LAWRENCE OSBORNE
Volcano

FROM Tin House

 

SIX MONTHS AFTER she divorced her husband, Martha Fink packed her bags and flew to Honolulu to attend a lucid-dreaming seminar at the Kalani resort on the Big Island of Hawaii. She had discovered the faithless Donald in the same position that the wife of Samuel Pepys had discovered the London diarist in, three hundred years before: copulating with the family maid. “I was deep inside her cunny,” Pepys admitted that night in his diary, “and indeed I was at a wondrous loss to explain it.”

Martha filed for divorce. She collected the apartment on Central Park West and a considerable sum of money, then went to counseling. Lovers did not materialize to replace the discarded husband. She became yet more enraged, went on Zoloft, and finally decided that her eighteen years of therapy and dietary rigor had not, in the end, helped her very much to face the endgame of biology itself. Growing older had proved a formidable calamity.

Nothing saves you from it, she realized. Not irony, certainly, or dieting or gyms or drugs or the possession of children and priceless friends. Nothing saves the declining human from the facts of her decline except the promises of work. And that had not saved her either, because, unluckily, she hated her work. She detested it more and more. A lawyer, she now realized, should always maintain extracurricular passions, and she had not. Her lifelong practicality and good humor had not sustained her either, and her fine skin and aristocratic profile felt to her increasingly insufficient, if not wasted. There was now just Hawaii and dreams. The resort, run by two gay dancers, was next to an active volcano.

She spent a night on Waikiki in a high-rise hotel called the Aston. The city seemed compressed, airless and suffocating. A nightmare of dullness and saturation, of Burberry and Shiseido, of families braying on the far side of thin walls. Her room was filled with red neon.

She wept all night, strung out on sleeping pills. In the morning, she went to the old Sheraton for coffee in a courtyard of banyans and squabbling pintails. It was now called the Manoa Surfrider, and there was Soviet-looking architecture all around. She sat there for some hours. She felt herself coming apart. The sun did not cheer her up; there was no charm whatsoever in the colonial affect of her surroundings, a style that could be called New Jersey Tropical.

She went to Pearl Harbor in the afternoon. Sappy music played, and the crowd was hustled along like cattle. “Each visitor can contemplate his innermost responses and feelings.” In the bus back to Waikiki, she saw a poster for Dr. Rosa Christian Harfouche, a preacher selling Signs, Wonders, and Miracles. The streets were full of federal detention centers and ukulele stores. Not a single attractive human. Suddenly she felt years older than forty-six.

She waited tensely for her flight to Hilo.

From the air, the islands regained their beauty. They seemed far-flung again, imposing, like sacred statues lying on their sides. The sea was immense, like a visual drug that could calm the most turbulent heart. Not America, then, but Polynesia, though it was difficult to remember. She slept, and her tears subsided into her core.

A driver from Kalani was there to meet her. They drove down to Pahoa through a landscape of lava rock and papaya groves. In town, they had a milk shake in a “French café” and sat outside for a while, looking up at silver clouds shaped like anvils, static above the volcano. The driver told her, as if it was a detail she might relish, that he had transported fourteen people so far from the airport to Kalani for the Dream Express seminar. Most of them, he said cattily, were middle-aged women who looked like they were having a bad time.

“A bad time?” she said tartly. “Do I look like I’m having a bad time?”

“No, ma’am. You look real eager.”

Eager, was she that? In a way, she was. A wide freeway swept down to the southern coast and lava flats and cliffs, above which Kalani stood in its papaya woods. As the sea appeared, she felt a keen relief. The road dipped up and down past affluent hippie resorts, yoga retreats, and fasting centers. A few flabby joggers shot by, all ponytails and tattoos. At the gates of Kalani, lanterns had been lit for the evening.

The resort was a considerable estate made up of groups of traditional spherical Hawaiian houses raised off the ground. In the thatched communal meeting place, everyone ate a macrobiotic, vegetarian buffet dinner, courtesy of the resort. The owners and the dancers were dressed in Hawaiian skirts and performing a votive dance to the volcano goddess, Pu’ah. They danced and clapped to welcome the new residents, jiggling their hips, rolling their fingers, and hailing the volcano itself, which lay only a few miles distant and had become active only two weeks before. At sundown, a dull red glow stretched across the horizon.

