The Little Sleep (5 page)

“Hey, Mark!”

“What?” My body catches itself in mid-slide against the wall. Heavy feet move to get my weight back over them. They’re neither graceful nor quiet. They kick a kitchen chair and clap against the hardwood floor. Don’t know what my feet have against the floor, but they’re always trying to get away.

Ellen is now sitting at the kitchen table, smoking one of my cigarettes. She says, “You were getting ready to go out, Mark.” She won’t say
sleep
. Not around me.

As difficult as it is to cobble together some dignity after almost falling asleep mid-conversation, I try to patch it up. I’ve had a lot of practice. I say, “Would the DA recognize the Genevich name, you think?”

“Of course. There’s no way he’d forget your father.” Ellen leans forward fast, stubs out her cigarette like she’s killing a pesky ant. She’s adding everything together and doesn’t like the sum. She’s going to tell me about it too. “Why do you care? What’s going on here, Mark? There’s something you’re not telling me. You better not be messing around with stuff that requires involvement with the DA. Leave that shit to the people who carry guns.”

“Relax. There’s nothing going on. It’s just this all might be useful information. I’m supposed to ask questions for a living, right? Besides, a guy in my line of work having a potential family friend in the big office could help my cause.”

Ellen stands up. Chair falls down. She’s not buying any of it. “What cause?”

I like that she’s so riled up, on edge. She doesn’t know for sure I’m working on a case, but even she can sense something big is going on. It’s real. It’s legit. And thanks to her, I finally have my breadcrumb trail, or at least one crumb. I sit down at the table, take off my hat, run my fingers through my thinning hair.

“I was speaking figuratively, Ellen. My general cause. Or someday, when I have a cause.” I wink, which is a mistake. My face doesn’t have a wink setting anymore.

“You’re being awful strange tonight.” She says it to the table. I’m supposed to hear her but not give anything back. Fair enough.

Worry lines march all around Ellen’s face, and not in formation. She taps the all-but-empty pack of cigarettes with her wedding ring. Tim Genevich is twenty-five years dead, and Ellen still wears the ring. Does she wear it out of habit, superstition, or true indefinable loss, so the loss is right there in plain sight, her life’s pain waving around for anyone to see? The ring as her dead husband, as Tim. My father on her hand.

I lean over and snatch the last cigarette out of the pack. Ellen stops tapping with Tim. I light up and inhale as much smoke as I can, then I take in a little more. Exhale, and then I do some reiterating, just to be clear in our communication.

I say, “Don’t worry, Clowny. I have no cause. The DA and I are just gonna get acquainted.

Tim was a landscaper, caretaker, winterizer of summer cottages, and a handyman, and he died on the job. He was in the basement of someone else’s summer home, fighting through cobwebs and checking fuses and the sump pump, when he had an explosion in his brain, an aneurysm. I guess us Genevich boys don’t have a lot of luck in the brain department.

Three days passed and no one found him. He didn’t keep an appointment book or anything like that, and he left his car at our house and rode his bike to work that morning, so Ellen had no idea where he was. He was an official missing person. Got his name in the paper, and for a few days everyone knew who Tim Genevich was.

The owners of the cottage found him when they came down to the Cape for Memorial Day weekend. The basement bulkhead was open. Tim was lying facedown on the dirt floor. He had a fuse in his hand. I was five years old, and while I’m told I was at the funeral and wake, I don’t remember any of it.

I don’t remember much of Tim. Memories of him have faded to the edges, where recollection and wish fulfillment blur, or they have been replaced, co-opted by images from pictures. I hate pictures.

Too much time has passed since my own brain-related accident, too many sleeps between. Every time I sleep—doesn’t matter how long I’m out—puts more unconscious space between myself and the events I experienced, because every time I wake up it’s a new day. Those fraudulent extra days, weeks, years add up. So while my everyday time shrinks, it also gets longer. I’m Billy Pilgrim and Rip Van Winkle at the same time, and Tim died one hundred years ago.

That said, I do have a recurring dream of my father. He’s in our backyard in Osterville. He puts tools back in the shed, then emerges with a hand trowel. Tim was shorter than Ellen, a little bent, and he loved flannel. At least, that’s what he looks like in my dreams.

Tim won’t let me go in the shed. I’m too young. There are too many tools, too many ways to hurt myself. I need to be protected. He gives me a brown paper bag, grocery-sized, and a pat on the head. He encourages me to sing songs while we walk around the yard picking up dog shit. We don’t have a dog, but all the neighborhood dogs congregate here. Tim guesses a dog’s name every time he picks up some shit. The biggest poops apparently come from a dog named Cleo.

The song I always sing, in my dreams and my memories, is “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Tim then sings it back to me with
different lyrics, mixing in his dog names and poop and words that rhyme with poop. He doesn’t say
shit
around the five-year-old me, at least not on purpose. The dream me, the memory me—that kid is the same even if he never really existed, and
that
kid laughs at the silly improvised song but then sings “Ball Game” correctly, restoring balance and harmony to the universe.

Our two-bedroom bungalow is on a hill and the front yard has a noticeable slant, so we have to stand lopsided to keep from falling. We clean the yard, then we walk behind the shed to the cyclone-fenced area of weeds, tall grass, and pricker bushes that gives way to a grove of trees between our property and the next summer home about half a block away. Tim takes the paper bag from me, it’s heavy with shit, and he dumps it out, same spot every time. He says “Bombs away” or “Natural fertilizer” or something else that’s supposed to make a five-year-old boy laugh.

Then we walk to the shed. Tim opens the doors. Inside are the shiny and sharp tools and machines, teeth everywhere, and I want to touch it all, want to feel the bite. He hangs up the trowel and folds the paper bag. We’ll reuse both again, next weekend and in the next dream. Tim stands in the doorway and says, “So, kid, whaddaya think?”

Sometimes I ask for a lemonade or ice cream or soda. Sometimes, if I’m aware I’m in the dream again, I ask him questions. He always answers, and I remember the brief conversation after waking up, but that memory lasts only for a little while, an ice cube melting in a drink. Then it’s utterly forgotten, crushed under the weight of all those little sleeps to come.

William “Billy” Times has been the Suffolk County DA for ten years. He’s a wildly popular and visible favorite son. All the local news shows are doing spots featuring Billy and his
American Star
daughter. He hosts now-legendary bimonthly Sunday brunch fund-raisers—the proceeds going to homeless shelters—at a restaurant called Amrheins in South Boston. All the local celebs and politicians show their faces at least once a year at the brunches.

Although I am Tim Genevich’s kid, I haven’t been on the brunch guest list yet. That said, Tim’s name did manage to get me a one-on-one audience with DA Times at his office today. What a pal, that Tim.

I fell asleep in the cab. It cost me an extra twenty bucks in drive-around time. I stayed awake long enough to be eventually dumped at 1 Bulfinch Place. Nice government digs for the DA. Location, location, location. It’s between the ugly concrete slabs of Government Center and Haymarket T stop, but a short walk from cobblestones, Faneuil Hall Marketplace, and the two-story granite columns and copper dome of Quincy Market, where you can eat at one of its seventeen overpriced restaurants. It’s all very colonial.

Despite naptime, I’m here early when I can’t ever be early. Early means being trapped in a waiting room, sitting in plush chairs or couches, anesthetizing Muzak tones washing over me, fluffing my pillow. An embarrassingly large selection of inane and soulless entertainment magazines, magazines filled with fraudulent and beautiful people, is the only proffered stimulus. That environment is enough to put a non-narcoleptic in a coma, so I don’t stand a chance. I won’t be early.

I stalk around the sidewalk and the pigeons hate me. I don’t take it personally, thick skin and all that. I dump some more nicotine and caffeine into my bloodstream. The hope is that filling up with leaded will keep all my pistons firing while in the DA’s office. Hope is a desperate man’s currency.

I call the DA’s secretary and tell her I’m outside the building, enjoying a rare March sunlight appearance, and I ask when the DA will be ready for me. Polite as pudding, she says he’s ready for me now. Well, all right. A small victory. A coping adjustment actually working is enough to buoy my spirits. I am doing this. This is going to work, and I will solve this case.

