Dreams of Rescue

by Laura Shaine Cunningham

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"I have spent the winter at my summer place," begins the narrator of this startlingly original literary chiller. Juliana Durrell Smythe, known for her "female in jeopardy" performances on film, fears her roles are proving prophetic. As an actress, she is accustomed to rescue. In movies, "Having known the comfort of muscled arms, I still expect, without reason, to be carried to safety and, ultimately, to be loved." But confined to her Victorian lake house, Juliana discovers the discrepancies between film and actual jeopardy. "The police have not turned out to be kindly, potential lovers...." She must walk the fault line of fiction and confront the mysterious and violent end of her marriage. An atmosphere of danger descends with the snow. The men who enter Juliana's life seem suspect; her predicament shadowed by the distress of her housecleaner. How much did she see? How much does she know? Haunted by her past roles and the history of her romantic home, built for a wedding in 1899, Juliana's marital mystery becomes entwined with that of the original Victorian bride's. To survive, she is compelled to connect a nineteenth-century disappearance to the contemporary despair of the lakeside resort. In a snowscape of dazzling beauty, Juliana must enact the role that will save or cost her own life. Plumbing the secrets of two centuries, Cunningham has written a hypnotic novel that will transport the reader into a brilliantly evoked world. With its hard-chiseled realities and incandescent images, Dreams of Rescue is a new take on a classic form, that shatters convention and will entrance readers long after its stunning finale.

Release date: May 14, 2003

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

From Chapter One
In Character

I have spent the winter at my summer place. Every night I watch the tabloid television shows for news of other estranged wives, and the extended coverage on those who have already been murdered.

Each evening I wrap myself in a shawl and settle on the sofa. Then I lie back and stare at the double flicker of the television and the fireplace. I am not operating at full efficiency, but am sustained as if on a dual pilot light. Some nights I play compact disc recordings, always operas, at the same time that I watch television, and the combined sound and light gives the cottage an electric liveliness, an air of camaraderie, as if I were having a party without people.

My summer place makes for an odd winter hideout. I am reminded of the scene in Dr. Zhivago, the movie, in which Omar Sharif finds his dacha transformed into an ice palace. Zhivago is freezing, but one senses that the unexpected beauty of his crystallized home sustains his soul. My summerhouse is much smaller than Zhivago's, but it, too, is iced with winter whimsy and offers its own chill consolation.

Can I call it pleasure? Perhaps not, under these circumstances, but my spirit rises to the white vista, the glittering twigs, and cushioned bushes. I love the snow -- have always loved it -- and now I need the snow in ways I never imagined.

The snow might save me, in every sense. The snow keeps a perfect palette: I can detect if anyone has tried to approach on foot. That is a practical advantage of being snowbound, but the spiritual benefit may prove more significant. To survive now, I must recall beauty, the possibility of bliss....

This house was dedicated to love, to the promise of joy. The house is not an ordinary house; Casa di Rosas was built as a chapel for a single occasion, the June wedding of a tobacco heiress in 1899. The Wedding Cake House, as it is more often called, has always depended on the triumph of charm over practicality. Only its fanciful design -- and the increased market for second homes upstate -- saved the structure from demolition years ago.

The Wedding Cake House stands at the edge of a bluff, overlooking the lake. The rationale for this picturesque but precarious position was the portico, where the bride and groom could pose, framed by latticework, the blue glitter of Lake Bonticou as backdrop.

From where I lie on the sofa, I can see their original wedding photograph, sepia and further faded from the century of sunlight. The Victorian bride and groom appear formal in their garb and expectation. They are young and extraordinarily attractive, but they look to one another with the solemn intention of the past, displaying none of the abandon of my own wedding photograph. My Kodachrome print fell from its hanging nail long ago and now leans against the wall below the more formal 1899 portrait. The contrast is acute: The unposed picture shows me bare-armed as I look up at my new husband; we are laughing, I remember, because the day was chillier than anticipated, and we tried to feign composure. I am wearing a sleeveless white crepe cocktail dress and trying not to visibly shiver; the camera caught us as we collapsed in laughter. The Victorian couple's decorum and our lack of propriety strike me -- as if my husband and I, the interlopers, trespassed to carouse where the first bride and groom exchanged sacred vows.

