“Awaken, dear sir.”

Not again! I turn over in my bed, eyes still closed, and hope the disturbing voice disappears. But I know it won’t. I can’t seem to shake the strange thoughts and voices that pop into my head at 4 or 5 in the morning when I have to pee but I don’t want to get up.

“Whilst you sleep in this paltry room, my good man, ’tis…”

Oh, this one is a doozy. I got a woman with a British accent bugging me. Last night, it was a pro wrestler with a gravelly voice and an eviction notice.

I turn to the other side and my pillow falls off the bed. I reach to the floor and probe with my hand, but can’t seem to find it. Drat! I grudgingly open my eyelids. And I freeze.

A woman is standing next to my bed. She is in an elegant blue nightgown. Brownish-blonde tresses are falling over her outstretched arm, which is holding my pillow. But I won’t look at her face. I am afraid of what I will see in this nightmare.

I shut my eyes and rub my lids with my fists. When I slowly open them, the woman is still there. But the pillow is closer, inches from my face.

I summon the courage to turn my gaze upward. I see a narrow, pale-white chin. Lucious pink lips in the hint of a smile. Finally, alluring eyes with long dark lashes. She nods toward the pillow.

I know this image is not real, but I smile and move my hands toward the pillow. But she whisks it away. She leans down closer to my face.

“Tis right that I withhold your pillow, Mister Longworth, because on this morn you cannot sleep in,” the woman says in a flat, serious tone. “You must rush in to work, because at this very moment, a fly-rink colleague at Dorn Manufacturing is plotting with company Vice President Franks to terminate your employment and your division. Don’t lay there like a wooden spoon!”

I close my eyes, but I still hear her telling me to get up. “If you do not reach the president and put a stop to this codswallop, you will be condemned to this pigsty perhaps until death. Where is the fireplace in this bedroom? And your bed—is that a common wood frame? Where is the brass, good sir? You live like a Middle Age primitive, not a self-respecting Englishman in the enlightened nineteenth century.”

I try to think of other things. I try to sleep. I toss around and the sheets come loose. It seems like an hour has passed. Maybe two. She is still there and still talking.

Enough! I throw off the bedcover and sheet, bounce out of bed on the other side, and run to the bathroom. I hear her voice until I shut the door. At least I finish my business in peace. I cautiously open the door. The voice is gone—and so is she.

But the messy bed I left is now a picture of order, every cover and sheet smoothed and in place and the pillow fluffed—with two wrapped mints on the pillowcase.

I shake my head and sit on the edge of the bed. Before I know it, I am laying atop the covers. My eyes closed.

“Excuse me.”

The next thing I know those two words are tumbling from my mouth. I am standing at the foot of a grandiose brass bed in a sprawling room with a fireplace, a chandelier, ornate furniture, and flowing drapes.

Someone in the bed stirs and slowly peels back an ornate bedcover. I see the frightened but alluring eyes. Quivering pink lips. And that narrow chin. This is the same woman who visited me.

She asks, “What are you doing in my bedroom?”

I open my mouth, but only frightened silence comes out. I shut my eyes, cup my face with both hands, and shudder. I open my eyes and I am back on my own bed.

I close my eyes and open them again. I am standing next to a bed in the corner of a gymnasium.

“Ahem,” I say because I don’t know what to say.

Someone in the bed stirs and tosses aside an old green cover. It is the wrestler who tried to evict me just the other night.

“How’d you get in here?” the wrestler says in a gravelly voice. “And do you have that deed?”

Panic sets in and I close my eyes.

A phone rings.

I open my eyes and I am laying atop my own bed.

The phone rings again.

I leap out of bed, run to the phone, lift the device off the charger, activate the app, and shout, “Hello?”

“Longworth, is that you?”

“Yessir, Mr. Franks. What can I do for you?”

“Nothing. Due to downsizing, I regret to inform you that your division has been eliminated along with your job. Effective immediately. Thank you for your service.”

The call ends. I shuffle back to the bedroom. I brush the mints off the pillow and lay on the bed. I wipe away a tear.

#

"I would really rather if you didn't--"

The weirdo lady interrupts me and starts talking again.

I stopped paying attention to what she was saying an hour ago.

I wonder if it's my fault for being too much of a pussy to force her to leave or if she's just an unusually stubborn cosplayer.

I sit on the end of the gurney bed, it's part of my costume as a lobotomy survivor zombie type thing.

"Ma'am," I begin again, "This is a sci-fi convention. Not a medieval festival."

The woman gives me a harsh glare and continues to blither.

I desperately hope that someone will come into my room so that I can finally get rid of this creep.

It's been two hours. She drones on. I cannot help but listen. A lifetime of vague implications my family was cursed, confirmed by one bizarre encounter.

I cannot find the feeling of fear inside me anywhere. She drones on. I think she - it, needs someone to talk to. My bedside table holds my folder from my voluntary inpatient psychiatric visit, diagnosis of disorder in plain view. She/it drones on about it.

I am familiar with long sleep paralysis. I am unfamiliar with an episode lasting two hours with zero fear. My body is relaxed. I cannot view this as a malicious curse. There has been no movement from the foot of my bed beyond a mouth forming words. My physical safety feels real.

Two hours, it's been. I've never been in a conversation where I was not the predominant speaker. This entity presumably precedes me, that is the reason I cannot bring myself to be the dominant speaker. I was after her, I can wait my turn. I am only a concept of a person at any given moment. A feeling identified. What a concept, my silence. A concept nobody sans she and it have seen actualized.

She drones on. It needs someone to talk to. The Victorian nightgown looks akin to my Mother's infamous nightgowns and I realize it must be who she says it is. The speech is disorganized, like mine - hard to parse through, almost impossible to process in real time.

I don't think it gets it. I don't care whether it is real or not. A maternal figure, one I was never blessed with meeting, has chosen me to spew her schizophrenic thoughts on. I can feel them soaking into me, yet I can't... I can't identify what ideals or stories are currently saturating me. The bed feels wet. Two hours for one decade of progress to be scrapped, I haven't wet the bed since I was fifteen. I never even felt the release.

It drones on about it. The Victorian nightgown seems strangely fitted in a boxy, unflattering way. I did not feel my rise to level with it, yet it happened. Sitting upwards in my sister's bed, where did my sister go? I can move after hours. I could have moved the entire time. It just feels like any of my days, blurred, unimportant, and above all, wholly unbelievable.

I can see the staining on its gown. Blood, yet not alarming. I look down, and I can see the staining on my nightwear. My urinary tract track record preserved, my maternal grandmother and I's menstrual track broken. It drones on about it.

Oh. The curse. The mark of Cain. Bound by blood. We are not grandmother and granddaughter, hallucinator and hallucinatee. We are brothers, bound in blood. It drones on and completes the binding of itself to me. I did not realize what process was occurring.

The only negative feeling I harbor is a sense of confusion. Brother, mother, grandmother, sister, one should never coerce a mentally unwell individual away from therapy. It shakes me to my core; it heard my heart's value questioned.

One of my only Precious Moments with my grandmother. One piece of precious advice, from a life denied, a life scorned. My grandfather.

One hour long were his therapy sessions. His time wasn't ready to grant him existence. Neither was my mother/father's. Two hours, one each for lives not granted a true experience. They attach to me, and I feel my heart start to carry them, the muscles beating harder and bounding stronger by each beat.

"All therapy converts."

Brothers, man I am not - man I appear. Find solace in me, live through me - I'll only ever pay you in the mind you should have had to begin with.