Stanley Stocker
The Habit of Sleep

When he awoke no sunlight had broken through the uniform sea of gray-white clouds. Instead, it was the intensity of the woman’s gaze that caused him to stir.

Marina smiled as he opened his eyes and offered him the fruit from the canvas bag slung across her shoulder.

The orange seemed to fill Stephen’s field of vision except for the piercing eyes beyond it. Gently, he shook his head, but the woman insisted so Stephen relented, sitting up and taking the fruit from her hand. The woman’s beauty caused him to thrill inside, as if an alarm were sounding.

***

During a getaway to the shore a month after they met, Stephen resolved to ask her about the one thing that puzzled him.

“Marina,” he said, “when do you sleep?”

The clouds were low and watchful, as if they too were a party to the conversation.

“I don’t,” Marina said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I don’t sleep.”

Even as Stephen frowned incredulously he somehow knew it to be true, as if he had always known. Back when he was an intern, before he became an emergency room physician in Center City, Philadelphia, he had heard of such cases. Whole branches of an Upper Darby family that did not sleep, the gene passed silently down the generations, seeking out and finding a brother while sparing a sister or vice versa. But in those cases its appearance inevitably led to death, to sickness and early death, the disease coming upon its victims suddenly in the flush of their otherwise good health. One day they were healthy and robust and the next they were wasting away, incapable of sleep. It was a plague of wakefulness, robbing them of rest like a shadow passing over a city, claiming some and leaving others untouched.

But this was nothing like that. If anything Marina seemed the picture of good health.

“For how long?” Stephen said. “How long have you not slept?”

Marina waited for him to see something that was self-evident; when he refused she sighed gently.

“I have never slept.”

The last of her kind to sleep was a grandmother, she said, her mother’s mother whom she regarded as a kind of antique, a curiosity that she knew only from stories her mother had told her when she was a child. On the morning of her grandmother’s 16th birthday in late July 1933, she awoke with the sun, and as it made its way across the arc of the sky the girl stepped across a kind of divide: she had entered a new realm the sights and sounds of which were exactly as they had been before except now her sight was infused with a kind of keen attention that made her view life with the kind of intensity a poet might—realistically and in great detail.

But the first thing her people noticed were the checks. Drawers full of uncashed checks from her part-time job as a clerk at the perfume counter at Wanamaker’s in downtown Philadelphia. When her mother asked why she had not deposited them she shrugged. “Why would I?” she said. She said it was the work she enjoyed, that the checks were just something that went along with the work so she had stuffed them in a drawer and then another after the first became full.

“Did her family know about her not sleeping?” Stephen asked.

“No, at least not at first,” said Marina. “Because she pretended to sleep. She was afraid of what her mother might think so every night she washed her face, put on her night clothes and went to bed and stayed there until she knew her mother was asleep. Then she got up and read or watched the stars until just before sunrise then got back in bed until she heard her mother’s footsteps in the hallway. She stayed still as her mother tiptoed into her room and stood at her bedside, whispering her name, then her eyes fluttered open, as if she were fresh from sleep. I understand it was quite the performance.

“My grandmother later learned that her mother knew she was pretending to sleep, but the pretense satisfied her mother’s desire for the appearance of normalcy. As long as she appeared to be like everyone else her mother was satisfied.”

“What was your grandmother’s name?” Stephen asked.

“Evangeline,” said Marina.

It was a retired school teacher named Helena who instructed Evangeline in the tales of her kind. According to the stories, angels had descended and breathed into the bodies of early proto-humans that burning particle of God called the soul, and like the angels the resulting creatures were tireless, sleepless, and heaven a living memory in them. But slowly as they evolved and explored their surroundings, spreading across the earth and travelling the seven seas, the memories of their origins began to fade until eventually they slumbered into legend, and the people acquired the habit of sleep.

