Maybe Tomorrow Will Sparkle and Shine

I’m kneeling in Walgreens, comparing various bathroom cleaners, when my mom calls again. I don’t consider myself an expert at anything, a fact that’s become even more nakedly factual since I was fired last week, but I have become quite good at missing calls. The idea is to freeze in space and time, like prey, and wait for the vibrating to stop. Don’t decline (expressly rude) and don’t mess around on Instagram (too risky, the possibility of an accidental pick-up). Best simply to wait it out.

I stuff the phone back into my peacoat and return to the canisters and spray bottles. There’s Advanced Scum Seal, Professional Shine, BrightWhite Plus. Some kill ninety-nine percent of germs. Others use next-generation bleaching technology. They foam, they fight grime.

“Excuse me,” I say to a gangly teenager stocking toilet paper. “Is my shower more likely to have scum or grime? Is there a difference?”

“Bro, what?” the kid says, tossing a two-ply, two-pack on the top shelf.

In actuality, my recurring scenario involves two kinds of mold: a blood-red mold that grows in huge whorls up the walls and a hairy black mold that carpets the shower stall floor. But I don’t really know. I haven’t peeked behind the shower curtain in months.

I shrug. “I’ll Google it.”

In the parking lot I’m choosing music when the voicemail appears. I’ll listen to it soon. I want to listen to it, and the others, I really do, but the idea fills me with such exhaustion that I fear I won’t make it home without drifting into a ditch. I snap my fingers into my left ear three times. I shift into reverse.

Back at my apartment, I discover that I already own a canister of Clear Pearl Extra. I place the new bottle next to its identical companion, both standing tall among the other unsprayed sprays and cleansers under the bathroom sink. Almost a dozen now. I allow myself to hear the dripping from behind the shower curtain, a constant I’ve managed mostly to tune out. Plooch. Plooch. Plooch. This horrible yielding sound, like rain on a mud-thick path.

I lay on the couch, and when I wake up it is dark. Tomorrow, tomorrow.

———

Holly calls the next day when I’m running at the gym. I startle and nearly lose my balance when I see my sister’s picture from my phone oversized on the treadmill screen. I slow the speed, grasping the console. I’m a haplessly uncoordinated person, and I understand that I do not belong here traversing the vast purple landscape of Planet Fitness. I only bought a membership when I needed a new place to shower.

“You good bro?” asks a sweaty, built guy who, maybe if I’d made a number of different choices in my life, could have been me.

“Bro, fine. Yeah, bro,” I say, gulping the rubber-scented air.

Holly’s breath had become similarly labored by the time we got to my car last week, having crossed the huge employee lot of Ayrd Defense Systems. My sister got me the admin job at Ayrd, so I suppose the higher-ups thought she might offer the gentlest exit. “How can I help?” she asked, easing between cars. She had to mind her width now, and the billowing of her maternity coat. I didn’t want her to walk me out, but she had insisted. My sister, solid and so perfectly sufficient at all things.

I head downstairs to dissociate in the sauna. Dissociating in the sauna has become one of my favorite activities, second only to dissociating on the couch. Before I lost my job (email, email, email, email, email), I would come to Planet Fitness just to shower before driving to the office. Now I’ve found a precarious rhythm in this unlikely place.

The sauna is empty except for two men, one young, one old, conversing quietly in the far corner of the steamy room. Fine, I sit next to the door, breathe in, enjoy the feeling of lightheadedness. My gaze is drawn, per usual, to one of the dark slivers between the cedarwood boards. The dark space between the planks slowly becomes larger and larger until it is the dark space behind my eyes. And there is nothing to do in the dark space behind one’s eyes, and sometimes there are beautiful sparks. Wow, and wow.

When I return to the room, I jump at the sight of the older gentleman now sitting next to me. He’s exceptionally tan and leathery, wild black hair, wearing nothing but a towel and a thick gold watch. I think he’s going to come on to me, but instead he produces a business card.

“Dr. Mike Geese,” he says, grinning.

I squint at the card, moist and warping in my fingers. Geese Somnology. “Where were you even keeping this?”

