Sugarplum
When the nightmares started was when I realized I was in trouble. For months I had been employing sleep as a pillowy refuge from my obsessive thoughts and the self-loathing they inspired. I would lay my head down and wander through a mundane dreamworld populated with acceptable versions of my life: versions in which I adopted a kitten and drove my father to the office of his urologist and cooked elaborate vegetarian meals. In another string of dreams I was a girl, a girl with obligatory and sequential aspirations, like the goal of being cast as Clara in The Nutcracker and invited on a dinner date. Sometimes I sleepwalked during dreams and woke up chastised or rescued from whatever chance of death by a roommate or a neighbor. At no time before waking did I become cognizant of the possibility that the dreams might be odd, that the universe of events or the personality my brain was inventing might be unreal. I dreamed and dreamed and in dreams did not think of the worst that could happen or of myself as broken for doing so. When I did wake I often found I felt renewed and ready, if such a thing is possible, to encounter the corners of my uglier conscious mind. That’s interesting, I would reply without speaking, addressing myself as the intake therapist had suggested during my first and final appointment.
Then a mirror in my house fell and broke into what seemed to be a thousand shards. I don’t mean this in a metaphorical sense; I had hung the mirror on a screw in the hallway of the converted factory apartment where I was still living with a dozen other tenants, and the mirror remained in place through all the slammed doors rattling the wall I’d raised despite not being licensed as a contractor, until one night during an explosive argument between the apartment’s two youngest residents—who everybody knew were sleeping together although none of us expected them to admit it—the mirror shuddered and wobbled and came down. The tiny shards and large, jagged slabs of glass bounced off the tiles I’d laid and the grout between them, and the two youngest residents screamed. The rest of us ran into the hallway in various states of semi-dress. The second-youngest resident’s foot was bleeding.
“Fucking fuck,” said the owner of the foot. The youngest resident was visibly chastened, having started the argument in the first place. I swept up the smaller fragments with a dustpan and brush. They were fine, powdery. Sleeping on the Hide-a-Bed that night I dreamed of ground glass poisoning a child’s food. In the dream I couldn’t recall that this was a myth, something debunked by expert murderers themselves in the city across the Hudson.
The following sleep I dreamed of the same girl’s face and neck coated in red; the shards and slabs had rained from an unfathomable ceiling. On the third night we were all swimming in glass—in our waking lives, the trampoline on the second floor had been replaced with an aboveground swimming pool for a house party—and the other residents and I and the child whom I didn’t know even in the dream but who was still mysteriously there, all of these people had bodies that were blood-laden although we swam and smiled as if nothing were wrong in any way. I kept waking up with a gasp, unable to swallow. My mouth full of ground mirror.
~
Because I didn’t know what to do without the safety of my unconscious flights, I took up running on the days and in the early and late evenings when I wasn’t expected to show up at the diner where I’d been promoted. I ran on sidewalks and sometimes in the street past shuttered businesses with little green awnings and row houses sided with stone or vinyl and flowerpots out of which plants that were dry and decaying most often spilled. It was fall but warm, and the state of the flowers seemed a likely sign of neglect; after seeing them I ran faster and my running faster was problematic because I was out of shape and would often end a run with my head between my knees.
The first IPCC report had come out in August and was grave in its expressions of concern about greenhouse gases and global mean temperature as well as in its uncertainty about the impacts of the chemical compounds on polar ice sheets and oceans and clouds. I had photocopied all 365 pages of the report at the library on the corner of Park and Fifth Street, which bordered a wooded square that looked as though it belonged in New England. The copy of the report was lying on top of the board balanced on two cinderblocks that I used for writing, and it was another reason why I wouldn’t go home and why my feet moved themselves more quickly when I saw the wilted plants, which by mid-October were also soggy from three inches of rain. I ran and stopped and huffed and ran again, trying to clear my head of environmental disaster, of my own abnormality, of girls with glass in their hair. I murmured hello to old women on the corner.
You’ll notice that I haven’t been specific about the worst of the thoughts that followed me around. This obfuscation stems partly from a stubborn-rooted shame and partly from the words of the intake therapist, who before I fled his office assured me that confessing the most terrifying contents of my brain was a shortcut to psychological hell. My desire to disclose these items, he explained, was more than a remnant of my family’s nominal and my own lapsed Catholicism. “You want someone to reassure you that you’re normal,” he commented as he ripped the handwritten prescription for fluvoxamine from the pad of white sheets. The impulse to let myself be judged would never ease if I yielded to it, he said. I would only make it worse, he said. The intake therapist lowered his spectacles and looked at me with cinematic sternness, no doubt conscious of having by far transgressed the usual boundaries of a diagnostic session. I was glad I’d worn my running shoes to the office because I felt a sudden urge to sprint away. But the repeated worsening of my condition isn’t something I can risk, so on the off chance that the man is right—well, you understand. What I can tell you is that I began storing up the exhaustion I would experience after a run, the numb sense of detachment and relief. Alone in my bed, I would call up and attempt to drown in the feeling, imagining myself outside the sad sack of my body. Then I would try to conjure dreams, to will them into existence the way the crash-bang of the mirror had planted nightmares in me.
~
After a long time they worked, the madcap brain escapes. Of all the places I forced my unconscious to go while I was sleeping, the one I most appreciated was the void of outer space. In this recurrent episode, I would take the A/C/E to West 4th Street and the F train to Delancey and the M train to its terminal stop, where after much walking I would find my estranged kid sister deep in Queens. She would be sitting on the stoop eating grapes like our dead mother used to do.
“Hello, Sugarplum,” I would inexplicably say. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
She would understand what I meant and realize that I meant it and would only nod, agreeing, following me back on the sequence of trains and then to the mission launchpad that of course would be located in the middle bedroom of a railroad apartment on the Upper West Side. “You’re so good at this,” she would say as we suited up, and I would know that “this” was brothering. As we watched the baking earth recede out the rear window, she would cover my hand with hers and gaze up at me and smile.
“We did it,” she would tell me.
“Together,” I’d say.
By morning my sister would be gone. December 23rd, and it was 66 degrees across the Hudson. I continued to run and dream and started hoping that the next dream would be the one that didn’t end. It would zigzag before me like a rocket trail, refracting light from the mesosphere after sunset. Exploded and exquisite, when it was already night on earth.
