Mark Miller is a librarian who splits time between Minneapolis and Tuscaloosa. He has published dozens of poems, short stories, and essays under his three pseudonyms. His novel, The Librarian at the End of the World, is forthcoming from Montag Press in 2019.
Sleepwalking
She regretted that he knew her secrets. But it felt good to write him things she would disclose to no one else. She was attracted to him, yes, but also repulsed by him. Two magnets is what we are, she thought. She was sleepy and didn’t trust him, didn’t even like him, in fact, and thought she should stop typing. Yet here she was, driven more by bored inertia than excited energy, more even than her need for sleep. Okay, what do you want to know?
Anything you want to tell me, he wrote. She didn’t, at the moment, but could, if she wished, tell him everything. All the things. The sounds and shapes and colors of her childhood, the lover whose sweat she drank off his skin in ecstasy, the hole in the middle of her where god once resided. She wrote, when I face north I will tell you everything. South, nothing. Her mind was fuzzy. Is there a reason why magnets exist? They do, obviously. But why? I don’t even care what we are. Why are we, is what I want to know. Then she fell asleep and dreamed of window washers skimming the sky and cleaning glass. But there was nothing to see, inside or out. Emptiness on both sides.
She also dreamed of a man with no face, following her from car to car on a never-ending train. No sooner would she enter a car and push halfway through its loitering commuters than would the door behind her open, revealing his presence. She hurried to the next door, crossed through to the next car, and pushed through the next crowd, only to look behind her again, and see his featureless countenance.
When she woke it was still night. The lump next to her rose and fell with her husband’s breathing. She tiptoed across the cold floor into the kitchen. She looked out the back window and traced the familiar tree limbs lit by the bulb poled in the backyard. She shivered.
The dreams meant something or nothing. The man meant nothing or something. Magnets attracted or repelled. Regardless of the science, there was no reason for it unless there was. Perhaps we are not magnets, she thought. That was too easy.
Outside she climbed the grey-brown branches with her eyes. She tried to imagine what color they would be if she painted them. What the eye sees and the mind knows are rarely the same. She couldn’t remember what he looked like. She would recognize him if she saw him, but now, alone in the dark, she tried to picture his face but could not. She was aware that for some time she had been willing herself not to feel the cold. The sensation had registered on her skin, but she had refused to recognize its effect. Now she was shaking.
She crawled back into bed and realized her life was both truth and lie. It was profound in its discord of want and circumstance, alive with need and dead of hope, mundane in its routines. The things that gave meaning were the opposite of the things that gave joy, and she worked to maintain a grasp of both, much as it stretched her into odd contortions of self. In this way she was both true to herself and a lie to the world, and vice versa. No one would know what to do with her, nor could she figure out the puzzle of the world. The space between the pieces was the only place she felt honest.
She lay in bed as her husband snored. She thought of the man again for the last time that night. No, we are not magnets. We are nothing. But I tell him everything because he doesn’t judge me. He is the void I hurl myself into knowing there will never be a ground to break my fall. He can love me because he doesn’t have to depend on me. I can love him, and he will still not know me. If I throw myself into him, he cannot hurt me. He is nothing at all. She closed her eyes to the dark room and, as always, could not remember what he looked like. Yet she knew when she woke she would imagine him again.