Experimental Film

That’s family, Lois. Healthy doesn’t come into it.

And Clark . . . God help me, helpless bedrock affection notwith-standing, we just made each other so uncomfortable, him and me, all the time. For someone on the autism spectrum he was amazingly persistent at seeking out contact, demanding your interaction, but only on his terms: he’d play up to me while I struggled to keep myself even, pretend I didn’t feel resentment at the interruption or frustration at so often not being able to follow his skittering attention shifts until it became impossible to ignore him. If he loved me at all, I sometimes thought, it was only because he could still be so easily distracted into forgetting our last quarrel.

Similarly, if he really did notice that I was gone during this trip, it’d probably only strike him as a bonus. More time to spend with his “friend Daddy,” without that annoying, ever-pushy, ever-insistent-on-making-people-use-their-words Mommy around. . . .

Simon’s breathing had dropped into his usual snore, body gone limp. Pain throbbed steadily under my collarbone and looped through my capsular ligament, rotator cuff puffing; I shifted, felt the blade flare uncomfortably, and cursed, but only mentally. I stayed still another few minutes to make sure Simon would remain asleep before extracting myself, slipping onto my desk chair and turning on my computer, knowing the light wouldn’t wake him.

I sat there in the dark and watched Lady Midday (Version One) again, with the sound turned down, till I felt tired enough to go lie on the living room couch. To stare up at the ceiling, glasses still in place, before finally closing my eyes against my throbbing temple, the grind-anticipating ache in my back teeth, and the only slightly dimmer knot where my arm met my torso, trying my level

best to simply slip away.

No dreams that night, however unsettling—mere dreams would’ve been too simple, too homey. Instead, I had a full-blown night terror episode for the first time in . . . well, not years, but enough consecutive months to make it seem so. If you’re lucky, you don’t know what I’m talking about, so here’s some background on the concept.

Night terrors, or pavor nocturnus, are a classic sleep disorder whose universal feature is inconsolability on awakening plus apparent paralysis and pressure on the sleeper’s chest, chased with intense feelings of terror or dread. Sometimes, especially if the sleeper somehow manages to force their eyes open while trying to wake themselves up, this is accompanied by horrifying hypnagogic visual hallucinations: floating, crawling, and looming phantom figures with rictus-frozen faces, eyes in the dark, orbs and auras, threatening shadows, and nonexistent insect swarms. Typically, night terrors tend to happen during the first hours of Stage Three non-rapid eye movement sleep and coincide with periods of delta or slow-wave sleep arousal, but they can also occur during daytime naps.

During bouts, patients often bolt upright with their eyes wide open, a look of absolute panic on their face. They scream out loud, sweat, exhibit rapid respiration and heart rate, thrash and flail. When woken, they’re confused or unresponsive, unable to recognize familiar faces. Sometimes they lash out further, kicking and punching; I’ve never done that, but then again, I’ve also never experienced the one positive side effect of this syndrome—while most people with night terrors become at least partially amnesiac about their incidents the following day, I remember each iteration with almost grotesque clarity.

They used to call it being hag-ridden. In ancient Britain, it was the province of the literal night-maere, which rode men, women, children, and even animals through their sleep, sometimes to their deaths. Even trees were thought on occasion to be subject to this sort of bewitchment, resulting in their branches being entangled, their roots knotted, strangling each other.

My first night terrors happened in Australia, when I was still going to visit my dad every year. He and his significant other met me in Sydney and took me to the house they’d arranged to stay in—a cool, modern, single-level beach house that sat at the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. From the outside everything looked great, if not exactly designed with the acro- or agoraphobic in mind, but once we got inside I realized that this woman apparently collected Polynesian art, which meant that every part of her home was crowded with leering, life-sized statues made from dark wood with inset shell eyes and teeth, the largest of which depicted a giant shark-god swallowing a man whole. In order to make it more habitable, Dad moved all the masks and what-not out of the main bedroom and into the living room, which was where I was going to sleep, in a window-seat bed surrounded by massive looming Polynesian death-gods on one side, and on the other the open edge of the cliff seen through windows full of unfamiliar Australian stars. I was so frightened I woke up later that same night in the throes of a classic maere, certain I was having a heart attack while being sexually assaulted by a ghost.

Time softens all things, however, which may explain why this particular event was gentle by comparison, if no less disturbing. At roughly 4:30 A.M., my eyes opened with what sounded to me like an audible click, and I found myself looking upwards; the room was silent, the whole apartment likewise, which was its own brand of unlikely—no snoring, no dryer, no ambient noise or traffic outside. The air in my lungs felt heavier than water, turgid, like jelly. No light—Simon must’ve gotten up to use the bathroom, then turned everything off on his way back—and my glasses had slipped off in my sleep, probably ending up on the floor, smeared all to hell. But I could see nonetheless. I could see everything.

And how I wished to Christ I couldn’t.

Above me, something leaned in, shrouded in layers of white-turned-grey. Where its face should have been was a lace grille, fine-holed as a bee’s eye; it hung limp, whatever lay behind stiller than stone and had been for years. For almost a century. And still I heard a voice, small and fleshless—a murmur, a buzz, faint and fainter. Words ant-crawling up through dirt.

Don’t go, Lois. I beg of you now, face to face—not warn, not threaten. I beg, sister; please, oh please. Please, please, no.

(no)

(oh, no no no)

I wanted to shut my eyes again but couldn’t. Wanted to flail out, to punch and scream—no such luck. Instead, I simply lay there, chest on fire, drowning in my own fear; felt each breath catch on the inside of my throat, scoring it with a thousand fish hooks. My tongue was a choke-stone, gone rough, dry and cold in a dry, cold mouth, spit gummed and bloody.

The fear mounted, mounted, mounted, till I thought my heart would burst. But . . . it didn’t.

It never does.

When I woke it was morning, full sun and the normal bustle. Clark was reciting along with Match Game as Simon shoehorned him into his clothes. For a split second, I had no idea where I was, or who, or why—till he noticed me staring, that is, and smiled at me. “Hey, hon,” he said, almost unbearably cheerful. “Sleep okay?”

I swallowed, painfully. Then managed to repeat—

“. . . Okay.”

“That’s good.” Checking his watch: “Well, bus time. Clark, say ’bye.”

Clark made a noise somewhere between a buzzer and a burp, as he’s wont to do when asked to participate in something uninteresting. “Aaaarp! ‘No match. King-size, or king crab?’”

“Neither,” I rasped back, swinging myself up and beckoning. “Kiss, please.”

“No kiss.”

“Oh, I think yes kiss.”

“No kiss, you’re silly! The Mommy should listen.”

“Listen to who, bunny?”