When I was a child, I would walk through our town at night. I called it sleepwalking, because I had not fully understood that the term was reserved for unconscious movement, a dream state, whereas I was wide awake. I wish I could remember when I first started, and why, but it feels so blurry; the origins of things are often harder to remember than people credit. But by the time I was ten, I was experienced at waiting for that proper moment, usually around one or two in the morning, when everything felt so still that I could move without resistance. I simply opened my bedroom window, pulled the screen into the room for safekeeping, and climbed down the brick footholds to the ground. When I’d first started sleepwalking, I would often not stray beyond our yard, just staring at the stars in the sky, or watching my breath cloud in front of me, my hands and feet going numb. But it doesn’t take long, when engaged in the clandestine, to put yourself in spaces where you are not wanted.
We lived on campus at a tiny school, known as Valiant College, which had previously served as an experimental arts college in the sixties but had been forced to rebrand and reorganize after years of declining enrollment. It was at that time simply an unconventional liberal arts college that stressed the arts as the foundational element of any higher education, but made nods to majors and coursework in other fields of study. My father was the treasurer, previously of the economics department at a prestigious university before some sort of unpleasantness led to his termination and he and my mother, a visiting professor at the previous university, moved to this tiny town in Tennessee. My mother would adjunct in the visual arts department in the field of cartoons and sequential art. I never understood entirely how they got together, since my father was nervous and rule-following, while my mother was loud and funny. There were also twelve years between them. Their history came in snatches that didn’t quite add up when you stitched them together, but I also didn’t know the right questions to ask. And I didn’t ask because I was mostly happy, which I think makes you uninterested in knowing more than what you already know.
The campus was heavily wooded, with primitive, strangely designed buildings as you might expect at an experimental college in the middle of nowhere. I started to walk along the streets at night, looking into the windows of the dorms where there was still light, often seeing someone reading or dancing to music that I couldn’t hear. The few times that someone saw me, some student stumbling back from a party or a late-night study session, they didn’t seem to think much of it. I carried myself in a manner that suggested I was supposed to be there, which was not the case during the day, when nearly every single thing in the world seemed a source of concern to me. I had this unceasing paranoia that I would die in public, in a crowd, some random accident that found me amongst dozens of people standing so close to me. And I think that’s also why sleepwalking became an obsession, because the world was so empty at night, and I felt invincible, like nothing bad would happen in the darkest hours, in empty spaces, under a canopy of stars.
My favorite place to explore during these sleepwalks was Variance Chapel, a nondenominational place of worship on the edge of campus, a tiny building with a high roof, with stained glass windows inside that had been made by some famous artist back in the sixties who had been associated with Fluxus. He had decorated each window with strange representations of god, my favorite being a pilgrim holding a long tube that read see god through this fluxtube of ben. The altar was made of curved stone and had rocks encased in Lucite with words like void and spirit and soul and chaos etched into them. It was the holiest place I knew, and I would sit for an hour in silence on one of the pews.
This is where I was one night, when I heard someone opening the door to the chapel. I ran toward a small alcove behind the altar, which was entirely in shadow, and waited.
A girl walked into the chapel and immediately called out, “Hello? Hello?” I didn’t say a word, could barely breathe, and I heard her call out again, “If anyone is in here, it’s a sin to not say anything. You’ll go to hell.” It was such an obvious trap that I remained silent, and then the girl, seemingly satisfied that she was alone, walked down the aisle leading toward the altar. She was a college student, I assumed, though she looked younger; her face was pale and pristine, and her blond hair was long and covered her eyes. Her mouth was interesting, the way she held her jaw, as if keeping something under her tongue, like a bee or a tiny bird, that was trying to escape.
She was wearing a black tee shirt under a pair of red overalls, and she had on big heavy boots, even though she was quite small, not much taller than me. She was holding a backpack, and she slung it onto the front pew before she sat down beside it, looking up at the symbol hanging behind the altar, a long black banner with a blood-red border and two primitive red crosses painted side by side in the middle of the banner. I could barely breathe, and she was now between me and the only exit to the chapel that I could access. She reached into the backpack and pulled out an envelope, two books, and a plastic Ziploc bag filled with various pills.
