Nightmare Man (3 page)

Leslie keeps going, the way she does when she gets started on art, but I’m thinking of the nightmare man, how he appears out of shadow, how he melts back into it.

Can you use magnets to rip a hole to another dimension? Or is that gravity? Or is that all from science fiction? I need to actually make the time to watch this episode, either tell the kids to go entertain themselves away from their big, square, hypnotic nanny or manage to stay up later than they do. Neither option sounds very likely, but I have to see what this Margot woman is doing, because yes, I wonder if the nightmare man is real.

* * *

After my wife called to make an appointment for me with my doctor, he called back to cancel it and refer me to a shrink and a sleep specialist. He validated what I said: he knew of no better treatment for night terrors than clonazepam, and he was in over his head. So my one appointment became two, which I managed to arrange for the same day. Since I have the entire day off for my two appointments but still can’t manage to sleep past seven, I take the kids to school. They think it’s pretty big fun. Especially Logan. He’s in third grade. Madison is in first.

She asks, “Why aren’t you in school today?”

“I don’t go to school.”

“I mean work.”

“I have to go to the doctor.”

“To help with your nightmares,” Logan says. He has a
Teen Titans
comic book open on his lap, but he’s staring out the window, and I know what he’s feeling. He’s wishing the car ride would go on forever, that he would never arrive at his school, but stay with his family where he feels safe and comfortable. He does very well in school, but we have a problem with him faking sick. Also with actually getting sick to his stomach when he’s nervous, which has caused problems with some of the other kids. They make fun of him.

“How do you know that?” I ask.

He turns his worried eyes on me. “I heard you and Mom talking in the kitchen the other morning.”

“Yes, I’m going to the doctor to try to get my nightmares fixed.”

Madison says, “Then, when we get scared, we can come and get in bed with you.”

“Hopefully so, honey kitty.” While I’ve managed to pass on my love of comic books and comic book cartoons to Logan (and he managed to get me into
Power Rangers
—I had no idea how awesome that show is), Madison hasn’t taken to them. She likes Hello Kitty. Everything she owns costs twice as much as it should because it has that cat’s round head stuck on it. We used to call her honey bunny, which is both cute and a reference to
Pulp Fiction
. She now insists on being called honey kitty. I’ve tried to explain to her that it makes no sense and doesn’t rhyme. She does not care.

“But what if the things you see are real?” Logan asks.

“They’re not, buddy. It’s no different than when you have a nightmare, except I can move during mine. Most people have something in their brains that keeps them still when they sleep. Mine just doesn’t work.”

“How do you know for sure? Maybe it’s like your superpower. Maybe you can see things other people can’t see, like a monster from another dimension. Maybe the medicine will just make it so you can’t see the monsters, but they’ll still be there. Then they’ll get us.”

Glancing from the road to Logan, I’m struck again by his intelligence and sensitivity. He’s far too smart, imaginative and empathetic for this world. He’s like me, but even more so, and look at how the world has broken me. I’m torn between directing him toward the creative endeavors that will make him happy and fulfilled but which he might not succeed at making a living at, and pushing him toward practical interests he might not love, but will give him the skills to make a good living without doing something completely horrible.

“That’s a really creative idea. It’s not what’s happening to me. I’m really just having nightmares, buddy. But maybe you should turn it into a comic book.”

For all my worry that creative dreams will do to him what they’ve done to me, I can’t help it.

His eyes unfocus. I can see his little brain working out how to get his story on paper.

“But not during school, unless you have free time.”

He smiles at me. He must have been thinking about drawing during class. “Okay. Maybe Mrs. Shandy will let me work on it during art class.”

“That’d be good.”

He doesn’t look so sad and nervous as he did a few minutes ago. How can I not encourage him to pursue art when this is the effect it has on him? I know why. Because if he isn’t successful, disappointment and a pragmatic society will deflate him like an industrial-age tycoon villain out on a stroll, popping children’s balloons with a pin as he passes by.

* * *

The psychologist comes into the waiting room to greet me. I didn’t have any specific expectations on what Dr. Gunnar would look like, but I have general preconceptions about shrinks: thin, pale, balding, etc…As I follow Dr. Gunnar back to his office, I look at the way his broad shoulders completely fill what was probably intended to be a loose-fitting sweater, the way his traps bunch and release as he swings his arms. It’s disconcerting.

I take a seat on the leather couch, he in an office chair across from me. I don’t know what to do with my hands.

“So tell me about your night terrors.”

I tell him about the nightmare man. I have known the nightmare man longer than anyone besides possibly my parents. I say “possibly” because my very first memory is of the nightmare man slipping from the open mouth of a toy box I forgot to shut. The mounds of toys inside propped the lid open so that it looked like the mouth of one of those whales that’s all chin, and from out of the shadowy grin the nightmare man flowed like ink and then rose to tower over my bed. We didn’t battle then. I just cowered.

So it depends on your interpretation of “know” as to who I’ve known the longest. Especially because nowhere in that first memory is the impression that I had never seen the nightmare man before. As far as I know, he visited me in the darkness of the womb.

I don’t tell Dr. Gunnar this, but it’s difficult to doubt the most persistent presence in your life.

I imagine sharing the safest, most comforting place on Earth with my mortal enemy. No wonder I have anxiety problems.

“Is there something that triggers these night terrors?”

“Well, I have them all the time now, more nights than not. It has to do with my anxiety.”

“Are you on any anxiety medication?”

“No. Well, I take clonazepam before bed, but that’s for the night terrors, not anxiety.”

