Sleep

“Jacob!” A quick jab to the ribs wakes me up. I’m in my 9:30am class, asleep in the front row.

“So nice of you to join us, Jacob.” I look up and lock eyes with Dr. Roth. Her steel blue eyes try to cut through me, so I look back down. There is a paper sitting neatly before me, printed and hole-punched.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” How did I get here, I think, but I don’t think that’s what she’s looking for. I look down t the paper—it’s the one that’s due on Tuesday.

“Sorry,” I mumble, and pull myself straight in my chair. I look about the floor around me—no backpack, no nothing. All I have is the one paper I didn’t write. And I’m soaking wet.

“Now, before we turn in the essays,” Dr. Roth says, continuing the lecture I’d apparently interrupted, “I want everyone to write their theses on a separate sheet of paper and get into groups of…”

Rain. It’s pouring outside my beige Volvo S60. The dashboard clock reads 5:26am. I’m dry in my ECU hoodie, and I’ve got my laptop on. I’m sitting in the parking lot of my campus library finishing a paper due in four hours. There is a 24-hour room on the other side of the building, but it would take longer to get out and walk around the building than to just snag internet from my car. And it’s pouring rain and 5:26 in the morning.

After hacking out the last two sentences, I glance over the paper with satisfaction. I like to think I always work best on a deadline. For some reason, four cups of coffee and sleep deprivation helps everything make perfect sense. I chug down the last cold drops of stale coffee, email my professor, and put the laptop away. Only then do I realize Keri Hilson has been singing through my car speakers. I hate Keri Hilson.

I slip the car into reverse and swing out in a wide turn across the empty parking lot. Shifting to drive, I make my way home…

“No sleeping!” I open my eyes to a mean looking old lady with a stack of books in one arm, the other arm still shaking me. It takes another second to realize she’s a librarian.

“And get off that couch before you ruin it,” she adds before moving on. I pull myself up off of a very comfortable couch and see that I’ve left a wet body print on the cushion. Confused, I stride over to the computer terminals.

Logging on to my student account, I look at the time: 6:15pm Tuesday. Did I go to my other classes? Did I skip all of them? I have no idea how I even got out of Dr. Roth’s class, so I check my campus email account.

There are seven unread emails. One says “40% off Viagra!” I mark it as spam. Two are campus events that I send to the trash. One reads: “Please Make an Appointment with counseling ASAP.” I delete that as well and get bored with checking emails.

While typing out the url for Facebook into the browser, I feel my pocket vibrate and check my phone. I don’t recognize the number and don’t answer. After another minute, it vibrates again and I check the voicemail.

“Mr. Ashlynn,” a strong male voice begins, “I am calling you regarding your incident last night. My name is Dr. Roger Fields, and I am a counselor here at ECU. I think we should meet.”

Deleting the message, I log off and exit of the library. Another minute of scanning the plaza and I find a suitable candidate to bum a cigarette from in a quiet looking fellow huddled under a gazebo wearing too much black. I stop to inhale a couple of drags of sweet menthol and wonder where all the missing pieces in my head went. I remember writing the paper…and I remember something else. I can vaguely see myself shifting to drive, finally making my way home…

Driving in the dead of night always makes me nervous. I have to travel down two pretty major roads to get home, and it’s very unsettling to see no cars. Or only the occasional car, with its brights on, barreling ominously towards me. I think I also just assume anyone out at 5:40am is driving shit-faced and will kill me.

I check my speedometer, because college town cops are dicks. Even in the dead of night. When I come to the first intersection, I wait patiently in the left turn lane for what I imagine to be thousands of invisible cars to pass. A couple minutes pass, and the light only turns for everyone else. Just when I start to consider running the light, a car barrels past. I’d better wait…

“57! 58! 59! Come on, you can do better than that! 60!” I open my eyes to some strange funnel and it takes a minute to register that I’m still in the gazebo. I can vaguely make out distant yelling nearly completely drown out by the storm. My body is ice-cold and my fingers completely pruned. I struggle weakly to pull myself up and realize that the kid in black is nowhere to be seen. How long have I been out? Across the quad are ROTC’s doing pushups in the harsh weather.

Pulling myself up onto a bench, I fumble in my damp right pocket for my phone. It’s off, and only powered up for a few minutes before dying again. There are three voicemails and a text message reading “where r u?” from my girlfriend, Beth. The phone dies before I can check the voicemail, but I manage to get the time: 6:12am Wednesday. Wednesday?

