Where the Green Grass Ends
by L.I. Henley
The dream goes like this: barefoot in the grass, I follow the white brick wall that separates the gated community from the sprawling golf course behind it. My left-hand grazes the wall as I pass a dozen back patios with the same glass tables, the same expandable umbrellas, deck chairs, potted mums, hoses coiled perfectly into stacked loops. The blinds are closed in each dim window of each sleeping house. One of the houses is where I live with my partner, JM, who is sleeping as everyone else sleeps.
At the end of the grass is the end of the white retaining wall, the end of the gated community, the end of everything manicured and managed. Here, the grass is dead and the sand is gritty, more like tiny boulders or jagged wings. The temperature is ten degrees colder, the air thinner. Sage and absence replace the smells of chlorine and fertilizer. There are no rows of boxy houses, just a few outposts that all lean further east toward Wonder Valley, Rice, Phoenix. I have to step carefully now, have to strain my eyes to watch for sharp, wild things.
I dare my body further out into the bajadas of my birthplace, to the Mojave town of Joshua Tree, to Sunset Road, to the little bedroom where my crib is still set beneath a falling sky of mirrors and shapes. When I arrive, the only sounds are the mating calls of crickets and the whine of a dry, downslope wind over telephone lines.
Inside my old bedroom, I pick up the little baby that is babbling away at the mobile and ask it, Baby, why aren’t you sleeping? Are you going to be like this your whole life?
It isn’t until the sound of a real baby, or rather, a toddler jolts my body with its screams that I realize I’d been sleeping. Rita, my neighbor to the west, likes to let her little boy outside for his a.m. temper tantrums so that we can all suffer together. But if it had not been him that woke me, it would have been the lawn mowers and blowers. It would have been a pain in my leg, my back, my stomach. It would have been the sheets against a patch of suddenly hypersensitive skin.
When you live in a gated community in a resort town and the little boxed house you rent is intimately sardined with all the others, you live by the community’s schedule. The unnaturally green stretch of lawn that runs behind all the porches must be beautified at first light. Parents send out their children as soon as the gardeners have finished. From there, it is a free-for-all: the seniors’ morning talk shows on full blast, the summer-school kids getting in one more round of Pop Pop Snappers on the sidewalks before they board the bus, the mothers talking into their cell phones as they keep one eye on the kids’ pyrotechnics.
When I sit up and hoist my legs over the side of the bed, the room spins. Standing is difficult. Sitting is difficult. And somehow, sleeping is the most difficult. Why hadn’t the Ambien worked?
My eighty-five-year-old grandmother told me the Ambien was stronger than the Lunesta. The musty ring box full of sleeping pills came with a handwritten note: “Take 1 whole Ambien for plenty of ZZZZ’s.” In her shaky cursive, she signed off, “Sweet dreams, baby,” and drew a happy face with X’s over the eyes.
I was hoping for a twelve-hour coma where not even screaming kids or street-legal fireworks would wake me, where I could drive the car straight into one of the community pools and not wake up. But I’d taken an Ambien the last four nights and averaged only two or three hours. I’d not somnambulated or chowed down on sticks of margarine or called a sex hotline like the television commercials warned I might. The recurring dream where I walked the white wall at dusk like a female protagonist in a Charlotte Perkins Gilman story was all I’d gotten out of the heavy hypnotic.
But maybe the dream is something to pay attention to. Finding the place where the grass dies and I can walk to Joshua Tree, walk into my childhood bedroom where the sleeplessness began, and hold that little me, awake in the lonely crib, agape at the quaking world.
It’s difficult to think on account of the screaming and the lack of sleep and the near-impenetrable brain fog I’ve had for several months now. Outside my window, the toddler is naked, red in the face, belligerent as all hell. I imagine grabbing him by his curly blond head and tackling him to the grass. “You’re out of your goddamn mind,” I would say, pinning him by his small bare shoulders.
I decide that it is a crawling morning. Or my body decides, and I don’t argue. It’s just easier not to fight with gravity this early in the day. Better to save the fight for later when I have to leave the house to tutor the sixth-grader over in Bermuda Dunes. Still in my nightshirt and underwear, I crawl down the hall past the guest bedroom where JM sleeps on an air mattress. I can hear him snoring softly and continue down the hall to the living room.
Our dog, Beatrix, does a double-take from the couch. She’s seen me crawl a few times before but still, she’s not so sure about it. She walks, she crawls! What’s with that? Next, she’ll be pissing on the lawn.
When I stand to make the coffee, Bea comes to my side as if she just recognized me.
“I know,” I tell her, “it’s super weird. I don’t understand it myself.”
Bea is a boxer mix of some kind. Everywhere we take her people comment on how beautiful she is with her caramel coat, amber eyes, and white socks. Bea has had a few strange episodes herself since we moved to Palm Desert—times where she will all of a sudden stare out into the void, drool, and slowly collapse to the floor. We think it’s the extreme change of weather and culture. We moved her from the cool, rainy, hippie-chic town of Arcata to this hot, humid, resort town of conservative retirees. That kind of sea change would make anyone succumb to the occasional mini-breakdown.
When I’ve got the coffee machine set, it’s time to go back to all fours. Bea, who had been wagging her tail at my side, is unsure again. She sniffs me a few times, sticking her snout up to mine, and decides the couch is a safer vantage point to observe the crawling human. It’s possible that my new disability will bring us closer, eventually, once she knows I’m not trying to mock her—or worse—replace her.