“Have you ever thought about going on an SSRI?”

“Sure, I’ve thought about it. But I doubt it would help. I’m a bit anxious by nature, but most of it is situational. My life is very stressful, and my understanding is there’s not a pill I can take that will fix my life.”

He jots some things down. I probably took the wrong tone.

“What’s causing the stress in your life?”

“Mostly my job, but then that spreads out into everything else.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I work for a collection agency.” When I tell people that, I’m accustomed to getting some sort of reaction. Maybe just a raise of the eyebrows. Maybe a lame joke (”So the enemy has a face. I expected horns”). Sometimes outright hostility, questions about how I can do what I do. Dr. Gunnar is good. He gives me nothing.

“That does sound very stressful. Your paperwork says you have a degree. I assume it’s not in collections. How did you get into that line of work?”

I start telling him my story. Then I start again, going back further. Then I start again. I wasn’t eager to talk to this man, but once I get started on this subject, it’s like everything tries to come out at once.

“I probably need to go way back for this to make any sense,” I say.

He gestures with his hand as if to say the floor is mine. So I go back, way back.

* * *

When I was a kid, it was all about comic books. This was before video games got so immersive, before there was a single twenty-four-hour-a-day cartoon channel, let alone a whole cable package of them, before parents made their children’s entertainment their top priority. It sounds like I’m complaining, but I’m not, because I had comic books.

The first comic books I ever bought were from a massive flea market. There were a couple of stalls with box after box of twenty-five-cent comics. I think I made it to the first B box of the first stall before I’d blown all my cash, walking away with some real crap, but also some fantastic stuff like
Arak, Son of Thunder
and
Batman
. I read those comics hundreds of times, but they’re still in good shape. I was a meticulous kid. I’d sit with a pillow in my lap, the comic spread open on the pillow, because I could feel the sweat and grease from my fingertips saturating the pulpy pages.

After that first trip, I begged my parents to take me to the flea market every Saturday, where even my measly two-dollar allowance could buy a solid week’s worth of comics, as long as the reader didn’t mind reading the same issue seven times over the course of as many days. I didn’t mind at all. The books were so jam-packed with art and words that there was something new to discover and appreciate with every pass. As my allowance increased, I was able to afford new comics. For the next decade, I knew exactly where all of my money was going. I wouldn’t spend a cent from Saturday until Wednesday afternoon, when I would blow it all at the comic shop. I’d take sandwiches when my friends ate out, because a meal at McDonald’s sure as hell wasn’t worth three comics. My parents gave me an old beater of a car for my sixteenth birthday (along with a page of original Captain America art), but I still usually road my bike because leg-power was free, and gas cost money. Not much in those days, but I had a list of comics I wanted to get every month, and for every fifteen miles I drove, I had to check one of those off, and that would put a gap in my collection.

When I wasn’t reading comics, I was drawing them. I don’t know if I had a ton of artistic ability, but when you practice something diligently, you get good regardless. My high school art teacher begged me to draw something other than comic book characters. She wanted me to try on the styles of the abstract expressionists who were her favorites, to be less representational.

The best I could do for her was to adopt a completely realistic style. Yes, it was the opposite direction she’d asked me to move, but it was at least suitable for things other than the very stylized world of comic book art. And it was my portfolio of this work that got me into the University of Colorado’s illustration program.

There’s not much to say about college. It was too happy a time to be interesting to anyone but me. Engrossed in my art, surrounded by intelligent, energetic peers who both supported and challenged me…It was the best time of my life. I don’t even like to think about it.

It was probably too good, because I didn’t want to leave my friends behind, and got sucked into the vortex that is Boulder, Colorado, the ultimate college town with a massively overeducated population and few decent jobs, but also no one pressuring me to do anything more with my life.

I told myself I was building a better portfolio, and really, I only wanted to take a year off to enjoy my lifestyle without the pressures of schoolwork or real work. So I went full-time at ScanTech, the part-time data entry job I’d worked through school, and partied and occasionally drew. And I met Shannon.

Shannon worked first shift at the data entry center. She had for most of the time I’d been working there, but I’d worked second shift while in school and so had at most seen her in passing at the shift change, along with the hundreds of other people who worked there. But when I switched to full-time and first shift, I knew I had to get to know her. She really was beautiful. Yeah,
is
beautiful.

Shannon was a townie. She hadn’t attended CU. She’d gone to community college for a year, but basically flunked out. Not because she wasn’t smart, but because she didn’t really have any interest in school and liked partying too much. She was one of the most entertaining girls I’d ever met, and even if she isn’t book smart, I think that takes a certain type of intelligence.

Then again, she wasn’t smart enough to see through my sensitive, brooding artist act. We moved in together within a couple of months, which didn’t seem like a big deal. Then she got a bad case of bronchitis she couldn’t shake.

She says the doctor didn’t warn her the antibiotics would make her birth control stop working. I have no reason to doubt her. She wasn’t trying to snare a winner. I was a nerd who’d landed entirely too pretty and cool a girlfriend. I wasn’t going anywhere. And because she didn’t have health insurance, the doctor wasn’t
her
doctor, just whoever was working the walk-in clinic that day, and he didn’t know her or her medical history.

It’s funny, because I had assumed that in this sort of situation, any normal woman would get an abortion. Shannon wasn’t some religious nut. We were obviously too young, irresponsible and unmarried. But she didn’t want to, got really angry when I casually mentioned it. And not casually like I was trying to be sly. Casually like I considered it to be the obvious conclusion we had both reached and had no qualms about, though we had never discussed such a thing.