I try to make my way over to the ROTC training, but I’m too weak. I make it about halfway before hunger and general pain overcome me and I collapse. Sleep creeps in around my eyes, and it’s a fight just to crawl the rest of the way. I manage to pull myself a little closer before collapsing again. Just as everything is fading I feel strong arms wrap around me and lift me up…

I peer through cracked lids and see that the light is green. Thank god. Turning onto the last major road, I’m about a mile away from home—from my bed. Driving along, it starts to rain harder, and I can only see maybe fifty feet of road ahead. The only light is I think a Popeye’s Chicken neon sign. Staring at that, I almost miss the man on the median.

When I do see him, he’s looking at me, looking past the bright headlights and the storm. Looking through my windshield—straight into my eyes. He is soaking wet but he doesn’t seem to notice, standing stark still.

I blink and he’s not there anymore. It reminds of being back home, where my parents live. They live so far deep into the country that hitting deer is inevitable: a fact of life. This is a lot like that—the thump, the oh-shit, the screeching of tires. My heart is racing and I have no idea what happened.

Then vaguely there are cops, there are questions, and there is the torrential downpour. I’m soaked and all I can think about is my bed. And that sleep that lingers around the edges of my eyes, pulling at my lids…

I’m awake, and I’m on a very comfortable couch. I look down across my body and see that I’m wearing ECU sweatpants and an ECU t-shirt. I am surrounded by the pleasure of how warm and dry I feel, and I slip back into a slumber filled with more police questions and cold, wet answers.

When I wake again, it is to the gentle nudge of a beautiful red-head. She’s holding a tray with an apple, some crackers, and a glass of water. I can’t even smell those things and my whole body wants them.

“Hi, Jacob,” she says, lifting the glass of water to my lips. She says more, but I’m so intently focused on the wonderful cold water surging past my lips. Her voice is but a pleasant murmur outside the flow of water, ever so slightly lulling me back into dark sleep.

“Mr. Ashlynn.” A masculine, but familiar voice snaps me back awake. “My name is Roger. I left you a couple of messages yesterday afternoon.”

A tall, slender man walks in. He is wearing a very comfortable-looking argyle sweater with a bowtie. I smile at the sight of him and immediately feel like I’m in good company. With a firm handshake, he pulls me up off of the couch. With another strong hand he holds me steady as I slowly shake the weakness out of my legs.

“What day is this then?” I ask, with some embarrassment. I don’t know why, but I can’t look him in the eye. I feel like he’s somehow connected to my dreams. I scan his desk instead and see a picture of him, his wife, and his daughter. His daughter’s pretty hot.

“I’ve been collecting some strange reports over the last two days,” says Roger, moving behind his desk to sit in my line of vision. He pushes some papers and in the first line I see Dr. Roth’s name.

Roger calls the red-head, Vanessa, back in and she comes up over to me with an apple in hand. I take it greedily: each bite hurts, but feels so much better sitting in my stomach.

Roger mentions his family picture and we start talking about his daughter. She just got in trouble for drinking the other day. She goes to college up at Virginia Tech. After a while, he asks me if I can explain everything I know from the last few days. It isn’t much, but he listens intently, stopping to ask questions every few minutes. There is a recorder spinning on the desk between us, but he assures me that it is to help me.

“What exactly do I need help with?” I ask him curiously.

“Well,” Roger begins slowly, pressing the stop button on his recorder, “it is a little too early to say for sure, but I believe you are exhibiting symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“Like war sickness?” I vaguely recall a history class dealing with PTSD.

“Like what happens after a traumatic experience,” Roger says firmly. “You seem to have quickly developed some advanced form of narcolepsy, which is actually quite strange.”

Roger takes this time to get up from his desk and move around. From my chair, I watch as he continues to list what is wrong with me. His voice is calm, but unsettling.

“You seem to be reliving vivid flashbacks from the night of your incident,” Roger continues. “But most victims develop insomnia, not narcolepsy.”

Something in his tone made it click for me. The incident. I realized for the first time since Monday night that I ran a person over with my car. I don’t know how I forgot.

Roger sees my face, and quickly changes his tone: “I want you to know that the police view it as an accident. He chose to end his life without regard for yours.”

I close my eyes and see the man on the median. He is still staring at me, but this time there is no car, no road. There is only him, and me. And total darkness. And then the faint sound of rain...

My heart is racing and I am in my car, screeching to a halt. I’m already halfway out the door when I realize I haven’t shifted into park and am thrown against the road-side curb, slamming the back of my head against the pavement.

Dizzied, I stumble after my car, jump in, and rip up the e-brake. It bucks to a stop, throwing me down into the driver-side foot space. When I open my eyes again, they sting with blood.

