oxygen tastes better than the smoky film of vomit in my mouth.

I sit up and take off the mask. I lose a few beard hairs in the elastic strap. No pain, no gain. Me and the stretcher are on the corner diagonally across from the burning building. A roped-off crowd and twin fire engines, ladders extended, block my view of the first floor. Firemen aim their hoses at the roof and the second-floor windows. Everything is loud, a world of noise too big for my shrunken head. Flash floods of debris-filled water run down H Street.

I wouldn’t mind curling up on the stretcher for a bit. All of which means I’m feeling back to normal, my normal. I stand slowly, making sure the earth doesn’t spin too fast. All of my body parts seem to be intact, and in the right place, or, more accurately, everything is where and how it was when I started the evening.

Two people sprout up next to me, one on each side, and they both take an arm. They can’t have them. The paramedic asks me politely to sit. The cop is less friendly with her invitation.

I sit and tell them that I’m fine, that I black out all the time and I keep score at home. The paramedic gives me his best professional voice: low, soothing, but insistent. I cooperate with him long enough to have my blood pressure checked and a light flashed in my eyes. I pass.

I give the cop my IDs. She writes everything down. I’m convincing enough that they let me stand again, and the paramedic says I’m okay, but gives me a list of go-to-the-hospital follow-up directions should I experience any severe symptoms of smoke inhalation. I guess it’d be a bad time to take out a cigarette. He leaves.

I ask the cop, “Is the kid okay?” I’m asking about the little boy who was in my hands. She doesn’t say anything right away, and now I’m afraid I didn’t make it into the building, and I didn’t save anybody.

“I don’t know. A neighbor found him at the bottom of the stairs, hiding behind an old coat rack, and pulled him out.” The cop nods her head at the corner behind me. An older, bald, pink-skinned man draped in one of those tinfoil emergency blankets has a microphone and a camera in his face. She says, “They sent the boy right to Mass General.” She clicks her pen twice on the notepad and tells me that, according to eyewitnesses, I went into the building and came stumbling out a short time later. My stumble carried me across the street, where I puked and then dropped to the sidewalk. She finishes with “That was admirable of you to run into the building. Tell me what happened in there.”

I’m stuck and can’t talk. I don’t remember the kid hiding behind the coat rack. I don’t remember a coat rack. Was the whole scene a dream? No, that doesn’t feel right. I was up on that second floor. Or at the very least, the narcoleptic me was up there. I helped that kid. I had to have helped him.

I try to stick to the facts, even if I’m missing some. I say, “I was on my way home, saw the fire. There was a woman screaming about a kid on the second floor. I ran inside, upstairs, found the kid in his blue PJs in his bedroom.” I pause, waiting to see if she’ll verify that the kid was actually wearing blue pajamas. She doesn’t give me anything. I add, “I got him out of his apartment, helped him down the stairs before succumbing to the smoke and everything else.”

“Everything else?”

“Yeah, everything else. Severe stress tends to goose my narcoleptic symptoms into action. Or inaction as the case may be.”

“What are those symptoms?”

I hesitate. Which means I’m lost. “Hypnagogic hallucinations. Cataplexy.” Might as well tell her lycanthropy with the looks I’m getting.

She writes something down in her notebook and doesn’t ask how to spell anything. “So you left the boy by the coat rack? Right near the front door?”

“I got down the stairs with him, and then it all kind of goes black. Look I did what I could, all right?”

“Okay, Mr. Genevich. Please remain calm.” She says it like she has proof that what I told her didn’t happen. Maybe the kid’s pajamas weren’t blue. The smoke was thick and the flames were bright, so the narcoleptic me got a color wrong. So fucking what? How else would the kid have gotten to the bottom of the stairs, if I didn’t help him? I don’t need a hero’s badge or the camera in my face. A one-on-one acknowledgment of what I did would suffice.

She asks, “Why were you at the scene, Mr. Genevich?”

Her tone has gone from dismissive to accusatory. Can’t say I’m shocked. The South Boston police don’t like or respect me. To them, I’m a sad clown relegated to children’s birthday parties compared to their big-top, big-show clowns. A pretend cop again.

I’m no longer feeling very helpful. I say, “Did you talk to Rita, ask her what she saw?”

“Who’s Rita?”

I point out Rita in the crowd. She’s behind everyone, looking for an opening, too short to see anything.

The cop says, “Yeah, we talked to her. She only followed the sirens here.” Her answer is a shrug, brimming with impatience, and it’s a lie. She hasn’t talked to Rita. “Let’s try again. Why were you at the scene, Mr. Genevich?”

“Like I said, I was walking home, down Fifth Street, and I just happened by it.”

“Walking home from where?”

I yawn and don’t cover my mouth. I’m not very polite. Mom would be mortified. “From not home. I was on a job.”

“Where was that, Mr. Genevich?”

I could tell her. I could do a lot things. “Sorry, client confidentiality.” I reach for my cigarettes. It’s all about timing.

“You’re not a lawyer, Mr. Genevich. Just a PI.”

“Really? I guess I’ve been doing it all wrong. I’m so glad you’re here to straighten me out.” I’m being a jerk, and yeah, she deserves it, but I’m also frustrated with myself. It isn’t so far-fetched to conclude she doesn’t believe me because I don’t and can’t fully believe in myself.

“Have you been drinking, Mr. Genevich?”

I light up, fully aware there’s already too much smoke here. “Not enough and not very well. Look, goddamn it, I’m fine, I was fine, there was just too much smoke, and I did what I could before I passed out, and…”

The cop flips her notebook closed. She’s not waiting for me to finish. “Go home, Mr. Genevich. We may call or stop by your office tomorrow. Maybe you’ll be better equipped to help us after a good night’s sleep.”

That hurts. The cop leaves me alone, propped up against someone’s apartment building. I’m behind the crowd, which has gathered around the news crew and the hero neighbor.

I check my cell, and there are no messages. It’s almost 1:30 a.m., and I think about calling Gus and asking him to come get me, to help me home, but I won’t do that. It’s easier to think about closing my eyes and just disappearing, even if it’s only for a little while.

Ambulance lights and sirens explode, giving me a jolt. The flashing lights reflect off the huddled buildings. We’re all in danger. I stub out the cigarette on my heel; maybe it’ll help spur my shoes into carrying me home. I adjust my hat and coat in anticipation of my renewed journey.

I notice my stretcher is gone. I didn’t see it leave. Maybe it rolled away, slinked off on its own, looking for someone to help.