Page 3 of Stay Awake
“Look,” the woman cuts in impatiently, handing me a phone. “We need to get back to sleep. We both have work meetings first thing in the morning. Call your boyfriend, and then go down and wait for him on the street.”
I wander through an open doorway, barely hearing her as I enter my bedroom.
“Hey, you can’t go in there!” she yells, coming after me.
The ultramodern platform bed with rumpled bamboo-cotton sheets is not mine. Neither is the metal floor lamp, or the abstract zebra print on the wall. I pick up a photo frame from next to the bed. Everyone in the picture is a stranger.
“Don’t touch that!” She snatches the frame from me.
I’m vaguely aware that her face is too close to mine. Her skin is mottled red, draining all her natural beauty. Her yelling is drowned out by a crackling sound inside my head. It gets faster and faster until it sounds like a Geiger counter hitting a radiation contamination site.
“Grant, call the cops,” she orders.
The noise in my head stops abruptly. The last thing I want right now is a confrontation with the police. I’m acutely aware the police won’t take my side. Even in my confusion, I know it looks bad for me. I can hardly explain myself to the police when I don’t have the faintest idea what’s happening.
“Wait!” I say, louder than necessary. “I’ll leave.”
I hold the staircase handrail tightly so that my legs don’t buckle under me as I walk down to the street entrance.
“Don’t come back. If I ever see you here again, then wewillcall thecops,” the woman calls from the landing. I open the building door and step out into the cold.
Lowering myself to the top stair of the stoop, I lean weakly against the brick wall under the intercom as I try to think of somewhere to go. I’ve been cast out of my home into the cold in the middle of the night. I remind myself that it’s not my home anymore. The couple upstairs have clearly been living there for some time.
My head throbs with confusion. I pat down my pockets on the off-chance that I have my phone tucked away somewhere. In the front pocket of my jeans I find a wad of cash. There’s an object wrapped in a T-shirt in the pocket of my long cardigan.
I prop the T-shirt on my lap and carefully unwrap it. Inside is a stainless steel knife streaked with blood so fresh I can smell it. I flinch instinctively, repulsed by the thought that this was in my pocket. The knife tumbles onto a step, hitting the concrete with a metallic clatter.
I’m reluctant to touch the blade. After a moment of hesitation, I pick it up with the T-shirt and toss both the knife and the shirt into a trash can set against a brick wall. As I close the lid, I hear car doors slam farther up the street. It’s a cab dropping off passengers. I stand in the middle of the street and wave down the cab as it drives toward me, its headlights shining on the wet street ahead.
“Where to?” the driver asks once I’m inside.
I give him Marco’s address even though I don’t know how Marco will react when I turn up at his place in the middle of the night. Our relationship has clear boundaries. One of them is that we don’t drop in on each other without calling first. We don’t even have keys to each other’s apartments. I reassure myself that Marco wouldn’t want me wandering in the dark with nowhere to go.
City lights pulsate in the distance as the cab weaves through thinly trafficked streets to mournful notes of Billy Joel singing good night to his angel on the radio. As we pass a streetlight, I notice writing on the backs of my hands. I look like a human graffiti board.
A few messages are legible. Most are so washed out that they’re virtually indecipherable in the streetlights strobing intermittently across me.
Above my knuckles are letters written in black ballpoint pen. I put both fists together. The letters spell out the wordsSTAY AWAKE. Above my right wrist I’ve written the name and address of a place called Nocturnal.
I lean forward and tell the driver to take me there instead.
Chapter
Three
Wednesday 3:44A.M.
There’s nothing familiar about Nocturnal when I press my face to the stippled glass door of the bar entrance. Smudges of color move behind the thick art deco glass like an impressionist painting coming to life.
The roar of the bar spills into the street when the doors open. The blur of colors I saw through the mottled glass turn into people in long overcoats, arranging scarves around their necks. Their inebriated eyes scan for passing cabs as they talk loudly among themselves in voices not yet modulated for the quiet of the street.
Once they pass, I grab the door before it shuts and enter a cavernous room filled with moody lighting and a deafening hum of laughter and clinking glasses.
“We’re closing soon,” an attendant tells me as if she knows me.
She disconnects a velvet red cord. It flops behind me as I walk inside. To my right is a closed-off section with empty restaurant tables. A cleaner in a white uniform silently mops the floor as if he is slow-dancing in his sleep.
I go down two steps into the busy bar area, where I get tangled in a party of eight rising from their table. They scrape their chairs against the floor as they get to their feet and drunkenly stumble toward the entrance. They take the bulk of the noise with them.