She then produced a can of 7-Up, and set it between her boots to hold it steady. She picked up a book, though I couldn’t make out the title, and started to read it, flipping through multiple pages and sometimes doubling back, as if trying to find certain passages. She put the book down and picked up the other one, doing the same, scanning pages, and she then reached into the bag for a pencil and underlined something on one page. And then she put the book down and started to weep, where her whole face crumbled instantly, her chin trembling, her eyes squeezed shut, and then she made a moaning sound, almost as if she was trying to find the lowest note she could make, a song she was preparing to sing for me. She pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes, and leaned forward, resting on her knees. I knew something bad was happening, something more than worship, of course, and I knew that whatever was happening was going to continue to happen unless she discovered my presence. I didn’t want to see it happen. And for some reason, I felt this kind of dreamlike invulnerability as I stepped out of the shadows and slowly crept toward her. When she saw me, she screamed out, and the can of soda turned over and rolled away.
“I’m sorry,” I said, holding my hands out to her. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, goddamn it,” she said, trying to catch her breath. “I just—I didn’t know—I called out—what . . . what are you doing here?”
“Sleepwalking,” I told her. She observed me now; she had stopped crying. She kept tilting her head slightly, as if I was an optical illusion, and she was trying to determine the edges of me, the way I might disappear and reappear. I don’t know how long this went on, but it was the longest that a stranger had ever observed me, had tried to commit me to memory, and I would have stood there for hours if she had required it. She had brown eyes, and her pale skin had flushed a bright red, but as we looked at each other, I could see her breathing began to regulate, and then I realized that we were breathing in unison, the air going in and out of us, back and forth.
“Can you come closer?” she asked me, and I nodded and walked toward her, closer and closer, until she reached out her hand and placed it softly against my face. She only touched me with her index and middle finger, stroking my cheek, and her touch was so warm, like it was leaving a mark on my skin. I held my breath, and she touched my face, and then she said, “Are you real?”
“I think so,” I said, but I wasn’t sure. It was entirely possible that I was now actually asleep, that all of this was happening inside of my own mind.
“Do you want to sit down?” she asked me, and so I did, lowering myself onto the pew, my left hand barely touching her right hand as we gripped the underside of the bench tightly. I looked across her body to the other side of the pew and saw the two books. One was called Dying, in Other Words by Maggie Gee, and the other was an old, ratty hardcover that said Ars Moriendi. I looked at the pills, but they had no labels, just different sizes and shapes and colors, jumbled together in the plastic baggie. She saw me looking at these objects, things she had gathered and brought to the chapel. I looked up at her and she shrugged, as if she couldn’t figure out how to explain anything to a child who may or may not be real.
I have trouble knowing now if I knew then what was happening. I knew she was in distress. I knew we were both sitting in a space where we weren’t supposed to be, that we had both wanted to hide, and maybe to do something that required us to be hidden. I was scared that maybe there was no way for us to disentangle ourselves from this situation, that we would have to run away together and never return to this town, and then I started to hope that this might happen. I imagined that she had a horse outside, tied up to a street sign, and then she would lead me out of the chapel and help me onto the saddle, and I would hold onto her and the horse would gallop through the campus, toward the hills, where we would disappear over the horizon.
“What’s your name?” she asked me, and then she immediately said, “No, it’s okay. You don’t have to say. I don’t want to say what my name is.”
I kept silent. I looked up at the banner over the altar, those two red crosses, like streaks of blood. There was no sound, such a stillness surrounding us. And we just sat there, not moving. These little spikes of fear would come to me, a worry that I had been away from my house for too long, that my empty bed would be discovered, a search party assembled, that I could never sleepwalk again. But I tried so hard to only focus on this single moment, that maybe it could last forever if I didn’t let it end.
And then she started to talk again. “I didn’t think anyone would be here. I kept trying to think of places that would be empty. This school is so small, and there aren’t many places to be alone.”
“Do you want me to go away?” I asked her, and she looked at me. I could see she was considering it.
“Are you always here?” she asked me. “Do you come here every night?”
