Ficciones

The Sleep Architect..............................................

In the first moments of the grayish morning, Lolo Lefkowitz knows that the architecture of his sleep has been gravely altered. Children spend the substance of their formative years decoding the details of reality and refining a sense of control over the world. Lolo, from his birth to his twenty-fifth birthday, has never stopped. He has made an unbending effort to hone this skill into a precise science. Lolo was never able to escape the primordial allure that experience is not the sum of random incidents, but elements of a system brought together by the grace of design. It is his dogma; one that forced him to replace the preferred theology of religion with logic. A crude replacement, he was to learn, that merely imposes a numerical equation on the duties of faith.

The previous night had been Lolo’s first acquaintance with a normal eight-hour sleep pattern. It was his only night away from his childhood bedroom and the distressed yellow pullout sofa-bed he had inherited from his father’s smoking den. It was that same morning Lolo was obliged to accept that randomness is not diametrically opposed to order.

His attic bedroom was directly above his parents. For the entirety of his twenty-five years, Lolo had tread lightly with uneasy steps. Despite three layers of carpeting and other assorted soundproofing measures, he always felt conscious that his parents could hear the creak of his every footstep. Adolescence disagreed with him on the whole; it was unsatisfying to the extent it always felt incomplete and void of substance. He was bothered by inconsistencies in personalities, unseasonable weather patterns, even a plastic bag that refused to dislodge itself from a tree despite the willful urgings of the wind. Lolo still craved what all children desire -- a comprehensive understanding of reality.

Lolo has never been able to maintain a respectable grasp of his internal chronology. His compulsion for logical consistency coupled with a conspicuously offset circadian rhythm has resulted in severe sleep dysfunctions. Up until the night before, his sleep disorders had effectively distanced Lolo from the full workings of reality. From the redundancy of being born on Christmas to missing an acceptance on the Dartmouth admissions grid by a single question on the SAT, Lolo has been plagued by lost details. Consequently, his entire existence has been blemished by a muted shade of unreality and ill-timed unravelings.

All normal organisms adjust their internal timing from an instinctual twenty-five hour schedule to a twenty-four hour rhythm to match the pace of the solar day. Lolo’s rigid rhythms were unable to make the necessary adjustments to the twenty-four hour day. The consequences of a vestigial sixty minutes have been indelible, staining nearly every crevice of his biology and altering his most basic biological processes. The proper movements of sleeping, waking, and dreaming never made their presence wholly known to Lolo until that fateful morning his circadian rhythm was jostled into alignment.

***

At twenty-five he strived for a moderate lifestyle, but missed the essence of the concept. Lolo worked under the premise that moderation was somehow a balance of existing equally between both extremes. After waking in the early afternoon, Lolo would begin his morning routine with yoga sun salutation asanas. Then, he would dress in a form-fitting chocolate and tan sweat suit and jog nearly six kilometers along a not particularly scenic route. He would stop at the Plantation Coffee Shop to purchase an obnoxiously large latte and smoke a series of slim joints in the neighboring parking lot. He would then walk across the street to the fast food establishment and order a bacon double burger, super-sized fries, and a small diet soda. While his parents did not quite understand his routine, they were understandably excited to see their son fully dressed and doing something.

The Lefkowitzs had always longed for a normal circadian rhythm for their son, going as far as to envy other parents for their childrens’ intrinsic attachment to the shifts and disruptions of temperature and light.

“Very late to be waking, no Leon?” His father asked in a husky Polish cadence. Lolo paused at the front door and adjusted his socks to fit snugly along the meat of his calves. He tied his laces with a double knot. Later he would be amazed at his own futility when the sneakers would unlace themselves near the chain video store built nearly three years ago, but still registered as ‘new’ to Lolo. He reached for the knob, paused, and answered in a slow drawl atypical for Binghamton, “It is rather late, isn’t it Pop?”
“Where are you going? Running to this coffee place of yours?” his mother inquired in a similar accent, only slightly more refined and reminiscent of the sing-songy tone Europeans use when speaking English with a level of command.
“Yes Mother, just like every morning.” Lolo shrugged.
“Only my son calls one in afternoon - the morning,” she says with her back to him.
“Still smoking cigarettes? A good Polish boy -- eh?” His father interjected.
“Later Pops.” The Lefkowitzs had made it clear to Lolo that he was capable of more than the routine into which his life had fallen. It was not that Lolo disagreed with his parents’ assessment, it was that there was nothing he felt accountable for. Parents, Lolo understood, have an overwhelming genetic claim in their children’s welfare that is destined to suffer a series of disappointments. Children, Lolo reasoned, have no corresponding duty to their parents.

