DANA RAJA WAHAB / HARD TO SLEEP
From mind to mind
I am acquainted with the struggles
of these stars. The very same
chemistry wages itself minutely
in my person.
—Denis Johnson, “The Heavens”
Home, the one my parents bought when I was born: a pale colonial house built in the 1930’s with columns before the curving crowned doorway. The windows, uncharacteristically vast, unfurled a blanket of morning sunlight across every surface from the wooden floors to the reserved white walls. Memories of this space existed without sound and the harder I tried to recall a conversation, an alarm clock, or the sounds of the television, the less I believed there had been any sound at all. Did my mother and I ever use our voices to speak or was it simply gestures and the motions of routine? It appeared in my memory like a doll house in which the orient met the occident: floors covered with Syrian rugs, furniture in deep shades of red, green and purple with gold details. Watercolors of stone village houses, black and white photographs of mid-century Lebanon, a portrait of a sheikh whose name I did not know. A seventy-two inch flat screen television on which we watched Wheel of Fortune and Everybody Loves Raymond. At night, there was always a light left on between two fiddle leaf fig trees.
The back of the house, facing the east, often felt more like the front. Eyes and bodies were drawn to the yard and to the water. The house admired the lake before it as if it were a muse stretched naked on the grass. A muse too far south to be considered Southern but not far reaching enough to be Caribbean. Rather, an evergreen swamp girl with bright capillary waves and unknown murky depths. Manatees passed through her brackish waters and out to the neighboring mangroves of South Florida.
An estranged sister to the Mediterranean shoreline beside the third story apartment where my father lived and I spent summer vacations. A space that used to make me uncomfortable upon arrival, purchased long before I was born. The wide living room faced the beach through window walls. I was melancholy for this home that did not get my mother’s attention and so had turned out awkward-looking, covered in expensive decor but not pretty or inviting. As a child I often worried I would be stuck there. From the balcony I would watch the waves rolling in my direction, reaching out to me.
After graduate school, I found myself back in the Florida house. This had been cause for celebration at first, after narrowly escaping my father’s wish to “return” to Lebanon. It was understood in my childhood that we lived among Americans as opposed to being Americans, despite my birth certificate and twenty-five years of schooling.
For the first time, however, the house was empty. In that year abroad, my brothers had both moved out. One into a house just fifteen minutes north with his newlywed. The other followed his wife to Massachusetts. My mother returned to Lebanon full-time, to care for her parents and her estranged, but not unloved, husband.
The absence of their company spread like ink over the picture frames and furniture until every room was a shadowy reminder of departure and the changes in my life that had come about without my realizing.
It took a long time to notice that sleep had disappeared like a friend you grew apart from. Like a Lilliputian tear on the back of your tights that grows without your knowledge. I felt that the house on the lake had begun to feel unfamiliar, even hostile towards me. Like I had overstayed my welcome.
*
I sprinted into my teaching career. What I already knew entering this position was that being a homeroom teacher was like running a race with no finish line. Hurdles included, but were not limited to, absolutely never being left alone and having no time to eat your lunch, use the restroom, or sit down over the course of eight hours. I smiled excessively and cried between class periods, seated on the toilet cover in the tiny bathroom made for children.
*
After school, I hung my keys on the rack beneath the alarm panel. I waited there, holding my purse. I listened and the AC hummed on. I imagined familiar sounds: the splash of the faucet or the closing of a cabinet. I remembered the smell of coriander that so often greeted me when my mother prepared dinner. The way she wiped her wet hands on the kitchen towel.
Returning to this newfound vacancy left me unsure of what to do next. Sometimes I sat down and stared out the window. Other times I quickly made my way upstairs, avoiding the dining and living room as if I had blinders on. I’d slip into pajamas and lay down in bed, staying there as the light from the outside poured from the crease of the ceiling to the pink acrylic dressers and then the beige carpeted floor. The room cooled at sunset. The stairway lost its color in the shadows.
