The power went off, and the silence woke me up, and I saw the moon for the first time in a couple of months hung up like a bell in the sky.
My breath on the window fogged the glass frost-white. It was always cold at night: nobody in the house wanted to pay too much for heat. It’d be warmer when I was asleep. I pulled my comforter tighter.
I turned over and began to shut my eyes again when a horrible spike of adrenaline shot through me.
There was someone on the floor.
Whoever it was lay perpendicular to the bed, with their head near me, barely hidden by the top of the mattress, and their feet toward the other end of the room, some nine feet tall at least. Both arms were stretched out sideways. The moonlight coming through the window lit the figure with a sickly luminousness, as though the figure’s flesh were made of paper, reflecting back a little more light than hit it.
It lay still. Each time I took a breath, I listened for the breath of the thing on the floor, but I heard nothing. It was holding its breath, or it was hiding its breathing on purpose, or—worst—it was timing its breathing with my own.
When we had lain there for perhaps three minutes, both of us unmoving, the power cut back on and the house was filled with its old familiar buzzing, the sound of ventilation or boilers or whatever it is that goes on in the walls. As though it were a signal, the door of my room swept open. Gold light streamed in from the hallway, and for a flash I caught sight of the body plainly, gone translucent like a sand crab or a molted cicada. Then the light clicked back off and with it went the body.
The moon was hidden by the clouds again and the darkness was complete. I felt suddenly blank, as though I’d woken up for a second time. The red numbers on my clock blinked 12:00. I’d need to set it again in the morning.
I opened my eyes again when the day was there. The vision of the night before left me with a distant sense of unease, but it was mostly short-lived: the room had warmed up a little with the morning, and in the diffusive light from the cloud cover, my bedroom floor was starkly and comfortably empty. On the second shelf of the refrigerator, I found a styrofoam takeout box half full of sauteed potatoes, so I stuck a saucerful in the microwave and settled down for breakfast at the head of the empty table.
When I had eaten for only a couple of minutes, Calf’s face appeared around the kitchen entry. She held up a hand vaguely and shuffled to the counter. Her hair was up around her face like a frizzed-up cotton ball.
“Morning, Garland,” she said.
“Good morning.”
“Don’t talk to me.”
Calf took a plastic cup from the cabinet—one of the free ones they let you take home from a barbecue place—and filled it with coffee, then tugged open the freezer, grabbed a fistful of ice, and plunked it into the cup. Finally, she popped open an orange pharmaceutical tube from the pocket of her robe and gulped the coffee down with a couple of the pills in one long chug.
I watched her and chewed my potatoes in silence.
“What’re you eating?” she finally asked. “You can talk again.”
I shrugged. “It was in the fridge. Somebody forgot to label it.”
“For someone so anal about everything, you’re pretty unpicky.”
“It’s pragmatism, not analness,” I said. “They’re different.”
Shifting in her chair, Calf set herself to staring into middle space and drumming her knuckles against the table softly. I couldn’t tell if she had a rhythm in mind. Probably not.
I rose when I had finished and brought my things to the sink. “Ever had sleep paralysis?” I asked as I passed her, in as off-hand a way as I could.
She didn’t look at me. “Do your own dishes,” she said.
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“It’s a ‘do your own dishes,’” she said. “Why?”
“Whyfore and wherenot?” said Horus suddenly as he entered the kitchen. “Indeed, the eternal question.” He gave me an eye-wateringly painful jab in the side as he passed. “Or is the real subject”—he lowered his voice and peered at us dramatically—“wherefore and why not? Or—“
He broke off. I had tipped the milky sauce that still remained on my plate into the sink, and at the sound of it pattering against the basin, he had wheeled around.
“Goddammit Garland, it seems you’ve consumed my taters,” he said. He leaned over the sink. “And wasted the garlic sauce like a true heathen would.”
“You’re coming in hot today,” I said, taking a step back from the sink. “And you forgot to label it. Fair game is fair game.”
“I always come in hot, good sir,” Horus said. He pivoted and caught sight this time of the empty coffee pot which Calf had left on the counter, disengaged from its base. “Nobody’s made coffee,” he said, and added breezily, “Damn you all.” He strode to the counter—it was never just walking with Horus; Horus always strode—seized the little pot, rinsed and replaced it in a few smooth motions.