Each Wednesday and Friday while he jogged, he anticipated an encounter with Arlette. He knew her name only from her name tag. She was a forbiddingly cute barista that worked the coffee machine with an intimacy that captivated Lolo. He liked Arlette for her aloofness and her disinterest in others; it was sign a of honesty that transcended the vacancy of niceties. Unlike Arlette, Lolo had never been able to treat strangers and acquaintances with the presumption of doubt that they deserved.

He was severely attracted when she asked, “Low fat or whole?” with a slight, involuntary sneer as she stared off over his shoulder. He was not the least bit put off by her giving ‘his’ coffee to another customer and responding, “Oh, I forgot” without even the faintest glimmer of sincerity. He did not mind her impractical loyalty to tank tops in the central New York winter, a thinly-veiled effort to brandish her tribal tattoo that gripped the thin circumference of her left tricep before it snaked around to the base of her elbow. A sigh teamed with an exasperated, “What did you want again?” was enough to drive him into a fervor. He was content merely watching her move in her barista grace; to get another showing of Arlette in her coffee dance was not only acceptable, it was encouraged.

He studied her as she moved: twice, she tapped the coffee dispenser with the thump of her two longest fingers filling the metal basket at the end of the espresso holder. With a nimble force reminiscent of a well executed tennis forehand, she jammed it into the entrance station, and curved it hard into a soft arc toward the locked position. She ignited the water pressure with the firm push of a button. While most push buttons feebly, taking for granted a machine’s sensitivity, Lolo noticed that Arlette pushed buttons with all her weight and intensity. She triggered buttons mistrustingly with definitive movement, expecting -- almost daring the machine not to heed her command.

With the nonchalance of a woman that has lifted milk at every conceivable weight, she swept the unsuspecting gallon off the counter and poured into the squared stainless steel pitcher, and filled it with the white glue-like consistency that milk takes on when poured from a height. Lolo’s excitement climaxed when Arlette pierced the steam nozzle into the pitcher and circulated it with a movement so slight as to foam the milk without bruising it. When it got sufficiently hot, she tilted the pitcher sieved by a spoon that protected the foam and filled the mug with steamed milk. Quickly, this was followed by an insistent dump of espresso. Finally her long, thin fingers would deftly spoon the remaining foam on top of the spun coffee, only to conceal her labored creation with a white plastic cap. His only complaint was that she was often premature steaming the milk, preventing his drink from reaching its optimal temperature.

He never expected their first encounter to unfold as it did that same afternoon his father wondered aloud if he had awoken too late. She called after him in the parking lot and saw him smoking his grass. “I felt weird asking inside, but can I get a pull off that?” she asked. “Hey, I’m Arlette,” she said, still half exhaling the smoke.
“I’m Lolo.”
“Why Lolo?” She smiled.
“Because Leonard became Leon, then Lolo.” As she passed the joint from her fingertips to his, he snuck a caress from off the tops of her fingers and disguised them as customary to the pass. She noticed and said nothing. They passed a few moments sharing the joint in silence and Lolo began to think. She’ll find it odd if you keep silent. Say something to her, anything. Don’t let her think she’s got you intimidated. If she’s the least bit cool, a silence can be profound. It creates an unspoken intimacy, I like that. She’s not real talkative either; I always had her pinned as the rather serious type. Not so much prudish, but reserved. She won’t laugh at corny jokes, just for the sake of laughing to break a silence. It would take something legitimately funny to make her laugh.