*
The nightmares were manageable at first. Once a week, then once every few days, then every day, and several times per night. Most nights it was a break-in: the familiar sound of the front door opening. A push against the peeling dark wood panel and a scrape of friction against the marble floor. I sensed a presence but stayed in bed with my eyes closed, aurally tracking the careful footsteps up the carpeted staircase, waiting for the drawn-out creaks. Then I felt it standing beside the bed, looking down at me, a dark silhouette against the grey moonlight. Dread consumed me as it lingered and I awoke in tears.
Sometimes there was a cinematic theme, like a post-world zombie-apocalypse scenario. These were loosely based on TV shows that in hindsight pulled me further into the universal and bizarre addiction of being afraid. I encountered other survivors, but never anyone I knew. Wooden boards dressed the windows of our house on the lake. The light was orange and the view unfocused like the fog at dawn or the wetness after a rain shower at dusk. I contemplated taking a canoe out across the emerald waters of the bay to live on one of the small islands that lay scattered along the shoreline. I stood alone on the itchy crabgrass, wondering where my family had gone and if they had survived. How quickly had they met their end? Was it painful? Would it be painful for me? A movement in the bushes caught my attention.
Before long I adjusted to waking up in panic. Every night I lost another minute of rest until eventually the sun setting was enough to make me afraid. The way in which I lost sleep was slow and unassuming, over the course of a year, as if I simply didn’t have time for it anymore.
*
On Fridays, the weekend pulled me in like a current when you’ve swam too far from the shore. I chose release over rest and the black painted walls of a bar where smoking was still allowed indoors and a stoic and burly gentleman seated outside the restroom sold dime bags.
My friend and I sat at a rickety wooden table. My heart sped. I swiftly unwrapped a fresh pack of cigarettes, discarding the clear plastic on the table, not bothered to stand for the trash a few feet to my left beside the DJ. I lit the first cigarette with a shaky hand and closed my eyes, just for a moment.
The crowds ebbed inside to the yellow-lit bar counter settled on the right side of the room with an open pickup window on one end. Outside, on the sidewalk, the seating hugged the wall in a cluster of chair and table legs. Three in the morning welcomed the late night leftovers from other establishments and an excess of revolving huddles standing or falling over the benches before the asphalt. Any predisposition of shame faded like light August rain once you stepped onto the cracked pavement.
We spat quick words at each other, giggling and watching the disjointed bar scene and then lighting more cigarettes and passing my wallet back and forth beneath the table and skipping off to the bathroom every thirty minutes until eventually the lines were unbearable and instead we walked to the alley behind the bar where grass grew in the corners through the concrete and the smell of marijuana made us feel like we weren’t doing anything wrong because everyone had used this corner for one thing or another.
We spoke to a gentleman at the table next to us who had a shaved head donned with a tattooed crown of leaves, like Julius Caesar, and we liked him immediately. He was an artist with bright green eyes and he had an obsession with frogs. We asked him to join us at the nightclub next door and he politely declined, citing an incident the week before when he gifted a beloved DJ a dead frog encased in glass and apparently, she had misunderstood the gesture and security had stepped in.
We nodded eagerly in understanding.
“That is the most amazing thing I have ever fucking heard,” I said, and we laughed some more and I sucked at my teeth and my leg shook beneath the table.
In an effort to go anywhere but home, we ping-ponged between the bar and the club next door until we were forced to retreat to my backyard and finish whatever we had left. I scraped the plastic dime bag with a credit card then split it in half. We licked the remains from the corners as the sun rose behind us.
*
I slept in intermittent trials like Goldilocks in the three upstairs bedrooms: mine, my mother’s, the guest room. My own room made the least sense. It had begun to feel unsafe after a small black lizard had taken up residence among my bookshelves months earlier. The shuffling sounds stirred me awake every night and in the foggy and twisted space between dreams I scolded myself for leaving hoarded stacks of novels on the floor. In the morning light, I would spot its tail in between the set of Tolkien books and modern illustrations of classic fairytales. It would appear beside me when I sat down to pull on my slingback pumps and I would leap screaming into the next room. It would disappear if anyone else was present. This went on for quite some time.
“Maybe it’s a lover from a past life trying to contact you,” my mother said, smirking.
