LEAVE YOUR SLEEP

I changed to my jeans and sweater after work, same black lace-up boots. I put on eyeliner, green, all around, which is how I picture the Spanish dancer. I am someone different tonight. Will life continue its normal progression at school at seven thirty in the morning? And will I continue?

Luke is bundled into a padded olive-drab jacket.

“Let’s walk,” he says, not looking at me.

“The wind bends you sideways,” I say.

He touches my hand. My hand.

“I’ll show you the boat I’m planning to go fishing on.”

“I don’t go on boats,” I say. “I don’t go on water.”

“Why?”

“I’ve always been afraid of water.”

He doesn’t question this. He doesn’t say my fear is unreasonable, just a phobia—here are ten steps to conquer your fear. I like how I say something, and he listens—he accepts it. What would he do if I told him the story about starving a woman? If I could find the words to repeat it. My great-grandmother. But he is the only one I could imagine telling this terror to. Maybe because what he did is raw in his eyes.

I glance at Luke as we walk. He doesn’t wear a hat, and the wind whips his hair.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” he says.

I am uneasy to hear. But I lean my head in to him in the wind that rushes us forward.

“I’ve been out a few months, back from Afghanistan longer, but every night, I’m there,” he says. “Every night I’m on the same patrol. Every night.” He shouts the words in the wind, and somehow it makes them more impersonal. More okay to say. He puts his bare hand on the metal of a guardrail that I know could take off a layer of skin, but he pulls his hand away and does not even grimace. “My head keeps me playing out scenes, trying to change the end,” he says. “With your father I was too busy to think.” The words are stark in the cold air as we march. “This kid dies. I dream it over and over and over.”

We have reached the road before the harbor. I turn down in. He follows. We come to a house with a glassed-in porch facing the breakwater. The fishing boats rock at their moorings across from the breakwater. We hear the steady horn of a buoy. The cold seems to free him to talk. A cocoon of cold.

“You got to be fast when you get them out. No time to stop. No time to ask. No time to say, ‘Fuck, I don’t know what to do.’ You can never hesitate. This guy’s heart will quit. You’re gonna lose him.

“Sometimes I dream I go in ten times, a hundred times. Every time I think this time I’ll save him . . . give me one more time. The kid is screaming.”

“You mean a child?”

“No, young kid, eighteen, a soldier.”

I imagine the fear of closing my eyes to try to sleep when it means you are going to live that again, that second of the possibility that you could save him. Someone is screaming. I stand very close so I can listen. At the same time I remember. I remember, very young, waking in my mother’s house and someone is screaming. It woke me and I raced to her bed. I needed to keep her, don’t leave me alone. Did we sit in the dark in a huddle, my mother who was screaming and me, and I pointed my finger for her to look at the moon?

Beyond the jetty, Luke and I see the fishing boats jostling and banging in the wind. One would be the boat Luke’s going out on.

I say, “I’d go on a boat if I could. I’d fish with my father.” I want to talk about the boat.

“Every second,” he says, “you got to know what to do. I don’t have any respect for a person who . . . there’s no time to say, ‘Fuck, what’s next?’ Your father’s like that, he always knows, you and your father.” He is slowing down. The words start slowing down. How does he know me?

The wind shoves us. And under the black sky I grab his hand and we race on the edge of the icy road, piercing the snow with our boots. We race back to Luke’s cottage.

We stand in the dark inside his door.

“Did I scare you?” he says.

“No.”

Around us is silence.

The cottage’s heat makes me ache as I begin to thaw. I see my grandmother’s eyes. I feel her brushing my hair.

Luke takes my hands, warms them in his bare hands that are somehow warm. “Some things you shouldn’t know.”

He takes off my coat, unlaces my boots. I feel his fingers carefully unknot each lace while I lean against the door, my palms pressed into the cold wood.

His touches my face. I don’t decide what to do in my head so much as in my body.

I step in to him, and his breath is warm on my cheek.

We stand in the pale light scattered by frost on the window. I feel his hips on mine. I let my hands wrap around him and hold him. He is so still that I think we will explode. I am pressing back, pressing into him. He holds me slightly away. We breathe.

Then he fits his body together with mine. He finds my lips and kisses me. Slow and deep and rocking and aching. And I am transformed, like the seal who becomes a woman.

I return his kiss in the way he teaches me, and it is as if we are discovering the universe.

“Jesus,” I whisper. And he laughs and we fall down onto a couch that squeals and kills us with its springs. But I am too far gone with kissing. The discovery of kissing. And his body. And mine.

- - -

In exhaustion, he had fallen asleep on the bumpy couch. He whispers directions in my ear. “Hold on. You just got the good stuff. You’re the braveheart guy. As soon as they drop the line, you’re going up. Buddy!” Now he shouts the name Buddy.

I stand. “Luke, you’re dreaming!” I say. “Luke!”

Luke jumps from the couch. He lets out a moan like an animal. And then, “Aw, god.” He’s catching his breath. His black hair falls over his eyes.

I see something on his bedside table. My tiger’s eye shines. My ring. It had been in his shirt pocket. But what time is it? I have to get out of here.

“I never know where I am. Just keep talking to me. Are you okay?” He is alarmed. “Christ, I didn’t hurt you?”

“You kissed me,” I say. “I kissed you. I never even did that with someone before.” I wish I hadn’t said it. I sound like a child.

“I thought— Jesus, I’m sorry,” he says. “I startle bad. Sometimes if I sleep I wake up and we’re under attack.”

“You were just talking,” I say. “I was Buddy. You called me Buddy.” I feel the ring of the condom in my hip pocket. Who am I? “I’ll bring rice.” I’m putting on my coat. “Rice is good for nightmares.” How do I know this? “With ginger. Ginger is for pain. I’ll bring gingerroot to get through the night.”

I am telling remedies that somehow I know.

He is sitting on the edge of the bed, his head bent into his hands. His shoulders are so tight, I think if I touch him, he would snap like a wire bearing the weight of one of the tankers from Romania that come into the harbor.

“Turmeric is also for pain,” I tell him. “Garlic for earaches.” I pull on my boots.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

I try to think of what I am. I say, “I never wanted to be with anybody before.”

He sighs. I sit tight beside him.

“I’m seeing a mess of ginger trees in here,” he says. His voice is husky.

I rest my chin in the curve of his neck. We fit together.