Rivotril

Monday, from one in the morning to half past two, I was dreaming. You know Skype? It’s like a telephone – in your computer. It has numbers you can punch – or, to be more precise, click. You can call anyone who also has a telephone in his computer, Skype, and when you have Skype and a Web camera connected to your computer you can call anyone who also has Skype and a Web camera on his computer, and then you can see each other, telephoning and videoing free of freaking charge. The technology made its way deep into my dream.

I was in here, good Lord, it was right here in my bedroom, and my laptop began to ring and I knew it was Evelyn, so I crawled to answer the call. I crawled in darkness; some sort of parade was going on outside and it was probably the fireworks from that parade that made the sky red, or reddish, or pink, like Icelandic pink, soft non-threatening shades that one might see only when a volcano erupts and transforms the chameleon sky. All right, it wasn’t a volcano, but there was something going on out on the streets which I could not see.

Two fat women covered in shadows were also in my bedroom, watching me crawl to answer Evelyn’s Skype call; one of them I thought I recognized but with whom I was too embarrassed to carry out pleasantries. Halfway, my mobile phone began to ring, right where I left it after I began to crawl, on the floor by the wardrobe closet, that sleek Apple iPhone wannabe the screen of which you touched to navigate. I love my Samsung more than anything I don’t have. There it was, the Samsung, the something-thousand-peso wannabe, begging to be loved, a melodious call, dent-dent-dent-la-la-la from someone registered in my phonebook as R, and how torn I suddenly felt. That I had to answer not just either of the calls but both meant that someone would have to wait. Do you know, I hate letting people wait; perhaps I got that from my father, who always said, “Better to wait than to be late. You can't make people wait.”

Where was I?

In a trap, it seemed like, a trap in my own bedroom forged by shadows and guarded by two fat women. Check that: it was a grave dug for me. My body suddenly grew numb, all of it, I couldn’t move, something invisible, something beyond me, or outside of me, locked me into the fetal position from which I could not do anything other than weep, panic, lay hopeless, die a little bit. How awful. How horrible. How harrowing. Skype went into voicemail mode, and I heard Evelyn’s voice jumping. I heard him smile. A surprise, that’s what he may have had in store for me – one small pleasant surprise, of which I know him to be regularly capable, but which this time I could not take.

“Migsy,” mother told me five days ago, “you know what I do whenever I have bad dreams? I cross my fingers. Even in your sleep you can always cross your fingers.”

I crossed my fingers and woke up, the way babies wake up. Tears in eyes; fears unexplained but not unfounded; with a book as a third pillow. David Sedaris edited it: Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules.