Wild Awake

until I knew everything, everything, and I could hear all the music I had ever heard looping through my head.
    I circle and circle, my knees weeping blood, until the pages are stained and torn and I can’t see the notes at all.
    When the sun comes up, I stop circling and march up the stairs. Birds are chirping in the backyard trees, industrious feathered machines, reminding me of all the work I have to do. I had better get some sleep so I can wake up, eat the first of the oatmeals, and go back to the piano refreshed. Sleep is important for memorization—that’s another thing I’ve heard. I ought to have been taking naps all this time.
    I go into my parents’ bathroom and click open the medicine cabinet. I twist open the Costco-sized bottle of ibuprofen, gravely dispense myself six orange tablets, and swallow them with water from the tap.
    I go to my room and lie on my bed with the lights off, but nothing happens.
    Something needs to happen.
    I need to go to sleep so I can wake up so I can practice piano so I can get Serious.
    I lie in bed five more minutes and don’t fall asleep at all. Reality whangs horribly in my ears. I feel like a glow stick that’s still glowing the morning after Halloween.
    I need to sleep so I can wake up so I can practice piano so I can snarfle with Skunk so I can wake up so I can get the situation completely under control.
    I can’t sleep.
    Why can’t I sleep?
    A minute later I still can’t sleep. I get up and go downstairs and smoke two medicinal-sized joints, then go upstairs and take ten more ibuprofen and a handful of sleeping pills I find in my parents’ bedroom, then go back downstairs, throw on some smooth jazz, and lie down on the floor under the piano.
    In a few minutes or half an hour or maybe the next day a blue haze comes over me and I don’t know if I’m dreaming or tripping or what but whatever it is it’s heavy and strong and it hurts a little less than whatever the fuck was happening before.

chapter twenty-eight
    Denny is here, and I’m so confused when I wake up and he’s dragging me out from under the piano that I promptly roll onto my stomach and puke.
    “Nice, Kiri,” he says, arching one eyebrow appraisingly. “Real classy.”
    When I lift my head to look at him, another squirt of puke shoots up my throat: flecks of pink and orange. Electric lemonade.
    I want to be back under the piano. It’s cozy down there. Like curling up under the car you’ve just been hit by and going to sleep. I grab a piano leg with one hand and start pulling myself back under. The piano is a big, kindly whale looming over me in a comforting way. As long as I’m under there, nothing can crush me.
    Denny crouches and grabs my ankle to thwart my return to the mother ship. I make a grunt of protest and thrash my aching leg.
    “Damn, Kiri, how’d you cut up your legs like that?”
    I groan louder, succeed at twisting my ankle out of his grasp, and clamp my knees to my chest. There. Much better. I am a turtle sleeping with the whale, and Denny is a bothersome crab that keeps trying to drag me away with his pincers. Go away, crab. Go away, Sir Crabulous . I have a vague memory that I went to the sea last night. There were ships and clouds and a magnolia tree that picked up and flew like a bird. Also a woman, some sort of witch, who followed me in her car until I dodged her at Granville Island. I remember being wet. Soaked, in fact. I think I was dipped in sacred water like Achilles. I might have taken a swim.
    Oh, I remember. I did take a swim. And the witch-woman stood on the pier and screamed, not realizing I was a turtle.
    “You smell like dead fish,” says Denny.
    Naturally. I am a turtle.
    “Why are your piano books wet?”
    It doesn’t matter. All that music is memorized. I summoned it in my sleep.
    “Would you sit up and answer me?”
    Someone spins around my turtle shell, and the rusty blade of Denny’s face appears over mine.
    “Kiri? Hey. Kiri?”
    Turtle out.
    The next time I wake up, there’s loud music playing and male voices talking in the kitchen. I hear Denny.
    “Yeah, I think she’s just hungover. But, like, hella hungover, dude.”
    I pull my head back into my shell. Whatever.
    The time after that, the lights are off and the house is quiet. Whoever was here has gone away. I gurgle and spoon the piano leg. Love.
    I close my eyes. Turtle in, turtle out.
    The next time I wake up, I hear a basketball game playing on TV.
    The next time I wake up, I smell