I could not recall when my phobia came into existence, but I had a sneaking suspicion that rather than battling trauma from a personal experience I had instead internalized a fictional character’s climactic demise in the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap.
The carpeted floors of each upstairs bedroom picked up a different series of sounds that the old house made. When one door was pushed closed, another across the hall popped open. I locked them all at night and imagined myself in a lockbox within a safe. I left the light of the staircase on, to remind intruders that this house was inhabited, if they happened to miss the car parked outside. These tactics, in hindsight, exaggerated the hysteria. I placed a towel beneath each doorway so that I could not trick myself into seeing shadows passing in the light.
*
I often remembered the year I turned twenty-two, when I was an assistant teacher, when my brothers and I lived at home together. The age range alone was enough to inspire the plot of a daytime sitcom. Thirty-two, thirty, twenty-two: Samir, Ramzi, and me. Our mother was often visiting the homeland.
My middle brother had entered into the steadily satisfying pace of life that people say follow your twenties. He had the job he wanted, the routine, and a string of responsibilities including a house to look after, even if it was technically my father’s. Left unbothered, he roamed between his room on the southern end of the house to the office on the other, working on peculiar art projects in the evenings and on weekends. First it was a series of Arabic calligraphy paintings. The phrase hamdillah, “thank God,” appeared in black and red on a rectangular canvas above the television in the playroom. His own name hung in black and white above the doorway. After his engagement, “Nancy” appeared above the printer in the office.
“Wow!” guests would exclaim with Western enthusiasm. “What does that one say?”
“Thank God,” he’d explain.
“And that one?” they would ask, turning towards the door.
“Ramzi.”
Next it was animal silhouettes: a pink flamingo against a cream background beside my bed; a golden lion against black above his desk.
One day, perhaps it had been a Thursday afternoon, he handed me two Nerf guns as soon as I walked through the door.
“Get ready,” he said. “Samir already has his.”
“What? What is this?”
“I bought them on the way home!”
“Where’s Samir?” My voice cracked with nervous laughter.
“I don’t know but we better hide or find him first!”
Samir, the eldest, could typically be found reading beside the fireplace, which had only ever been used once or twice by the first owner of the house back when Florida reached somewhat colder degrees. The Calcutta marble hearth, framed with a wooden shelf, was lined with thick cream candles and old photographs. He strictly read nonfiction.
*
At work my assistant and I played a game while the students ran wildly on the playground. It was called “serial killer or victim.”
We watched one shy, awkward boy trail behind a group of girls who did not pay him any attention. This was his daily routine. One girl stopped and spun towards him.
“Ugh! Stop following us!”
The boy froze. His eyes widened at the attention. Then the girls walked on and he continued to follow a few feet behind them. We nodded in observation.
“Serial killer,” she whispered to me. We snickered. The girl continued to look back at the boy and scowl.
“Victim,” I added.
Another student climbed up the plastic slide, meeting a kindergartner face-to-face at the top. The four year old took both his hands and smashed them into the face of the fourth grader, forcing him back down the slide with a maniacal grin.
“Serial killer!”
*
When did I start sleeping with a knife in the drawer next to me? I knew my brother had one. He kept it in the thin wooden dresser beneath the round wall mirror that faced a window to the driveway. A dresser with perfectly organized drawers, where a poignard with a black handle and blade sat next to a stack of birthday cards and a pack of wax ear plugs. When did I move it under my pillow?
*
The guest room, where Samir often slept, was next door to mine. Conjoined by a wall built with cream-colored wooden panels that opened for air flow before the first air conditioner had been installed. The modern consequence of this being that the individuals in each room could converse in whispered conversation as if they were sleeping under the same blanket, ensuring the impossibility of quietude. Sleeping on the west side of this wall for the first time left me at first wondering why I had given up the sage green bed frame as a teenager for the newer, less elegant frame that currently occupied my room. What I wondered next was what my brother kept in the drawers of his dresser. It did not occur to me that this was an invasion of privacy. I read the birthday cards and toyed with a small copper soldier.
At this time I also discovered melatonin pills. Ivory, egg-shaped capsules like small cheap pearls encased in a plastic green cartridge.
“Have you tried melatonin? They’re all natural!”
