Walking the Sleep (3 page)

I need to stop asking questions. Day. Not today. Get it? Day. I don’t know what today is. Day.
Happy? I feel. Today. I can feel pain and sadness but I feel happy in daylight. Sometimes at night. I cannot keep saying today, or tonight, or last night, or yesterday. I don’t know what that fucking means and it makes me angry. And I had a life of too much
angry
. That seems to be something I am aware of. So I say Day. I say Night. I do try to avoid “today” or “tonight” or “yesterday” because those terms seem like nonsense to me now.

I am sitting on the swings in the dusty playground of Val Verde elementary.
The only thing more ironic than the name Val Verde for a scorched, dusty wasteland, like this, is that I can come here. And I can come here and anywhere I’ve ever been. Why I choose this God forsaken dust pit is beyond me. But I sit and swing back and forth and listen to the rusty chain ache against the aged bars. I see myself now. On the playground. I’m about seven years old and the only white kid on the playground. A bigger kid has pushed me down and is threatening to punch my face in. Then there is Ronald. He’s grabbing the bully by the neck and slamming him into the ground. And then he’s pulling me up, dusting me off as the kid, cursing, walks away. He’s yelling threats of retaliation but the look of fear in his eyes tells me he will think twice about it.

And then the big brown arm around my shoulder, as he walks me off and away from the circle of kids, disappointed at not seeing the fight they had cheered for. Ronald is my neighbor. He’s older than me by a few years. Large, black, friendly, and protective. He was my only brother. My big black brother. I called him. My little white brother. He called me.
How many fights he had protecting the little white pastor’s kid, I will never know.

DAY. My dad calls me outside. I am standing outside the trailer on our property, next to the small white Pentecostal Church of God in Val Verde.

“I’m going away son. I’m sorry. I will be gone for a while, but I will come and get you.”

I’m crying as I watch him get into the little red 1967 Nova and drive away in the direction I know only as “aunt’s house.” I stand in the dirt driveway and wave goodbye. I cry and cry. I taste the dust and salt on my checks.

NIGHT. I’m tired. I don’t want to keep going on like this. I think there is something I can do about it and sometimes it’s very clear but then I do not always see what it is I can do. I am walking the sleep more and more. Walking the sleep is sort of like when you’re sick for a very long time. You enter that time wherein you no longer feel the heat of fever, the shivering and chills, and you simply fall very deeply into a realm of thought and dreams that make no sense, and make perfect sense in all.
I know I explained this before, but it changes. I’m changing and I don’t know why, how, or how much time is passing. I’m sick. Listen. I need you to pay close attention because I think I’m slipping. I might not make sense, or I may disappear. Just don’t come here if you can. Straighten your fucking head out and clear up all the bad shit in your mind. You can’t get forgiveness. You have to take care of shit on that side.

I see Christians, Muslims, Hebrews, and every other fucking type of religious nut you can imagine here. They walk around in a fucking stupor praying. Pleading for forgiveness. No one is here that listens to any of that bullshit so forget about your fucking get out of jail free card – if you have bad shit on your hands, in your head, on your conscience – you’re going to be wandering around here. I see it every DAY.

For the drinker, as I was quite often in life, and for extended periods of time, drinking for days at length. You will slip. You will begin dreaming unsettling dreams, happy dreams, terrifying dreams….walking the sleep is like this, and yet it is not.

I walk the sleep, for how long I don’t know, but then I am NIGHT. Or I am DAY. Then I do decide certain things. I decide where I go from there Awake. Am I asleep? I cannot say because this seems to be where dream and consciousness have a very reasonable coexistence without any seeming contradictions. I think. I go. I sit. I walk. I run. I walk the sleep, but I never stop thinking. And I wake from walking the sleep and I do not know how or why but I look and I see and I go or I stay. Or I walk the sleep and then see again. The DAY. The NIGHT. If it hurts I watch with morbid fascination until I cannot see anymore, and it feels like my soul is vomiting, and then I walk the sleep, or I run to DAY if it is NIGHT and I feel afraid. Mostly, I feel no anticipation. DAY. Walk the sleep. It will happen. I think I forgot how to leave this place but I also believe I can figure it out. I want the fuck out of here. And then I know I don’t want to leave at all. Can’t. Not yet. Maybe never. But I still hold that in my brain – I can leave.