“Lolo, that’s a funny name,” She said giggling. Say something ambiguous enough so that it sounds cool, but without really revealing anything. “Yeah, it has its advantages,” he replied. Not bad, not bad. She was wearing an amber ring of no particular distinction. Lolo reached in and lifted her hand to get a better look at the ring. “Is this amber?” he asked. “It’s really nice.”
“Thanks, I got it in California.” She didn’t seem to mind when I pulled her hand toward me. If she had, she’d have pulled it away. Ask her for a drink. Don’t mess this up. Be breezy, but stay natural. ‘What are you doing later? Do you want to have dinner -- maybe a drink? I won’t take no for an answer.’ Or maybe the more sensitive approach? ‘Hey, I was wondering maybe, if you weren’t doing anything later…’
“Hey Lolo, thanks for the smoke, but I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Yeah – sure - later.” It’s probably better this way.

***

His parents never doubted the severity of their child’s unnatural patterns of sleep. Initially, they blamed themselves. “If you had not insisted on naming the boy something so bohemian like ‘Lolo,’ he would not be compelled to act as odd as his name,” Jadwiga stated matter of factly.
“His name is Leonard.”
“Stop being silly Tomasz. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now the child truly is ‘American.’ Are you proud?”

His off-kilter circadian rhythms had not merely disrupted his sleep cycles, they had made it difficult for him to distinguish between his self-image and the image that his peers had constructed of him. Psychologists theorize that human intelligence began with the ability to delay immediate gratification for greater future rewards. Lolo had come to believe that self-consciousness, or the ability to distinguish your perception of yourself from others’ perception of you, is what accounts for the mild genetic differentiation between humans and chimpanzees. A less clumsy distinction, Lolo believed, was necessary to maintain the proper ambiguity when generalizing about the tendencies of humanity.

The possibility of his perceptions conflicting with what other people thought undermined any sense of objectivity, and accordingly the order he so desperately desired. He was unsure if it was the hazy sense of unreality that somnolence carried with it, or if it was simply a manifestation of his compulsion to isolate the different foods on his plate, but Lolo found the sound of worlds colliding often louder than their formation. He was forced to spend the better part of his adolescence on taxonomy, arranging the spheres of his life in precise, compartmentalized containers. Lolo was always careful never to blend them. Each one neatly labeled and segregated appropriately: Family; School Friends; Girls; Camp Friends; etc. It was not his preference to live in the dark matter between human interactions, in fact Lolo considered himself quite sociable. His distance was a design of necessity.

***

In the fall of his thirteenth year, the same year his parents had sent him away to a summer camp for athletic children, Lolo was forced to feel the impact of his first collision. He was not surprised by the agility of the other boys who were physically superior, or by his ability to separate himself from the mediocre boys who suffered from being neither good nor bad. What awed Lolo was the amplification of weight and gravity that sports radiated when girls were watching. The Darwinian parallel between chest pounding apes jockeying for status to court females and making a slick floater in the lane to impress Bunk Six had never touched him so plainly before. He was not particularly graceful, but skillfully adept at converting broken plays and missteps into wonderful, circus-like acts of calculation. Lolo came to understand that it is not the unfolding of the act that is important, but how it is remembered.

He loved camp, and not merely for its leisurely solace, but for its organized leisurely solace. He was enamored with the simplicity of routine: Flag Raising; Breakfast; Bunk Inspection; Morning Activity; Lunch; Boating or Swimming; Sports; Free Time; Arts and Crafts; Dinner; Evening Activity; Canteen; After-Hours Raids. Everyday was fundamentally the same, but the details varied greatly. Without knowing what every single person was doing, it was nevertheless possible for Lolo to know something about how the camp as a whole behaved. It refined and encouraged Lolo’s desire for order and calibration. Years later Lolo would look at his camp experience as a medication for his sleep dysfunctions, fending off apathy with structure and routine.