Kalani hosted four different seminars at a time. The Dream Express group was indeed, she saw at once, highly populated with middle-aged women wearing tense and confused expressions. Her heart might have sunk right then if she hadn’t determined not to let it. She braced herself for these sad, bewildered specimens, who were likely capable of comradeship and kindness. Her eyes sorted through them, but she was unable to keep from disapproving. The seminar leader, Dr. Stephen DuBois, was a Stanford psychiatrist who supplemented his academic income with dream seminars in alternative health centers. It was he who had devised a way to “wake” the dreamer inside her dream and make her conscious of it, through a daily routine of herbs and nightly use of a special pair of goggles that shot regulated beams of light into the eyes during the deepest periods of REM sleep. With these methods, one could enter a state of “lucid dreaming” and consciously direct the flow of the dream itself. It was a common technique of dream therapy but rarely used in a controlled environment like Kalani, a context from which normal reality had been almost entirely subtracted. DuBois claimed to be able to alter each participant’s relationship to her own dreams by the use of the herb galantamine. Aside from being a popular treatment for Alzheimer’s, polio, and memory disorders, galantamine, derived from Caucasian snowdrop flowers, was said to induce exceptionally intense and memorable dreams by deepening REM sleep. It looked like a white powder, like very pure cocaine.

DuBois introduced them all to one another: a psychiatrist from Rome at the end of a long nervous breakdown, a married couple from Oregon working through their difficulties, a female stockbroker from London who already possessed a “friend” inside her dreams who flew with her across vast oneiric landscapes. There were a few Burning Man types from the Bay Area who came every year, young and wide-eyed, and two New York basket cases fleeing their catastrophic jobs and marriages. All in all, they were what she had expected. Bores and beaten-down shrews in decline and kooks. She didn’t mind, particularly. People are what they are and they were no more broken down by life’s disappointments than she herself was. She was sure that half the women had faithless husbands who had run off with younger women. They had that archetypal event inscribed upon their faces.

“It’s very simple,” DuBois explained from the head of their trestle table. The volcano dance had wound down, and a group of new-age square dancers arrived at the adjoining table. “Every night we’ll take a capsule of galantamine and go to bed at a reasonable hour. We’ll put on our goggles before we go to sleep. If the infrared beam wakes us up, we’ll leave the goggles on and go back to sleep. Hopefully, though, we won’t wake up at all. We’ll simply become conscious inside our dreams.”

“Really?” said the Italian psychiatrist.

“Certainly. When that happens, you all have to remember a few basic things. To change your dream, simply reach out and rub a rough surface. A wall is perfect. The dream will change immediately and you can enjoy the next one. If you want to fly, simply start turning on the spot. You’ll start flying.”

They all began to smile, to nod. It would be like hours of entertainment every night. Like cinema inside their heads. And, because of the powdered snowdrop, they would remember it all.

“Every morning, we’ll tell each other what we dreamed. It’ll help us remember everything, and it’ll help us write our dream journals. The dream journal will be a book we can take back with us when we have finished here. Something permanent and life-changing.”

Now they would get acquainted and then return to their thatched cabanas and prepare for the first night of lucid dreaming. It seemed to Martha a simple enough plan, and she was still tired from the long flight. The resort owners stopped by the table, still in their skirts: handsome, tan, muscular gay men whom you could imagine vigorously fucking in hot tubs and saunas. Shaking their hands gave her a twinge of arousal.

“Look over there,” one of them said. He pointed to the glow visible above the tree line. “Looks like lava on the move.”

Across the smooth, rolling lawns, Martha could see naked men strolling down toward the hot tubs surrounding the swimming pool. The resort was nudist after 9 P.M. After a cup of chamomile tea and a few desultory chats, she said good night to the group and walked back to her cabana. A high moon illumined the edge of the jungle.

She took the galantamine capsule, lay under the mosquito nets of her bed, and attuned herself to the rhythmic chirping of the tree frogs. She put on the cumbersome goggles and adjusted the strap so that it did not squeeze her face too tightly. Then her exhaustion took over. She was too tired to care that the goggles were uncomfortable or that the frogs were loud because the windows had no glass. She slept without thinking about sleeping, and soon the REM cycle had swept her up.