“Calf drank it,” I said. “The last of it at least.”
“Do your fucking dishes,” she called again from the table. “I’m not doing them again.”
“You never answered me about sleep paralysis,” I pointed out. There was a little itch in my mouth, the sensation of a shred of something stuck against a tooth, maybe. I explored it with my tongue unfruitfully.
Horus interjected, holding the canister of coffee aloft. “Midnight I caught a vision of a corpse—“
I started. “Hold on, really?” I asked.
“Lakesberg,” he said. My excitement fell: he was quoting a play. “A spray of lavender was at her throat / A shade of grief, intractable and grim, so on—probably a parasomnia, no? Sleep paralysis? That is, if we were to psychoanalyze poor Edmund. Which we’re not, because as everyone knows, seventeenth century poets did not write with modern psychology in mind and as everyone knows adherence to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders isn’t a precursor to being the most influential fucking poet in history.” He glared at us both from under his thick eyebrows.
“Alright, man, nobody’s trying to shit on Lakesberg,” said Calf.
The coffee pot spit and sputtered on the counter. The kitchen had gradually filled with the burnt leaf-litter smell of Folger’s.
“Tell me more about this corpse you saw,” said Calf, turning in her chair to face me.
“What?” I leaned back against the counter and tried to make it look nonchalant.
“You obviously had a problem with sleep paralysis last night,” she said, “and you were way too excited when Horus came out with his corpse bit.”
“It wasn’t a big deal,” I said, feeling oddly ashamed. “I don’t think I’ve been eating too well. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
“Eh, happens. I wouldn’t worry too much,” said Calf. “Used to get it in high school. It was more voices in my ears for me. Mom said it was people I’d killed in a past life.” She reflected. “To be fair, she said a lot of shit, so take it with a grain of salt. Unless you’ve murdered someone lately.”
She stood up, threaded her way between me and Horus, took a coffee mug printed with DRUDGE REPORT in huge wraparound letters from the doorless cabinet.
“It wasn’t really a corpse,” I said, and then paused. I didn’t know why I was so sure the vision I’d seen was alive. I had assumed so the night before, but I also hadn’t heard it breathe nor seen it move. Was a dead body on the floor worse, or was it better, than a live one?
I continued: “I woke up pretty late when the power went off, and I could see something in the moonlight, and then it disappeared and I woke up in the morning.”
“The moonlight something being a body, presumably?” said Horus.
“Yes.” I felt uncomfortable talking about it. I pushed my tongue against the inside of my mouth again. The obstruction was still there. I looked forward to flossing later.
“Could it have been a prescient image of Calf, post-drugs?” Horus said pointedly, but with good humor. Calf had filled her mug, and she stood now with it in one hand and her orange tube in the other like an ironic, postmodern incarnation of Lady Justice.
“It’s aspirin,” she said drily. “Today’s going to be a migraine day.”
I welcomed the opportunity for a change of subject. “I read a study the other day about caffeine and headaches,” I said. “Apparently it really is helpful for them.”
“I know,” Calf said. She took another pill. “I’m the one who gets them.” She shuffled out of the kitchen and down the little hallway, leaving me and Horus alone in the kitchen.
“Garland, I gotta talk to you about your rent,” Horus said when she had gone. “I can’t pay for you forever.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve got a few things lined up.”
“Dude, you’ve told me that now for what, four months?” He had dropped his affected, theatrical aspect from earlier.
“If you want to evict me, feel free to.”
“Come on, man. I’m not the one in charge of that. Everybody pays their own way. It’s not my job to pick up the slack. This is what now, seven hundred dollars, interest-free?”
“Six hundred forty,” I corrected him. “I thought you didn’t believe in interest.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t, but like—I can’t just keep giving my money away. I don’t make enough for that.”
“If your wanting money overrides your ethical problems with lending, then feel free to, I don’t know, beat me up or whatever it is you’re threatening.” I went to the sink, hunched over it, and started scrubbing at my plate. I felt mean. I tried to think of something I could add that would soften it. “I mean, if you think you can take all this brawn,” I added lamely.
“Come on, dude.” His voice was flat, disappointed. Maybe a little sad. “Get your act together.”
I focused on washing my plate. The sound of his bare feet on the linoleum accompanied him out.