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eleanor no. 31 She woke, still semi-delirious from the sudden onslaught of sleep, hard sleep, after weeks without. Her skin was stretched taught across her face, her eyelids two thin, tight walls that scraped her eyes roughly. She had been preparing for this night for weeks, drawing the blinds firmly shut each night, dragging closed the heavy curtains she’d bought expressly for this purpose; she had extinguished every source of light in the apartment, right down to the tiny starlights generated by the bank of electronic equipment Jack had been storing in the corner of her room for the past month while he studied for his certification. (”Studying” included noisily prying apart various hardwares, servers and PC boxes and CRTs, all many years past their prime, while they continued to hum and drone. She woke from her already useless sleep state on more than one occasion to Jack’s yelp at an unexpected shock.) The apartment took a dim, ghostly form around her, everything constructed in shades of charcoal and black. She couldn’t quite grasp where she was; even the tangibility of her blankets and pillows, twisted around her like knotted vines, confused her. Her teeth were thick, her hands heavy as cinderblocks. Her hair hurt. “Jack,” she called, but no answer came. Even the buzz of his machines had been silenced. She couldn’t remember turning them off before she’d gone to sleep. She had unplugged everything else, though, which might explain to a more satisfying degree her confusion. Where usually the pale blue numbers of her bedside clock glowed there was only uninterrupted darkness. The night light she still kept plugged in beside her door was unlit. “Jack,” she said again, louder this time. Her voice surely penetrated the closed bedroom door, vaultlike as it was, but if he had replied she could not hear it. She inched to the edge of the bed, wary of the height of it, this new California king that Jack had surprised her with, hoping that a change of firma would somehow encourage her to sleep. It had been weeks and she still had not slept, but she had not acclimated to the height of the bed either. Dismounting usually was accompanied by a sharp pang of fear when the floor proved to be seven or eight inches farther down than she repeatedly assumed; she landed painfully flat-footed many times, and other times the surprise of landing at all threw her off-balance and she would tumble into the bookshelf or the bedside table, sending books and the clock and the lamp clattering to the floor. This time she landed as she expected to, though her legs betrayed her and buckled anyway. Every muscle in her body trembled like fine fiddle strings, continually plucked and pulled and left to shimmer and pulse. She made her way across the bedroom floor, the pale wood cool, her toes like barnacles clinging hard to her clenched feet. She was more disoriented than she had expected, and thumped into the bedpost as she made her way to the light switch beside the door. She snapped it upward with her elbow after pressing her balled fists into her eye sockets. The insides of her eyelids flared a vibrant red, and she waited for the rush of color to fade before she lowered her hands and blinked a thousand times. The bedroom was empty except for the bed upon which she’d slept. The bookshelves, the bedside table: gone. The alarm clock hadn’t been there at all. The lamp, the papasan chair, gone. The thoroughly useless, loopy rug that her god-daughter had crocheted for her, the one that refused to cling to the floor, but graciously permitted anything else to cling to it, was also missing. Jack’s machines had vanished, along with the constellations of red and green and blinking LEDs that had so many times kept her from sleep. At her sides, her hands splayed open and then relaxed, dangling like roots from the trunk of her slumping body. Eleanor felt a strange, dull thrum in the air behind her, and turned to see that the bed had been spirited away. The empty floor, this room, were all that was left, and even those were no longer quite there. As she watched, the walls were suddenly there and then not; the sudden and inexplicable absence of light caused her to look up at a ceiling that was no longer there. She felt a breeze — of course she did, she thought, there were no more walls. But it was coming from the wrong direction — not from her sides, but from… beneath. And then her stomach quivered and sank and she was falling again. The steep updraft, a violent torrent now, ripped at her clothing until it too was missing, and she plummeted, naked, into an abyss she could not see. It had been years and years and years, but she remembered every inch of the descent, and when the colors returned, casting ripples of tinted light on her skin, she immediately thrust her arms out and stretched her fingers as far and as hard as she could. It was not unlike pushing her fingers into paint, first as deep as the tips, then reaching harder until her knuckles were buried in the viscous blur. She dragged against her fall, remembering how to slow her body, and eventually she came to a near-stop, dropping so slowly that she was like a feather tumbling through water. The colors twisted together, creating veins of new and richer pigments she had only seen once before, and yet had never forgotten. She was delighted and terrified to be here again; after decades, she had finally, somehow, found her way back. She hung nearly suspended in the abyss, her arms rigid, supporting herself. Her shoulders should have ached, she thought, from the strain of bearing up her entire body, but they did not. She remembered that, too, that nothing had felt like it should have. That she need not even concern herself with breathing, that sound was dimissed here like an archaic technology; that self was core, that body mattered not. Are you here? She simply allowed the question to echo inside her, content to wait for however long an answer might take; she had waited thirty years, and in this timeless place, she might wait a thousand more, and it would not matter to her. The answer would come when it came. She would wait.
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