I shook my head. “No, almost never. Just when I really want to be here.”
“And you came tonight. You came right before I showed up.”
I nodded.
She started to shake, her lip quivering. “I think . . . would you hold me?” she asked.
I leaned into her and she wrapped her arms around me. I touched her hair, which was so soft, so fine. She smelled like dry grass, something vegetal, of the earth. Everything I would ever want in my life, for years and years after, would revolve around this moment, to hold someone, surrounded by strange and unknowable works of art, the darkness so close to you that if you leaned too far, you could disappear inside of it.
But it ended, a sudden shock of recognition, and she stood up. “I need to get back,” she said. “I have to go.” She grabbed her books and shoved them into her backpack, but when she picked up the pills, they spilled onto the bench, little sounds echoing through the chapel, and she knelt on the floor and started to pick them up. I helped her, dropping each one into the bag, until they were safely returned. She zipped the bag closed and put it in her backpack and stood up.
“I’m always going to think of you,” she said. “I’ll see your face always.” And then she ran down the aisle, out of the chapel, and I watched her fade into the darkness. I was still on the floor, hunched over the bench, as if in some kind of unnatural prayer. And then I saw that she had left the envelope, which had fallen under the pew. I reached for it and held it close to me. I thought about opening it, but I wasn’t sure what I would find. And the events of that night, how miraculous they had seemed, might diminish if I read the letter, if things would be made too explicit. So I put it in my pocket and looked around the church. I could still faintly smell the scent of moss, but it was already fading. I looked around for one of the pills that we had missed, but I couldn’t find one. I would most certainly have swallowed it if I’d found any of them. I looked at the stained glass windows one more time, each one a version of god so unknowable and strange that it felt like the only possible way the divine could appear to someone like me, a child staring into a hole cut in a box.
I stood up and walked out into the night air. I wondered if the girl would still be outside, but she was nowhere to be found. I walked along the sidewalks, the wind making the trees creak and sway, the moon obscured by clouds. When I climbed back into my room, nothing had changed, everything as I had left it, my parents still asleep. I took the envelope from my jacket and put it in my sock drawer, at the very bottom, and climbed into bed. And I did not dream, my mind a complete and total blank, until the sun filled up the room and I was returned to myself.
_____
I didn’t see her again for fifteen years.
After that night, I started going out more and more, walking through campus as often as I could. I looked for her and would sit for hours in the chapel, but she didn’t return. My sleep was so irregular that I would go to school with bags under my eyes, barely awake, hardly able to focus on my teacher, taking naps during recess. I can’t understand how my parents didn’t figure it out sooner, and I can only imagine that both of them were drinking themselves into a stupor every single night, or medicating themselves in some way, but they finally caught me a year later when I had fallen down an embankment and been completely covered in mud. By the time I got home, I was so tired that I didn’t even bother to clean up, simply collapsed on top of my bed and fell into a deep sleep only to wake up in the morning to my mother pulling off my muddy boots, nearly yanking me off the mattress. She shook me awake and I looked toward the window, which was wide open. “I was dreaming,” I told her. “I had a terrible dream.”
They sent me to a psychiatrist, a battery of tests from my pediatrician, meetings with a child therapist. From the start, I wasn’t sure if it was better to say that I had been walking at night through the streets in a waking state or if I needed to pretend that I was not in full possession of my own body. The doctors all seemed to agree that it was better if I was sleepwalking, and I agreed with them. It was easier to explain, and I didn’t have to do much, only tell them that I had no idea where I went or what I did in those evenings when I left the house. The psychiatrist put me on Klonopin and an antidepressant, which I’ve learned was strange for someone so young, but it left me in a nearly permanent state of sleepwalking, this strange sensation of being neither asleep nor awake, and I found that it wasn’t difficult to manage. When I was fourteen, a number of cats on campus were killed and placed in front of different buildings, and my parents worried that I had been responsible, had somehow escaped from the house—even though my window was permanently locked—and when it was revealed to be the cruel actions of three members of a fraternity, my parents still seemed to regard me with a kind of polite terror, which I think was more attributable to their guilt over the fact that they had not noticed my sleepwalking in those years.
