Dance of the Sleepwalkers

Wolfgang Wright

My freshman roommate was a sleepwalker. You’d think he might have bothered to mention that when we first moved in together, so I’d be prepped if and when it ever occurred, but no, apparently he thought it’d be a lot more exciting to let me find out the hard way. One night, while I was fast asleep, I felt a sharp poke in my side, just below my favorite rib, and when I awoke, there he was, towering over me like a monolith, his thick thighs pressing up against my bite-sized dorm room mattress. Naturally, I asked him what the hell he was doing, what’s the emergency, but he just stared at me, blankly, like he was trying out for a job as a department store mannequin. So I said his name, “Alan,” and when that failed to elicit a response, I said it again, this time with some punch: “Alan.” That shook him. He put his hands out like he was about to fall over, right on top of me, but at the last second caught himself and somehow managed to remain on his feet. He mumbled something about the Twins–it had been a tough season–then went back to bed, his own bed, a whole three feet away from mine. A few seconds later he was snoring, another treat he’d neglected to alert me of.

The next day, as I yawned my way through Intro. to American Lit., I kept thinking about The Incident, which was what I’d come to call it, italics and all. It was bad enough I’d come from a small town with a population punier than the number of students enrolled on campus, but I was also an only child, had always had a room to myself, and now in my first experience of having to divide up my breathing space with a fellow human being, that being had assaulted me in the night!

Later, when I got back to my dorm room, full of Melvillian pomp, I confronted Alan about The Incident.

I said, “So, are we going to talk about what happened last night?”

“Sorry,” he said, “next time I’ll eat it in the lounge.”

It took me a sec to realize that he was referring to the burrito he’d concocted around nine p.m., which had given off a stench only a skunk could appreciate.

“No,” I said, “I meant you poking me in the chest while I was sleeping and standing over me like a psychopath.”

Again with the mannequin stare. Apparently, he had no recollection of The Incident, so I refreshed his memory, or rather, informed him of what his memory had failed to record. And that’s when he finally told me about his propensity for sleepwalking. “Propensity”–his word.

“It happens sometimes when I’m stressed,” he said, “and I had that physics test today, remember?”

He apologized and said it wouldn’t happen again, or at least he hoped it wouldn’t, then asked me if I’d like to watch some porn.

“Sure,” I said.

***

He was wrong about the sleepwalking: it did happen again, several times, although thankfully there was no more poking involved, at least not of me. No, instead he’d get up and leave the room, closing the door with a bit of force as he did so, not so much as to call it a slam, but enough to scare the bejesus out of a light sleeper like myself. The first time it happened, I thought he’d just gotten up to go to the bathroom, perhaps to throw up (he was a sucker for vanilla vodka). But when he came back, like an hour later, I could tell by the way he was strutting that he wasn’t awake. He did this little shuffle when he reentered the room, sort of like a dance maneuver, and proceeded until he got to the far wall, at which point he finally crawled back into bed and continued his sleep in one of the more traditional lying down positions, leaving me wide awake to contemplate why on earth his white socks had appeared to have grass stains on them.

When the next morning I told him about this second incident–which, because it did not involve me directly, requires no capitalization or italics–he once again confessed to having no memory of it, and wondered, just as myself, where it was that he might have moseyed off to.

“I think there was music,” he strained to recall. “But not like from a stereo or a phone or anything. It was like it was being pumped right into my head. And I think there might have been other people there as well, but where we were, I’m not sure. Hey, do you think maybe next time, if there is a next time, you could like follow me and see where I go?”

***

Alan liked to sleep in pajamas, top to bottom, and of the three pairs he owned each had a different animal printed on them–giraffes, pandas, and cute little kitty cats. I, on the other hand, preferred to sleep in nothing but boxers, a practice I came to regret when the next sleepwalking incident reared its drowsy head. Not that I’m bashful about being seen in next to nothing–I’ve got a smokin’ hot bod, with strong legs, a chiseled chest, and a back you could break bricks over–it’s just that Alan, bless his somnambulant heart, decided not to remain indoors. After descending the stairs and passing through the lobby, he opened the main door of our residence hall and ventured outside, out into the crisp, cool air of the night, and the only extra apparel I’d managed to slip on before following him out was an old pair of shower slippers. Unlike Alan’s feet, mine were protected from shattered glass and any other sharp or jagged objects that we might happen upon during our journey, but the rest of me was exposed to the breeze, and it wasn’t long before I was shivering, wishing that my roommate was a faster sleepwalker so I could get my core temperature up.