Everything was permitted to be ritualized: amusement park field trips, camp outs, and even sexual play. To this day Lolo credits that graceful floater in a crowded lane to the sudden interest of Leyla Sandusky later that night at evening activity. They had a normal and even somewhat routine romance that followed the established summer camp practices of rarely interacting during daylight hours aside from whimsical dining hall glances, and late night precocious sexual play. Sneaking out of his bunk, traversing nearly two kilometers to the girl’s side, and into the wood cabins toward the proper bed in a room scattered with sleeping girls and frilly sheets was both pronounced and elaborated, but never obstructed by the accommodating counselors who, like disinterested parents, neither facilitated nor hindered the ritual. The process offered him the comfort and legitimacy of normalcy that came so easy for the other children. For the first time he was not reprimanded for his sleeping habits, but encouraged and even praised (yes, even praised) for lurking around after all the campers had fallen asleep, but before the counselors had returned drunk from the woods sluggish, smelling like sex and cheap beer. During the days no one questioned his lethargy, or asked why he could not clearly distinguish between the dream world and the responsibilities of waking life. Camp life thoroughly agreed with him.

Lolo’s trouble with Sandusky (the campers and staff were exclusively referred to by nickname or last name) only arose in the denouement of August when she graciously pronounced, “We don’t have to say goodbye Lo! You know I live in Endicott. I can’t wait to visit your house.”
He dreaded the possibility of such a tryst, or worse yet, a formalized encounter. It was not the instability of her hair color, her tendency to speak in greeting cards, or even her inability to etch herself into his memory that offended him. He was repulsed by the prospect of observing the careful image he had constructed of his home life collide with the reality of Sandusky touching and smelling his actual home. Lolo was not concerned about how Sandusky and him would interact outside of camp, as much as he anticipated the interaction between her and anyone he knew, but who had not known one another.

Lolo looked on helplessly as Leyla and his mother conversed, each one quietly assessing the other. He watched them judging one another in the living room while sharing assorted nuts, tortured by their unwarranted conclusions and generalizations. Without him as an intermediary, Lolo was certain they would misinterpret each other without the full context that only he could offer. He imagined his mother confusing Leyla’s moronic bubbliness of being the product of “such a nice and happy girl,” or Leyla mistaking his mother’s foreign accent and mannerisms as a sign of simpleness. He felt a responsibility to defend both of them, and that a judgment on their virtues and shortcomings was a judgment on him. He did not want either of them invading or dismantling the reality he had laboriously constructed. Their interaction tainted his exacting sketches of reality, bringing into question any opportunity for order or even a fleeting sense of objectivity.

Lolo suspected that his father suffered from a similar ailment. After reminiscing on his cold-war childhood in Poland with both affection and disdain, his father would unfailingly offer a long audible sigh followed by a well known Polish proverb that served more as a caveat than a life lesson: “Nostalgia nie jest jak wiele uczucie dla historii jak jest opłakujący zgubę okresu dojrzewania.” (“Nostalgia is not as much the romanticizing of history as it is grieving the loss of adolescence.) Lolo wondered if his father was alluding to the preferences of memory, or if he was again insinuating that Lolo was “squandering his youth.” Either way, Lolo understood it was nostalgia for a reality that had never fully introduced itself to him.

***

A few months before his parking lot encounter with Arlette, Lolo had begun spending three nights a week at the Bartle Library at the State College on the midnight to 7:00 am shift, technically as the Night Circulation Supervisor although there was no one to supervise. The schedule allowed him to sleep from 9:00 am until 1:00 pm, traditionally his strongest hours of sleep. His nights working primarily consisted of flipping through periodicals, reading through books and copying out sentences of interest, searching for the resident cat Percival, and returning misplaced books. After a few months working, he nurtured a great affinity for the Dewey Decimal Classification system and its noble goal of imposing order on chaos.
Many nights surrounded by books and numbers Lolo would create parallel hierarchical systems arranging emotions, moments, and even individuals from the general to the specific. Arlette was a 523.74: 500 = Women; 520 = Beautiful; 523 = Aloof Sensuality; 523.7 = Mediterranean Features; 523.74: Presumptive Intimacy. His fascination with mathematical mysticism was encouraged by his readings of the Osiris Cults who based the construction of the Pyramids according to an intuitive understanding of Pi, the Pythagorean school that was as much a religion as a study of mathematics, and the Kabbalists that believed they could channel God through numbers. Lolo had never done better than a C in Math throughout high school and junior college; an irony, that he would freely acknowledge, that was not lost upon him.