They sent me away for high school, to a boarding school where it was so easy to sneak out, to wander, and so I felt returned to myself. My grades improved, I made friends, won a national art contest for a series of photographs of empty buildings at night, and yet I felt like I was only partially in this new place, that some part of my consciousness was back at Variance Chapel, waiting for her to return.
So I went back to Valiant for college, majored in art, took several classes with my mother, who seemed convinced that I had made it through some strange aberration, perhaps one similar to the unspoken episode that led my father to come to Valiant with her. My father, now struggling with lung issues from constant smoking, rarely left the office on campus or the office at home, and I don’t remember any meaningful conversations that we had during my four years back on campus or in the following years until he died.
I became interested in drawing elaborate backgrounds for animation cels, the medium which was my mother’s specialty, for which she’d won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film only a few years after I was born. I would recreate backgrounds from famous animated films, but I would make hundreds of them, each with a slight variation, so that the background itself, which was meant to be static, seemed to mutate. My mother would then recreate those original scenes, the movements and actions of familiar characters but with her own designs, the movements so similar that it felt like a dream. I would then help her with those cels, painting them to help speed up the process. At this time, no studios used this method any longer, had moved to digital animation, and with only two of us, it took so long to make even the shortest film. But the few films we made won awards, any number of grants and fellowships.
I don’t think we ever talked about ourselves in those long hours. I still don’t fully know why she married my father, and she never asked about those endless nights where I explored the campus on my own. My mother was so lovely and strange and funny with other people, but it was like there was a screen between us, as if it pained her to think of me as a part of her, and these projects, where we worked in silence and constructed these films almost by telepathy, were her attempts to make amends for that unnatural feeling.
I never left Valiant College, simply took a job as a secretary and moved along the organizational chart, making my own animated films in my spare time. And then, in 2002, I saw an article about a novel written by a graduate of Valiant. It was called An Illusory Spirit, and when I saw the author’s photo, I recognized her instantly.
The novel, her second, was about a young woman who, struggling with familial upheaval and her own uncertain mind, attempts to commit suicide but is halted by a childlike specter. I could barely breathe as I read the synopsis, and I ended up leaving work to buy a copy at the bookstore. I walked to Variance Chapel, my hands shaking, and I sat on that very same pew and read the entirety of the slim novel, which had won the National Book Award and several other prizes.
In the book, the young woman, a quiet and intense girl who wants to become a writer, receives a scholarship to an experimental college in the woods in Tennessee. While there, she encounters several difficult relationships with various teachers and students, who all make her doubt her own abilities. Her mother dies, unexpectedly, under mysterious circumstances, and when she returns home for the funeral, she learns that her mother and father were not her birth parents. After she workshops a new story based on these autobiographical elements, her professor, along with her ex-boyfriend, the favored student in the class, tears the story apart. After she returns to her dorm, she takes a bag of pills, which she has been collecting for the last three years, made of any number of scavenged barbiturates and painkillers, and heads to a small chapel on campus to kill herself. While there, a strange, glowing child appears to her, what she refers to as an illusory spirit, and the shock of him prevents her from going through with her plan. As she leaves, the child comes with her, stays in her dorm, and becomes her companion, appearing to her at various times, pushing her toward decisions both destructive and restorative. She often cannot tell if the spirit is demonic or angelic, but she navigates the uncertainty of her future and continues to write. The novel culminates in finding her birth mother, who reveals that she was a twin, and that her sister died in childbirth.
When I finished the book, it was evening, the chapel empty. The novel was unsettling but mesmerizing, the language more playful and self-aware than the themes would suggest, and there was this odd tonal element that seemed to delight in the possibility that the character had made wrong decisions at every turn, that perhaps nothing after that incident in the chapel when she first meets the spirit has actually occurred. There were chronological jumps, things out of order, repeated, but all I could think about was that moment in the chapel, how the dialogue was exactly as I remembered it on that night in 1988.
I looked around at the stained glass windows. I loved the idea of god as something we construct, a kind of vessel that holds all the uncertainty of being alive, and I thought that art fulfilled those same desires. I thought about how I fit inside this novel, how only two people in the world knew exactly how that moment touched against that real evening so long ago.
