The Long and Sleepless Night

Pete is sending an email in his sleep. His wife, Anne, sits up in bed and watches him type onto his blackberry. The city is sleeping behind him, all smeared colored pencil lines on black paper. The red lights along the skyline pulse slowly. She leans over to get a better look at the screen as his thumbs dexterously hop around the keypad. His eyes are half-closed and elsewhere, and she can see the exposed slivers of his irises slowly turning in their sockets.

"Where are you? I miss you, baby," he writes.

Anne slaps the Blackberry out of his hands, then slaps him on the forehead with just enough force to stun a dozing fly.

"Hmmmm?" He hums groggily, "Wha?"

"Who were you dreaming about?" she asks him. She retrieves the Blackberry from the floor. Her pale legs are all aflutter as she spins them off the bed and onto the floor – two white blurs in the dark. She holds the blackberry to his face. "What's this?"

Pete's eyes adjust. Two glowing rectangles merge into one. "Just another dream," he says. "I can't remember. Go back to bed." he rolls over and takes most of the blanket. He is a giant, stuffed burrito.

She falls asleep and purposely dreams about sixty male models carrying her across a meadow on a four post wood bed. When she wakes up, it is only 3:30 in the morning. Pet snores as if there is a miniature weed-wacker stuffed up his nose. Anne can hear something else. She hears it from under the covers. Clickety clack. A soft glow is coming from under the covers, as if his body were metamorphosing into a luminous angel under the sheets. She throws the covers open and sees that he is typing an email on his laptop.

"I really want to see you. Please. I love you," he writes. The recipient field is blank.

Anne gets up and snaps the laptop shut on his fingers. "Ow!" Pete screams. His jolts up, and holds his fingers up. "Wha?"

"What was that message all about?" asks Anne. Pete's own head casts a shadow on her face but her eyes are opened wide enough to catch a glint of the moon from outside.

"Mmmph! What message?" he asks.

"That email your were sending. About me knowing something?"

Pete put his hands over his face. "I was asleep. I must have been, you know, sleep messaging. You know how it is! It's not like it's the first time."

Anne takes the laptop away from him and sets it on the night stand. "But you usually type nonsense! Like, I am a blue god. Or there are monkeys typing. No letters of yearning."

"Those are just dreams! How can you be upset! It's all still nonsense! No matter how real it may seem. Can you please just let me go back to sleep?" Pete rolls over again.

Anne shuts her eyes. She is furious. When she drifts off to sleep she intentionally dreams of sleeping with her ex-boyfriend from high school. They are driving in a car down a long, dark road and they pull over at a motel. There is a bag of money in the trunk and they are both on the run – an old fantasy of theirs. They have sex and she makes no effort to be quiet. She is as loud as she can be, knowing that in reality, she is moaning in bed next to Pete. She hopes she wakes him. She makes sure she properly moans her ex-boyfriends name, each syllable a dagger she hopes to penetrate deep into her husband's own slumber.

She rolls off of her ex-boyfriend, breathing hard, and lights a cigarette. It is the first smoke she's had in years. She takes a deep breath and exhales toward the static ceiling fan. Outside a car drives up, its tires crunching the gravel. The beams from its headlights grope the walls. She can hear two men talking. They walk around the perimeter and then one of them gets back into the car and drives away. The rest of the night is uneventful. Her ex-boyfriend, Leland snores lightly.

When the sun comes up, the desert outside the motel is illuminated. Anne steps outside and breaths in the cool air. It smells of wet grass, although there is hardly any grass on the flat and infinite landscape. A thin road stretches from east to west.

When she comes back into the motel room, Leland is sitting up in bed. "I really winked out last night," he says. "Everything okay?"

Anne slides under the covers next to him. "There was someone here last night. I could hear him asking questions about the guests here. I'm not sure if he was asking about us exactly, but he was asking. He walked around the area, then he got in his car and left. It was about 4 in morning."

Leland gets up. "We'd better get moving then," he says, then locks himself in the bathroom. She can hear him brushing his teeth. She gathers their belongings and lays back in bed. She checks her purse and pulls out her Blackberry. There's a message.

"Where are you? I miss you, baby," it says. She checks the second message. It reads "I really want to see you. Please. I love you."

Spam mail, she thinks, and deletes them. Outside, the air is starting to warm up, and the road ahead is long.