But we didn’t travel long, only as far as the campus quad, where Alan came to a quick and sudden halt behind some other guy who was already standing there, right on the edge of the southeast corner. For a second I’d thought that Alan was going to run right into the guy, and was about to give him a head’s up, but then Alan just stopped, fell in right behind him, as if he were getting in line for lunch. Confused, I maintained my brief distance behind him until a moment later when someone came up from behind and bumped into me. Quickly, I spun round, ready to defend myself–I’ve a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu–but the individual, presumably another student, moved languidly past me without another blow. He, too, fell in line, right behind Alan, and when I saw that he was also wearing pajamas, it naturally occurred to me that he must be a sleepwalker as well. That’s when I went up and checked out the first guy, who was also out of it, staring at the grass in front of him with sluggish, glazed-over eyes. Not long after another student, this time a co-ed, walked up and fell in behind the first three, and then another, and another, until there were a dozen or more of my peers all lined up and asleep. Like I said, we were standing at the southeast of the corner of the quad, but as I looked around, I noticed that the same thing was happening at the other three corners as well. One after another students were lining up, facing their respective corners at a diagonal, as if waiting for a signal to walk onto to quad itself and do whatever the hell they were here for. And that’s exactly what happened–I mean, there was no actual signal, or at least nothing that I happened to notice, but at a certain moment, and in complete and total unison, they each stepped onto the grass and headed toward the center of the quad, where, after a moment’s pause, they all began to dance.

Now, when I say dance, I don’t mean the kind of moves you might learn in gym class or at cotillion, if that sort of thing still exists, and nor what passes for dancing in your average night club. No, this was more like the stuff of music videos, or perhaps a musical, where the whole shebang is choreographed, except that there was no choreographer, no one directing them when to step or where, and on top of that, they were all asleep, at least as far as I could tell.

Amazed, I ambled further up the sidewalk for a closer look, and only then did I notice that I wasn’t the only one who’d come to see the show. There was an older woman, seventy perhaps, sitting on a bench just off the middle of the quad, with a scarf around her hair and a sketch pad on her lap. She caught my eye and smiled, then pointed at my phone, which I’d thought to grab before leaving my room, thinking it’d be worthwhile to capture on video what my roommate was getting up to, in case it was funny. But the old woman had other ideas.

“I’d rather you didn’t record this, dear,” she whispered at me. “This isn’t something the whole world needs to see.”

I wasn’t so sure about that–it looked like viral news to me, but she seemed sweet enough, and I didn’t want to upset her, so I turned my phone off and lowered it to my side. With that out of the way, she smiled again and patted the spot on the bench next to her, so I walked over to her and sat, rubbing the goosebumps on my chest as I did so.

“This must be your first time,” she said to me, still whispering. “The way you’re dressed.”

“They aren’t much different,” I replied, pointing at the quad, where the sleepwalkers were still dancing about, not much more warmly clad than myself.

“No,” she conceded, “but I don’t suspect they feel the cold.”

“So you’ve seen this before?” I asked, noting that she was fully dressed, including a coat and cap. “Do you know what it is?”

“All I can tell you, dear, is that it happens every two weeks on the half moon, and that all those who participate must have some propensity for sleepwalking.”

“Propensity?”

“They’re all college-aged, too,” she went on, introducing herself as Margaret. “Perhaps there’s an experiment being conducted by one of the professors.”

“So you’re not a professor?”

She shook her head. “I’m a grandmother. That one there, in the purple shirt, she’s my granddaughter, Stephanie.”

I glanced at the girl in question. Her shirt was one of those oversized ones, the kind some girls wear to sleep in, though when I say oversized, I mean just long enough to cover up what sort of underwear she was wearing. Her legs were on full display, and they were delightful.