And here now for some inexplicable reason was an evolutionary reversal in which sleep was elided from the lives of some of their descendants. The only remnant of sleep in Evangeline and those like her was the “torque” or standing sleep in which they dreamed while standing so that Stephen would find Marina seeming to gaze out at the sea, as if transfixed; no sound or touch could disturb her reverie in those moments. It was then that they were said to hear the call and to answer back in the voice that those around them could not hear. It was during the torque that the origins of humankind were passed down the generations.

“But every creature has its rhythms,” Stephen said stubbornly. “Every creature has periods of greater activity and less. What are yours? What do you do?”

“We pray,” Marina said.

“When?”

“When called.”

It’s like walking in a thick forest, she said, and hearing your name called somewhere in the distance, and turning to listen.

“So you’re called,” Stephen said. “But by whom?”

Marina was silent, as if words could only fail her.

“Is it the same for each?” Stephen said. “The intensity of attention like your grandmother?”

“It’s different for everyone.” Marina said. “For some it’s an intensity of sights and sounds, for others of feeling and insight. Some experience visions. Some live longer than average, some much shorter.”

“And with you?” said Stephen.

“With me you know it’s being compelled to record what I see.”

Stephen thought of the many times he had been out with her, and she had stopped whatever they were doing and pulled out her camera to capture it. They could be in the middle of dinner with friends or alone and she wouldn’t hesitate to get up and leave, apologizing profusely, but she would leave nonetheless. It was, he understood, the price of the ticket.

“But what’s true of all,” said Marina, “is the torque which gives us access to that forgotten part of ourselves, to a direct experience of God.”                   

So not unlike Marina’s great-grandmother before him, Stephen asked only that when they were at overnight gatherings – vacationing at the shore or at family events in the city – that she appear to be like everyone else, that she lay down when he lay down and she rise up when he rose up.

Marina agreed, and eventually she moved the sixty miles from the little beach town of Toms River to Philadelphia to be with him.

Every year on the anniversary of that first encounter among the dunes he would present her with a single orange, and she would close her eyes and drink in the aroma of the fruit and then peel the orange, separating the sections with her thumbs and fingers, and together they would eat it, dividing the pith-covered segments between them. Sometimes instead of discarding the skin she would gather the pieces and lay them in the sun to dry. Afterwards she would grind them into a fine powder, and once she knew he was asleep she would sprinkle it on the bed covers and over his sleeping head so that his dreams were filled with the pith, flesh, and aroma of the fruit. Sometimes he dreamed that he himself was born into the cocooned heart of it and only when she peeled it could he emerge into the light, born anew.

They lived happily together for several years until the voice out of the darkness announced the birth of the child.

Marina came home to an empty house on a Saturday afternoon from a long day of teaching photography as the neighborhood children played in the street outside. The youngest and most technically gifted of her students had remained after class to share her work, and Marina, determined that the young woman would one day be more than a merely competent photographer, had exhausted herself in pressing the young woman to see beyond composition and to listen to her instinct about when and where to shoot. The young photographer was barely able to comprehend what Marina was trying to teach her so that within moments of arriving home that afternoon she fell into the standing sleep, her keychain dangling from her hand.

When she emerged from the torque she looked around the room with a puzzled look on her face, as if only gradually coming to terms with the fact that she was alive and well in the house she shared with Stephen.

“It’s a vision I’ve had over and over again this past month,” she said as she and Stephen sat on the living couch. “I’m swimming in the ocean at night. The moon is full and suddenly I’m swept out to sea and wave after wave is crashing over me. Then a gigantic wave comes up out of the darkness, a deeper concentration of night, so that even the moon is blotted out, and I know then that I will die when the wave crashes over me.”

Stephen held her and kissed her, soft pillowy kisses that travelled down her face to her neck and lingered there. Marina closed her eyes and let the kisses unstring the tension in her neck and shoulders.

“It’s the long hours you’ve been keeping,” said Stephen.

“Maybe,” said Marina.

The voices of children echoed from the street.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

Stephen’s eyes widened.

“No,” he said, surprised. “Really?!”

Marina nodded.

