The Sleepwalkers

We wanted out. Inside, it was dark and warm. We wanted to take those ragged breaths of night air, inhales sharp enough to shred our throats. We wanted out of the tent and out of our skins. We peeled back the tent flaps, and if we could, we would have peeled off our skin there, too, and left it in our sleeping bags. We couldn’t sleep like this, not when our skin felt this tight, and the air in our tent was this hot. Outside, it was cold and bright under the moon and stars. We took deep breaths and stifled our screams.

Mom and Dad slept in their own tent just a few feet away. Let them sleep, we said with our breaths. We walked on our toes, out of our campsite, across the campground, to the trail that led down to Lake Michigan. We wanted to go down that trail, and so we did. We knew what we were doing. We knew where to step to avoid the thick roots and where to duck our heads away from the low hanging branches. With our feet we could feel where the path changed from dirt to sand, and we could hear where the clustered woods thinned out to individual trees as we approached the open sand dunes. The darkness in the woods was colorless and quiet, but across the dunes that same darkness became bright and blue. There was a half moon and stars making their shapes in the sky. The occasional cloud pulled itself thin between us and the blue dome. We crested across the last sand dune and descended down to the shore. The water was calm, but not still. The waves were gentle, rocking the shore to sleep. We walked to the water’s edge and let the cool water kiss the tips of our toes. We knew where the water was in all the places it reflected back the light from the moon and the stars. Further out, we couldn’t tell where the sky stopped and the water began. It all looked like a sheet that had been pulled underneath itself, so that the horizon wasn’t some distant line out there but actually came up to where we were standing, like the line between Earth and sky was at our feet. We wanted out and we had found it. Out here, we could peel away our skin and let it fall into the water.

~

It didn’t matter which brother we were in the dark. We were both here. What one of us said, the other heard, and so it was both of us who were doing the speaking and the listening. We were two years apart in age. One of us was eight and one of us was six. One of us was short for our age and the other one was tall; we were the same height. We had the same skin and our nose turned in the same direction. Mom cut our hair with the same pair of scissors. We didn’t look like twins or like copies; we looked like one person. We looked like one person who had split himself into two. That wasn’t the same thing as looking identical or looking similar. We looked the same because we were the same. Some days the older brother was called Robin and some days the older brother was called Riley. Some days we were both the younger brother. Some days we didn’t answer to either name. We were the same person named Richard or Brad or Atticus. Some days we didn’t have a name at all, and in the space where we would call out to one another we made O-shapes with our mouths or copied the birds. Chick-a-dee-dee-dee, chick-a-dee-dee-dee.

We wanted out all the time. We wanted out of our beds and out of our house. We wanted to be out in that darkness rather than in our beds where all the quiet was. The quiet made us think. Thinking was not the same thing as knowing. Knowing was sure and solid. Thinking meant walking through a wild landscape where we had never been before. In bed, in the dark, in the quiet, we would think about our eyes and how they worked. Or we would think about our fingers and what it was like to feel them squeeze around our own wrists. We would think about what it meant to have eyes and fingers and bodies, and to have our bodies specifically. We would think about what it was like to be awake, what it was like to be awake as one person split in two, and not, for instance, what it was like to be two brothers who looked a lot alike. We would think about how different things would be if we were separate beings, maybe not even brothers anymore, but instead sisters or dogs or two strands of dune grass that bent in opposite directions. We didn’t like doing all that thinking. We wanted to be out in the darkness where we didn’t have to be different people who thought about things like that. We could just be the same person who knew things and wanted out. Mom would find us sitting at the top of the stairs or outside standing under the tree in our front yard. We didn’t know how to say what we were thinking about. We didn’t know why it was so scary. So we said different things.

Mom, we’re afraid of the Big Bang.

Mom, we’re afraid of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.

Mom, we’re afraid of the chicken and the egg.

Mom, we’re afraid of being born again.

She said, boys, you should be sleeping.

She said, boys, it’s the middle of the night.

She said, boys, there’s nothing you can do about that.

She said, boys, maybe you were sleepwalking.

It sounded right to us. We were walking around the house or outside in the grass or down to the beach, and everyone else was asleep. Everyone’s sleep hung in the air like a fog and we were out there walking through it, and everyone’s sleep clung to our arms and legs like dew or sweat. We were sleepwalkers.

~

During the day, we got our sunburns down at the beach, so we came down here to give it back. Brown boys don’t burn! Brown boys don’t burn! we yelled at Mom when she told us to put on sunscreen. We never remembered. Mom shrugged her shoulders and went to swim in the lake for a while. She told us to stay on the beach, and occasionally we would see her arms coming over the waterline and cutting back down. She swam back and forth, parallel to the shoreline, circling us like a fish looking for food. We stayed on the beach and built sandcastles. We pretended we were giants and destroyed each other’s creations until it was just flat, wet sand again. Then we built new ones and destroyed those, too. We didn’t put on sunscreen, even when our skin started to prickle. We were brown boys and we didn’t burn. We wanted to be dark, like Dad was in the summer, but it never worked that way. By the time we were walking back to the campsite, our skin was red and taut, like the skin of ripe fruit. Everywhere we touched it, everywhere it moved and stretched, our skin felt like it was being torn away from our bodies. Every time we complained, Mom just huffed her breath. We knew she would never say I told you so, but that was only because everyone knew it. Mom didn’t say things that everyone knew. It would have been a waste of words.