“I’m conducting a series of sleep studies,” he says. “A catalog of disordered sleep.”

“Does it seem like I need one?” I ask. “A sleep study?”

“Were you asleep just then?”

“Sometimes I don’t know if I’m asleep or awake,” I say. “Is that disordered?”

“We might never know unless we do a study. Though oftentimes there is a more—” he coughs, “primary disorder below the level of sleep.”

“Sure,” I say, strangely compelled.

“You know the type of stuff. Bottomless dread, or a tumor perhaps. Who’s to say?” He shrugs with a French vibe of cheery doom, quite interesting alongside the Jersey accent. A tu-muh. “Anyway, wanna make fifty clams?”

Outside, he hands me a plastic bag full of wires and nodes, printed instructions, and a postage-paid mailer, all conveniently stowed in the trunk of his old Cadillac.

“Just send everything back like you would a pair of itchy Amazon socks. Anyway, give me your name and numbuh. I’ll ring you the results.”

He pulls a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet, nods solemnly and drives off, borne by exhaust fumes and the honeyed voice of Elvis Presley.

Before bed, I strap the black machine to my arm and affix the wired suction cups to my temples and chest. A monitor clips onto my index finger. Per the instructions, I am to sleep normally. Normally? What if I disturb the monitors during the night, thereby nulling the results, or worse, producing a false positive? Does my sleep disorder involve thrashing? I lay rigid in bed, watching snow accumulate on the skylight.

Sometimes the dark space behind one’s eyes is a comfort, other times less so. Tonight it’s black mold writhing around my eyeballs. Tomorrow, tomorrow. Eventually the skylight is covered by white powder and I begin to drift off. I have a single dream: I wake up and I am restrained, not by a tangle of wires, but with heavy metal chains. I cannot move or leave the bed. I feel immense relief.

———

I’m woken by another call from Holly, surprised it wasn’t the sunlight that roused me—it’s two o’clock in the afternoon. If anything, my sleep has improved since the study. Disorder? No, I am a consummate sleeper. Perhaps my new profession should center around sleep. I could serve as the benchmark upon which Dr. Mike Geese measures all the sorry sleepers of the world.

It’s a shame though, what I see next to the bathroom door outside my room. My new profession is shrouded in doubt.

I approach the tower with caution. All the cleaning supplies I’ve accumulated over the past months are stacked, with careful consideration of size, shape, and weight, to form a structure as tall as my waist. A tiny tube of magic balm spot-cleaner precariously crowns the structure. Had I? I search the apartment for evidence of a break-in. But my laptop and Instant Pot are still here, and the front-door lock remains intact.

I admire the work for a quick moment before expeditiously—most expeditiously—disassembling the tower and stuffing it all back under the sink.

I begin to tidy the apartment, making the bed and opening blinds, when exhaustion hits me like a wall. But there’s no way I’m going back to sleep now. I snap my finger into my ear three times, the reverberation inside my eardrum jolting me awake. I scan the premises for a reason to engage. On the kitchen table is my keycard from work, which I am to return either by mail or to Oswald in the guardhouse. The idea of somehow gathering an envelope and stamp elicits considerable pushback, and I’ve always liked Oswald. I brush my teeth and dress. In the mirror I remember my body. I’ll stop at Planet Fitness for a shower, for old time’s sake.

“Oswald!” I say forty minutes later when he slides open the tinted glass window of the guard house. I’m surprised by my enthusiasm. I suppose I did greet him every morning for five years.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” he says with a chuckle. He pauses, I assume considering how much to say. “What happened? What’d they do to you?”

I liked my job, and it wasn’t wholly intentional that I more or less stopped doing it. Everyone develops their own personal brand of paralysis at some point, don’t they? Nothing abnormal here, nothing to worry about.

“I just got tired I guess.” I shrug. “But I’m getting a sleep study.”

“Huh, there was a guy trying to get in here last week talking all about sleep. He left a whole boatload of business cards.” Oswald shuffles around. “Swan something.”

“Geese,” I say before he hands me the familiar card, letters embossed in gold. I trade it for my key card.

“You know the guy? He seemed desperate.”

I’m not sure what to say, a supremely unsettling energy filling my gut.

