Awake
by Tara Srinivasan
When Dev wakes up his legs are completely tense, toes pointed. He can’t move them for a few seconds and all morning he feels a dull ache in his upper thighs. He mentions this to Alia, who is reading a magazine—she still buys magazines—and she says vaguely, “Sleep paralysis,” licking her index finger to flip a page.
The next morning it happens again, for longer. When it’s over he nudges Alia to tell her. “Light as a feather, stiff as a board,” she mumbles from under the duvet.
He has no idea what she means. “Are you sleeptalking again?”
“You know, the levitation thing,” she says, emerging to throw off the covers and swing her legs off the bed. “Didn’t you ever do that in school? We had a coven. I never floated, though.” She hums her way to the bathroom.
Alia never seems to grasp how different their childhoods were. A coven? He thinks back to school. Once they pushed a junior into the pool, knowing he couldn’t swim. Once they jumped off a wall, watched their blood absorb into the muddy ground.
⦿
It begins to escalate. At breakfast Dev feels his legs stop feeling, his arms thunk onto his knees. He tries to ask Alia to call a doctor but his mouth won’t make the sentence. When he can speak again, he is angry. How could she not notice what was happening? “What do you mean?” she asks, bewildered. “You were talking to me. You said we should get the blue curtains, not the green.”
On the train, just as he gets to his stop, this sense of a waking nightmare as he’s hit by backpacks and ponytails and unruly children. When he comes back to himself he’s swiping his ID at the office door, a coffee in his hand.
Fork halfway to his mouth at dinner, Alia telling a story about her colleague’s cat. The waiter stands over them as his legs grow leaden and his mouth traps his scream. Then Alia says, “I thought you hated eggplant.”
“You know I do.”
“Why’d you order it as your entree, then?”
⦿
He sees a doctor. He doesn’t tell Alia, who disapproves of what she calls his “tendency to hypochondria.” The doctor, stocky and clean-shaven, listens gravely to his symptoms, checks his reflexes, asks how he’s been sleeping and eating, does he drink, smoke, etc. Says, “Physically, sir, you are fine.”
“I’m not making this up,” Dev says.
“Try to get more sleep,” says the doctor, who looks about ten years old. “Maybe don’t watch the news before bed?”
On the way home it happens again, and when he regains control he finds himself sitting on the pavement, an ice-cream cone dripping vanilla down his sleeve.
⦿
Now he has to tell Alia. He chooses Sunday after lunch. Her face is soft, receptive, as he explains that it’s getting worse. “Honey,” she says, carefully, “I believe that you think something is happening to you.”
“Something is happening to me.”
“That’s what I said.” But it isn’t, and she knows he knows it. Alia is a fixer. He watches her reach for a compromise.
⦿
A specialist doctor: older woman, no-nonsense. An array of tests. It happens amidst the clacks of an MRI, and again while the doctor takes his medical history (when Dev says this, she shows him the notes she’s been taking—all the answers to her questions, delivered straight from his mouth). He is trapped in these fluorescent rooms, knowing that the only way out requires a horrible answer. Cells mutating in his body, tumours pressing against his organs—any of these will be a relief.
But: clear, clear, clear. There’s nothing wrong with him, except for the elongating stretches of time in which his body controls his brain instead of the other way around. He wakes to find himself at self-checkout, scanning toilet paper and netted tomatoes. Staring at himself in a mirror, a razor curved against his cheek. Alia’s head resting on his shoulder as she says, “I love when you tell that story.”
⦿
He joins reddit communities and attempts implausible solutions. Not lying down. Lying with his legs in the air and his butt against the wall. Is this a sleep thing? An anxiety thing? He considers therapy but his sister went once and all she did afterwards was cry and accuse him of “not holding space” for her, and anyway they don’t have the money now, not after all those bills for all those clean, clean scans.
So maybe it’s fine. Maybe the body version of himself is the better version. Think of those times he comes to and the whole conference room is laughing at a joke his body made. Think of the sob in his sister’s voice when she calls to thank him for the flowers (“But you never remember my anniversary!”), or Alia glowing with sweat, thrilled that he’s signed them up for the tennis lessons she’d coveted for years. And there’s a joy to knowing that he’s abdicated all decision-making. He learns to luxuriate in the stretches of nothingness before he wakes to something new. Salt spray from the ocean, the lights coming on at the end of a movie.
⦿
About six months later it disappears as if it’s never been. The redditors on r/medicalmysteries say it’s common; “psychosomatic gaslighting,” one user calls it. Suddenly his time is returned to him, his brain once more master of the endless seconds that make up the endless minutes of his endless days. He’s silent in meetings, knocking back paper cups of coffee and avoiding eye contact. At tennis he foot-faults, his breath coming in heaves. He can’t connect satisfyingly with the ball. Later his face feels flushed as he fights the vending machine for a drink.
“I think it was just a concentration thing,” Alia says on the drive home, reaching across to touch his wrist, “you’re normally so focused, but today you looked like you were off in another world.”
Tara Srinivasan has lived in Chennai, Singapore and New Delhi. She has a BA in English Literature and a constant, unrequited love for stray cats. You can find her on Twitter @taralikestea.