But . . .

There’s a swarm of
ifs
, peskier than a cloud of gnats. The ifs: If, as I’m assuming, the DA sent me his daughter and her case, why wouldn’t he contact me directly? Again, am I dealing with the ultimate closed-lips case that can’t have any of his involvement? If that’s right, and I’m supposed to be Mr. Hush Hush, Mr. Not Seen and Not Heard, why am I so easily granted counsel with the public counsel? He certainly seemed eager to meet with me when I called, booking a next-day face-to-face appointment.

There are more ifs, and they’re stressing my system. Stress, like time, is a mortal enemy. Stress can be one of my triggers, the grease in the wheel of my more disruptive narcoleptic symptoms. I could use another cigarette or three to choke myself awake, freshen up in the smoke.

I step out of the elevator and walk toward the DA’s office. Bright hallways filled with suits of two types: bureaucrats and people carrying guns. The bullets and briefcases in the hallway make me a little edgy.

The DA’s waiting area is stark and bright. Modern. Antiseptic. Very we-get-shit-done in its décor. Wooden chairs and glass-topped tables framed in silver metal, and all the window shades are up. No shadows here.

There are two men waiting in the room and they are linebacker big. They wear dark suits and talk on cell phones, the kind that sit inside the cup of your ear. The receiver is literally surrounded by the wearer’s flesh; it’s almost penetrative. The phones look like blood-swollen robot ticks.

The men are actively not looking at me. Sure, I’m paranoid, but when I enter a room people always look at me. They map out my
lopsided features and bushy beard and anachronistic attire. Everyone is my cartographer. I’m not making this up. Even when I display narcoleptic symptoms in public and the cartographers are now truly frightened of me and try not to look, they still look. Furtive glances, stealing and storing final images, completing the map, fodder for their brush-with-unwashed-humanity dinner-party anecdotes. I’m always the punch line.

Instead of the direct path to the secretary’s desk, I take the long cut, eyeing the framed citations on the walls, walking past the windows pretending to crane my neck for a better view of Haymarket. Those two guys won’t look at me, which means they’re here to watch me. I’m already sick of irony.

The secretary says, “Mr. Genevich?”

I’ve been identified. Tagged.

The two men still don’t look up. One guy is shaved bald, though the stubble is thick enough to chew up a razor. The other guy has red hair, cut tight up against his moon-sized brain box. Freckles and craters all over his face. They talk into their phones and listen at alternating intervals like they’re speaking to each other, kids with their twenty-first-century can-and-string act.

I say, “That’s me.” This doesn’t bode well for my meeting with the DA. Why does he need Thunder and Thumper to get their eyeful of me?

The secretary says, “The DA is ready for you now.” She stays seated behind her desk. She’s Ellen’s age and wears eye shadow the color of pool-cue chalk. I wonder if she wears clown pants too.

I say, “I guess that’s what we’ll find out.” It feels like the thing to say, but the line lands like a dropped carton of eggs.

His secretary points me past her desk, and I head into an office with an open door. I walk in too fast.

DA William Times sits behind a buffet-style oak desk. The thing spans the width of the room. A twin-engine Cessna could land on top of it. He says, “Mark Genevich. Come on in. Wow, I can’t believe it. Tim’s kid all grown up. Pleasure to finally meet you.” The DA walks out from behind his desk, hand thrust out like a bayonet.

I’m not quite sure of protocol here. How he’s supposed to be greeted. What sort of verbal genuflection I’m supposed to give him. I try on, “Thanks for giving me the time, Mr. DA.”

DA Times is as big as the two goons in the waiting room. I’m thinking he might’ve banged out a few hundred push-ups before I came in, just to complete his muscle-beach look. He has on gray slacks and a tight blue dress shirt; both have never seen a wrinkle. His hair is pepper-gray, cut tight and neat. White straight teeth. His whole look screams public opinion and pollsters and handlers. We have so much in common.