I haven’t seen a wanderer I thought I knew for what feels like a long time. It is one minute, and it is ten years and I don’t know that they may have just grown sick of this place, and remembered how to leave. I have as of late, rarely seen a wanderer I thought I recognized, or have thought I have seen more than once. That beautiful wanderer on the pier and her smirk. She lives in my DAY and in my NIGHT. When I wander, when I walk the sleep, when I am somewhere in between, I see her soft cheeks, her soft brown eyes, and her pouty smile.

I try to connect whether I am dreaming about her, or whether I am seeing her though the fog and haze of walking the sleep. I have seen her wandering, as I said before, but I also see her through a fog and haze too. In the confused time following an extended walking of the sleep, where dream meshes with reality. Walking the sleep. Where time stands still, changes speed and motion, and challenges the sanity if not the concept of time, of space, of dimension, and of reality.

DAY. I was walking the sleep for what seems like a long time because I am having trouble with my memories today. And I seem to think like a child. And I’m angry. Things seem unfair today and I’m angry but I’m fucking helpless to do anything. I remember the bully on the playground and my dad saying goodbye. But it’s hazy now. A bad dream but it wasn’t. A remembering, a seeing while walking, and wandering. Walking the sleep.

I remember waking up and there was a raven looking at me with a cocked head. And he laughed at me. Those fucking things. If people only knew they would shoot them all dead. They’re smart, and they know things, and worst of all they talk. This is something I had learned in hazy times. The waking. Coming to as it were. Like a drunk. That morning feeling. Raw. Remembering the beginning of the evening fairly well, when the alcohol made you just a little bit funnier and wittier above the norm. But as the evening wore on, time sped up. The next morning wasn’t so clear. It wasn’t so funny, or witty, or anything but an embarrassing blur. That’s
waking
here. And I had learned to shake myself awake quickly after walking the sleep because, inevitably, there was a crow, or worse yet, a raven there about. The noisy screeches. They mostly talk in deep and throaty voices. There’s a few high-pitched screeching demons here and there. Some are very articulate, some are effeminate, and some have accents.

They sometimes mock me and others. And I’ve seen them eating rotting corpses. They pick and chew. They stick their black heads into the stomach and emerge shining with bloody pieces of entrails and intestines. They pick at the eye sockets, having devoured their favorite of delicacies, the plump and fleshy eyeballs. I have never seen them feasting on a corpse with eyeballs. Always gone first.
Though I did come upon one once who had ripped a fresh eyeball from the socket. He flipped the round fleshy ball with a long serpentine string attached to the ocular nerve. He flipped it into the air and then swallowed it with a noisy slurp.

He flipped it up and tossed it into his black gullet like one would toss a peanut, or a piece of popcorn into the air, right into his black gullet.

I remember thinking about how when we were small kids, my sister had tried to return a fallen raven chick to its nest. She was subsequently pecked so hard on the head that she was bleeding and screaming.

And I felt bad for laughing.
My sister, a terror, trying to do a good deed and then getting pecked in the forehead. It’s still funny to me.

Now I try to kill ravens when I see them. They hurl insults and bring up my bad deeds, screaming them through the air as I fling rocks at them like bullets. Like I said, they know everything, and they are rotten evil things. They will taunt the weak that wander. I watched six of them screaming insults, and yelling unspeakable things to a young female wanderer. She flailed her arms and screamed, and cried for god to help her. And I figured she must be walking the sleep because we know there is no god here. I whizzed a round stone so hard it took the top of a large raven’s skull off.
It bled black into the desert sand. The others screamed threats and vowed vengeance on me as they flew away screeching my sins into the skies. Screaming, screeching, threats… promising to devour my black soul.

The wanderer sat blinking. She was young. Twenty-something. Pretty. Ragged. Blue eyes and dirty blond hair. Her arms had deep lacerations. She was still carrying around her death image, that’s how I knew she didn’t know she was dead. Wanderers usually know they’re dead. These, like her, normally they just stay where they dropped.

