The Sleepwalker by Chris Bohjalian
I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.
—SYLVIA PLATH
PART ONE
IT MAKES ALL the sense in the world. You awaken and smell smoke and see that the cat at the foot of your bed is on fire. And so you scoop him up and race to the bathroom and douse him with water in the tub. You reassure him that he’ll be fine—he is fine—telling him that everything’s okay. You hold him firmly but gently under the faucet because you are worried about his burns.
The only thing is, you’re not awake. But you’re not precisely dreaming, either. After all, in the morning the sheets are wet where the cat slept when you both went back to bed, and there is fur in the tub. There are scratch marks on your arms and the back of your hands, because the cat was justifiably resistant to the idea of a shower in the middle of the night. And, of course, the animal was never on fire. Nothing in the house was on fire. And you’re a reasonable person; you know that cats and dogs don’t spontaneously combust. But in the middle of the night, in the fidelity of that instant, you were saving the cat’s life and that was all that mattered.
Or, another time, you open your eyes in the charcoal dark and decide that you’re hungry. So, you stroll to the kitchen and whip up an omelet, tossing atop the whisked eggs in the pan a little cheddar cheese and a handful of baby aspirin—a mortar and pestle, the ground orange a cure in the crock of a medieval apothecary—because in the murkiness of the moment, you are craving the sweet-and-sour tang of orange St. Joseph’s.
Or you decide to go for a swim. In the river.
Or you are teased by a stirring between your legs, then a craving, and so you reach for the body beside you. And if no one’s there? You push off the sheets and climb from your bed. You will search out a stranger who will satisfy it. With any luck, you will wake before you find one. But not always.
It is—you are—vampiric. And while it would be easy to use words like insatiable or unquenchable, they would be imprecise. Because the libertine needs of your sleeping soul will be sated. They will.
And that’s the problem.
CHAPTER ONE
EVERYONE IN THE county presumed that my mother’s body was decaying—becoming porridge—at the bottom of the Gale River. It was the year 2000, and we were but three seasons removed from the Y2K madness: the overwrought, feared end of the digital age. It was a moment in time when a pair of matching towers still stood near the tip of lower Manhattan. Fracking and photobomb and selfie were years from becoming words, but we were only months from adding to our vocabularies the expression hanging chad.
I was twenty-one that summer and fall, and my sister was twelve. Neither of us fully recovered.
The experts were surprised that Annalee Ahlberg’s body hadn’t been found, since a drowned body usually turns up near its point of entry into the water. But near is a relative term. And so police divers had searched long stretches of the waterway and even dredged a section along the levee that was built to protect the road from the flash floods that seemed to mangle the great, sweeping curve there every other decade. But there was no trace of her. They had scoured as well the small, shallow beaver pond in the woods a quarter of a mile behind my family’s red Victorian and found nothing there, too. Nevertheless, my younger sister and I thought it most likely that our mother was in that Vermont river somewhere. We hadn’t given up all hope that she would return alive—at least I hadn’t—but every day it grew harder to feign optimism for our father or say the right things (the appropriate things) when people asked us how we were doing.