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 days ago Peter had mentioned Warren Ormont in conversation, and she had gaped at him and said, “But Warren’s dead, isn’t he? He was stabbed to death; he picked up a sailor in a bar and was stabbed to death. Wasn’t he?”
Peter had had little trouble convincing her that Warren was alive. Because she had learned not to trust memory, had learned to doubt her own ability to be sure. Warren was alive, though she had dreamed him dead. Her dreams did not have the power to kill.
Perhaps she had not even had that conversation with Peter. Perhaps that too had been a dream—
She got out of bed again and crossed the room to Robin’s side. She knelt beside her daughter’s bed and listened to her steady breathing. Devil’s daughter, she thought. Spawn of the Devil, thief of sleep. How many times had she dreamed Robin dead? How often had she killed her in her dreams? In some dreams Robin ceased to exist entirely; Gretchen edited the past and killed her by an abortion. In other dreams Fate did the deed — Robin would die in a car wreck, or drown in the canal, or be carried off by a mysterious fever. And in still other dreams Gretchen bloodied her own hands, wringing that little neck, slashing the throat, going berserk and beating the little one to death.
“Oh, baby,” she said softly. “Oh baby, you know what scares me? Someday I’ll think I’m dreaming and won’t be, because I can’t tell the difference anymore. Christ, baby, don’t let me do it—”
Robin grunted softly, shifted position. Gretchen leaned over and kissed her lightly on her lips. pointed her index finger and brought it to her own lips, kissing the tip. “This is a knife,” she whispered. She traced a line across Robin’s throat with her fingertip and dreamed a fountain of scarlet blood. She snapped her eyes shut and the scarlet fountain gushed more vividly; then opened her eyes wide to calm herself with the sight of the sleeping and undamaged child.
“Oh, God,” she said.
She returned to Peter’s side and lay on her back for a few more minutes, trying to will the disturbing image out of her mind. It was difficult to do this. Sometimes they tried to take control and it was very difficult to keep them from overpowering her. She was so afraid of what she might someday do. There would come a night when; instead of believing her finger to be a knife, she would hold a knife and believe it to be her finger. And it was so hard, so unbearably hard, to know what was real and what was not.
Time to be the succubus.
She breathed deeply in and out, in and out. It was indeed time to be the succubus. She always put off this moment as long as she dared because it was the one thing that calmed and reassured her, and thus she would wait until the most desperate part of the night so that afterward she would not have long to wait before sleep saved her. But it was time now, and his sleep was deep and easy, and it was time.
Succubus. Suck. Suck you. Bus, a Greyhound, she herself lean and sleek and spare as a greyhound, the succubus.
First she touched him, her hand fastening immediately upon his penis. For a time she merely held him in her hand, held the soft harmless sleeping cock in her hand Then slowly and carefully she shifted position at his side and breathed her warm breath over him.
The succubus. The devil’s spawn, the succubus, sucking men’s souls from their bodies while they slept. Steal my sleep, Petey, and in return I steal your soul. The succubus, stealing your soul, sucking it out through your sleeping cock.
Her mouth claimed what her hand released. She took all of him into her mouth, at first just holding him for long moments in the moist warmth. There was a time when he seemed on the point of stirring but it passed and his sleep continued as before. Gradually, with her considerable skill, she began to use her mouth to excite him.
This was what she liked best. These special moments, when his body responded while his mind remained utterly unaware of what was taking place. She felt him growing in her mouth and her heart thrilled. Bit by bit he grew until his cock was rigid and pulsing in her mouth. She kept her hands from his body and inclined her head so that only her mouth touched him. She bobbed up and down, sliding him in and out of her mouth, teasing purposefully with her tongue, establishing a single incessant rhythm and matching that rhythm perfectly to the rhythm of his breathing.