Dad stayed at the campsite when we went to the beach and slept through most of the day. He was awake when we came back, and when he saw us, not brown boys, but burnt boys, he grabbed towels, quarters, and a green bottle of aloe gel. The three of us walked down to the showers. Dad put in the quarters to start the water and started taking off his clothes. We took off our swim trunks. When it was warm enough, he rotated all three of us under the hot water, like pieces of a carousel under a waterfall. He ran his fingers through our hair to make sure all the sand got out and brushed away any grains that still stuck to our skin. Everywhere he touched us, it hurt. Everything burned and we were grateful that the shower hid our tears. While he rinsed himself, we looked at Dad’s tan backside and saw where it darkened down across his thighs and up his back. On the lower part of his legs, and across his face, shoulders, and arms, his skin was the color of wet dirt. That was what we wanted: skin so dark that it looked like it came from the ground.

When the water turned off, Dad patted us dry as lightly as he could and spread the aloe all over our bodies.

You should have listened to your mom, he said.

But brown boys don’t burn! We howled like dogs. We want to be dark like you!

But you have white skin, Dad said. White skin that burns.

Where? Where do we have white skin? We began looking all over our bodies, trying to find it. We lifted each other’s arms and looked in our armpits. We held up our feet to one another and checked our soles. We looked down at each other’s privates. It was lighter, sure, but we wouldn’t call it white. We knew our colors.

It’s right here, Dad said, and he pushed his thumbs hard into our burnt shoulders until we yelped like animals caught in a trap.

It’s right here, underneath, side-by-side, he said. You’ve got a brown dad and a white mom, so you’ve got brown skin with a little white in it, too.

We didn’t say anything else, because we had started crying again from the pain, quietly to ourselves. Dad kept covering us with the aloe without saying anything else. The aloe smelled like medicine and felt like thick paint being spread across our bodies.

Your skin will be darker when all this peels, Dad finally said. We smiled at that and wiped away our tears as gently as we could.

~

We were out on the beach at night, trying to give back our sunburnt skin. No, thank you, we said, while we peeled away our sunburns and let the flaky pieces fall back into the sand and water. We got carried away and kept peeling. One of us was being funny and put a piece of skin in his mouth. The other one was being funny, too, and did the same thing. We thought this is how we would always be the same person, by eating each other’s skin. We peeled off as much of our skins as we could, swallowed some pieces, let other ones fall away. The skin underneath was soft and new and a little bit darker. Not as dark as Dad, but as close as we could get.

These were not the first pieces of a body we had left on this shore. When we came here the first time, we were so young we barely remembered. Our family was the largest we had ever seen it; there were people there we didn’t even know. We were all here because Grandpa had died. He had been cremated, which was a word we didn’t understand yet. We thought it sounded like maybe he had been turned to stone. Someone came around and gave everyone little handfuls of soft, white sand. We held them in our hands as if we were cupping water. Somehow, this was Grandpa, but it didn’t look like him. Someone said Grandpa loved this beach, loved these dunes, loved this lake, and he wanted to be here forever. Everyone took their handfuls and waded out into the water. The sun was setting and the water was orange. We were the youngest, confused about what everyone was doing, and we just stood together. We didn’t know how to get from here to there. We had our handfuls, sure, but we didn’t really know. We didn’t know what it meant, how someone could become a handful of sand or what it meant to leave someone somewhere forever. What we did know is that we didn’t want him to get inside of us. We didn’t want to breathe him in, so we held our breath with big, puffed cheeks. When we finally walked into the water, we didn’t want to throw him up over our heads the way we sometimes did with wet sand when we were playing, because when we did that, the sand came right back down and got stuck in our hair or in our eyes, and we didn’t want Grandpa to get stuck there. And no one was really throwing him around like that anyways. Our whole family stood in the orange water, everyone keeping their distance, as if by being far enough away from one another we might not hear each other crying. We were standing in our own lakes. Our aunt and uncle, and our cousins, and Grandma, and Mom and Dad. They were in front of us. Dad kept trying to get close to Mom but she waded out farther than anyone else, until the water was up to her waist. She wanted out. We stayed where the water only passed above our ankles, and when we finally let our handfuls of Grandpa fall into the water, the small waves lapped him back across our feet, and he got stuck there for a second. We looked up to Mom then, because we were worried we did something wrong, that there was a problem with him being stuck to our feet like that, but we couldn’t say anything because Mom was crying, or something like crying. It was this awful wide-open sound that was low and close to the ground and even though her back was to us, we could see by the shape of her arms that she was pressing her handful of Grandpa into her chest, and he was falling down her front and into the water. When we looked down at our feet again, Grandpa was gone.

When everyone had left their handfuls of Grandpa out in the water, we all walked back to the shore and someone told us the story of the Sleeping Bear for the first time. While the sun was setting, someone told us that a mother bear and her two cubs swam across Lake Michigan to avoid a forest fire. The mother bear made it across but her cubs did not. She waited for them on this shore for so long that she fell asleep. The spirits knew how much she loved her cubs, and they covered her in blankets of sand and turned her into a sand dune. The spirits turned her cubs into two small islands out in the bay where the mother bear could watch them forever from where she slept. Someone said love made this land and now Grandpa was sleeping with the mother bear and her two cubs. Now Grandpa had been turned into sand and water and land.

Sometimes, it freaked us out to think about Grandpa sleeping here forever, where we built sandcastles and where Mom swam and where the sun burnt our skin instead of making us darker. We went sleepwalking and peeled away our sunburns and left it for Grandpa in the water, so he would know we were the same person and that we had been here with him, because we were too afraid to stay anywhere forever. We knew, because we were sleepwalkers who didn’t like to do much thinking, that we would never lay down our heads and no spirits would cover us in blankets of sand. It sounded good enough for everyone else, but we knew better. We wanted out.