It was the nights he was not working that troubled him. The average person spends about twenty-five years of his life sleeping, at his current rate Lolo would be lucky to reach fifteen. He was unsure of how his sleep debt was accumulating since he began work at the library. He thought the contrary seemed true. According to his alarm clock Lolo was sleeping for more consistent hours than he had ever before. He also noticed that he could no longer remember the detailed blueprints of his dreams, aside from a faint recurring one about the banality of writing.
His dream recall had been completely lost, ending a practice he had loyally followed since childhood. He would recount tales of the fantastic to his parents at meals, assembling an orderly account of his dreams, shading in the necessary details he could not recount with the proper depth in order to organize the commotion of dreams. Six months into his librarian job the integrity of Lolo’s sleep had completely dissolved into unworkable limits.

***

Since he was born Lolo’s sleep dysfunctions have naturally transformed, and revealed themselves to him differently over time. As a toddler, Lolo was unable to satisfy the requisite twelve hour sleep cycle required for children his age. Due to his inability to adapt to set times for sleeping and waking, he would remain awake for days; manically finger-painting geometric hopscotch patterns and mathematical sequences on the kitchen tile as his parents slept. Eventually, he would collapse and over-compensate with a prolonged hibernation period that once extended to nearly fifty-six hours, causing him to miss the largest snowstorm of the decade.

As Lolo reached adolescence his difficulties with sleep and order persisted, but grew more acute and subtle. His circadian rhythm developed into a less erratic system, yet profoundly more disturbing. Lolo’s desired sleep time was delayed precisely sixty minutes each evening, which carried over into a sixty-minute delay of his desired waking time in the morning. Lolo spent much of his adolescence in a constant search to retrieve his “missing hour” by running up downward moving escalators, asking the bus driver to drive to school in reverse, and excitedly changing clocks throughout the house to the previous hour without telling his parents.
Recently, Lolo’s disorder again transformed itself. The mind treats waking, sleeping, and dreaming as distinct. For Lolo the ususally rigid mental states are seperated by imperfect, sometimes porous boundaries that results in waking, sleeping, and dreaming overlapping and even bleeding into one another. He had always wondered if his seamless access to altered states had made him susceptible to odd synchronicities and the manner in which waking and dreaming are enmeshed.

Fifty-three minutes after falling asleep, Lolo would prop himself up against the back cushion of the sofa part of the bed, pull the blanket up to his waist, and reach down in the narrow alley between the sofa and the wall. He would retreive a black leather bound journal with an attached pen that his Uncle Stefano had bought for him on his trip to The Tatras. For roughly three hours nightly, Lolo proceeded to draft an elegantly composed novel in the economic prose of Hemingway.

When he awoke, he would have no recollection of it or the contents of his novel. Lolo would never remember that the dream world was more vivid than the waking one or how naturally he was able to navigate it. In the margins between dreaming and waking Lolo was unhinged by endless possibilites, dreaming yet able to exert some measure of his own will, weaving new landscapes and personalities into the fabric of a reality that he had constructed. Lolo would never know that he was happiest when he was sleep writing.

***

Arlette wanted to name the novel “something postmodern like The Consequences of an American Diaspora or A Casualty of the Gaze.” Lolo figured that he should at least entertain her ideas for the title; after all, it was technically Arlette that ‘discovered’ the novel in the Christopher Columbus sense of the word. They had started dating seriously rather quickly since their encounter in the parking lot; an inertia that progressed at speeds beyond Lolo’s better judgment. He did not feel powerless to stop the forces set in motion, but he was unsure if that was what he wanted.

