Jeremy Saperstein

Dennis Givens had the sleep apnea real bad.

At least that’s what the voice, shrill and backwoods, intoned inside his head in the not-quite-wakeful dark of the early morning, when he woke up to survey his room. The alarm clock cast a faint red light to everything that seemed to grow brighter as Dennis woke up.

It might be sleep apnea, for all he knew. Sometimes, he woke up and had gauzy memories of lying on his back and feeling a watery thickness begin rising at the base of his throat, creeping up the bottom of his nasal passages and stopping his breathing. In his half-wakeful state, he felt like he was drowning in an ocean that had been inexplicably tossed into a deep and unmapped forest. He remembered light filtering through the canopy above as he struggled to breathe, knowing that even if he could somehow begin respiration that moving after that would be like swimming in a thickgelatin.

Sometimes he would wake up like this and be able to toss fitfully until he fell back into a deep slumber. Other times he would return completely to the world of the waking and lie on his back, eyes open in the darkness, believing he could hear the subtle changes in the gentle hum of his alarm clock that indicated the advance of minutes. On those nights, Dennis tried to get back to sleep for a while, then got out bed and padded silently to the television set and turned it on, then sat back on the edge of his bed, naked, and changed the channels, idly looking for anything to take his mind.

There wasn’t much on during those hours. One channel offered infomercials he had seen so often he would sometimes unthinkingly mutter the highpoints of the pitchman’s spiel along with him. Another channel used the time for public affairs programming, a talk show featuring two older white men incomprehensibly discussing minute details of current events while sitting in a faux-Scandinavian set that featured a lot of chrome and glass. Dennis thought the set looked like a bachelor pad from decades ago. Occasionally, the educational station stayed on the air past the normal midnight sign-off and broadcast old documentaries. There had been one on mental hospitals, another on the industries of the Northwest. The show Dennis remembered best, though, was one he has seen a couple of years ago about some country — Greenland or Iceland, he couldn’t remember. He could remember, though, the landscapes, full of lush greens punctuated by deep gray granite outcroppings, like clumps of mozzarella scattered over sauce-covered pizza dough.

On the nights he couldn’t sleep, Dennis would either watch television all night or fall asleep in front of the cursed appliance. Whichever, it wasn’t very restful and he supposed that if his job was a difficult one, he might have trouble, but all he really did was stare at a computer monitor — another screen — all day. Occasionally, he answered the phone and then typed commands that generated reports in response to whatever suit had asked him on the phone for numbers.

Dennis clearly understood his lack of importance to the organization where he had been working for the last few years. Any trained monkey could do his job, he knew, but it was a paycheck. The job paid his rent and didn’t make any difficult demands on him. If he didn’t fit in, or wasn’t being moved up the corporate ladder — well, that was okay with him. Most people his age didn’t understand. The ones Dennis met were usually working at the bottom for only a few months before they were moved, either out of the company or into a better position. Kyle was the one person who had stayed in a single position — in the mailroom - the entire time he had been there.

He didn’t remember meeting Kyle, and couldn’t remember how it had happened. Dennis guessed Kyle had been delivering mail one day and had noticed the portrait of Ché Guevara which Dennis had tacked into the soft cubicle wall above his desk, for no reason other than a vague desire to provide a response of some sort to all of the photos of children and fishing trips that adorned the walls of the other cubicles.

Kyle was his friend, Dennis supposed, even though he felt certain that if they didn’t work together, they wouldn’t exchange one word. As it was now, Kyle stopped and chatted with Dennis several times during the day, recounting his weekend triumphs at the bar — Dennis was fairly certain most of them were fictionalized or at least heavily embellished - and plotting grandiose future accomplishments.

Kyle wasn’t his dream best friend, it was true, but, Dennis reflected, he was about the best friend he had, and if Dennis spent time outside his apartment or work, it was generally with Kyle.

This Friday afternoon Dennis was planning an evening with Kyle. They would go across the street to the imaginatively named My Place for a few after-work beers. If the pattern of previous evenings held true, Dennis would return, half-drunk, to his apartment and would hear the next Monday about some beautiful but tragically flawed woman (usually they were crazy or impossibly depressed) who had entered the bar just after Dennis had left.

Dennis suspected the stories — which usually ended with Kyle scoring - were pretty much untrue. Kyle had told him one about his first sexual encounter, a heated makeout session in the closet of a hotel room that had been rented by somebody’s older sister for a high school drinking party. Dennis thought that was probably Kyle’s only such encounter, despite the tales he told on breaks at work.