Now, in late February, the light slices through the rooms. The halls appear as through a reducing glass, angles oversharp and outlined. Even the parquet floor seems heightened and whitened, as if the cold raised wax to its surface. The windows tremble and the furnace roars. Every several minutes the boiler grunts and fires. The house vibrates at the effort of keeping the wind outside these walls.

The Wedding Cake House was never intended to be used in winter, let alone converted to a home. Many years ago, the previous owners inserted a bed, dressing, and bathroom under the eaves, and the heat still travels toward the original vaulted ceiling and escapes through fissures in the attic. The upper story rooms overheat, while the downstairs living and dining area remain chilled.

One of the challenges of this winter has been to stay warm. My husband and I added, at some cost, this fireplace into which I now stare. The leaping flames provide a visual cue, but the fireplace loses more heat than it provides. There is a small radius of warmth directly in front of the crackling hearth, and I huddle toward that. I feel warm as long as I don't move, keep my shawl tucked around me, and sip my hot tea and listen to operas. I hope the arias will, in a magical aural equivalent to the beauty outside, counteract the ugliness of the events that happened here.

I have a mental habit, perhaps it qualifies as a tic, the reverse of tic douloureux, tic of sadness. My tic is the prediction of happiness, or at least pleasure. Before I actually see a person or a destination for the first time, I visualize appealing men and women, beguiling locations. I'm not conscious of projecting these people or places; they present themselves, full blown, in exact detail. En route to the actual meeting or on the phone, I conjure a face, a home, an office.

I'm not always accurate; I'm often disappointed, occasionally alarmed, when confronted with "the real thing." I have no idea why I project these visions, as they run counter to my experience. But I cannot stop, nor do I wish to. I have my successes -- perfect matches of expectation and reality and a few spectacular improvements over fantasy. I believe my dreams-come-true, my good fortune, predict that I will be blessed somehow. I have always entertained the idea that, someday, someone will come forward on my behalf and offer me love, in all its most magnanimous incarnations, and I will be forever changed, blessed. It's almost happened, just that way.

Seventeen years ago, en route here for my surprise honeymoon, I "saw" Casa di Rosas in my mind's eye. I pictured a pleasant cottage, nothing fanciful. My projection was specific as usual: I saw a blanched cabin, listing blue shutters, picket fence. A single rosebush, thorny. Hummingbirds. The entire vision was blanched, as in an overexposed print.

We arrived in June. The orchard was in bloom, an aisle of cherry and apple blossoms. The white-veiled trees were bridal for us, as they had been for the original newlywed couple. We, too, walked that blossomed aisle, kissed beneath the boughs of the most bountiful tree, the weeping cherry. Matt and I admired the roses for which the house was named -- "antique" roses -- white, scarlet, teatime yellow. It was not that there were so many roses; it was their run of the property that charmed me. Roses climbed trellises; they poked up from behind the rusting wrought-iron gate and rambled in hedges round the house. The white roses twined and twisted through the wedding latticework on the portico, then descended the cliff, adhering to the rock ledges all the way down to the lake. These renegade white roses had escaped, domestic joining the wild, and they flourished in aromatic profusion.

I inhaled, sighed. We came to honeymoon, and remained to purchase. It was I who cried, "Oh, this is the place." The house was so inexpensive, it seemed to be a gift, sold "below market" with all "the original furnishings," including the four-poster bed upstairs and the rather sunken sofa, upon which I now recline. Even the rugs remained, faded Orientals, showing bare at the tread of my predecessors. The style, Victorian, with many griffin-clawed, ball-holding furniture feet, was not especially fine, just old. But the bureaus were filled with creamy linens monogrammed AJD, almost my maiden initials. Folded sheets, lace-trimmed shams and cases, embroidered holders for every household object -- Spoons, Buttonhooks. I was beyond charmed; I felt enchanted.

The house met my criteria at that time -- a perfect set, I thought, for romance. I could walk outside naked by moonlight and not be spotted by neighbors. The night we took possession, my husband and I dove naked from our dock into the lake. We laughed as he carried me, nude, over the threshold. Propriety was not a problem then...

Now seclusion has become ironic. My desire for privacy boomeranged; no one witnessed what happened to me here. Yet, even after all that occurred, I still find solace in this place during its winter metamorphosis. The orchard bears blossoms of snow. The lake has become a Lalique; the house itself a confection. True to its conception, Casa di Rosas looks like the bakery's best wedding cake, kept fresh under refrigeration. Icicles double its Victorian frills; frost fern retrace the curtain lace.