“How far along?” Stephen asked.

“Three. Maybe four weeks.”

“How can you be sure?”

Marina frowned.

“All right, all right,” Stephen said, the joy leaping up in his chest. “But you’re sure?”

If Stephen had been another kind of man he would have felt excluded from the growing communion between mother and child, but he felt a part of it because he understood his role as one who supports and encourages, particularly in the final month of pregnancy when Marina’s belly was round and low, indicating that the child might be a boy. In the fortieth week of her pregnancy, her water broke as Marina worked in the kitchen. As the warm rush of amniotic fluid descended, she thought of the sea and how the earliest creatures crawled up out of its depths and took to the land. Marina calmly turned off the stove and removed the pan from the burner.

Stephen knew by her call that it was time.

The baby was crowning as they wheeled Marina into the operating room. Stephen thought the child’s scream even before the child had fully passed through the birth canal and especially its wide eyes boded well. Thirty minutes later the baby, a girl, took to the breast, suckled hungrily for nearly twenty minutes then fell contentedly asleep. When she learned that the child was a sleeper, Marina, stone-faced, stared at the far wall.

They named the child Frances after Stephen’s mother and Evangeline after Marina’s grandmother.

It took some time for Stephen to notice the withdrawal: Marina’s reluctance to hold the baby for longer than absolutely necessary. In the days and weeks that followed, Stephen told himself it was post-partum, the hormones raging and predictably so after the trial of pregnancy and childbirth. And there was science to support him down to how long he could expect it to last. He wrote the head of his unit about cutting back on his hours in order to care for Marina and was met with nothing but support. First, Stephen’s mother, then one of Stephen’s closest friends, Sienna, came to stay with them to help out and the days assumed a dream-like regularity: feeding and changing the infant Evangeline and Marina standing by the doorway, watching the rain fall, no longer mimicking the rhythms of Stephen’s days and nights.

Two months after the birth of the child Marina told Stephen she would to return to Toms River and the sea.

“It was a mistake,” she said, and began to cry.

“What was?” Stephen said, as he held the baby. “Our child?”

“Of course, not.”

“What then?”

“To think that it could work; I could have a companion.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t know how much I wanted someone by my side until she was born.”

“She is by your side. If you’ll let her. Does she have to be by your side all day and all night? You knew there was a chance she’d be a sleeper.”

“That’s not it. I want her too badly.”

“Isn’t that motherhood?”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then make me understand.”

“I’ll smother her. I’ll ask what isn’t fair to ask. For her to be like me.”

“I won’t let you. Isn’t there a way you can love her without smothering her?”

“You don’t understand,” Marina repeated.

“How many times have I not understood but accepted anyway? Not this time. Not you running away.”

Marina turned.

“Look at me, Marina,” Stephen said, grabbing her by the hand. “Why did you bother that day on the beach if you planned to cut and run when things got tough? So what if she’s a sleeper? She’s our daughter. Why did you even bother that day? Tell me.”

“Because I was tired of being alone,” Marina said. “And because I was drawn to you.”

“You were drawn to me, but now because our daughter has the nerve to sleep like the rest of the humanity you want to run?”

“That’s not it.”

“Then what is it? Aren’t we happy? Don’t we love each other? You’re not alone anymore. You have me and you have Evangeline.”

Marina just shook her head.

“Then you tell her,” Stephen said, pushing the sleeping child into Marina’s arms. “You explain it.”

As quickly as he had pushed the child into Marina’s arms he took her back again. The baby began to cry. Stephen’s body sagged, and he leaned against the wall then let himself slide to the floor. The baby cried, and Marina stood above them, her face in her hands.

Then Stephen said, “What will I tell her when she asks me where you’ve gone?”

***

Stephen and Sienna had been married for fifteen years when Evangeline said she wanted to find Marina. For most of Evangeline’s life, Marina had been like a figure in a tale. Although Evangeline was curious about her, Evangeline’s life had been full and happy in the home she shared with Stephen and Sienna first in Philadelphia then in Pittsburgh, and some part of her feared she would hurt Sienna if she asked about Marina. But on the threshold of her sixteenth birthday the equilibrium in which she balanced her desire for knowledge and her desire to care for the woman who had raised her would not hold, and her desire to know won out.