However it turned out, and despite the fact the Dennis dreaded the evening on the surface, he was inwardly looking forward to having an excuse to go out and drink beer. He didn’t keep beer in the refrigerator, for fear that whatever problems he had would turn him to drink, and the nights he went out with Kyle were the nights he slept the soundest, without interruption.

At quitting time, the pair clocked out and left behind the office to walk across the street, where they joined the early crowd of post-middleaged regulars who watched afternoon television and drank away the afternoons of their retirements. As usual, they took seats at a table — ‘their’ table — in the back corner with their backs to the wall so they could observe the goings-on. Kyle went to the bar to order their first pitcher and Dennis surveyed the regulars.

Two girls at the pool table immediately caught his eye. They were not the middle-aged regulars. One of the girls had straight jet-black hair and a look in her eyes that reminded Dennis of a boy he had went to grade school with. Terry was his name, and he always seemed to be wearing a dirty, chipped cast on his arm, the result of some crazy stunt he had pulled. Dennis remembered that he was always in trouble, and tried to stay away from him as much as he could, since to be near him inevitably meant that Dennis would get in trouble as well. The other girl was plain, with curly brown hair that was cut straight across her forehead. Both girls were smoking and drinking beer, laughing and playing pool, and Dennis thought that the one with black hair seemed much more at ease, smoking her cigarette as if it were just one more soldier in a march of thousands. Brown-hair seemed very conscious of her smoking, putting on what Dennis thought were obvious poses when she remembered to.

"Here you go, killer, drink it up!" His observation was interrupted by Kyle’s return with the beer. He followed Dennis’ gaze and let out a breath. "Saaaaay! There’s some fresh meat for us!" Dennis cringed at the bad-boy talk from Kyle. An ill-fitting affectation, he thought.

They drank their beers and made small talk while both of them kept a surreptitious eye on the girls who continued to play pool in the absence of any competition challenging them for the table. It was somewhere in the middle of the second or third pitcher when Kyle got his bright idea.

"Hey, you play pool, right? Let’s play ‘em!" Dennis never played pool and his stomach did flip-flops at the thought of actually having to talk to the girls in person, though he had had conversations with them in his mind that were undoubtedly leading directly to marriage. Before Dennis could react, Kyle had grabbed the beer and was walking towards the pool table. Dennis followed the beer slowly, wishing he were anywhere but there.

Kyle dug two quarters out of his pocket and made a show of loudly slamming them on the siderail of the pool table. "You girls want to play teams?"

The girl with the black hair spoke. "Sure. I’m Natasha and this," she waved the hand which held her beer in the general direction of her companion, "This is Louise. She’s a lawyer!"

Louise grimaced. "Well, um, actually, I’m just a paralegal." She laughed nervously and looked down.

"Well, I’m Kyle and this is Dennis. We’re CEOs!" Dennis, who was in the middle of a swallow of beer, snorted, frightening himself and splashing beer on his face.

"Um, actually, I, I mean, we work in the mailroom," Dennis said, wiping his face with his sleeve. It was easier to say he worked in the mailroom than to try and explain where in the middle management he stood.

"Whatever," said Kyle, "We’ll even let you girls break."

The foursome played a few half-hearted games with banter and mock amazement when one of them made a particularly difficult shot. It came out that Natasha and Louise both worked at the same law firm, Natasha as a secretary and Louise a paralegal who was taking night classes for a degree in Art History. When they were out of quarters, Kyle poured himself another beer. "That’s that! More wine!" he said and sat down at a empty table near the pool table. Dennis, already a bit tipsy grabbed the pitcher and started to pour himself another beer, then caught himself and spoke to Louise and Natasha. "Ladies?" he said, pushing the pitcher in the air towards them and raising his eyebrows. The girls briefly exchanged a glance that Dennis couldn’t read and Natasha turned and held her glass out to Dennis.

As he was pouring, Dennis thought to himself that he might have been wrong to doubt Kyle’s Monday morning tales of conquest. He was startled to realize that Kyle was talking to him. "C’mon, Dennis! Snap out of it!" He turned to the girls and said "He’s like this at work, too. He would have been fired long ago of ol’ Kyle wasn’t his pal!"

Dennis could detect a bit of slurring in Kyle’s speech and realized that he was probably a bit drunk himself. "I’m here, I’m here!" he said a little more loudly then he meant to, then, remembering Kyle’s slurring, he carefully enuncuated, "What do you want?"

