Dancing in Dreamtime (5 page)

The hopes, it turned out, were mostly Sally's and the fears were mostly Kenneth's. Not long after the wedding, when she was promoted to chief engineer, he bungled another operation, then another. Obviously he couldn't amend every mistake by marrying the victim, even if all the victims had been female.

When the patient lay muffled in green sheets on the operating table, a rectangle of skin exposed to the knife, Kenneth began thinking of solar flares, meteor strikes, ion storms. What if dark matter engulfed the solar system? What if the moon spiraled away from Earth, abolishing tides? He knew from browsing on-line that tectonic plates were lurching about, triggering earthquakes and volcanoes. Glaciers were melting. Sea levels were rising. Deserts were spreading. Species were vanishing at a thousand times the normal rate of extinction.

During surgery one day he lapsed into a meditation on ozone holes, and only returned to the here-and-now when a nurse remarked that he had opened a potentially lethal hole inside the patient. The patient survived but Kenneth's nerves were shattered.
How could he concentrate on the geometry of incisions while Earth unraveled?

After settling the malpractice suit for a hefty sum, he announced that he was hanging up the scalpel. Busy campaigning for mayor, Sally didn't quarrel with his decision, not even when he began shuffling around the house, wringing his idle hands like a mourner beside a crash site. Those hands were as firm and steady as ever, he was quick to point out. Unlike many surgeons who retire in their forties, Kenneth had not lost his touch. What he had lost was his ability to concentrate. When he made love to Sally he stroked her body with a harpist's delicacy, teasing melodies from her skin. Then suddenly his fingers would freeze, his eyes would roll shut, and his mind would wander off—to fret about killer drones armed with lasers, perhaps, or antibiotic-resistant microbes, or some other menace.

“Come back, space cadet,” she would plead.

Kenneth used to be the one who couldn't sleep, while Sally, exhausted by her mayoral duties, dozed through the night. At breakfast, his eyes glazed from staying up reading bad news, he would tell her about polluted aquifers, dying corals, blighted forests, or gyres in the oceans swirling with millions of tons of plastic.

“Did you realize the sun is already middle-aged?” he announced one morning over English muffins. “When it uses up all the hydrogen it will swell out and roast the planets.”

“Is that so?” she replied, without looking up from the crossword.

“Maybe it won't matter,” he added. “If we kill the plankton, we're done for anyway.”

“Would you pass the honey, dear?”

She filtered Kenneth's fears through the grid of her engineer's pragmatism. Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof, she thought, stuffing her briefcase with notes on the current emergencies. One by one the town's troubles crossed her desk, and one by one she wrestled them into submission. She could prevent the explosion of a boiler in the basement of a nursing home, but she could not keep the sun from going nova. She could protect kids by ordering the removal of asbestos ceiling tiles from schools, but she could not save frogs from pesticides. If Kenneth saw fit to lie awake brooding on catastrophes, that was no reason for Sally to ruin her own rest.

Well before sunrise on the day the spacesuit arrived, Kenneth was propped up in bed, reading by the glow of his headlamp, muttering to himself. At last unable to contain his alarm, he blurted out, “Honey, do you realize that bacteria from ice in a comet's tail could set off a worldwide epidemic?”

“That's nice, dear,” Sally murmured. She folded a pillow over her ears and dove back in search of dreams. She didn't find any, however, and wouldn't dream again until long after her husband disappeared.

When the spacesuit was delivered, in a carton large enough to hold a refrigerator, Kenneth unpacked the numerous pieces, laid them out on the floor, and studied the instructions. Then at bedtime he began donning his mail-order gear.

“Isn't it rather late to be trying that on?” she asked.

“I'm going to sleep in it,” he said as he wormed his arms into the puffy white sleeves.

“You're kidding.”

“Could you reach me those boots?”

“You'll swelter.”

“It has a ventilation system.” He pulled on the clumsy gloves. “Now the helmet.”

“But you'll suffocate.”

“Each air tank is good for eight hours.”

Sally quit protesting and helped him into the suit, since it appeared to be lifting his spirits. After the bubble helmet was in place and oxygen began flowing through the hose, his voice emerged by way of a speaker, sounding like the drone of a pilot instructing his passengers. “If you ever notice this needle creeping toward the red zone,” he said, pointing to a dial on his chest, “open the air valve a half turn. If you hear a beeping sound, call the ambulance.”

That first night, squeezed to the edge of the mattress by the bulbous white hulk, Sally slept fitfully. The second night she dozed off for only an hour or two. The third night she gave in to insomnia and read a report on waste management. Meanwhile Kenneth slumbered blissfully, his face inside its bubble as tranquil as that of a newborn in a crib.

In the mornings, he didn't stir when she left for work. He still cooked supper, but hastily, for the hours he once devoted to fixing elaborate meals he now spent shopping at big box stores and hauling back carloads of supplies, which he stowed in the basement alongside the residue from his former hobbies. When she asked what they would ever do with all this stuff, he replied, “Postpone the end.”