It had been this way since their first date at Tony’s. “Lolo, do you find me attractive?” she asked while breaking off a piece of garlic bread and dipping it in the residue of the marinara sauce on Lolo’s plate. Okay, that’s a real softball question. “Yeah, I think you’re… you know… beautiful.”
“Do you want to fuck me?” Oh God, loaded question feels like such a understatement right now. Who says something like that? Don’t answer yes, she’ll think you’re a meathead who just wants to sleep with her. Not that she’d be entirely wrong. Don’t answer no, she’ll pin you for a wuss, which she’s probably done already. Say something funny, change the subject, anything. “You mean right now?”

Despite having her own apartment not more than half a mile away with an absentee roommate, Arlette made herself quite comfortable in Lolo’s household. She began immediately by referring to his parents by their first names; a feat of such boldness that Lolo had fully expected his mother to remove her immediately from the property in a slew of Polish curses that would transcend the language barrier. To his amazement, his parents were not merely comfortable with Arlette’s presumptuousness; they seemed to revel in her unapologetic demeanor and her air of instantaneous intimacy. Never before had Lolo seen two worlds overlap so fluidly.
His mother took an instant liking to Arlette despite her obvious “goyishness,” and began teaching her to roll potato piroshkis and dessert blintzes on Wednesday evenings. “Jadwiga, why are you wasting time with the potatoes? Show her the meat piroshkis.”
“Tomasz, she is a vegetable-a-tarian.”
“Well, actually I eat fish and seafood occasionally. Just not red meat. Mainly for political reasons, but its also just healthier.”
“Ahh! This is why you are so skinny. I used to wait four hours in line just to buy half kilogram of meat. Also for political reasons.”
“Tomasz -- please.” Although he remained skeptical about her vegetarian tendencies and the confrontational size of her tattoo, within a few weeks of the expedited romance Tomasz remarked to his son, “Lolo, do not scare this one away. She is sweet and she has a fire to her.”

***

Arlette was graduating from State College in May, and was a devout advocate for the majority of eastern philosophies and medicines. Lolo had told her about his sleep disorders on their second date, and she has been on a mission to cure his ailments ever since. Her most recent fascination with feng shui was a method in which Lolo had little faith. “Okay Lolo, we’re going to have to do a few things to the get the energy flowing around your bedroom. We have to clean this place up, shed some of these carpets, and get rid of all this ungodly clutter and electronic equipment. Electronics are a no no, they’re known to disrupt sleep cycles.”
“Don’t touch the stereo Arlette.”
“Okay Lo, what about tossing that map? It takes up half the wall.”
“The map stays too,” he said firmly. It was a yellowing wall-sized map titled The Dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire since 1683 rendered nearly illegible through a tangle of weather charts and illustrated tide and wind stream patterns. It had been a gift from his grandmother who had passed in her sleep the morning of his sixth birthday. Lolo’s only remaining memories of her are the evenings that he meticulously watched her bloated, parchment-like fingers as they played hours of backgammon. If he was distracted for a moment, without fail she would sneak pieces over a few spaces and pretend to be deaf when Lolo would confront her.
“Okay we’ll worry about the clutter later. We need more yin flowing; maybe some more blues and greens can lighten the place up. An easy thing we can do is move your sofa or futon around, or whatever you call that thing.”
“It’s a sofa-bed.”
“The bed should never be lined up with a door so that your feet are facing it when you sleep. It symbolizes death.”
“What?”
“Can’t you just grab the other arm and help me move this thing? It’s a lot heavier than it looks,” she said, struggling to pull it from the wall. It disturbed Lolo to watch her struggle with anything.
“Lolo!” His father yelled from the living room. “Lolo! What are you doing, playing musical chairs?”
“We’re moving stuff,” he yelled back down the stairs.
“It’s heavy because there’s a bed inside, a sofa-bed.” Lolo grabbed the other end to help Arlette, fully intending to move it back to its original position as soon as she left. As they both lifted the sofa forward, a black leather journal wedged between the wall and the bed revealed itself and lay innocently on the floor. “What’s this Lo -- I didn’t know you kept a diary?”
“Neither did I.” It was not until the following afternoon that Lolo realized that Arlette had not only excavated a fully composed novel from beneath the sofa-bed, but the secret hiding place of his dreams.