She began to dream at once, but later she could not remember it as clearly as she had hoped. She did recall that in this dream she was standing in a hotel bar, drinking a glass of port. Rain was falling outside, and behind her there seemed to be a roaring fire. When she turned to look at it, she felt the fire’s heat touch her face, and the piercing red beam of the machine inside the goggles flooded her consciousness with its color. Unused to this intrusion, she awoke immediately and tore off the goggles.

The first thing she heard was the frogs. The moon had moved position and shone directly into the room, touching the foot of the bed. She was drenched in sweat. She got up and went to the screened window. Nightjars sang in the papayas. She felt intensely awake and therefore restless. She put on her flip-flops and a sarong and climbed down the steps of her cabana into the long, wet grass. At the end of the lawn shone the pool, wreathed with steam from the all-night Jacuzzi. She made her way to the hot tub, tiny frogs popping out of the grass around her feet, and when she reached the pool she disrobed again and sank into the water, naked. Tall palms stood around the pool. The moon shone between them.

As she floated on her back, she could feel that something in this idyllic scene was not quite right. It was too serene. Then, from far off, she heard a wild whoop of male voices. She sat up. A group of naked men ran down the lawn toward her. They approached in a line, their erections flapping about, and they headed straight for the pool. Startled, she leapt out of the water, grabbed her sarong, and darted into the dripping papaya trees on the far side of the footpath. The men, oblivious to her presence, jumped en masse into the pool and filled it with phalli and noise. She reached out and touched the rough bark of one of the trees, and as she did she found herself back in her bed, the goggles still fixed to her head. Rain was pouring down outside the window.

She tore off the goggles, gasping, her body drenched with sweat. The rain was so heavy that the frogs had fallen silent, and all she could hear was the mechanical dripping from the edge of the window frame and the rustle beyond, in the forest. She got up a second time, and her bewilderment made her reach out and touch the insect screen to see if it was real. She wrote down her dream straightaway.

In the morning, the sun returned, but there was a taste of burned wood on the air, born from afar, and a reddish dust that seemed to linger over the tree line. In the cafeteria, the group was eagerly discussing the eruption of the volcano during the night—one of a series of eruptions, it seemed.

“It kept me up all night,” the London broker said, eyeing Martha up and down. “Didn’t you hear it?”

“Nothing,” Martha said. “Did it rain all night?”

“It rained, but there was one hour when it was pure moonlight, peaceful as can be. I went down to the pool.” The broker lowered her voice. “Unfortunately, it was occupied. Men are strange, don’t you think?”

The woman had bossy, aggressive green eyes that possessed a knack for mentally undressing other women.

“I slept badly,” Martha admitted, rubbing her eyes. “The rain woke me up.”

“Personally, the galantamine does nothing for me. You?”

Martha shrugged. “I have nothing to compare it to.”

During the day, they listened to DuBois lecture in one of the rotunda meeting halls, and Martha dozed in a corner, feeling that she had not enjoyed enough sleep. It was a hot day, and after lunch she went for a walk by herself along the coast road, where the woods were thicker. She walked for miles, until she came to a gray beach under the cliffs, where sundry hippies and half-stoned locals sat drinking kava and smoking reefers. Beyond the beach lay flats of black lava that reached out into the sea. She went down onto the beach and lay in the roasting sun for a while. Her grief welled up inside her until tears flowed down her face. No one could see them there. She emptied herself out and breathed heavily until her body was reoxygenated.

Later that night, she walked down to the lava again with some of the other dream women. One of them was a mosaic artist from Missoula, Montana, and another sold hot tubs for a living. Makeshift kava cafés made of driftwood had been set up on the rock shelves, and wild travelers on motorbikes appeared out of nowhere, racing across the lava with their lights blazing. The women drank kava and seaweed honey out of small paper cups and watched the red glow of the volcano in the distance; three divorced women, two of them long into middle age, waiting for improbable turns of events. Aging European hippies in feather earrings, with names like Firewind and Crystal Eye, tried to pick them up. Martha felt supremely detached from everyone. She didn’t want to talk about the love lives of the other women. Everyone’s love life, she thought, was more or less the same, and to be disgusted one only had to remember that seventy million women were saying exactly the same things to their friends at that very same moment.

“I left him only six months ago,” one of the women was saying, as if they had all known each other for years. “He never gave me cunnilingus either. I know he was sleeping around—”

“They’re all sleeping around.”