"Well, I was just finding out that ol’ Natasha and Lulu here have never visited the reservoir, and I was saying we should go over there now," he said, shooting Dennis a glance that seemed to hold some meaning, at least fot Kyle.

The reservoir was a place that had held fear for Dennis, back when he was in grade school. It was a place for the big kids, a place he dared not go unless he had somehow been roped into one of Terry’s adventures. There was a ramshackle clubhouse built into the side of a huge old oak, with plywood walls and roof, where Terry went to steal smokes and, sometimes, beer. Inside the shack was an old mattress and a lot of empty beer cans. Dennis remembered an older boy knocking him down and smashing his fists into his head and laughing one winter day, before he had realized that he always got hurt when he followed Terry and drifted into another clique.

It wasn’t as scary now that Dennis was older than any of the big kids — in fact, he thought, he was a grown-up now in that strange pecking order that kids automatically calculate, and he meant only danger and punishment to anybody younger he met in the reservoir now. "Okay, sure, let’s go!" he said, drinking the rest of his beer in a swallow.

They walked, a little unsteadily, to Kyle’s van, parked across the street, Kyle and Natasha leading the way and talking animatedly while Dennis and Louise walked behind them in silence. Dennis knew he should say something, something funny that would make them all laugh, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.

Kyle's van was a battered old Ford cargo model with no windows on the sides and a bench seat for passengers that had been scavenged from another van. It wasn't attached to anything, so it tended to move around with Kyle's stops and starts if nobody was seated there to weight it down. There was an adhesive outline of a Christian fish on one rear door, the original silver medallion long gone

Kyle drove them to the parking lot of the reservoir, which was actually a deep wooded area that that the ciry had built in response to a huge storm and flood years before, when Dennis and Kyle were not even in school yet. The reservoir was a man-made valley where storm water would run off to in the event of another storm, which had never come. Without floodwaters to govern them, trees and bushes had taken over the valley, giving the city a little nature preserve within the urban sprawl. A while ago, noting the lack of further huge storms, the city engineers had bulldozed a road down to the side of the forest and put signs up calling the woods exactly that.

Once they were seated and Kyle was backing out of the company parking lot, Dennis wondered to himself if this was wise. Kyle had downed at least as many beers as Dennis, who felt warm and loving towards all mankind which certainly indicated that he at least a little tipsy. Let it ride, he thought. Live a little! He thought he sensed warmth behind Louise's eyes and smile when he looked at her. He thought he might be about to get lucky and he imagined how Monday's conversation with Kyle would go when they could compare notes - he and Natasha certainly seemed to be hitting it off - on their mutual conquests. "We made out pretty hot," Dennis imagined himself saying, "But she's really a pretty sweet girl." Even in his daydreaming, Dennis couldn't hear himself speaking about a girl in the same guttural way Kyle did. "Oh, yeah! That Natasha was wild! We went out to the woods, and then - bam! - we're here!"

Dennis started and realized that the van had stopped and Kyle was announcing their arrival. "We're here! Let's go for a walk. Man, it's dark out. I wish I had a flashlight that worked in here, but it's sitting on my counter at home." Kyle and Natasha opened their doors, but Louise, who was sitting next to the sliding door, didn't move.

They got out of the van. Dennis was struck by how dark it was. There was no moon, and he could see only the vaguest hints of the figures only a few feet away outside the van. "You guys go," she said. "I think I'll stay here. I'm not feeling quite right." She turned to Dennis and put her hand on his thigh as she asked, "Would you stay here with me? I'd feel kind of funny in the dark by myself."

Dennis could hardly believe it. He nodded, realized that Louise couldn't see his action in the dark, then uneasily patted her hand. "Sure. No problem. You guys go on!" he called.

Natasha and Kyle giggled and walked away from the van. Dennis felt very aware of his hand, still resting on top of Louise's, which was still resting on his thigh. In a dizzying moment, he realized he was beginning to get an erection. Think about sports! he thought. Think about something - anything - else! He worked his jaw, feeling his very dry tongue stick to the roof of his mouth. His eyes were beginning to adjust to the thick night, and he could make out the outline of Louise's face as she turned her head towards his, paused with her nose directly in front of his, then tilted her head, closed her eyes and kissed him hard on the lips.

