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I’m quite sure it isn’t right to call it a dream. But in the night the sound came into my poor battered head once again, the music and chanting and the clash of metal I had heard before, and there was the feeling of heat on my face and a swell of savage joy rising from the special place inside that had been empty for so long now. I woke up standing by the front door with my hand on the doorknob, covered with sweat, content, fulfilled, and not at all uneasy as I should have been.
I knew the term “sleepwalking,” of course. But I also knew from my freshman psychology class that the reasons someone sleepwalks are usually not related to hearing music. And I also knew in the deepest level of my being that I should be anxious, worried, crawling with distress at the things that had been happening in my unconscious brain. They did not belong there, it was not possible that they could be there—and yet, there they were. And I was glad to have them. That was the most frightening thing of all.
The music was not welcome in the Dexter Auditorium. I did not want it. I wanted it to go away. But it came, and it played, and it made me supernaturally happy against my will and then dumped me by the front door, apparently trying to get me outside and—
And what? It was a jolt of monster-under-the-bed thought straight from the lizard brain, but . . .
Was it a random impulse, uncharted movement by my unconscious mind, that got me out of bed and down the hall to the door?
Or was something trying to get me to open the door and go outside? He had told the kids I would find him when the time was right—was this the right time?
Did someone want Dexter alone and unconscious in the night?
It was a wonderful thought, and I was terribly proud to have it, because it meant that I had clearly suffered brain damage and could no longer be held responsible. Once again I was blazing new trails in the territory of stupid. It was impossible, idiotic, stress-induced 266
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hysteria. No one on earth could possibly have so much time to throw away; Dexter was not important enough to anyone but Dexter. And to prove it, I turned on the floodlight over the front porch and opened the door.
Across the street and about fifty feet to the west a car started up and drove away.
I closed the door and double-locked it.
And now it was my turn once more to sit up at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and pondering life’s great mystery.
The clock said 3:32 when I sat down, and 6:00 when Rita finally came into the room.
“Dexter,” she said with an expression of soporific surprise on her face.
“In the flesh,” I said, and it was exceedingly difficult for me to maintain my artificially cheerful facade.
She frowned. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing at all,” I said. “I just couldn’t sleep.”
Rita bent her face down toward the floor and shuffled over to the coffeemaker and poured herself a cup. Then she sat across the table from me and took a sip. “Dexter,” she said, “it’s perfectly normal to have reservations.”
“Of course,” I said, with absolutely no idea what she meant,
“otherwise you don’t get a table.”
She shook her head slightly with a tired smile. “You know what I mean,” she said, which was not true. “About the wedding.”
A small bleary light went on in the back of my head, and I very nearly said Aha. Of course the wedding. Human females were obsessive on the subject of weddings, even it if wasn’t their own.
When it was, in fact, their own, the idea of it took over every moment of waking and sleeping thought. Rita was seeing everything that happened through a pair of wedding-colored glasses. If I could not sleep, that was because of bad dreams brought on by our up-coming wedding.
I, on the other hand, was not similarly afflicted. I had a great deal of important stuff to worry about, and the wedding was something that was on automatic pilot. At some point I would show up, DEXTER IN THE DARK
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it would happen, and that would be that. Clearly this was not a viewpoint I could invite Rita to share, no matter how sensible it seemed to me. No, I had to come up with a plausible reason for my sleeplessness, and in addition I needed to reassure her of my enthusiasm for the wonderful
looming event.
I looked around the room for a clue, and finally saw something in the two lunch boxes stacked beside the sink. A great place to start: I reached deep into the dregs of my soggy brain and pulled out the only thing I could find there that was less than half wet.
“What if I’m not good enough for Cody and Astor?” I said. “How can I be their father when I’m really not? What if I just can’t do it?”