Outdoors, the grounds are decorous as a deco lounge, draped in white, dust-covered to stay fresh for the next season. The summer wicker furniture, casualties of my distraction, remains unstored for winter, arranged in conversational circles on the white lawn. The porch swing sways, carrying its plumped white pillows, a wind-sculpted passenger. And over all is the whisper of the snow, the unending snow.

Never before has there been so much snow. The locals, the Bonticouans, as the summer people call the natives of Lake Bonticou, swear that this winter surpassed all records. The snow fell before the leaves, aborting autumn. More snow has fallen than the town plows can push; the roads have narrowed to lunar canyons.

I must be the single person here not to complain about the snow; it serves my purpose. The snow has become my buffer zone, kept my situation on literal ice. The blizzard seems to have drifted selectively: The roads may be impassable, but the wind whisked a magical passageway from my front door to the woodpile, a route along which I scurry several times a day to feed my now continuous fire. I have lost only my driveway; the snow drifted over it, obscuring even the delineation of the road that used to lead to me.

I have had an order of protection since New Year's Eve. The actual order, a smudged Xerox, I keep in an old Bendel box, labeled THE ATTACK. In my mind the order is strung round my property like a red surveyor's ribbon, looped through the gray trees, to define my new boundaries. My husband may not step within a thousand feet of me. If he does, I can summon the sheriff of Lake Bonticou. I imagine the sheriff striding from the woods, with his own order of blue knights, the state troopers.

I should know better than to entertain such visions. I already know the reality: I have dialed 911; I have summoned the police. The squad car, red light pulsing, has skidded up this driveway. I know what actually happened next...

Yet, even after this experience, I am too attuned to fiction to contemplate danger without rescue. I'm infected with optimism. I have seen too many melodramas in which the heroine is saved "in the nick of time." I am conditioned now to expect cinematic salvation. I confess that I am implicated in these fictions, having performed in those movies known in the trade as "FemJep" -- female in jeopardy. For sixteen years, in a dozen films, I have played the victim-heroine. The aftereffects have been insidious: Having known the comfort of male, muscled arms, I still expect, against reason, to be carried to safety and, ultimately, to be loved.

Now it worries me that I was so often cast as a victim. What is it about me that I must play the hunted, the frightened? I once asked my friend the casting director, Elsbieta, and she said, "It's your eyes: They widen so nicely in terror. And the pointy chin...You look sympathetic yet vulnerable." She used a word I loathe -- plucky. I put plucky right there beside spunky, which is my usual character description in scripts -- "spunky but vulnerable." And I am light for my height: I can be carried or thrown without too much stress on the actors playing either my attackers or my saviors.

Of course, I imagined a different career. In fifth grade, we were asked to select a play and dramatize a scene for class. Other girls brought in Peter Pan or Grease. I enacted the climax of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly, Last Summer. I can laugh now at how I flattened myself against the blackboard and recited, in breathy tones, the murder of my beloved bisexual Sebastian: "Against the white wall," I recall saying. "Blood against the white wall." I modeled my performance on Elizabeth Taylor's in the film, American Classics Channel version. The teacher's eyes widened and her jaw dropped, but I was recommended to the drama club, and in a sense never left. Soon after I went out to audition for ingenue roles, I was cast -- my first strangulation by a serial killer who preyed on schoolgirls. I recall being bent backward in a school coatroom. My legs kicking. I wore small white boots.

Once cast, my trajectory has been direct -- straight to Wardrobe for the costumes that would ultimately rip, to Makeup for cosmetics that would smear, and to Special Effects for the fake blood packets, to be concealed and burst upon puncture. I have, most often, been stabbed. Thirteen stabbings, three strangulations, two drownings, one gunshot to the head, and, most inventively, a single impaling with a decorative sword. I survived all. In that sword sequence I had to do ten takes; I was "speared" for days. I cannot even count the hours I have worked on hospital sets, tucked into beds with artful bandages on my head.

Last year I began to refuse scripts in which I was threatened. Now I wonder: How much was premonition? Was it possible that deep within, in some untapped subconscious from whence all motivation springs, I had begun to question whether I wanted to play victim-heroines anymore? Had I sensed in that core of the self, where all is known, the reason?