She came to read at the university a year later, and I went to the reading, sat in the back of a crowded auditorium, and she came onto the stage, looking as if she had not aged. She wore a green corduroy jumpsuit and big heavy boots, and her hair was curlier, darker, but I instantly recognized her as that woman in the chapel. She seemed bashful, a little stunned to be here, and she mentioned that she had gone to school here, yes, as the introduction had stated, but that she had not returned since she graduated, not out of a need to distance herself from her time at Valiant, but a desire to not undo the magic of it, to not disturb the memory of it, but now that she’d written the novel, that it was settled and on paper, she felt it was good to be back. She also stressed that, though the place in the novel might bear a resemblance to Valiant, she wanted to reiterate that fiction was just that, an invention entirely of her own making and that nothing in the book should be considered true, that none of it happened as it is written.
And she read that scene in the chapel, her calling out to make sure the space was empty, and my ears started to ring, this kind of vibrating, unrelenting hum, and I could not hear her at all. My heart was racing, the strangeness of having someone else tell the story of which you are a part. Maybe my brain was protecting me from having to share it with a crowd of people. I realized she was done when people clapped, and then I clapped, too.
A line formed for her to sign books, and I stood in the line, holding her book, and I waited as she talked to each person, scribbled something on the title page, and then signed her name. I got closer and closer, and it felt like that night, the way I observed her from a distance until it was finally time, when it wasn’t possible to stay hidden, and I made myself known to her. When she looked up, I wondered if she recognized me, and then her eyes widened. I had changed so much more than she had, but she recognized me. I handed her my book, and when she opened it, the envelope from that night, still sealed, was there. She held it, turned it over, and then looked at me. I nodded. She took a deep breath. And then she signed only her name, and then the date of that moment in the chapel, sixteen years ago.
She handed me the book. “Will you go there tonight?” she wondered, and I said that I would. She nodded again. And I walked off, out the doors of the auditorium, and I walked along the sidewalks of the town where I had lived almost my entire life.
Late into the night, long after the campus had quieted, even the parties finally winding down to their conclusion, I waited on the same pew in Variance Chapel. And then she arrived, pushed open the doors, and I could hear the sound of her boots on the stone floor, getting closer and closer to me. I turned around and she stood over me, observing me, my face, considering who I was or maybe how she remembered me.
She finally sat down next to me, our hands touching. “You never opened the letter?” she asked me. I shook my head. “I don’t . . . I just thought I’d keep it for you. I didn’t know who it was for.”
“It was for anyone that would have found me,” she said. “But I’m glad you didn’t open it. Because, here I am. I’m still here.”
“Back here,” I said, and she nodded.
“I have a kid,” she told me, “a boy.” I didn’t say anything. “I left my husband almost immediately,” she continued. “I don’t know why I married him, and I’m not sure that I even wanted a baby, but then I did and it made sense, but not to stay with him. I feel like . . . I think sometimes I made myself do the opposite of what I felt because . . . maybe I didn’t trust myself to know what I should do.”
I still didn’t know what to say. “I’ve stayed here,” I finally said.
“In the chapel?” she asked.
“In this town,” I explained. “I went to school here. I work here now.”
“I still can’t quite believe that you’re real.”
“I liked your book,” I told her. “I loved it so much.”
“I always wondered if you would read it,” she said.
We sat there, looking around at the chapel, at the banner, still there, and I wondered if it was the same one from that night, or if it had been replaced.
“Could you hold me?” she asked, and I turned to her, and I wrapped my arms around her. She turned so that her ear was against my chest. She listened to my heartbeat, and we sat there, in that silence. It was not the same as before, and I didn’t want it to be. I didn’t want it to be the same story. I wanted it to be different, just enough, some way that it would bend toward a different conclusion.
And yet, still, we would experience the strange sensation that this had happened before and would happen again, but if we tried hard enough, it would feel brand new. It would always feel like a new story, a thing that we had made together. And after we had made it, it would fill up with light, and we would see god inside.