This was the most frequent response to my sleep troubles, which I sprinkled shyly into conversations with friends at work. I kept my tone calm and comical.
“God knows I need this break,” I said one Friday morning. “I haven’t really slept in weeks – hah!”
But sometimes I laughed so hard my eyes would sting and water and I would pinch my arm in an effort to dial it back.
This suggestion engaged the American in me: the belief that the modern world had delivered the cure to my problems in the form of a pharmaceutical pellet sold across every major CVS chain in the country.
A suggestion that also subdued the personal and unspoken apprehension that if I acquired a Xanax prescription, I would end up juggling more addictions. Those days I enjoyed downers the most. Never to party, just to sleep that true deep sleep. The kind where you retire so far back into your mind until there is nothing but a blank caressing space. In a cruel or alternatively lucky twist of fate, sedatives were never readily available to me. I was often irritated at my dealer for this and secretly suspicious that my friends were holding out on me.
The phobia of my dreams slunk into daylight, trailing like a shadow in the wake of my movements. I retreated into myself, like the house had shrunk. I slipped under the covers and sunk into the soft imprints of the worn mattress, leaving the duvet tucked in place and folded over at the top, disrupting as little as possible. I was afraid if I made too much noise or moved around too much that I would miss something important, the sound of a door opening or a step across a floorboard downstairs. That envisioned signal of doom. The side table, green-tinted glass on twisted geometric legs, carried a glass of water, the pill bottle, and my brother's knife.
In light of the harmless portrayal of these pills, I failed to consider that they might not help, or worse yet, that they might have adverse side effects. I began with two at a time. At some point it became six.
As it turned out, they renewed my dreams with unprecedented lucidity. Phantasmal figures moved through the room in foreboding loops from the doorway to the next bedroom and back again. They passed me while I choked shallow breaths and prayed that I appeared to be asleep. I squeezed my eyes shut and then squinted to observe them. Black silhouettes in careful movement, walking, searching, sometimes stopping to look at me. The floors beneath the carpet groaned when they stepped over the threshold. The weathered latch of the doors slid open and closed like the metallic tolls of a church bell.
I woke up in tears and floundering for breath. As soon as I closed my eyes I fell back into the petrified horror of that performance. The next morning, I would be unsure whether I had slept through an eight-hour nightmare or if I hadn’t slept at all.
*
In the end, I lingered in my mother’s room, for if it was left empty, the house would seem to lose what little life it had left. The drawer beside me held a box of old polaroids featuring Samir after birth, my father with the remaining hair on his head combed over and my uncle’s skinny frame in floral button downs. Beside that some loose change and a wool beanie. The contents never really changed, but I continued to check for anomalous treasures. My pre-teen years had also been spent in this room, on the side of the bed where my father might have slept had he been there.
With my mother gone now as well, I slept on her side, in her space, with her pillows fashioned in the same position. Three beneath my head, one on my left and a long body pillow on the edge of the bed to my right. I was convinced that this was the best way to do it, especially in her absence. I gorged on the nostalgia of the acrylic furniture and chipped picture frames.
On windy nights, the limbs of the pitch apple smacked against the hurricane shutters. Passing cars projected soft beams of light in erratic patterns on the wall above the television. I wondered if someone had pulled into my driveway but that was never the case when I creeped across the green marble of the bathroom to the window facing the front yard.
Sometimes I focused on a pleasant and calming memory. The year before, my friend and I had road tripped across the Southwest.
We spent two nights on a farm in Page, Arizona, where the land in between the canyons stretched out in boundless waves of baked sand in the desolate glory of the desert. Seated on logs outside our cabin we looked up at the midnight sky, pale with stars and scars, like Elmer’s glue smeared with glitter on black construction paper. The air turned frightfully cold at dusk. We shared wine straight from the bottle. I remembered the dry chill of inhaled breath. The fire smoke carried on the wind. We sat with the withered flora of summertime, dusty brittle tufts that crumbled beneath our hiking boots. The soft cracked dirt lit up under the moon and it had occurred to me then that I had found something I had been looking for, though I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what that was. Perhaps it was the closest I ever felt to the word celestial. I brought a notebook, hoping to stumble upon inspiration that would serendipitously manifest into a novel.
