RED NIGHTS
565
stillness of the room, trying to slow my breathing. For an hour or
more I lay motionless in a self-induced trance, my eyes open but
sel–
dom moving, my ears listening to the sounds of the house and the faint,
inexplicable, continuous noises from outside. (In this state my ears
seemed rather far away. I was burrowed somewhere deep in my
skull, my ears advance outposts sending back reports to headquarters. )
As
I remember it the trance must have been close to the real thing.
It was an attempt to reach an equipoise of fear, a state in which the
incoming fear signals balanced with some internal process of dis–
simulation. At best it worked only temporarily, since fear held a
slight edge. But for an hour or two I avoided what I hated most, the
great noisy swings up and down. The panic and the hilarity.
At the first flashing thought of the Southbury Training School
I sat up and took a book from the shelf. (Escaped inmates were rare,
and supposedly harmless, but I knew that a runaway had ripped the
teats from one of the Green's cows with a penknife, and that another
had strangled four cats in a barnyard.) I read quickly, skimming the
pages for action and dialogue while most of my mind stood on guard.
Book after book came down from the shelf, piling up on the bed
beside me as I waited for sleep. I knew that if I left the lamp on I
would stay awake most of the night, so when the pages began to go
out of focus I set the alarm clock, cupped my hand over the mouth
of the lamp chimney and blew myself into darkness.
Being sleepy and being scared do not cancel each other out. After
hours of waiting the mind insists and slips under itself into uncon–
sciousness. The sleeping body remains tense, the limbs bent as if poised
for flight, adrenalin oozing steadily into the blood. Every few minutes
the mind awakens, listens, and goes back to sleep. Fantastic dreams
attempt to absorb the terror, explaining away the inexplicable with
lunatic logic, twisting thought to a mad, private vision of circular
references so that sleep can go on for another few seconds.
I wake up in the dark, a giant hand squeezing my heart. All
around me a tremendous noise is splitting the air, exploding like a
continuous chain of fireworks. The alarm clock! My God the clock!
Ringing all this time, calling, calling, bringing everything evil. I reach
out and shut it off. The vibrations die out under my fingers and I
listen to the silence, wondering
if
anything has approached under the
