Heather Bourbeau

Sleepwalking

In the summer of Tobias Randall’s 40th year, the heat was unbearable. He tried to calculate the likelihood of this being the new normal, explored the idea of transferring to colder climes, and began his sleepwalking.

He was unaware of his nocturnal ambulations. Had he known, he would have tried to cure himself. As it was, each night, just as the temperature dropped to something nearing tepid, he would roll out of bed, put on his slippers, grab his keys, and walk slowly for 0.73 miles to stand before the door of Madison Rhodes, a lawyer from his firm, who rode a motorcycle, had tattoos, and, he was certain without any proof, loved skiing. He would stand for 10-12 minutes before returning home to his bed as if he never left. The only clue, had he been looking, would have been the sweat on his cotton pajamas that indicated he had drifted out of the comfort of his air conditioning.

Toby was cautious, overly so—the unintentional by-product of his work as an actuary. He rarely ate sushi, avoided cliffs, loved deeply but rarely, and never ever skied. With over 600,00 accidents each year, the statistics were not in skiing’s favor. When his first wife went for scuba lessons, he chose to learn the fine art of Tahitian hula. The learned rhythms of the ōteʻa kept his wife satisfied and exhausted. Years after they divorced, she would tell her friends that she would have left him earlier had it not been for those smooth, subtle movements in his hips and thighs. In the end, his timidity outside the bedroom drove a wedge between them. She wanted to take life by the horns. He wanted to avoid the bull at all costs. Life was meant to be long, if perhaps a bit dull, he reasoned. Ironic that the opposite could still be said of his lovemaking.

It was only 11 days later when Madison, who had recently installed a video security system thanks to a rash of Amazon package thefts in her neighborhood, got a call from the security service. She saw his sturdy, trance-like figure appear on her screen and tried to remember why he looked familiar and why she did not feel threatened.

The next two nights, the same routine, the same calls of warning from the service, the same checks on locks and her old baseball bat at the door. She had dealt with freaks and stalkers before. “I do walk this world while female,” she would note to girlfriends who would sigh in recognition of all that phrase implied. On the fourth night, she went outside, bat in hand, and only when she saw no acknowledgement of her approach did she realize he was asleep. She put down her bat and sat on her lawn, and when he began to walk back to his house, she followed. This went on for one week. A dance of conscious and unconscious, stalker and stalked.

She didn’t know what she needed from Toby, but she would have liked some answers—Why was he sleepwalking? Why her house? How did he even know where she lived? Was he threatening? The last one seemed obvious at first. He was clearly unaware of his actions, but in her decision to follow him, fully aware and fully curious, she felt an unmooring. Without realizing it, she was, for the first time, letting go of her innate vulnerability as an average-sized woman and was adapting the menacing creep of all she had been taught to fear.

She knew Toby’s nighttime movements, schedule, and habits. She could exploit those—rob him while he was walking to her house, wait for him with a weapon, film him and post it on social media to humiliate him. Instead, she held back, toyed with all the possibilities like a cat with a mouse, bouncing one after the other against the walls of her mind.

The fourth week the heat broke, and Toby’s rhythms changed slightly. He arrived at her house a little earlier, stayed a little later. This allowed Madison just enough time.

First, she simply added a blanket to his bed. When Toby woke the next morning, he assumed he must have gotten it in his sleep. Next, she moved two of his coffee mugs to a different cabinet. His mind again raced to find an explanation. Perhaps he was distracted when he put away the dishes. By the time Madison replaced some of his tea with her coffee and his tofu with spare ribs, he had begun to worry about himself.

His work was suffering, he second-guessed his every move. He made a point of recording activities at his house and photographing his groceries as he put them away. He found comfort in the order of numbers, he retreated more from his friends, and he struggled with insomnia, fighting the urge to sleep with the need to understand what was going on. He made an appointment with his doctor, contemplated care, and eventually installed a security system throughout his house to monitor his own movements.

Madison had not anticipated the changes, and she was struck by how much she missed her nightly games when Toby stopped his regular somnambulations to her house. She was delighted the few times when he did come, but started to worry about him or rather, she worried that he had fixed whatever drove him to sleepwalk in the first place. She hadn’t realized how much she needed to be subtly in control, how she felt a rush throwing someone else off their balance without touching them, and how deeply it affected him.

She tried to check in at work, though how she would ask after a colleague she had barely said “Hello” to in two years, she was unclear. When Toby would pass her in the hallway, she would scrutinize his appearance, look for signs of vitality or calm. She came to appreciate the softness of his lips, the way his right brow arched slightly. One day, she was horrified to see the slight wrinkles in his normally impeccable clothes, the desperately tired look in his eyes. She recognized in this slight decay the madness of not trusting one’s self, of feeling violated by your own mind.

She had dipped her toe into that well after her mother’s suicide, when she worried genetics meant predestination. Four months after the funeral, at 17 armed with a fake ID, Madison got her first tattoo. It felt like a reclamation of her body. She took up running, first as a way to rid her limbs of the frantic kinetic energy that was building up, then as a way to feel the clearing of her thoughts, the reclamation of her mind. Running led to bicycling, which ultimately led to her first motorcycle, purchased just before law school.

When she finally saw his pain, she understood that she had crossed the line between prank and bullying, between mild revenge and menacing. After all, he did not know why she would seek revenge in the first place. And she felt ashamed. She stopped her own nighttime movements. By then, however, it was too late. 

When Toby first saw her image flash in grey and white on his computer screen, he assumed it was someone else. He tried to calculate the odds of knowing one’s mildly sadistic intruder. Why would this woman that he barely knew enter his home and torment him in this way? But when, at work, she smiled at him in a way that imparted the intimate pity of a parent, he knew.

She noticed the shift in his posture, the flashes of anger and questioning when she looked into his eyes, and how he no longer came round at night. She began to worry that maybe he knew. Why wouldn’t he also have a security system? Why hadn’t she thought of this very basic fact? When she realized he must have evidence against her, she lost her balance, nearly falling into the toilet on the 3rd floor of their office building.

She was a lawyer; she should have known better, been less headstrong, more cautious. The more she understood her miscalculations, the shallower her breath became. While he hadn’t done anything wrong, other than unintentionally scare her while he was asleep, she had entered his home illegally. She was nearing hyperventilation when she decided she needed to try to show him why. Maybe he would understand, see the humor, or at least, since he hadn’t done so yet, maybe he would not press charges.

It was another week before she made the first move, sending an email that simply said, “Can we talk? I need to show you something.” He seethed, in a way that felt unfamiliar and thrilling. He had forgotten any feeling other than anxiety and dread the last few weeks. What could she have of his and more importantly, why? He had something on her, he knew that. Her career, hell, her life was in his hands. And precisely because he was beginning to think of all the things he could do with this information, he felt more alive than he ever had. He finally understood why his first wife liked to fight, and why his brother, god rest his soul, loved to ski black diamonds.

It was the fourth Wednesday in October, when they met. She had come from a conference call with the partners, he from a mid-quarter review. Each was nervous and curious, and each was secretly thrilled. She wore her green fitted button-down shirt and black pencil skirt that she hoped would weaken his resolve to prosecute. He, on the other hand, in an effort to be appear unpredictable, eschewed his usual suit and chose slacks with an almost fashionable sweater.

When he entered the small boardroom she had reserved, he was surprised to find himself at first smiling as she smiled back. They walked slowly toward one another, their eyes now focused on the carpet that was losing its pattern, and without a word, they each held out a flash drive and looked up.