Insomnis

A car screeches into her dream where she is tiny and sitting on a sunny lily pad and then she is furious and wide-smacking awake in the dark city night of her room as the car screeches and squeals away leaving rubber on the road, taking her precious and precarious sleep with it. The sheets are soaked and bits of far-off laughter float in the open window on a humid current of air, cutting through the thick summer night, coming over from Gottingen Street, from the parking lot behind the house, from yards and sidewalks, in through the window, to the woman who won’t sleep between now and dawn.

The doctor supposes she has transient insomnia. “From moving so much?” she says. He laughs. Well, yes, from that too. But he means short-term insomnia. As opposed to intermittent — on and off — or chronic — constant — insomnia.

“But I thought it would be better when I moved home to Nova Scotia,” she whispers.

“Maybe it will get better,” he says, “maybe when it’s winter, when the air is cool.”

“Maybe not,” she says. “It’s always worse in the winter. And then it’s not just insomnia — it’s seasonal claustrophobia, too . . . winter.”

He laughs. “Location, location, location . . . maybe you should move out of the city. Maybe you should move to a better part of the city. My diagnosis is chronic bouts of transient insomnia. Stress-induced. Go to sleep . . . think about moving somewhere nicer,” he whispers, his finger on her nipple.

The doctor turns his head on the pillow and his lips touch her earlobe and he exhales wet breath and slowly spreads his fingers over her neck. He murmurs a story about whitewater canoeing and stars and pretty things until he snores deeply and falls into sleep with his leg across her stomach and hand sticking to her ribs. It’s the fifth time he’s found her late-night dancing and the first night she’s brought him home.

Outside, a woman’s shrill voice catches in the thick hot air: “Here, kitty-kitty.” A car starts in the parking lot outside. Kitty does not come and the woman hollers again as the car backs up and then drives off. “Kitty-kitty, come in now. It’s past late, Lister. Kitty, you stupid kitty, it’s way past late.”

The car noise fades and then it’s just him snoring in her ear and then more “Lister, Lister, Mister Lister” — the lady’s voice rising and stretching on each Lister as though Lister might be sitting in a treetop and she must throw his name up through the leaves. But outside, the cat does not come.

Inside, the snoring does not stop. She nudges the doctor awake and he snaps upright, rubs his temples. Lies back down. Pulls her to him. “You should drink less coffee,” he whispers.

“It’s always like this,” she says. “I am a creature of the night.”

“Poor you,” he says. “Poor creature.”

“Poor you,” she says. “What about being on call and not sleeping?”