I should have paid closer attention to the tabloid news, on which most heroines appear in the past tense. FemJep as genre is, I am discovering, criminally false. The producers themselves should be stalked and shot. I had always supposed that such films were not realistic, but the gap between truth and fiction is wider than I would have guessed, and I have taken an almost fatal fall into the abyss.

The first night under the new order, I flipped the yellow pages to Security and telephoned around the county, trying to hire a bodyguard, only to discover that I could not afford one. Even the decrepit, crackle-voiced self-described "seventy-five-year-old retired cop" said, "Have to charge you fifty dollars an hour. And how many hours do you need?"

I have no answer. My case could go on for years; it may never be resolved to my satisfaction. In my economic situation -- my bank account emptied, unable to work -- I could not be protected for a week. My assets, like my house and grounds, are frozen.

In movies, security cost is no object. In my female jeopardy roles I was accustomed to quality alarm systems and even the occasional high-tech electronically sealed half-million-dollar so-called panic room. In my actual low-budget, low-tech life, the cost of being fully "armed against intruders" is prohibitive. I must settle for sound waves that cover my "main points of entry," the downstairs front and back doors, the ground-floor windows. This arming of doorways strikes me as comical, as if my attacker would observe the etiquette of a polite form of entry.

There is also the fact that several years ago it was my husband who paid for this minimal security system; I have now changed the code and my password, Dot (the cat's name), but I suspect this will not be a deterrent. Even in the bygone days of "normalcy," the Be Safe system was more nuisance than reassurance: How many times have mice set off the motion detectors? I discontinued this feature; I was spending my days and nights alarmed by rodent social life.

For true safety I would have to wire every opening of Casa di Rosas and install sound and motion detectors, sensors in the ground, including, I suppose, the cliff. My daily life, given the activity of the unseen critters, would be a series of electronic screams for help and continual false alarms to the Bonticou police.

In a high-budget movie, whenever I played the victim, I was surrounded by kindly types until the denouement. Then, by orchestrated misfortune, I would be left alone for a few tense moments with my attacker until I could be saved by the man who became my next romantic interest. The kindly cast included two types of cops -- gruff older ones who became crinkle-eyed surrogate dads, and lone younger cops who had big noses or enlarged pores but were still appealing and sexually tense. The actor with the nose or the pores (sometimes he had both) would be the one to rescue me.

Also at my side I would have brisk but efficient lawyers, either a snappy skinny girl lawyer or a paternal older male lawyer with E. G. Marshall eyes. I was also surrounded by friends who put me up in million-dollar scenic hideaways, often at the risk and occasionally even the loss of their own lives. Throughout most of the movie I would sit around, worried but comforted, sipping home-brewed coffee or tea in hand-painted mugs in an attractive setting.

In recent years there has been a shift: As a film heroine, I have been forced to become less passive. It has not been enough to be rescued; I must participate and help save myself, either through ingenuity or kickboxing. In the end I may still make love with the large-nosed, big-pored, but undeniably virile man, but I also must prove that I am not helpless. The new FemJep has made an effort to be politically correct. In my last movie, Stalked by a Strangler, I am such a powerful, formidable would-be victim that I actually save the big-nosed, large-pored detective hired to protect me. I bandaged his wounds and kissed his chest. He saved me; then I saved him; the would-be killer was caught and the big-nosed cop and I end up in a clinch.

The discrepancies between FemJep on TV and in my actual life have been numerous. I have a hand-painted mug and I sip tea, but that's where the resemblance ends. In my current no-budget life, I am left with fire and smoke alarms and a voice activation system that blares: "Fire! Fire! Get out of the house!" when I burn toast.

The police have not turned out to be kindly, potential lovers. They have seemed hesitant about engaging in any rescuing at all. My "real" police officer, the one who responded, as they say, to my 911 call, was scared-looking and surprisingly short. He turned out to be short on time, also, and allotted only a half hour to resolve my situation.

On film, no one who comes to your aid is ever in a hurry to get to something else. And your saviors never kick off the relationship by demanding high fees, which actual lawyers do. My lawyer, J. J. Janis, might otherwise be castable: He has perfected a grumpy but loving grandfatherly style (against type, I had imagined him gray-bearded, plump). In reality, J. J. Janis has bright red hair draped over a bald pate, a single red eyebrow knit over the feature he always calls his "schnozz." I did predict the schnozz -- I heard nasality on the phone that forecast enormity and a deviated septum. J. J. Janis would be better typed as a Borscht Belt comic, past his prime but beloved by people who enjoy comedians with a mean streak. J. J. Janis leans forward, doubled over by his suspenders, a peppermint in hand. And he always has an endearment on his thin lips ("Let me see that gorgeous punim" is his favorite).