Well, she thought, the canned goods and freeze-dried foods would keep, as would the bottled water and toiletries and fuel. If stockpiling supplies and sleeping in an astronaut's suit freed him from gloom, she would indulge him. Her insomnia was bound to pass, as soon as she grew accustomed to the wheeze and purr of his life-support devices. There were, of course, some practical difficulties, one of which she mentioned in the opening week of his spaceman era.

“How are we supposed to make love while you're wearing this contraption?”

“NASA thought of that,” he replied. “There's a strategically placed airlock.”

“I'm talking about sex, sweetheart, not the docking of spaceships.”

“It's been tested in the space station.”

“Couldn't you go without the suit once in a while?” His look of dismay kept her from pressing the point. “Okay, okay,” she added soothingly. “Suppose I skip my yoga class on Wednesdays and come home at noon, so we can frolic in the old-fashioned way?”

He frowned. “That's my prime time for shopping.”

One of the qualities that made Sally a good mayor was a high degree of tolerance for human idiocy. But Kenneth's antics were straining her patience. At the town hall, where the eyes of her staff members began to resemble empty eggshells, she grew irritable. “I haven't been sleeping well,” she apologized after scolding her secretary. “Neither have I,” the secretary replied.

Everywhere the mayor looked, faces had been eroded by sleeplessness. Upon questioning the clerks who gathered listlessly at the drinking fountain like buffaloes at a waterhole, she discovered that a plague of insomnia had swept through town in the days following the arrival of Kenneth's spacesuit.

Winos hugging their rags curled up as usual in the waiting room of the bus station, but they could not shut out the blare of departures or the shuffle of feet. Children sat up watching midnight movies. Babies clamored for attention at all hours. Parents took turns hiding in basements, in barns, in parked cars, anywhere to escape the tantrums of exhausted kids. Teachers called in sick. Druggists sold out their supply of sleeping pills and began recommending warm milk to their bleary-eyed customers. Soon the dairy cases in grocery stores were stripped bare, and the smell of scorched milk filled the July streets.

Not everyone complained about the insomnia plague. All-night disk jockeys welcomed the dramatic rise in song requests. “Play us some crooners, quiet stuff, ballads and blues,” teenagers begged. Bowling alleys and cafes and bookstores kept their doors open, and doubled their business. On the town square, where the mayor would perform her startling exhibition, the cinema began screening films in the wee hours. An abandoned gas station was converted into a thriving doughnut shop. Truckers cruising through town discovered they could drive all the next day without needing pills. Traveling sales reps contracted insomnia as soon as they checked in to local motels.

Sally was reluctant at first to attribute the plague to Kenneth's donning of the spacesuit. As an engineer, she knew quite well that correlation is not causation. Still, it was hard to ignore the coincidence. While the townspeople tossed and turned in their beds,
he slumbered placidly through the nights. Then he began dozing through the afternoons, and eventually he slept around the clock. Now and again, without opening his eyes, he spoke in a scratchy voice. “Maintain oxygen pressure in the blue zone,” he might say, or “Add serum every fourth day.” Several times Sally heard him whisper, “Don't open my suit or I will die.”

Despite her engineer's training, she wondered if Kenneth's unbroken slumber might be sucking sleep away from the town, as a black hole sucks in matter and light. Tapping on the helmet would not rouse him, nor would jostling his body in its pale husk. Perhaps there were narcotics in the bag of pink fluid that fed nutrients to him through a tube. But the label seemed innocent enough, and so did the sample that the police lab tested for her.

After Kenneth had slept for seventy-two hours straight, she called in the hospital pathologist, an old friend who could be trusted to keep mum about her husband's peculiar condition.

“Damn fool stunt, if you ask me,” the pathologist grumbled when Sally warned him that they mustn't open the suit. He shone a light through the helmet, flexed Kenneth's legs and arms in their bloated casing, read pulse and blood pressure and other vital signs from gauges on the front of the spacesuit. “It looks like normal sleep,” the pathologist concluded. “Has he been exceptionally tired lately?”

“He's been wrung out by worry for years,” Sally conceded.

Now it was her turn to worry. Not so much about Kenneth, who seemed to be enjoying his hibernation, and not about the town, whose problems could be solved. What kept her awake now were the vast, irresolvable dilemmas that had so deeply troubled Kenneth. Nor was she alone in her anxiety. At the office her secretary began quoting statistics about rising greenhouse gas
emissions. The county surveyor brooded over satellite photos showing the clearcutting of Amazon rainforests. The panhandler who used to pluck a banjo for loose change on the steps of the town hall now passed out leaflets condemning strip mining. Children playing video games fretted about radiation poisoning from nuclear reactors.

While replacing Kenneth's nutrient bag one morning, Sally muttered, “You're making me a nervous wreck.”

She was surprised to hear him drowsily reply, “I'm almost finished.”

“With what?”

“The dream work. The sacrifice.”

She asked what he meant, but he would say nothing more.