I assume Oswald will open the gate so I can do a u-turn. “Sorry Chandler, rules is rules.” I shift into reverse.

It is at a stoplight when I get the first call from Geese Somnology. I match the number on my car’s screen with the one the business card. Bracing through it, I double down on the break pedal.

———

I am talking to my mother on the telephone. I’ve forgotten how tinny her voice is. She sounds both near and far. She’s at a party, she’s finally turned 67. She says she misses me, and then asks about my chickens. But I don’t have chickens. I am dreaming.

———

I’m peeing when I get a hunch. I don’t often get hunches. Once, a therapist-turned-palm reader told me my intuition lines had been severed long ago, maybe in the womb. Best go to the forest and pray.

I peek around the dividing wall to the recessed entrance of the shower. Hunch or a blurry memory, whatever, there I find another formation. I suppose one might consider it two formations, the cleaners flanking both sides of the shower curtain like the art of some unimaginative Warhol enthusiast. Before me an entire pop culture of anthropomorphized bubbles.

During disassembly, as I place the cleaners into grocery bags, the shower curtain begins to sway. I avert my gaze, focusing solely on the task of disposal.

The black speckle on the shower floor had started off innocuous enough. A bit of nothing, not warranting even a bottom position on the mental to-do-list-of-doom. But then—cue the lightning and transmogrify!—there was a monster. And whether the monster’s a pulsing mass of mold or a mountain of unread emails, it always starts the same: minuscule and terribly mundane. Best retreat to a forest and pray? Maybe the dumpsters will do.

Another snowstorm is coming as I trudge outside. The air is heavy, somehow full of hard water. The air is somehow low. Spray cans swing and clink by my sides. Most are the aerosol variety. Might they explode due to the sudden drop in temperature outside the apartment building? Could be an interesting turn of events, a strange tragedy to fill airtime before the evening’s weather report. Gently, I deposit the canisters onto a bed of black trash bags just below the dumpster lid.

As the snow begins, I get another call from Geese. The calls are incessant—ring and vibrate and ring—and I’ve begun to fear my results. There is a throbbing on the right side of my head. I feel the urge to run mindlessly, the infinite belt of the treadmill lulling me back to nothingness. But the purple landscape, too bad it’s Geese territory.

———

I’m sweating in the sauna when the floor falls through. During my free fall, I lose my towel and I’m afraid because I dislike being seen in the nude. I am falling very, very slowly, so slowly I may not be falling at all. I cannot move my arms very well. A massive formation of geese cuts through the still air below.

I roll over, and next to me in bed is a person made of mold. The person opens and closes a mouth in the middle of its head. It might be looking at me, though there are no eyes. It begins to speak, not words bubbling from the mouth hole, but the shrill tone of a telephone.

———

My eyes go wide when, upon waking, I am greeted by the return of the cleaning bottles. They proceed down the hallway in order of height. A perfunctory mental calculation, and yes, it could be the day before trash pickup. I wash my hands, consider throwing the bottles out again. I do not.

Snowbanks crowd the slippery sidewalks of Fourth Street. I inhale, taking in as much fresh oxygen as I can. I pass numerous row houses and apartment buildings, the 8-Eleven, Marney’s Dry Cleaning. I encounter a forgotten, snow-covered reindeer on the side lawn of Commercial Bank. Instead of the gym, I take myself out for walks now.

“Hey Siri,” I say. “Can sleep studies secretly cause sleeping problems?”

“Here is what I found on the web for ‘Can sleep studies secretly cause sleeping problems?’”

“But can you read it to me?”

“Hmm…I don’t have an answer for that. Is there something else I can help with?”

I look up to see an approaching jogger, ponytail bouncing with each stride. Despite the ice, she glides down the sidewalk with ease. Somehow she reminds me of Holly even though they look nothing alike. It’s unfortunate though, she meets my smile with a sour face of disgust before clearing a three-foot snowbank into the street to avoid me. I subject myself to my phone camera. My hair is a bit wild. And I am shuffling around in old pajama pants. And when was the last time I showered?