***

The most amazing part of the novel was its cohesiveness. There were no side annotations on theme and tone, character scribblings, or even the faintest sketch of chronology anywhere in the journal. The dating of the novel seemed intentionally vague, but could probably be placed somewhere between the fifties and the seventies in the south of France. It was told in the first person and was assembled through the overlap of unsolicited encounters and romanticized landscapes.

On the shores of the la Cote d’Azur, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, I was staying at a rose-shingled villa. It’s barely noon and I’m starting to feel tight off my third drink. I can tell it’s going to be the kind of afternoon that Marcus will pay a visit, and will want nothing more than to impress me with the details of his life. I realize now that this is the very basis of my love for Marge. She is the only woman I know that is as charming drunk as when she is sober.

As a self proclaimed adversary of anything French, Lolo was scornful of the French backdrop of much of the narrative. He blamed his parents for successfully indoctrinating him with flowery Francophile rhetoric.

Always I had Marge. I assured Mother that had I never known anyone so proper, so thoroughly stunning as Marge was in the early morning hours of the masquerade ball. It was same night that JT Pickering and his lady friend from Lyons fell asleep on the deck of his sailing yacht without securing it to the dock.

After his initial reading of the novel, Lolo was devastated. The first thing that grabbed him about his work was the remarkable use of punctuation and correctly spelled words, a feat he was not capable of in his waking life. Mainly, he thought it was trash. “Why would anyone be interested in the rantings of a disgruntled ex-patriot who discovers that the actual Riviera does not coincide with his idealized vision of it?”

Three years earlier, a similar woman roomed next to me in a repugnant villa on a Greek Island whose name I cannot recall, but it smelled like Ocean Perch. She was a scrunchy-faced girl raised at the poker table. She walked the island each afternoon in sandals too large for her feet. I have not forgiven her for the grating flip-flopping sound that trailed her wherever she went. That same summer she drowned from a 40-foot cliff dive after misinterpreting the tide.

Arlette showed the manuscript to an English professor of hers, who thought of an agent friend of his that may be inclined to work with it, who shopped it to a few interested publishing houses, creating a bidding war that would eventually earn Lolo a minor literary status and a relatively large sum of money in the span of a few months.

I spent the afternoon on the beach, drinking tart Cuban drinks and eating shellfish. Marcus had finished playing tennis and insisted on making pleasantries despite my disinterest. He mentions Judith. I was beginning a new glass of gin when Marcus ordered the garlic potatoes and a pitcher of sangria. I cannot help despising him for saying her name when he knows how it tortures me.

His father was dumbfounded by the entire phenomenon. “Only in America, can a boy do nothing and still make money.” His mother was unaffected by the experience, outside of not being able to understand why his sudden good fortune would prompt her son to move out. It was not the prospect of an income above minimum wage that induced Lolo to move out of his parents’ house; it was Arlette’s subtle coaxing that eventually convinced him that “at some point everyone has to leave the nest.”

***

Immediately as he awakes in the new apartment overlooking Binghamton’s modest-sized red light district, Lolo glances at the alarm clock in disbelief. Unusually refreshed after sleeping a full eight-hour block, he frantically rushes to the drawer imbedded into the frame of the bed. He runs his hands anxiously across its base fondling spare sheets and towels, searching for the black leather journal and pen he had deliberately inserted the night before. Checking each page again and again, Lolo searches for anything, a few notes, even a doodle, only to discover the journal untouched.

Arlette had foreseen the possibility that Lolo may not be able to re-create his sleep-writing behavior in a new environment, but she had not verbalized it. She reasoned fears only transform into reality when acknowledged aloud.

Solemnly laying in their new bed, half-naked and half-covered in a flat white sheet, she gazes intently at him grasping his journal. Captivated by his eyes vibrant with a lucidity that she has never seen in him before, Arlette understands that this is the first morning that Lolo has ever been fully awake, and that they will never again sleep together in the same apartment.