As for Stephen, he had long ago turned from practicing medicine to research, specializing first in psychology then in neuroscience with a focus on the mysteries of sleep. Thanks, in part, to several popular books he and others had written, sleep was slowly ceasing to be a mystery and instead was becoming something that was scientifically proven to have myriad benefits, and as knowledge of sleep’s true nature had grown so had Stephen’s renown as a researcher and writer at the University of Pittsburgh. Still the mystery most central to his life and that of his daughter remained unsolved: Marina and the sleepless ones.

So Stephen gave Evangeline the information he had on Marina with whom he had only maintained intermittent contact, and one early morning in June Evangeline boarded a bus and traveled east to the little town of Toms River. After she arrived, it didn’t take long for her to find someone who pointed out a modest little house high on a bluff overlooking the sea.

“My name is Evangeline,” the girl said, as Marina opened the door of the cottage. “I’m Stephen and Sienna’s daughter. And you are my mother.”

They sat in the little living room and spoke about Evangeline’s life as a rising junior at the Friends School in Pittsburgh and the books and games she loved and her friends. Her devotion to contemporary dance. Marina listened, and let Evangeline do most of the talking. Evangeline had thought she would ask all manner of questions, but those questions somehow felt unnecessary.

As Marina prepared tea, Evangeline examined the sparsely furnished room. It took a moment before she noticed the framed photographs of herself at various stages of her life placed unobtrusively here and there throughout the room. At first, Evangeline thought that Marina must have taken them herself, but then she recognized them as photos Stephen and Sienna had taken over the years. Stephen must have sent them to Marina little by little over time so that one could trace the development of Evangeline’s life by following the trail of photos. Evangeline looked up at Marina in surprise as she held one of the photos. Marina’s smile was apologetic and forlorn and proud at once.

When by means of a glance Evangeline asked whether she could see the upstairs Marina nodded in consent.

The second floor was just as unadorned and simple as the first had been. There was a little bathroom and two little bedrooms – one which faced the sea and another, smaller middle room, the only one containing a bed.

“I keep it for guests,” Marina said. Evangeline stepped into the little room and ran her hand across the bedspread.

Evangeline rubbed her eyes; the long bus ride and the hours of talking and listening weighed on her.

“I would like to sleep,” she said.

“Please, go ahead,” Marina said, smiling.

Evangeline produced a cell phone from her bag and punched in a number.

“Mama?” she said. “I’m at Marina’s. No, I’m fine. I meant to call earlier. I’m going to stay the night. I’ll call you in the morning. No, it’s fine. I’ll tell you later. OK? Kiss daddy for me. OK. Bye-bye.”

She placed the phone in her bag then removed her sandals, letting one then the other fall with a pleasant clatter on the wood floor. She lay her head on the cool of the pillow, pulled the cover up over her shoulder and quickly fell asleep.

In the hallway, Marina pulled the door closed then cracked it for a moment and watched the girl as she slept then she closed the door and descended the stairs.

Before sunrise the next day, Marina and Evangeline had toast and jam, boiled eggs, and hot black coffee, then Marina led Evangeline down the stone path to the sea.

The early morning was cool. Gulls called out, hovering over the dunes in the salt air. Marina and Evangeline walked along the beach then sat in the darkness at the foot of a dune, a crescent moon above.

“Are you lonely?” Evangeline said into the darkness of the breaking waves.

“Sometimes. But I have my work.”

“What do you do?”

“I teach at the college. Photography mostly, though I do some writing too.”
“That’s right. My father said so. He doesn’t know it, but I’ve seen your book of photographs. He keeps it among his science books where he thinks I wouldn’t look.”

“What do you think of them?”

