ON MAY 23, 1987, Kenneth Parks—husband and father of a five-month-old infant—rose from his bed and drove fourteen miles to his in-laws’ home. There he stabbed his mother-in-law to death and nearly killed his father-in-law with a tire iron. Then he drove to the police station and turned himself in. He was acquitted of both crimes because the jury agreed he was sleepwalking.
Melissa Toms of Scotland would emerge from her bed, her husband asleep beside her, and meet college boys from the nearby university. The Tomses lived at the edge of the campus. At first she met them at the hall in which the students resided. But then, for reasons no one can quite recall, the boys started coming to her house, where they would be waiting for her in her front yard. She would have sex with three and four of them at a time there, though always on her terms. She hardly spoke. It only stopped when her husband found the condoms scattered in the wood chips along the front walkway. To this day, she insists she has no recollection. Two of the college boys have admitted they were quite sure when they were having sex with Melissa—or as one said, “she was having sex with me”—that she was sound asleep.
In January 2009, Timothy Brueggeman of northern Wisconsin walked in his sleep from his house into the nearby woods in only his underwear and froze to death.
James Currens, seventy-seven, once walked in his sleep into a pond full of alligators in Palm Harbor, Florida. He survived because he had been sleepwalking with his cane, which he would use that particular night to keep the animals at bay.
I collected stories like these like stamps. I hoarded them the way some people amass matchbooks, postcards, or old coins.
In them I saw deviance and strangeness, but also the raw power of the id. I saw its absolute independence.
And, of course, I saw…me. And I knew I was not alone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I CLUNG TO my memories of Annalee Ahlberg that autumn and tried to focus on the mother I knew. It was impossible to ignore the thrum of words and the sexual werewolf they conjured—parasomnia, sexsomnia, sleepwalking, sleep sex—but our home was a museum to the singular woman she was. Even the footlocker with the magic tricks I had outgrown but was unable to bring myself to resell could resurrect her for me in my mind.
When I was ten and Paige was still a baby, my father had a conference at Columbia University, and my mother joined him and brought her girls to Manhattan. (And, in hindsight, we always were her girls: not their girls and not his girls.) While he was uptown at the university, she took me to my favorite store for magic tricks on Broadway and Twelfth Street. It was near the Strand Bookstore, where we would also spend hours on that trip, and a restaurant that specialized in chocolate. (I had honed my appreciation for decadent chocolate desserts long before my mother would die and I would meet Gavin Rikert.) The store was on the second floor of the building, and on that particular visit we took the elevator, rather than the stairs as we had in the past, because Paige was against my mother’s chest in a robin’s-egg blue Snugli.
Like Lindsay McCurdy—a.k.a. Rowland the Rogue—the gentleman behind the counter was from another era, but otherwise he was nothing like the dapper and rather elegant old magician I would meet when I was in college. This fellow was crusty and brusque. He had a paunch reined in ever so slightly by suspenders, unruly topiaries growing from his ears, and a thick shock of salt-and-pepper hair it seemed he hadn’t washed or combed in a very long time. I saw men like him in magic stores or in how-to videocassettes about magic all the time. His hands were awash in tea-colored sunspots, but I loved watching him use them to demonstrate tricks for us. They were smooth and fast. And like a lot of the magicians of his generation, he tolerated a girl like me—but just barely. My mother and I were the only customers in the store that morning.