A State of Variance
On her fortieth birthday, the woman lost the ability to sleep for more than a single hour. She did not accumulate a tired feeling; in fact, that one hour served the purpose of eight, and she awoke refreshed. But because that hour was full of only the most intense, involving sleep, the sleep beyond rapid eye movement, the consequence was that she had no time in her sleep hours for dreams. So, during the day, she would experience moments when the rules of the world would shift and she would see, inside her teakettle, a frog floating, dead. And then blink and it would be gone. Or she would greet the mailman and he would hand her a basket of seawater, dripping, with stamps floating wetly on top. And then she would smile and bring in the mail. These moments sprinkled throughout every day; she still had a driver’s license and wondered if she should revoke it herself, as the zombies who passed through the crosswalk and disappeared into the lamppost were confusing.
She assumed she would die at eighty. She figured this because the sleep shift began on her fortieth birthday and all her life, things had happened symmetrically like that. Her birthdate was 11.25.52, and that was not notable until she realized that she had been born in Amsterdam and there the day comes first: 25.11.52; the address of the only house she could afford for miles and miles was 1441, on a street named Circle Road on the edges of Berkeley. She had a son the day her father died. Her son’s face was almost a perfect mirror of itself, in such a way that one realized how imperfections created trust, because no one trusted her son with that perfect symmetry in his face; contrary to the magazine articles that stated that women would orgasm easily above him, beneath him, due to that symmetry, no—his symmetry was too much, and women shied away, certain he was a player. Certain he would dump them. And because no one approached him, when he did have girlfriends every now and again he would dump them, because he found he did not trust them either, because they were always looking at him so furtively—making, with their faces, the action of holding up your hands in front of your chest to block a blow.
He told his mother he could not seem to meet a woman who had a core strength to her, and his mother, studying geometry at the kitchen table with cutouts of triangles and squares, said she was sorry for what her pregnancy had done.
“What did it do?” he asked.
She held a mirror up to his nose. He saw his face in the hinged reflection. “What?” he said. Then she did it to herself, and the sight of his mother in perfect matched halves so disturbed him that he went and made himself a huge ham sandwich.
“So what are you saying?” he asked, mouth full of meat.
“I am saying that your face repels trust,” she said. “Because it is too exact. I am saying,” she told him, “that I will die on my eightieth birthday, because I stopped sleeping at forty.”
He knew, in a vague way, about the sleeping. The shapes on the table danced in front of her and slipped into her mouth, large mints. Then they were regular again. The mirror on the table was a mouth. She put a finger in and it bit her, wet. She’d finally told her son about the sleeping when he complained that she had made him too many colorful crocheted blankets and he had no more room for them in his apartment. “Take them to the shelter,” he’d pleaded, and then asked, “How are you making all these anyway? Are you taking drugs?” (He himself had been taking overdoses of B vitamins to relieve stress to take the edge off how he felt when he smiled at another person who seemed to have an inordinately tough time smiling back.) His mother had laughed. She told him not about the dreaming aspect but about the one hour, the way she didn’t feel tired, and how it began promptly on her fortieth birthday.
He finished his sandwich and touched the blob of mustard left on the plate with the tip of his finger.
“Are you saying you believe in some kind of grand plan?” he asked. “Because I never thought you raised me to believe in any kind of overarching concept.”
“I’m just noticing the patterns,” she said. But her voice was so doubtful that he made a mental note with the sponge in his hand to be sure to be there on that eightieth birthday itself, so that she would not try to do anything herself, so interested in the pattern that she might let herself be a sacrifice to it.
Neither missed their father/husband, who traveled so often he was unrecognizable when he returned. He came back from the latest trip with his hair dyed black and a deadly cough that landed him in the hospital. He lay there for weeks and weeks, and his hair grew in long and brown. The cough got worse. Above him, before death, stood his symmetrical son, whom even he did not trust, and his wife, whom he could not sleep next to anymore, as she read until all hours and wanted to talk to him and had forgotten that other people needed more than an hour. She resented the world, he felt, resented that all people were not exactly like her in this way. She was so lonely for those seven hours, and when he awoke he always felt that she was slightly blaming him for sleeping. After she had turned forty, he traveled more, for years, so that those eight hours could be his alone, and in different cities he loved different beds—his mistresses not flesh and blood but made of pillows and sheets and the wide-open feeling of waking up without alarm or expectation. As he died, as he looked at these two people he loved most, he only thought: What a curious pair they are, aren’t they? And then it was the white light, and he felt fine about succumbing to it. He was not, by nature, a big fighter.
A year or so after his father died, the son felt a strong desire to get his mother a suitor, so that she would not lean on him as the main man in her life. He knew a son’s role could be confused that way, just as he’d felt the tugging from inside all those crocheted blankets, and he was too keenly vulnerable himself to the attention. He could see it, marriage to Mom, never official or blessed, and yet as implicit as breakfast or dinner. He did not want that. For all the lack of trust the world had bestowed upon him, he still had hope that something would happen to his face that would soften its appearance to others, and allow him into the palm of true love. So he went on a dating search for his mother. He answered several personal ads on Craigslist for men who were looking for women that sounded, more or less, like her, and so he wrote them, explaining that he was looking for his mother, and invited them, one by one, over to the house on 1441 Circle Road, under the guise of landscape gardener. The men were skeptical about the idea, which seemed untrustworthy, and even more skeptical once they met the kid, who seemed untrustworthy, but they all fell for his mother, almost elegantly, and in contrast to the general lore that good men were difficult to find, here were four, almost instantly, who were ready to take her mourning and knead it into their hearts. Two became her weekend companions: one on Sunday day, one on Friday evening. She did not tell them of the sleeping, or of how, when she was watching a movie, another movie often superimposed itself onto the screen, so that when he asked, after, how she’d liked it, she wasn’t sure which movie he had seen and which was her dream addition.
The son now had some space to do things. His father was gone. Which was sad, but his father had never trusted him, and that had always been a problem. He went to the Grind It Up coffee shop down the street from his apartment in Oakland and ordered himself a raisin scone and a black tea. Then he sat down at the table of a large man, a man with tattoos but the old kind, before tattoos became dainty and about spiritual life. This man wore tattoos from the time when tattoos meant you liked to kick people around.
“Yes?” the man said, moving his newspaper aside.