J. J. Janis asked for the remains of my savings, $25,000, as a retainer before he could begin to help me. He also conceded that $25,000 was an hors d'oeuvre, the "forshpeiz" that would be "eaten up" pretty fast at his rate of $305 an hour. Indeed, new invoices dressed in creamy high-rag quality envelopes, of the sort I used to associate with formal invitations, have already arrived.

Now I question my wisdom in retaining J. J. Janis. Do I connect his high price to the promise of expertise? Or is it my fear of Matt, who, though a patent lawyer, can navigate the legal maze so much better than I. Surely, I am influenced by the fact that my husband has connections and has retained a powerful trio of lawyers who seem eager to serve a colleague.

The truth, though, is that I had no time to find another lawyer. I had less than a week before Matt's arraignment, and I didn't know anyone other than the local fellow who had composed my will. So I grasped at the single connection I had: My best friend Nadine had "used" J. J. Janis and she swore he would protect me in court.

"J. J. is a shark, and he feeds on the bottom, but you will see his sweet side," she promised. "He can also do your divorce." In the rush to court to maintain the order of protection, there was no time to find another lawyer. J. J. Janis took my call; J. J. Janis was willing to take my case.

"I don't like what I'm hearing. You're in danger, dolling," he said, displaying what I critiqued as middling acting ability. "You're a nice girl. A heart knows a heart." He charged me for the call. At his going rate, plus Verizon, nighttime, off-peak.

The details fascinate me. I would never have imagined J. J. Janis's legal phone meter, which computes the charges of our telephone conversations at the same $305-an-hour rate, including, I suspect, my lawyer's digressions regarding his own slipped disc and a recent trip to Saint Bart.

Now I know the answer to one question: Why does the endangered heroine always remain in her spooky abode? For years, every time the character went down into her shadowy, moldered cellar with a defective flashlight, I mentally cried, Get out of that basement! Now I have the defective flashlight. I do actually go down in the stone dungeon that is the netherworld of Casa di Rosas, the near-flooded chamber where the lake washes in, bearing its tide of decay and rotted critters. I go to check. For leaks. For suspicious sounds. For intruders. I trip over paint cans and scream. No one hears me.

Why doesn't she move? Why doesn't she flee the isolated, atmospheric place where she is being stalked?

I can now also answer that question with certainty: She doesn't move because she can't.

In many of my films, my character has taken refuge in the homes of friends. My two closest friends, Nadine and Elsbieta, invited me to stay with them in New York. The two women live separate but similar existences in studio apartments. Even as they offered, I heard a weakening timbre in their voices. And who would blame them for not insisting I stay with them?

In so many of my movies, girlfriends die. The supporting actresses usually die in car wrecks staged by my would-be killer, or they are murdered, in my stead, at my on-screen residence. My actual friends have sometimes worked on films with me: Nadine, played a detective in the FemJep classic Kiss of Death, and Elsbieta trained me to scream without abusing my vocal chords. My presence in their studio apartments would place them in FemJep as well. I sensed their relief when I phoned down to the city and said, "I must stay up here for the court proceedings."

I could not move down to their tiny apartments in New York even if we all so chose. I have to appear in court here, in Lake Bonticou.

For the first few days after "The Attack," I did consider running away. In Kiss of Death, I dyed my hair blond, boarded a cross-country bus, and then lived incognito as a waitress. The killer found me anyway, but it took him a while, and then someone, a cop, killed him. In the genre movie no one mentions that if you press charges, as I have, you are also expected to appear in court. If you disappear, so does your case. No, I must stay here, near Bonticou County Family Court. What if I lose the case? Then I must reconsider flight, hiding. But even then, where would I go?

In my films, there was always a supporting cast of relatives; not so in my life. Where is the silver-haired character actress to play my mother? My mother is dead, my father vanished. No dear, worn Dad will materialize, bearded and wearing a cardigan as cable television dads do, to offer paternal counsel. There is no ingenue with perky bangs to be a cute kid sister. I am accustomed to this, the sense of being alone. I am an orphan. Closest relative: second cousin, twice removed. The cousin's over eighty years old now, and I have not seen her in many years. She lives in a high-rise, assisted living, somewhere in Florida, where I imagine her enjoying early-bird suppers that are always flounder. Could I visit her?