“Does a fling every two years count as sleeping around?”

“Maybe we could fuck one of those filthy hippies. Firewind is quite sexy.”

They drank the kava and became more stoned.

“Mine never gave me cunnilingus either. They get lazy after a while. No one stays with anyone, ever, unless they’re Christians.”

“I wouldn’t sleep with Firewind. He has blue fingernails.”

“You wouldn’t notice in the dark.”

“Yes, but feather earrings?”

To Martha, the red glow in the night sky was more compelling than the conversation. It seemed incomprehensible that a volcano was active so close to them and yet there was no outward concern. The more distant molten lava must be moving down to the sea. The scene must be one of terror and grandeur, yet no one saw it. She thought about it as they licked salty seaweed honey off their fingers.

She dreamed of her husband that night. She was cutting his toenails in a sea of poppies, and his toes were bleeding onto her scissors. He laughed and writhed as she ripped his toes with the blades. The galantamine made her remember it vividly. In the morning, she skipped the dream seminar, which no longer held much interest for her, and rented a motorbike from the front desk. She took a night bag and some money and decided to play the day by ear. She drove to Pahoa and on through Kurtistown until she reached Route 11, which turned west toward Volcanoes National Park. Soon she was rising through the Ola’a Forest.

At the top of the rising road stood the strange little town of Volcano. It was a cluster of houses on the edge of one of the craters, lush with rain forest. She parked by a large hotel and walked into a wonderful old lobby with a fireplace and oil paintings of volcanic eruptions on the walls. There was no one there. She wandered around the room for a while, admiring the native Hawaiian artifacts, then noticed a spacious bar on the far side of the reception desk. She went in.

Enormous windows wrapped around the room. Through them, the entire crater could be seen. It was a pale charcoal color, a vast field of uneven rock scored with ridges from which glittering steam rose hundreds of feet into the air. A pair of antlers hung above the bar itself, next to a “volcano warning meter,” a mocking toy with a red arrow that pointed to various states of imminent catastrophe.

At the bar sat an elderly gentleman in a flat-cloth cap, dipping his pinky into a dry martini. He looked up at her with watery, slightly bloodshot eyes in which there was a faint trace of lechery. He wore a windowpane jacket of surpassing ugliness and a dark brown tie with a gold pin in it. The barman was the same age, a sprightly sixty or so, and his eyes contained the same sardonic and predatory glint of sexual interest in a forty-six-year-old woman entering their domain unexpectedly.

“Aloha,” the barman said, and the solitary drinker repeated it. She echoed the word and, not knowing what to do, sat down at the bar as well.

“Going down to the crater?” the capped man asked.

“Yes. I just wanted a stiff drink first.”

“A good idea. I recommend the house cocktail. The Crater.”

“What is it?”

“White rum, pineapple juice, cane sugar, Angostura bitters, a grapefruit segment, a dash of Cointreau, a cherry, dark rum, a sprig of mint, an egg white, and a hint of kava,” said the barman.

“I’ll have a glass of white wine.”

“The Crater’ll set you up better.”

She looked at the volcano paintings, the flickering fire, the inferno landscape smoldering beyond the windows, and finally she noticed that the man in the cap was halfway through a Crater. Oh, why the fuck not?

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll have one.”

They all laughed.

“Try walking across that crater after one of those,” the drinker said. “The name’s Alan Pitchfork. No, it’s not my real name, but hey, we’re at the Volcano Hotel in Volcano, so who the hell cares?”

She took off her scarf and sunglasses.

“I’m Martha Prickhater. That is my real name.”

“Oh, is it now?”

Alan leaned over to touch her glass with his. Her eyes strayed up to the ancient clock underneath the antlers, and she was surprised to see that it was already 2 P.M.

“Are you a local?” she asked politely.

“Moved here from Nebraska in 1989. Never looked back. Retired geologist.”

“How nice. Did you come here with your wife?”

“Died in Nebraska, 1989.”

“Ah, I see. I’m sorry.”

“Long time ago, not to worry.”

“Well, cheers.”

She sipped the amazing brew. It tasted like the effluent from a chewing gum factory.

“Cheers,” the man said, and did nothing.

