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Smoke has as many different scents as skin. Part of the pleasure is not knowing what it will be — sulfurous or closer to incense or airier and sweet as I imagine the smell of clouds. Nothing relieves me so much as burning something old, watching it flicker and disappear into air. Dresses dance as they go, lifted as if by some music. A photograph flaps like a wing or a hand waving. Perfumes hiss, then shatter, papers curl, plaster jewels curdle. Once I tried to burn an old toy — a mechanical duck. When I'd found it at the bottom of a drawer, it reminded me of the groggy sunrise Easter service and the hunt for eggs in the graveyard. After I set the match to its tail, it started walking pitifully on its metal legs, and it knocked around the room singeing the walls and linoleum until it burned down to its metal frame and folded with a crackle and small battery explosion. It is less dangerous to burn things than to save them.
I'd poured myself six thimble shots of bourbon and walked the edges of the bedroom touching the walls and windowsills, hoping to work the starry twitches from my legs so they'd lie still. If I let go, I'd fall off the night that was galloping fast. Every time I got into bed, I heard an intruder finagling the catch on the window or slowly climbing the basement stairs. My heart raced. My eyelids fluttered. I jolted up, walked to the kitchen, ears stinging at the silence, and poured another shot.
The train had gone by three times, rattling into the air. Porter was the kind of Indiana town where the whistle sounded cheerful, not plaintive, but then the wheels chewed ravenously on the tracks.
I listened for the man until he turned phantom again — thetrees, the wind. Ridiculous to be twenty-two, a year past adulthood, and still afraid of stray noises. I went into the kitchen and sat down at the table, turned on the clock radio, and fiddled with the ridged knob until I heard the song about lightning and the crashing sea of love, just at the point when the guitar strummed in waves. My bare feet pressed on the cool, grainy floor; my nightgown bunched up around my knees.
I traced a panicky finger over the constellation of glitter in the Formica — two nights of not sleeping, with nothing to do for long, bare hours except worry over the crucial thing it seemed I needed to remember and couldn't: that blankness revolved in my head like a siren.
Twirling the salt shaker in my fingertips, I groggily felt that if I acted asleep, sleep might come. Sprinkling a little salt in my palm, I dabbed a few grains into the corners of my eyes before I closed them and put my head down on the table. But when I tried to breathe slowly and think of nothing, I began to crave potato pancakes and apples.
Over the stove hung the cast-iron skillet my father had used to make them, crisp and salty in a way my mother and I had never mastered. After he died, the drinking started — secretly at first, from sticky bottles next to the flour in the pantry cabinet, and for the same reason I often couldn't steep now: an old sensation that I was falling, or about to fall, from some roof or ledge or stairs.
Bourbon gave me the courage to loosen my grip. It wasn't that I wouldn't fall anymore, but the fall would be pleasant and it wouldn't matter so much when I did.
I was about to drift off when I heard a scratch, a mouse or something, in the pantry. I got up to open the door and turn on the light. The colored boxes and gleaming cans glared back at me. I knew I was hanging on too tightly, but this time couldn't make myself let go.
The landlord had asked me to leave my apartment on Birch Street, and I was staying at my mother's until I could move into one of the rooms at the Linden Hotel, where I worked. There the insomniacs made anxious trips to the ice machine after midnight, and by morning they were already showered and dressed as if there were some purpose to their being awake so early. When they came down to the lobby to check out, their faces swollen and pale, a lostness about them, I'd keep my voice quiet and slow as I gave them directions or simply thanked them and said good-bye. I knew they'd sleepwalk through the day, just as I often did, wincing at light and hoping not to stumble, all along hearing that murmur: if you couldn't sleep last night, you might not get to sleep later, or ever.
I went back to the metal chair and sat staring out the window at the grass, my stomach hollow from all the bourbon. I got up and opened the refrigerator, peered into the cold light. In the lingering smell of leftover cherry pie lay a quart of milk, a hunk of molded bread, a dozen eggs. I grabbed the egg carton and shut the door.
I was going to scramble them, but immediately lost my appetite and just lay them on the table in front of me. I thought of all the people I knew sleeping then, their heads nestled in dreams like those eggs in their cups. I visited each bed, examined the sleeping face, the mouth pressed closed or slightly open, the deep slow breaths or snores, the sprawl or curl of limbs. I wanted to know how they let go so easily, how they managed to spiral so bravely into sleep, unafraid of all they had forgotten.
The dark sky was bluing. Taking the first egg from its bed, palmed it in my hand, shook it just slightly, and felt the weight of the yolk wiggling in its sack. In the gentle press of my fingers, the shell felt brittle and fragile. I tossed it at the window, and it smacked against the blue-black surface, a toy sun. I threw another one at the glass. It cracked and splashed yellow, then dripped sleepily.
Copyright 1999 by Rene Steinke