“She’s pretty,” I said.

“I could put in a good word for you, so long as you erase whatever you’ve recorded so far.”

I immediately did so, then pointed at her sketch pad. “I see you’ve come prepared.”

“Stephanie came to spend a summer with me a few years ago, when she was still in high school. Her parents were going through a tough time, and they wanted her out of the house so she didn’t have to witness all the yelling. I awoke late one night to find her dancing in my living room. I called to her with the intention of suggesting that she might want to choose a more appropriate hour to carry on as she was, but she made no indication of hearing me.”

“She was asleep.”

“And so are they all.”

“So you’ve been watching her closely since then.”

“When she decided to come to school at the U, she moved in with me. I live just on the other side of the tracks. For the past few months, I’ve been agonizing about whether to tell her about this. Going out dressed the way she is, it could spell trouble. But who’s to say this isn’t good for her, and when unconscious activities suddenly become conscious, well, it can change them. So I’ve compromised.”

I nodded. “You follow her, make sure she’s okay. And the sketch pad?”

“I draw the patterns they make. It’s not the same every time, you see. A different dance for a different night, though always lovely to watch. I keep them in a shoe box in my closet. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to make sense of them, see if there’s any meaning to it all. Ah, but now it’s over.”

She was right. The sleepwalkers had concluded their dance and were beginning to reform their lines. In single file, they walked back to their respective corners and then dispersed, each heading off in whatever direction they had come. I jotted down my name and phone number on the corner of Margaret’s sketch pad, in case she decided to follow through with her offer, and then helped her up. We said goodbye, and then I followed Alan step by step back to our dorm room. Along the way we happened to pass a couple of stoners coming back from a party, but they didn’t seem to notice Alan’s strange shuffling, or the fact that I was only wearing my underwear–or perhaps they were just too high to care.

***

Like Margaret, I, too, decided to keep what I’d seen a secret. I’d taken to heart what she’d said about how all that mysterious dancing might be good for the sleepwalkers, and how letting them in on what they were up to could throw off their game. And so when Alan asked me the next day if he had sleepwalked, I told him no, or if he had, he’d managed to sneak out of the room without waking me up. I wasn’t keen on doing him dirty like that, but I’d just found out about the concept of a Noble Lie in my Intro. to Philosophy course and thought that this was as good a time as any to put into practice what I was learning. That’s education for ya.

What did stick in my craw was Margaret’s granddaughter, because she never called. I wondered if maybe Margaret had forgotten to tell her about me–she was old, after all, and her memory could be starting to slip. Or maybe she just wasn’t able to drum up her own Noble Lie to explain how she had met me. Of course, there was also another possibility: that Margaret had told Stephanie, but Stephanie had decided she wasn’t interested. I mean, let’s face it, if your grandmother comes to you saying she’s met the perfect guy for you, “a nice boy,” are you really going to be all that gung ho about going out with him?

But whatever the reason I didn’t get that call, it made seeing Margaret the next time my roommate went dancing uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be pushy about it, demand to know what was up, but at the same time I was itching to know where things stood. In the end, however, she must have read my mind, because the second I sat down next to her on the bench, this time dressed appropriately, she launched right into an apology.

“It seems Stephanie’s got her own ideas about the right way to meet men,” she told me. “She wants it to be ‘organic.’”

“Organic?” I asked, looking on as the sleepwalkers began organizing themselves on the quad.

“I believe she meant what an old-timer like myself calls fate. Well, I wanted to tell her what could be more fateful than you seeing her for the first time as she danced around in her skivvies at night in the middle of a field while she was asleep, but that would have meant revealing to her all of this.”

“Yes, I see your point.”

“Though if you want,” she went on, reaching for a folded up sheet of paper she’d stuffed inside her sketch pad, “I could give you her schedule. Seems to me there’s nothing wrong with helping fate along a little, don’t you think?”