No. There's no place for me but here, at Casa di Rosas, and no identity to assume but my own. I can only work as Juliana Durrell (née Dubrovsky) Smythe. Even at the best of times, my employment is sporadic -- when I'm not possibly pursued. Incognito, I would fare much worse. And what of my Actors' Equity and SAG identification cards, tax bites?

So here I am, stuck in the snow, serving a life sentence as myself. I live in the limbo of adjournments: I have gone to court, only to hear that my case is yet again postponed. My estranged has been arraigned but remains free, doing his own time, I suppose, in our former primary marital residence in the city. He commutes to family court. When the weather is bad, which is often, he takes a room at the largest hotel in town, a double-gabled affair named the John Adams, after a signer of the Bill of Rights.

I can almost smile; that is exactly the sort of hotel Matt likes -- polished mahogany tester bed, brass eagles, framed historic documents, and portraits of unidentified forebears. I imagine him picking up credibility from John Adams, himself, the specter of justice. I overheard Matt say in court, "I'm at the John Adams," and the way he said it, you would think he was John Adams. He has hired not one but two Park Avenue lawyers and one local lawyer to defend him. He has an imported city law firm and a local former DA who is a member of a legal team known for fierce radio commercials -- "Family Law? Disability? Come to Regan, Roach and MacPherson."

J. J. Janis and the counselors at Bonticou county Family Court convinced me that my case should be tried here, in family court. While my husband's actions were criminal, there is not enough apparent injury for a criminal charge to stick. I've been advised to keep my case in family court, which will protect me on the basis of the evidence that I have in my possession. I must maintain the order of protection at all costs, I am told. It cuts the odds that I will be killed. I see the order as ephemeral, like the sound waves that frame my front door and ground-floor windows. Both systems require the attacker to respect certain boundaries. The assumption is that my husband is maddened, yet in enough control to follow the rules of engagement.

"Can't they put him in jail?" I asked J. J. Janis.

"Don't kid yourself," J. J. Janis replied. "That would be nice, but good-looking well-to-do white men in three-piece suits with law degrees don't go behind bars so easily. You were lucky to get an order of protection. You'll be luckier still to hang on to it. If his lawyers are as good as they claim to be, they will pull every trick out of the hat. If he can control his violent impulses for a while, he might just walk."

But what about my injuries? Don't they count? J. J. Janis answered in his one-two, case A, case B style, peppered with endearments, salted with cynicism: "(a) Bubeleh, they were not severe enough. Dolling, a woman needs a hatchet in her head to establish injury serious enough to put a man in jail right away...(b) He's innocent until proven guilty, remember. He is free. Let's hope he's just mishugunah, not berserk."

In the deco dark of my bedroom, whilst the neon clock fixes to the witching hour of three A.M., I wonder: How crazed is Matt? Crazed enough to drive two hundred miles up here in a snowstorm to finish me off? Or is his insanity an impulse in the midst of argument? The question that keeps my heart beating in time with the clock: Does Matt know his own behavior? Or does he edit his memory? Does he have an amnesiac reaction after his violence? He does wear those suits; he proceeds in a "proper" mien. I think he believes himself. My tenuous hunch is that he will not break in here and attack me now, just before we go to court: It would ruin his case. Then, again, he might.

I would not have predicted his behavior on the final night of our marriage, so I cannot speak of him now with any certainty.

My estranged husband is not an easy villain, an outlaw escapee. He is the person I trusted for seventeen years, whose chest was my pillow and with whom I shared a thousand confidences, all irrelevant in less than a minute on New Year's Eve.

FemJep has one detail down right: the fear. On my first night alone here at Casa di Rosas, I shoved a plank bench against the front door, barring it from the inside. The bench could not have stopped him from entering, but it would have alerted me on the off chance that I lay deep asleep. For the first several days, true sleep eluded me: I went under only for moments, in too-deep dives, as if lowered on a faulty cable. Then I'd be yanked up again in jerking rises, from one level of consciousness to the next, until I lurched to the surface of remembrance, there to stare the blackness in the eye and recall why I had stiffened into sleep on the sofa, still i