All I had was: “The sky looks like someone sneezed pixie dust.”
For a little while, the strength of this memory alone would carry me through the twilight hours.
*
The alarm system had other plans for me. It was notorious for going off accidentally, but that did not stop me from wondering if each instance would be the first real break-in. At three in the morning I leaped out of bed to silence it. I searched the keypad in my mother’s closet for a monitor number to figure out which window or door was triggered. I stood in complete darkness, as if turning on a light would disturb the balance of the hour where blackness rightfully belonged. Floor-length coats and rungs of purses hung to my left and right.
I forgot about sleep. I leaned against the frame of the doorway with the knife in one hand and my phone in the other, waiting to hear one sound that would confirm there was someone else in the house. I tried to rationalize each groan and grind: that click was the AC, the mechanical humming, an airplane flying overhead. That floorboard in the hallway, with antique green chandeliers mounted on the wall, made the same faint squeak every ten minutes. I strained my senses to catch a movement through feeling, a vibration, and I swore that I heard something before realizing it was the pounding of my own heart reaching my ears and throat.
In a loop of imagined scenarios I considered the intrusion from every possible angle: through the worn-out door to the backyard that seemed to loosen when it was pushed; through the bay windows that offered an unobstructed view of the living room with wooden chests inlaid with pearls; through the darkest side of the house, farthest from my bedroom, where I would not be able to hear it. Sometimes I dialed 911 without hitting the call button.
At some point I convinced myself that the alarm was going off on purpose, as if some force in the universe wanted to wake me several times a night with the ear-splitting warning of danger. To what end, my fated lunacy? Why is this happening to me, I wondered?
*
There was, as a matter of fact, one more room downstairs. However, no one slept in it following Ramzi’s brush with a ghost under the lychee tree outside his window. A lingering spirit, the existence of which was denied by members of the family in favor of reincarnation.
“So help me, I will lose my goddamn mind if you say one more time that it was a sleep-walking neighbor,” he said to my mother over dinner following the paranormal encounter.
*
On a field trip to the local nature center, I waded in the knee-deep murky water of the shallows with my students. The bed of seagrass wrapped around my ankles in gooey adhesive strips while I dragged a net along the floor of flowering plants.
The children, hovering along the shore in ecstatic delight at this aquatic adventure, pulled up their nets mostly empty: “Is this something?” one little voice asked, pointing at a rock caught in the mesh.
“No, but don’t give up!” I hid my amusement at their disappointment.
It seemed the sun and waters of the North Atlantic worked in the partnership of spring to warm my torso and cool my feet in a simultaneous harmony. I turned away from the group and breathed in the brackish breeze with my eyes closed. I prayed to stand there forever.
On the shore, the center chaperones emptied the nets into white buckets filled with water. One by one, they carried out tiny creatures to examine and discuss before being returned to their sticky sea forest: two pitch black sea urchins, a frail pink seahorse, a red brittle sea star, several translucent baby shrimp, and a batch of adolescent pea fish, aptly named. The lead chaperone was a middle aged woman with dull blonde wisps whipping out beneath her khaki bucket hat.
“And this,” she said, holding up a 5x5” clear tank, “is a blue-legged hermit crab.”
My students, seated in a semi-circle facing the water, cooed at the miniscule iridescent shell.
“If we’re real quiet,” she continued, “he’ll come out and say hi to us.”
One student turned to me and whispered, “so there’s something in there?”
I encouraged him to raise his hand and ask this question to our guide.
“Yep,” she confirmed, “this shell is his home, which he carries with him everywhere. Once he’s outgrown it, he’ll move into another one”
“What happens to the old shell?”
“Well, it probably becomes the home for another, smaller crab, no problem.”
She shrugged at this statement.
I envied the blue-legged hermit crab.
Dana Raja Wahab is a writer from Miami, Florida. She studied at The George Washington University, Goldsmiths College, and currently serves on the board of advisors for O, Miami. Her writing explores the cultural hybridity of identity, from folktales to creative nonfiction.