It was a tempting offer, and one I almost took her up on, but just as I was about to put my greedy hands on the schedule, I noticed that the sleepwalkers were pairing up. Last time around, despite all the coordination between them, they hadn’t once touched each other, and so it came as quite a shocker now to see them dancing as couples. What made it even more shocking was how random it all was, at least from the perspective of an onlooker, because there seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to who paired off with whom–certainly it wasn’t by gender, for Alan wound up dancing with another guy, someone who I was pretty sure was on the football team. But there was another aspect to it all that really caught my attention, and that was that there was an odd number of dancers, meaning that one of them got left out, and that one, of all people, was Stephanie.

“Maybe there’s another way to make fate work in my favor,” I whispered to Margaret, and with her blessing, I got up and went after her granddaughter. Zigzagging my way through the others, I soon came to her, and after mirroring my hands up to where hers were moving about in the air, I latched on and began to dance with her. Because I had no idea in advance what the movements were going to be–we weren’t exactly waltzing–I let Stephanie lead, though in time I was able to catch on to the general flow of things and make myself a better partner. That’s when I was finally able to look her in the eyes, and I saw there a kind of recognition that had always been absent from my roommate’s.

“You’re Dylan, right?” she whispered when her back was turned to her grandmother.

I almost stumbled, but just managed to regroup before I made a complete ass of myself. “You speak?” I whispered back. “Can you hear me?”

“Of course I can, silly. I’m as awake as you are.”

“But how?” I asked, not really knowing what else to say.

“My grandmother keeps a diary. She left it open on her desk one day when I went in to return her laundry, and I happened to see my name. I know I shouldn’t have, but I just couldn’t help myself. It was about my dancing–this dancing.”

“But that must mean…”

“Yes, the spell is broken, if that’s what it was. To be honest, I don’t know what’s come over us, although I’m not sure I much care either. I was just happy to learn that my grandmother was getting so much enjoyment out of it.”

Upon the next turn I glanced in her grandmother’s direction, who was furiously scribbling away on her sketch pad. “So you keep coming out here–”

“For her, yes. I owe her a lot for what she did for me a few summers ago, keeping me company while my parents duked it out. And on top of that, she doesn’t charge me rent.”

I stifled a laugh. “And what about that whole thing you told her about wanting to meet guys organically?”

“I’d say this qualifies, wouldn’t you?”

I nodded, not too obviously, and we continued to dance, danced until the dancing was over. As we parted, she whispered to me where she’d be eating lunch tomorrow, and at what time, and even though it would run up against my Intro. to Sociology class, I said I’d be there. Then I walked back to her grandmother, trying not to smile, until it dawned on me that I should be smiling–what guy wouldn’t be after dancing with a great girl like Stephanie?

“You looked good out there, dear,” Margaret said upon my return. “Like Fred Astaire.”

“I’ll have to look him up,” I said, helping her to her feet. “And I think I’ll take that schedule, after all. What you said about helping fate out a little, that sounds about right to me.”

***

Eventually, I told Alan. I didn’t want to, but he, too, began to notice how green his socks were getting. He called me out, and so I told him everything, including the part about how he had danced with a linebacker.

“So we just dance?” he asked perplexedly. “Nothing else happens? We don’t make anything happen?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I replied, slipping into a new pair of shoes. “A lot happens, it’s just not–what’s that word they use in your science classes? It’s not…quantifiable. Anyway,” I said, hopping up, “I’ve gotta go meet Stephanie. We’re going dancing.”

“But it’s five o’clock,” Alan objected. “And it’s not a half moon.”

“Strange as it may sound,” I said, heading for the door, “some people still like to dance during regular hours, and also while they’re awake.”

And that’s what Stephanie and I did: we danced at a local club on campus, amongst a crowd of our peers who were just as awake as we were. It’s true the atmosphere wasn’t quite as wondrous, and the movements were a bit banal compared to what we were used to, but somehow we still managed to enjoy ourselves, and afterward we went back to her grandmother’s house and played three-handed cribbage, Margaret winking every once in a while over the ‘secret’ we were keeping from Stephanie, and Stephanie squeezing my knee over our own. It kind of made me wonder what would happen if more of us went dancing in our sleep, and awoke to see the world anew.