After struggling to pull myself out of that position, I’m out on the road again. One car is passing slowly when I pull myself to my feet again. I walk back to where the man was standing and my knees buckle. I’m still dizzy from hitting my head. It hurts like hell right now, but still I move.

When I get close, I see the man in the road, slumped on the ground, barely visible through the rain. Next to him, I see that one of his legs has been completely ripped from his body, and his face is mangled. But I also see that he is still alive.

“Hhliiff,” a faint voice mutters, impossible to understand. The man repeats this same jumbled word again before shutting up for good. I collapse onto the ground next to him as blue and red lights faintly appear on the horizon.

“Jacob!” I’m in a car again, but everything’s dry. I rub the back of my head, and feel the sharp stab of pain from a big lump there. Felix, my roommate, is staring at me from the driver’s side of his Mazda 6.

“You okay man?” Felix looks genuinely concerned. It’s maybe the only time I’ve ever seen him like this. “You didn’t say two words the entire time I was in Dr. Field’s office or on the ride home.”

“You came to Roger’s office?” How do I not remember getting from there to here?

“What?” Roger must not have told him much of anything. I took that time to get out of the car and make my way to the house. Every time I blink, I see the man on the median. And on the road. But not hitting him, I can’t see that.

We both walk upstairs, where our roommate Jake is smoking a bowl. Felix walks up and grabs it, taking a big rip. He extends his hand out to me, and looks questioningly in my eyes.

“Sure,” I say, and grab the bowl. There’s just a little corner of green left, and I chose to burn that. Moments later we’re all sitting baked around on the couches.

The man on the median is standing in my living room but the roomies don’t say anything. He’s still staring at me through rain. It’s raining in my living room and he’s staring at me, cold and stark.

“Thank you for killing me,” the man says, as the room melts away. He walks along the median towards me, until we are face-to-face.

“I didn’t kill you,” I lie. I look around me and we’re both standing on the median. I’m in the same damn wet clothes I was in on the night of the accident. There is a car turning onto the road just a couple hundred feet away. The headlights shine on the man’s face and he stares it down hard.

“Wait!” I recognize the outline of a beige Volvo S60. “Wait! You can’t jump this time!”

“This time?” The man says without turning back towards me.

I watch in horror as he crouches, the car only a dozen feet away. As he leaps into the road I can see my own face, oblivious, mesmerized. I see my distant eyes, the body rolling over the car, and I see myself fall out a couple dozen feet later.

“No!” I scream at the top of my lungs and shut my eyes. I have to run away from this.

“Jacob!” I open my eyes again, and I’m still on the median. My phone is pressed to my ear.

“Jake! You have to stay focused!” Roger is yelling at me on the other end of the speaker.

“I’m here!” I look around. “No, I’m actually here!”

“Where are you right now?”

“I’m on the median. I’m the man on the median!”

“Okay, calm down and take a seat,” he says. He’s trying his best to sound calm, but has to shout over the rain crashing all about me. It is dark except a bright Popeye’s Chicken sign glowing through the storm. “What you just experienced was a nightmare. I’m worried that your visions are getting worse. We have to get you somewhere where I can observe—”

“Roger!” I have to yell to get him to shut up. A single car slowly passes and then it’s dark again. “I have to call my girlfriend now, Roger. I’m sorry.”

I hang up before he can get another word in. I speed-dial Beth.

“Jake?” She just woke up. “Jake? Do you know what time it is? Where are you?”

“I’m standing on a median off of Lincoln Avenue,” I shout. That wakes her up. “Before you say anything, I’m okay.”

We talk for about ten minutes. I tell her everything that has been happening as best as I can remember. And then I tell her that I have to go. I blow a kiss through the phone and promise that everything will be okay.

Looking down the road, I see a car turning towards me, headlights boring through the violent storm. As it barrels closer, I think about jumping.

I see my life through a lens of pain. I see the last days and how it has affected me. I can’t keep track of things. I don’t know what time it is. But I know that this car is coming.

It gets only a couple dozen feet away and I peer beyond the headlights and the windshield. I see the face on the other side and I am cold. I bend into a crouch, and prepare to jump.

And then I see that it’s Roger, and fall back onto my ass. The car slams on its breaks, and in a moment, Roger is surrounding me with a blanket, pulling me to my feet.

“You are going to have a hard time, my friend,” Roger says, promising that he will not abandon me, and that he will not lie to me. “But we’re going to make it out okay.”

I smile, and whisper thanks as I climb into the passenger seat of his car. Wrapped warmly in his blanket, with the heat turned high, I feel the black slipping in around the edges of my eyes. I let it take over as the peaceful comfort of Roger’s old Audi A6 station wagon fades out, and I find myself once more behind the wheel of the Volvo S60.