Some of them go about like they aren’t dead because they really seriously don’t know they are. She was wearing a pastel blue sun-dress. I looked into her vacant eyes – pools of blue. Watery and lost but not sad really.

“You’re dead!
Go home!”

She looked down at her arms. No blood just deep vertical lacerations on the veins seven inches long.

“Nice work. No bluffing with you huh?”

She blinks again.

She sees me for the first time. She looks back at her arms and begins tracing the cuts with purple finger-nails. She looks back at me.

“Are you Jesus?”

“Sure, why not?”

“What should I do?”

“Go home.”

“Where? I don’t know how to go there anymore. I ran away. I forgot how to get home.”

She turns and looks. I know now there is someone waiting for her and she knows it too. I don’t know them but I wonder why they took so fucking long to get here.

She points.

“Over there…that’s my grandma”

“Good for you kid.”

“Thank you.” She lets a tear drop fall and smiles.

She walks up a small hill to a cluster of desert oaks and she is gone.

I head back down the road. I’m sick of the desert. Too many fucking ravens. I pause for a second to smash the head into the desert sand with the heal of my boot.

I fucking hate ravens.

DAY. I feel good. No walking the sleep. I watch the kids playing baseball and they are so intense. Some are having a good time and some are trying desperately to please their parents who are screaming from the stands. It’s been a good stretch for me lately. I wander from inland to coast. I watch people live, love, and laugh. I see the fortunate and unfortunate things happen. I’m becoming very distinctly aware of that which is happening, and that which is memory, and that which is someone else’s memory. It helps to keep my mind straight.

Night. I’ve been walking the sleep again and don’t know how much time has passed. I have no idea how long I was wandering. Now I recognize when others are deeply walking the sleep. There isn’t a glint of recognition, and their eyes are dead. And I was thinking I was so glad that I didn’t have that fucking blank expression I have seen.
I see a guy with his jaw hanging off, one eye, brain pulsing gray and red.

“Hey, you’re dead asshole! Go wherever it is you’re supposed to be. There’s a light at the end of a tunnel five miles back that way…go towards the light jackass! Move towards the light.”

Now, I see he never heard me because I am no different. I walk the sleep and I am in that state, and I am a stupid wanderer just like him. Walking hundreds of miles in the sleep and then becoming aware. And never really resting. I feel tired again. DAY. Maybe I should really leave. It doesn’t seem like I’m accomplishing anything anymore. I am having a harder and harder time counting DAYS. Counting NIGHTS. Sometimes I believe I have time and space clear but then I am walking the sleep and it seems a thousand days have passed and I don’t know where I have been walking. I am very aware now that there are people here that I know.

I saw a friend of mine, Brian. He died in a motorcycle accident when we were both in our early 20’s.
He was walking the sleep. I watched him for a while near the Golden Gate Bridge, and I don’t know what I was doing in the park, except that I had been sitting near the Russian River thinking about my mom. The sleep came, and then I was standing watching him as he walked the sleep. And now I know better than to try and speak, but I hope I can see him again when he is not walking the sleep. He is wearing tight fitting jeans and a multicolored button up silk shirt. His hair is long and feathered. He looks like he stepped right out of 1983 because he did. He stepped right out of 1983 into here. Into now that isn’t now. His head had been split in half when a truck ran him off the road. It was comforting to see that he was still that good looking kid with the feathered hair. His head was in one piece. Glad to know that he wasn’t walking around looking like the way he did when he left. I learn to appreciate the little things now. So I watched him wander along and saw the look of the sleep. He walked past me and looked right through me. I wasn’t hurt. I was sad for a second. Maybe I should follow him and see what he’s looking for. Why is he still here maybe 25 years after he came here, when people that left only a few years ago are gone?

I’m beginning to think that most everyone here knows
who is here
, at some time or another, when they aren’t walking the sleep that is. Except for the extended sleepers, and those that don’t know they’re dead. For the extended wanderers, the ones that don’t know they’re dead and won’t listen….. I don’t know that they know anything, are aware of anything, or can be told anything.

Sometimes people leave and you know.
‘Hey, Kenny left.” No one says that and no one cares. You just know. No celebrations here outside of memories.