“I’m drawn to them, but … I don’t know. It’s like overhearing a conversation in a foreign language. You love the music of it even if you don’t understand it.”

“You’re honest and intelligent,” Marina said. “Your father must be very proud of you. Is he well?”

“He is. He works too much, but that’s him.”

“And Sienna?”

“She’s well too.”

Together they listened to the waves as they rolled to the shore and up the slope of the beach. There was a hum in the air like the sound of a florescent light switching on.

“Why did you leave me?” Evangeline said.

Marina turned to her but couldn’t make out the girl’s face.

“Because I knew I would fail you.”

“Fail me how?”

“When you grow up without a grandmother you don’t ask why. It just is. I later learned that she and my mother were estranged though I never understood why. Perhaps it was the burden of wakefulness. They were together too much; they didn’t spend enough time alone. It takes a toll. I swore I wouldn’t make the same mistake.

“I knew I wanted you too badly. I knew it as soon as I saw you. As soon as I looked in your eyes. It wasn’t because you were a sleeper though I know your father believed that. Even if you had been one of us, I wanted you too much, and I knew I would hold you too tight, that I would smother you. It was the one thing I vowed I wouldn’t do. So I ran.”

“Not very far,” said Evangeline.

Marina smiled in the darkness.

The wind buffeted them as the moon rose higher in the sky.

“It’s my birthday,” Evangeline said softly.

“Happy birthday,” said Marina, reaching for Evangeline’s hand in the sand.

A band of pink blossomed in the distance with a deeper concentration of color at the center of the horizon. The electric hum grew louder, but now it seemed to come from every direction, as if the air were alive with an electric current that caused the surface of Evangeline’s skin to tingle.

Evangeline turned to Marina; she could now see the woman’s face, but not so clearly that she could tell what expression her face wore.

As the band of orange broadened, the hum slid into a low rumble, and the weighty darkness slowly lightened to gray. Wave after wave of the sea arrived and broke at the shoreline, ran up the beach, and touched their feet then retreated again, then repeated the movement, as if paying homage to the woman and the girl as they sat at the foot of the dunes.

The splash of orange at the center of the horizon darkened and encircled itself, becoming an orb, and the waves heralded its formation, thundering now as they curled and crashed in on themselves as they climbed the slope of the shore.

When then the orange ball thundered like the liftoff of a rocket as it rose up new-born from the sea, Evangeline grasped Marina’s hand.

“Oh!” Evangeline gasped, “Marina, the light! The light!”

***

Marina and Evangeline spent the day together. They spoke little of what they had experienced together on the beach. Marina asked Evangeline if she wanted to talk about it, but Evangeline said she wanted to sit with it for a while. They worked in silence in a small garden surrounded by low ivy-covered wall where Marina grew a variety of fruits and vegetables. The work was difficult beneath the hot sun, but they worked without complaint, their silence easy and companionable.

In the early afternoon, Evangeline donned Marina’s apron and prepared a simple lunch of vegetable soup and bread. They ate quietly, enjoying one another’s company. After lunch, they sat on the stoop of the little house and together read the runes of the sea – the congregations of waves, the slow movements of the tides – and breathed in the salt air. As the afternoon wore on, Evangeline understood for the first time that the sea was eternal, sleepless. Tireless like the stars.

At dusk, Evangeline gathered her things and prepared to say goodbye.

“Shall I accompany you to the station?” Marina said.

“Thank you,” Evangeline said, “but I’d like to walk by myself if that’s all right?”

Marina smiled and they embraced. Marina placed a kiss on Evangeline’s cheek.

“May I see you again?” said Evangeline.

“I’d like that,” Marina said.

When she reached the dunes, Evangeline turned to wave but Marina had already gone inside, but Evangeline waved nonetheless, then she walked along the beach and turned west on Mantoloking toward the bus station.

The pines began to sing as the wind began to pick up.

