As he walked down the last row of graves on the way to the gravel path, he saw, pressed by the wind against the chain link fence separating the cemetery from the park, a finger’s length of frayed pink ribbon. He strode off course to where it was trapped and took it. Rubbing it between his fingers, he sought to verify its reality. In his imagination he saw the cemetery workers filling in the grave and cutting down the decorations. He wondered if there could have been enough time for all that since the memorial for Helen. It had been windy lately, and a shred might have easily blown free. He was so pleased to have found it. The little piece of material evidence confirmed his faith in Melody and what she’d been telling him.
Across the picnic table that night, he told her about the death of Helen Roan, the hit in the head that made him a sleeper, and his test, comparing the girl’s night grave and beribboned tree to the same scene in daylight. The two of them glowed pale blue against the dark, talking in low voices, not because they had to but because that’s the way they would have spoken on a spring night in the waking world. Then he showed Melody the piece of pink ribbon he’d found against the fence and spoke about how it immediately mended his perception of her and of being a sleeper.
“Owen, you have to understand,” she said. “At night, when we rise up from our sleeping bodies and walk the neighborhood, the world isn’t exactly like waking life. There are things that can influence the night world. You already know it has its own predators, the cutters and the miasma. Sometimes, something from your dreams can slip into the night world. 99.9 percent of what you’re seeing and experiencing is the same as the waking world, but there is a small percentage of times where you’ll run into something inexplicable. Something concocted by your ego or id or whatever those processes are that take place in the shadiest corners of your imagination. Nothing to worry about until it happens,” said Melody.
“The very fact it’s possible, though,” said Owen, “makes it difficult to believe any aspect of the night world.”
“Everything is mutable, not exactly what it’s made out to be, and neither completely one way or the other. There’s always room for change and speculation, even in the waking world. It’s part of the human condition. The same goes for the night.”
He nodded and paused before asking, “What are we going to do tonight?”
“Let’s visit some of your fellow citizens.”
“You mean go into people’s houses? Isn’t that wrong?”
“You were in your neighbor’s house the other night. I didn’t see you hesitate.” Melody pointed two houses up the street.
“I was chasing you,” he said.
“Did you learn anything?”
“I suppose, but spying on people isn’t my thing.”
“Don’t think of it as spying. It’s a unique opportunity to see the intimate aspects of others’ lives.”
“Shouldn’t they be private?”
“For the most part, yes. As a sleeper, you have a special responsibility to see how people live, and to know their joy and suffering. There’s nothing prurient about it. As a sleeper, you are called on to bear witness to the night.”
“Then why would the police arrest someone for peeping in another’s window?”
“That’s in the waking world. You have other responsibilities there.”
“Are you serious, Melody?” he asked. “That we’re expected to bear witness? But are we supposed to do something about whatever suffering or evil or joy we encounter?”
“Sometimes, if we can. It’s up to you.”
“Vague.”
“Come then,” she said, and stood. She led him, again, over the hedge, through the adjoining backyard, and to the street. “Choose a house at random,” she told him.
“Do people have to be awake? Does there need to be a lit window?”
She shook her head. “Any house is fine. Discoveries abound.”
Ten minutes later, they stood in a darkened room, leaning over a crib, watching a baby sleep. Owen made as if to push the mobile above the child, a herd of zebras, into motion, but his hand passed through it.
“So sweet,” said Melody.
They moved down the hall and found the parents’ room. A young couple slept in one another’s arms. The spring breeze blew in through the screen of the open window. A black dog in the corner of the room awoke and tracked the movements of the intruders. “Can it see us?” he asked.
“Maybe. Some can but not many.” That said, the dog started barking—loud, low—and fierce.
“Someone’s here,” said the woman in the bed.
Her partner stirred and said, “What was that?”
Melody walked through the wall to the outside and Owen quickly followed. They stepped off from the second story and floated like feathers to the ground.
“What did you make of that one?” she asked.
“Peaceful until we showed up,” he said.
A little while later, they spent some time in the attic apartment of a young woman writing a book. She had sheets of butcher paper taped on the walls of the cramped room. Using a Flair pen, she wrote her lines around herself and became like a fly in a spider’s web.
“Her name is Shiela Tobac,” said Melody, as the woman sat at a small desk only two feet away from them, bobbing her head as she wrote longhand in a journal dedicated to notes about her massive story. She wore a green T-shirt and a green cardigan sweater, shorts, sneakers with thick yellow soles, and white basketball socks. Her movements around the room bordered on the athletic. Even when she stood reading from some section of the wall, she bounced on her toes, her long red hair swaying wildly.
“She looks like a hard worker,” said Owen. “I mean she’s up and she’s down and traveling from one part of the room and its chapter to another corner to, I guess, check the continuity?”
“She’s crossed the line between genius and insanity,” said Melody.
“Heading in which direction?”
“Well, I come here now and then and try to find my way back into her story.”
“What’s it about?” he asked as the busy Shiela Tobac passed through them on the way to a distant chapter.
“Too much to get into,” she said. “I wouldn’t know how to start telling you about it.”
“I think she’s amazing, living inside her creation,” said Owen. By then, they were out on the rooftop. They stood at the edge and Owen waited for Melody to choose a way to go. Eventually, she leaped across the side yard and driveway below and landed on the roof next door. From there, she leaped again, high and at the peak of ascent almost weightless, jump after jump, all the way down the street. Ten houses in a row. He followed her, with a few stumbles. The last of those mishaps saw him trip and fall headfirst through the roof, through the second floor, to the living room of an abandoned house.
He landed in the middle of a candlelit scene. One man was sitting in a chair in a corner that the light could almost but not quite reach, his face and much of his body obscured. Two young men, just visible in the glow, were sitting in chairs facing the first man in the shadows. They gave him a satchel of money and he produced a plastic bag of large, live cicadas. The two traders immediately dug into their plastic bags, pulled out squirming specimens, and shoved them into their mouths. As they chewed, laughter spilled out of the darkness, and Owen leaped all the way to the roof.