Dennis was shocked. He stifled a small laugh of joy. I'm kissing a girl! he thought. This is actually happening! As soon as he thought it might be unreal, he realized how unreal it all was. All of it - the beer, the night and now this made him feel as if he was separating from his earthly body for a moment, and that he was floating above the back seat of the van, watching the couple below make out. Funny, the boy seemed a reluctant participant. His hands remained awkwardly staged, one on top of Louise's, the other resting on the back of the seat above her shoulders. Kyle would have been all over her. Kyle! What would Kyle do? Jesus Christ! Move that other hand over! Touch her! Put your arm around her! Dennis shook his head back and forth involuntarily, shaking off his lack of awareness, as he moved his free hand to Louise's shoulders and firmly pressed her lips with his own.

They remained that way for some time. It seemed like a moment and an eternity to Dennis. Then he felt her tongue, looking for entrance at his lips. He let loose a surprised snort.

Louise stopped and pulled her head back. In the dark, Dennis could see her staring at him. He started to mumble an apology, felt the heat coming to his cheeks that would have been accompanied with a bright reddening, then he moved his head forward and pulled her towards him and resumed the eternal kiss. There was no point in trying to explain his joyous surprise at her tongue.

As they kissed, Dennis could smell her hair and skin. Both smelled of Ivory soap - a nice, clean smell that Dennis had previously only associated with his grandmother. He moved one hand and ran it through Louise's hair. For the moment, he no longer cared about his future or anybody else's for that matter. Just him and Louise, that's all there was, by God!

He noticed a lack of response on her side and he gently pulled away. Louise was staring at a point just over his left shoulder in a strange way. "Hey, what's the matter? What do you see?" he asked.

Louise's response was to begin rotating her gaze further to the right, away from his head. Then she began to convulse spastically and grunt.

Dennis was frightened and scooted away on the seat as far as he could from her, slamming his back into the wall of the van. He tried to yell out, but his throat was as dry as if he had been eating sand. Louise, meanwhile, continued to violently shake and her lower torso had begun to vacate the seat and move to the floor, dragging her head with.

She's having a seizure! Dennis realized and tried to remember what he had been told to do in such cases. Terry had been an epileptic and had told Dennis what to do in case he had a seizure. Keep her from swallowing her tongue! he thought, and looked around for something he could put in her mouth. There was nothing he could see in the van, and he was remembering that he had been told that such a procedure caused more harm than good at any rate. Keep them from hurting themselves, he thought, or maybe remembered. He reached over to hold her head and keep it from slamming into the dirty floor of the van and, as suddenly as she had started, she stopped and became still, only a thick snore giving any indication that she was still breathing.

"Hey, Louise!" he shook her gently. "Are you okay?" She loudly snored in response. Hearing he deep and rhythmic breathing, Dennis remembered that it had been some time since he had taken a breath. He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and took a deep breath, then another. Unconsciously, he began to match Louise's breathing.

He reached over and laid her gently on the floor of the van, then took his jacket off and laid it under her head. Louise continued to snore.

Dennis rapidly became aware of the walls of the van becoming closer and closer. Feeling panic stir within him, he quickly stood and drove his head firmly into the roof of the van. What would Kyle do now, he wondered, or what would Terry do? Almost as quickly he realized that this sort of thing just wouldn't happen to them.

Crouching a little now, he carefully stepped over Louise's prone body to the door of the van and opened it. He jumped out, then turned to to the interior of the van again and held his breath for a moment. He could hear the deep and rhythmic snoring of Louise and he turned away again, in the direction Natasha and Kyle had walked off in. At least it might have been the direction they had gone, Dennis was no longer certain of any direction and he moved his hand withou thinking, so he could keep the van within his touch.

Dennis held his breath again and listened carefully for any audible sign of the other couple. Nothing but the snoring. He put his back against the passenger door of the van and slid down until he was sitting on the ground, leaning against the van. The ground was surprisingly damp and cool.

Dennis didn't know what to do. He was stuck there, waiting for Kyle to come back. Panic struck then. What if Kyle never comes back? He forgot for the moment that the sun would rise eventually, illuminating this tableau of van in meadow with the snoring post-seizure victim. He was alone. His heart began to beat more quickly, and he remembered the terror of being a child, lost on a shopping trip his mother. All around him were bustling shoppers, all wearing the same brown wool coats as his mother. A sob escaped him. He thought of the documentary on Greenland again and wondered if they had forests as deep and dark as this one and he knew, that if it was daylight, he would be able to look up at the canopy above him and it would seem as if he was at the bottom of a deap sea.