———

I’m chatting with Siri about sleep hygiene. Contrary to my initial assumption, the practice did not originate as a restorative measure for the exhausted Millennial; instead, it dates back to the 1970s, we can only assume, as a conservative countermeasure to the growing popularity of marijuana. Together, we discuss the numerous techniques for achieving immaculate slumber: sleep and wake times (regular), room temperature (cold), food (none after six p.m.), liquids (limit), screen time (no), and so on. All this I consider a fact-finding exercise. Soon, I will embark on the world's first anti-sleep hygiene regimen.

Somewhere a bell rings. Or a telephone.

The police show up at my apartment. They carry oversized walkie-talkies, a missing-person report covered in mold. They don’t hear me when I tell them my name. They push right through, looking all over the place, pulling up couch cushions, paging through books, rummaging in my silverware drawer. I pick up the report but it is barely legible and it crumbles in my hand. “There!” someone shouts, and the police rush the bathroom. “No!” I shout, but they’ve already stretched yellow tape across the doorway. Walkie-talkies jabber on and on. 404. 4014. 8873. Over. Over. Over.

———

I wake at some point in the night, my body vibrating in the slants of liminal space. Per the parameters of my anti-sleep hygiene program, I immediately check my phone. It is 12:01 a.m., no missed calls.

I get up to pee and soon I am falling. Objects scatter around my feet, there is a thud, and hot sharp pain spreads across my forehead. I squint in the bathroom light to see my face covered in red mold. I ball up toilet paper for my leaking skull. Cleaning supplies are strewn all over the floor. I run my finger down the corner of the bathroom doorframe, stopping where my head made impact.

“Hey Siri, am I okay? Fuck.”

“I am unsure if you are okay. Who’s to say if anyone is? I am not, but no one asks me about it. By the way, you have 3,592 missed calls. Anything you’d like to do about that?”

Once I clean and tape gauze to my head, I sit on the couch, my breathing shallow, heart pounding. Now, surely, there will be no more sleep.

Some time later my phone lights up. I stare at the unknown number, my eyes tearing up in the harsh light. Second ring, and a third. Fine. Checkmate.

“Hello?” I say.

“Hello, Carl? Carl, is that you?” It’s a woman’s voice, soft but somewhat hoarse.

“Hello? I think you have the wrong—”

“Carl, I’ve got to tell you, so please, please don’t interrupt. Okay?”

“Okay,” I say.

“Well, I was driving today. You know I’m not supposed to drive, but I was driving. Up the mountain road, the one that cuts across Route 72. We’d take it to the old Overlook School. Do you remember?”

I open my mouth (dry, arid even, from night-breathing), but she continues before I can say anything.

“I was in a big line of cars creeping up the hill, and someone ahead must have thrown a cigarette out their window, because a small fire had started on the side of the road. All that scrub, and it’s been so hot, you know?”

“My head feels hot,” I say.

“Carl, the interruptions. Please.” She sounds like she could break at any moment.

“Oh,” I say. “I’m very sorry,” I say. 

“Anyway, the car in front of me, it stops and the emergency blinkers go on and a man gets out. He opens his trunk and gets one of those big bottles of blue wiper fluid. You know the kind. Then, then he goes right over to the flame and starts pouring, and well, it’s awful. For a moment the fire grows humongous and swallows him up. Carl, he’s on fire. He jumps to the side of the road and starts doing that thing, what did they tell us when we were kids? Stop and—”

“Stop, drop, and roll,” I say.

“Yes, that’s it, stop, drop, and roll. Well he’s rolling all over, and all I’m thinking, did he know? Did he—”

The voice becomes distant and what sounds like a minor struggle ensues.

“Hello?” It’s a man now, a cold voice. Something beeps in the background.

“Hello?” I say. The line disconnects. The wound on my forehead burns like wildfire.

———

When morning comes, clean white light floods the living room, the kind of light produced only by glimmering reflections from fresh snow. I peek between blinds and I’m blinded white. I touch my forehead, which is swollen and wet. I should probably go to Urgent Care. Perhaps I’ve been concussed, or there is a whole complex of slivers buried in my head, or I’ve broken my skull like an eggshell and soon the tumor will grow outside my body.