At the station, Evangeline boarded a crowded bus bound for Pittsburgh that would stopover in Philadelphia and found a window seat near the rear. A young father and mother and their two young children sat in the seat across from her. A middle-aged woman dressed in a gray-blue blouse with her name on the breast made her way slowly down the aisle and took the seat beside Evangeline.

After a short wait, the bus pulled out of the station and onto Mantoloking, then turned west on Route 70. The woman beside Evangeline began to nod. After a while, Evangeline told her she could rest her head on Evangeline’s shoulder.

“Are you sure, darlin’? I was dead on my feet after working two shifts in a row. I’d sure appreciate it. You don’t mind?”

Evangeline nodded, smiling, and the woman settled her head on the girl’s shoulder. Soon the woman’s breathing grew slow and shallow. Evangeline imagined sleep steadying the woman’s heart and spreading the sweetness of dreams like the scent of fresh fruit.

As it grew dark, the bus wound its way through small towns lit by gas stations and one-story motels. When the bus entered the forests of the Pine Barrens, one by one the voices of the other passengers began to fall away like lights being extinguished as the passengers gave themselves over to sleep. Inside the cabin, the driver switched on the soft interior lights so that blue tongues of flame seemed to leap up above the heads of the people.

Evangeline watched the many sleepers arrayed around her and marveled at their beauty – the young father and mother, the children asleep in their laps, the old men and middle-aged women, all those who found themselves dreaming as they sped through the whispering pines. Each of the sleepers had descended from a host of ancestors and like those ancestors each harbored within that original burning particle of soul passed down the generations, even if it slumbered and could only be found in deepest dreams and the most abandoned reveries.

It was nearly dawn when Evangeline arrived home. She carried her bags up to her room, walking quietly past her parents’ bedroom and sat at her desk, her jacket still on, surrounded by posters of dancers. Outside the window, beneath the street lamps, a stand of pines swayed silently in the wind.

Evangeline heard footsteps in the hall then a tap at the door.

Stephen appeared.

He knew as soon as he looked in her eyes. Somehow he had anticipated it: Evangeline was her mother’s daughter after all.

He closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Daddy –” Evangeline said, her eyes wide. ”Daddy, I’m afraid.”

Stephen embraced her, and Evangeline leaned into him, as if taking shelter from a storm.

“I made a mistake,” he said. “A long time ago. I asked Marina to be like me, at least to pretend to be. I was wrong. I thought I was protecting her, but I was protecting myself. I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Of what I didn’t understand.” He cupped her cheek in the palm of his hand. “All I ask is that you let me in, to help me understand.”

Evangeline nodded.

“Wait here,” Stephen said, and disappeared into the hallway. When he returned he was carrying a book. He handed it to Evangeline.

“I should have given you this a long time ago,” he said. “This is hers.”

It was as if Evangeline were seeing Marina’s book of photographs for the first time. On the cover in black and white was some kind of shell, a nautilus, she suddenly remembered from her biology studies, the spiraling shell separated into chambers. Evangeline turned the pages. Here was a starfish on its back, its vulnerable mouth agape. A burnt orange dragonfly perched on a piece of driftwood. A white sand dollar washed ashore. As she examined the creatures, Evangeline saw with Marina’s eyes so that each of them suddenly, irrevocably came alive. Each vision was her own so that it was she who accompanied the family of horseshoe crabs on its journey to the sea, she who sat with the black skimmer and the sand fleas in the swash and stood in the sea marshes beneath noctilucent clouds.

When she looked up Stephen was gone.

Outside the morning sun sent tendrils of soft pink light into the chamber of her room as if to alert her to the arrival of a guest. Trembling, Evangeline stood and opened the window wide, facing east. Wave after wave of soft pink light flooded the room, enveloping her. Then as the sun rose higher in the sky the pink rays gave way to golden shafts that pierced her heart again and again with a painful yet sublime ecstasy as if each shaft of light carried with it a little fire that set all of her being ablaze. With a sharp intake of breath, Evangeline closed her eyes and gave herself over to the light like a lover to her Beloved.

*Originally published in Middle House Review