“Staying at the hotel?” he went on, eyeing her. “Nice rooms here. Traditional style. African antiques in some of them. Views over the volcanoes.”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Well, you should think about it. You get a good night’s sleep up here in Volcano, if a good night’s sleep is what you want.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” she said testily.

“You should. Bear it in mind, I mean. There’s no better spot for watching the sunset.”

She finished her drink, said her farewells, and went back into the sunlight of the parking lot, where her bike stood, the only vehicle there. She drove down the lonely road to the trails that led to the crater. She chained up the bike and wandered down, through the rain forest dripping with water from a shower she apparently had not noticed. The trail led to the edge of the lava crater, which smelled of sulfur. She walked out into the middle of the stone plain.

In the sun, the wreaths of rising steam looked paler, more ethereal. She lay down and basked, taking off her shoes and pushing her soles into the slightly warm rock. Looking up, she could not see the hotel at all. To the south, the sky was hazed by the continuing eruption of the neighboring crater and soon, she could tell, that haze would reach the sun and eclipse it. She was tipsy and slow and her body ached for something. A man’s touch, maybe. The touch of a rogue.

It was early evening when she got back to the hotel. The fire was roaring high and yet there was still no sign of other guests. She hesitated, because she was not quite sure why she had come back at all. The barman was on a ladder, dusting one of the oil paintings. He stepped down to welcome her back.

“Want a room?” he said hopefully.

“Not exactly.”

“I can give you thirty percent off.”

It was clear the place was empty.

“Dinner?” he tried, stepping gingerly around her. “A drink at the bar? Two for one?”

She peered into the bar and saw that the same drinker was still there, a little the worse for wear but still upright on his seat, another Crater in front of him. He caught her eye and winked. Behind him, the windows had dimmed, and only the outline of the crater could still be made out, illumined by the red glow that never seemed to diminish. The men told her the hotel’s clientele had vanished after the volcano warnings had been issued two nights earlier.

“Volcano warnings?” she said, sitting down again at the bar.

“Red alert.” Alan smiled, raising his glass.

The barman began to prepare a Crater without her asking for it.

“Yeah,” he drawled. “They run like ants as soon as there’s a red alert. But Alan here and I know better. We’ve seen a hundred red alerts, haven’t we, Alan?”

“A thousand.”

“See?” The barman garnished her drink with a yellow paper parasol. “It’s perfectly safe to stay the night if you so wish.”

“I wasn’t thinking of it.”

“It’s a long ride back to Kalani,” the geologist remarked. “In the dark, I mean.”

She let it go.

I can do it, she thought.

They turned and watched the fireworks display outside for a while. The eruption had intensified, and it was easy to imagine the flows of lava dripping into the sea only a few miles away. The glow cast itself against the walls of the bar, turning the room a dark red. She gripped her drink and tilted it into her mouth, watching the geologist drum his fingers on the bar. Who was he and where did he live? He never seemed to leave the hotel bar. He asked her how she had found the crater, and he added that he had watched her cross it from this same window.

Soon she was tipsy again. Something inside her told her that a motorbike ride back to Kalani at this hour would be suicidal. That “something” was simultaneously a desire to cave in, to book a room upstairs with African antiques and a view of the eruption. But it seemed, at the same time, inexpressibly vulgar to do so. To be alone in a hotel like this with two decrepit old men. She tossed back the dregs of her disgusting drink and ordered another.

“That’s the spirit,” the barman said. “It’s on me.”

Alan disputed the right to buy the drink and soon she was obliged to thank him.

“Shall we go sit by the fire?” he said.

In the main room, where the fire crackled and hissed, the Hawaiian masks had taken on a lurid uniqueness. They stared down at the odd couple sinking into the horsehair armchairs. The geologist put his drink down on a leather-surfaced side table and told her a long story about the last major eruption, when he had spent a week alone in Volcano, smoking cigars at the bar and enjoying the view. People were cowards.

“Personally, I’m not afraid of lava. It’s a quick death, as good as any other, if not better.”

“That’s philosophical of you.”

“I’m a geologist. You have beautiful legs, by the way. If I may say.”

She started with surprise and displeasure and instinctively pulled her skirt down an inch or so.

“No, don’t cross them,” he went on. “Don’t feel awkward.”

Instead of feeling awkward, she felt warm and insulted. Her face began to flush hot and she wanted to throw her drink in his face. She controlled herself, however, and tried to smile it off.

