Praying for Sleep

scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
    http://us.penguingroup.com

And can you, by no drift of conference, Get from him why he puts on this confusion, Grating so harshly all his days of quiet With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?
     
Hamlet, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

1/
    No Beast So Fierce

1
    Like a cradle, the hearse rocked him gently.
    The old vehicle creaked along a country road, the asphalt cracked and root-humped. He believed the journey had so far taken several hours though he wouldn’t have been surprised to find that they’d been on the road for days or weeks. At last he heard the squeal of bad brakes and was jostled by an abrupt turn. Then they were on a good road, a state road, and accelerating quickly.
    He rubbed his face across a satiny label sewn inside the bag. He couldn’t see the label in the darkness but he remembered the words elegantly stitched in black thread on yellow cloth.
    Union Rubber Products
Trenton, NJ 08606
MADE IN USA
    He caressed this label with his ample cheek and sucked air through the minuscule opening where the zipper hadn’t completely seated. The smoothness of the hearse’s transit suddenly troubled him. He felt he was falling straight down to hell, or maybe into a well where he’d be wedged immobile, head down, forever. . . .
    This thought aroused a piercing fear of confinement and when it grew unbearable he craned his neck and drew back his thick lips. He gripped the inside of the zipper with lengthy teeth, yellow and gray as cat’s claws, and with them he struggled to work the mechanism open. One inch, two, then several more. Cold, exhaust-scented air filled the bag. He inhaled greedily. The air diminished the bristle of claustrophobia. The men who took away the dead, he knew, called what he now lay in a “crash bag.” But he couldn’t recall these men ever taking away anyone dead from a crash. The dead ones died by leaping from the top of the stairwell in E Ward. They died from severed veins in their fat forearms. They died facedown in toilets and they died like the man this afternoon—a strip of cloth wound round and round and round his neck.
    But he couldn’t recall a single crash.
    His teeth rose from his lips again and he worked the zipper open further, eight inches, ten. His round shaved head emerged from the jagged opening. With his snarling lips and thick face he had the appearance of a bear—though one that was not only hairless but blue, for much of his head was dyed that color.
    Finally able to look about he was disappointed to find that this wasn’t a real hearse at all but merely a station wagon and it wasn’t even black but tan. The back windows weren’t shaded and he could see ghostly forms of trees, signs, power towers and barns as the wagon sped past—his view distorted by the misty darkness of the autumn evening.
    In five minutes he began on the zipper again, angry that his arms were pinioned helpless by, he muttered in frustration, “damn good New Jersey rubber.” He opened the crash bag another four inches.
    He frowned. What was that noise ?
    Music! It came from the front seat, separated from the back by a black fiberboard divider. He generally liked music but certain melodies upset him greatly. The one he now heard, a country-western tune, for some reason set off within him bursts of uneasiness.
    I hate this bag! he thought. It’s too damn tight.
    Then it occurred to him that he wasn’t alone. That’s it—the bag was filled with the souls of crashed and shattered bodies. The jumpers and the drowners and the wrist slitters.
    He believed that these souls hated him, that they knew he was an impostor. They wanted to seal him up alive, forever, in this tight rubber bag. And with these thoughts came the evening’s first burst of real panic—raw, liquid, cold. He tried to relax by using the breathing exercises he’d been taught but it was too late. Sweat popped out on his skin, tears formed in his eyes. He shoved his head viciously into the opening of the bag. He wrenched his hands up as far as they’d go and beat the thick rubber. He kicked with his bare feet. He slammed the bridge of his nose into the zipper, which snapped out