“Thank you, if that’s a compliment.”

He said it was, and he wasn’t going to apologize for it. His scaly, wrinkled skin seemed to shine under the equally antiquated lamps. After a while, she heard a quiet but insistent pitter-patter against the windows that was not rain. The man smiled. It was ash falling.

“Sometimes,” Alan said, “I swear it’s like the last days of Pompeii.”

As the evening wore on, it became obvious that she would have to stay overnight. The barman told her that she could have the Serengeti Suite at half price. She agreed. He served them sandwiches with Hawaiian relishes, and more Craters. Martha began to see double. Eventually, she decided to go up to her room and lock the door. It was safer that way. She got up and staggered to the stairwell, while the geologist sat back and watched her radiant legs take her there. They said good night, or at least she thought he did, and she pulled herself up the squeaky stairs with a pounding head.

The suite was cold, and she left the main light off while she lit the glassed-in gas fire. Then she opened the curtains and let the red glow invade the rooms. On the horizon, beyond the extinct crater’s rim, globs of white light seemed to shine behind a frazzled line of trees. She lay on the damp bed and kicked off her shoes. There were Zulu shields on the walls and pictures of Masai spearing black-maned lions under the suns of long ago. The chairs looked like something from a luxury safari lodge. She lay there and grew subtly bored, discontented with her solitude. She wondered what they would be doing at Kalani right then. Dancing in skirts to the volcano goddess, sitting around a fire and drinking their kava with marshmallow, or doing Personhood Square Dancing in the woods, with paper hats. She lay there for an hour, fidgeting and feeling her emptiness and loneliness well up within her, then got up again and went to the bathroom to rebrush her hair. The antagonizing red light filled her with restless anxiety, but also an itching desire not to be alone. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw, for once, what was actually there: a lean, pale, frightened-looking little girl of forty-six. She put some salve on her lips and dusted her face with powder.

The hotel creaked like an old ship. Wind sang through empty rooms. She went out into the corridor with its thick, red carpet and felt her way along the hallway, listening carefully. She could hear a man singing to himself in one of the rooms, no doubt the repulsive geologist. She thought of his slack gray skin and his leering eyes, and she felt a moment’s quickening lust-disgust. What was arousing to her was that she was alone and no one could ever discover what she was doing. She ran her finger along each door as she passed. As if responding to her telepathic signal, one of them finally opened and the familiar face, with its leprechaun eyes, popped out.

“So there you are,” Alan said. He put a finger to his lips so that she wouldn’t reply.

His room was exactly the same as hers, but it was plunged in complete darkness, as if he had been prepared to go to bed. She sat down on the bed. Soon his hands were all over her, the scaliness visible only by the light of the volcano. His dry, slightly perfumed skin was against hers, though she refused to look at his face. Instead, she kept her eye on the red glow and on the Zulu shields on the walls. He told her they were alone, as he put it, “on a live volcano,” and the thought seemed to make him smile. All these years sitting in that damn bar, he said, and hoping that a beautiful woman like her would walk in. Up to then she never had. No sir, not until then. She had walked into the bar and he knew, he said, as soon as he laid eyes on her, that she would sleep with him.

“You did?” she whispered.

“I saw it in your face. You would sleep with an ugly old man like me.”

He gripped her shoulders and kissed them slowly, as if there were kiss spots arranged in a predetermined line along them. His mouth was dry and papery, but not untitillating, precisely, because it was a human mouth. She could accept it in the dark. From behind, he slipped a hand between her legs, and she let herself roll to one side, sinking into sheets scented by contact with inferior cologne. He pulled her arms behind her and, perhaps for the first time in a year, she forgot that her treacherous ex-husband existed. The geologist closed greedily around her, and before long he was inside her, desperate and voracious and relaxed at the same time, and although she knew it was a dream, she was not sure how to terminate it or change it. She reached out and stroked the wooden surface of the bedstead, then the cold surface of the wall, but still the old man held her pinned down and pumped away at her. The goggles, she thought. When was the beam of red light going to wake her? And soon she heard rain, or was it ash, pitter-pattering on the windows and tinkling like falling sand on the sills. The man gnawed her neck, her shoulder blades, and told her he was going to penetrate her all night long. His perspiration dropped onto her face. She flinched, but still she didn’t wake up.