I sip my coffee and look over my timeline of symptoms that I tried to read to the orthopedist last month. I’d started with the knee and leg pain, of course, since that was his specialty, but somehow he already knew what was wrong with me. He held up a finger to shush me and then tapped my bent knees with a rubber mallet. When my legs stayed motionless, he said, “I have to leave for a minute, but when I come back, you’re not going to like what I have to say.”
He started to leave when JM stopped him, practically throwing himself in front of the door to block the doctor’s exit. “You can’t do that,” said JM. “You have to tell her now.”
“Fine,” the orthopedist said. “She has arthritis. She’ll need knee replacements by forty. Maybe by thirty-five.” Then the orthopedist left the room and didn’t come back.
Today is my appointment with the rheumatologist in Indian Wells whom I’ve been waiting to see for months. To prepare for the five minutes I’ll have with her, I have to update my timeline to include the neurological symptoms and the extreme insomnia that have developed. The nighttime vertigo and bile. The loss of word recall. How I used to win at Scrabble every time we played, but just now it took me a full minute to remember the name of the game. “Scramble” and “Shrapnel” both seemed like reasonable possibilities.
I want to tell her that my recent google searches are lists of words that look like breadcrumb trails, only the breadcrumbs get eaten up by greedy birds as soon as I drop them and there I am, stuck in the dark forest, lost.
I want her to understand that I am losing it. Losing. It.
Since the first strange symptoms began, I accepted that every specialist I saw would perceive me as a nightmare of a patient, a walking, crawling psychological thriller. The doctor sees me and thinks I’m going to be a simple fix, that he or she might be early to lunch. What a pretty girl, what a nice girl, reminds me of my niece. And then I rattle off my list of symptoms and I become the diagnostic equivalent of nailing jelly to a tree. The doctor will never reach the golf course. I am the long, white retaining wall keeping them from their pastimes. “But wait,” I’ll call out as the doctor pole vaults over my head, putter in hand, “I didn’t have a chance to tell you about the rash on my stomach! What about my rash?!”
I wait an hour to wake JM. He’s trying to make up for all the sleep I’ve robbed him of since he fell in love with me three years ago. To love me is to not sleep. Or, to love me is to have your sleep interrupted at a rate akin to torture. I would wake him up because of his snoring and sometimes for his breathing. “J—you’re snoring again,” I’d say.
“I’m so sorry,” he would reply, “I’ll stop.”
“J—you’re breathing so loudly.”
“I’m sorry—I’ll stop breathing.” I confess that sometimes I woke him up out of panic, too, after lying awake for hours, afraid I’d never sleep again. I’d read that insomnia was something you could die from, something that could lead to insanity. He would tell me wonderfully benign stories about rabbits and field mice that had no conflict whatsoever and the droning of his voice would put me to sleep until he started snoring again.
Since my so-far-unexplained illness progressed, my sleep has gotten much, much worse—so bad that when JM turns over, thereby moving the sheets, patches of my skin feel like they are being scraped by sandpaper. And so JM has found respite in the spare room on the most deluxe air mattress money could buy.
When he comes down the hallway, he looks like he’s been sleeping on a raft in the middle of the ocean, or like an evacuee of an apartment fire—disheveled but infinitely grateful he survived.
“How did you sleep?” he asks.
“I didn’t,” I say. “I mean, I got a couple hours in toward morning. But I had the dream again.”
“The wall dream?” JM is in the kitchen pouring coffee. Beatrix is up and wagging her long tail, threatening to knock down the couple of cheap knickknacks that came with the cheap furniture set we bought on credit when we moved in. Beatrix bats her long eyelashes and leans heavy into JM’s bare legs.
“The wall dream, yeah. I picked the baby up this time—I picked me up. I think in the next one I’ll try to steal the baby for interrogation purposes. ‘How do I change the future, baby? Tell me! Who do you work for?!’”
We take Beatrix outside so she can chase her ball a few times before it gets too hot. Our retired neighbor to the east, Buzz, comes outside to tell us again how the dog’s pee is killing the grass. He is dressed in golf shorts that have the same pattern of piranha fish as a glow-in-the-dark bean bag I had as a teenager.
“It’s the female urine that does it,” he says pointing to the brown patches. “The male urine doesn’t do it.” He shakes his head at life’s mysteries. “Must be the estrogen—the hormones or something.”
JM can hardly stand it. “Well, Buzz,” he says, not missing a beat. “I guess you’ve tested this hypothesis yourself already?”
Buzz is not a bad guy. He laughs at the joke and waves us on, looking at the patches of brown grass one more time before he retreats back into his house that looks identical to ours. And, for the record, we try our best to get Bea to pee in the grass that is directly in line with our rental. But with no fences between us, the grass belongs to all. And to none.
It would be easy to understand, given Buzz’s age, given the intense heat and the identical houses, if one morning Buzz were to open our sliding glass door, shaking his head, and saying presumably to his wife, “Female urine will be the death of this place, Karen.”
It would be easy to imagine myself opening any of these sliding glass doors, walking inside, and not recognizing that the dining table was round instead of square, the carpet beige instead of taupe. How long would it take me to realize my error, given the heat and my sleepless state? Someone like me could go on for days, maybe weeks, living a parallel life, a life between brown and gray, and not know it.
This is one of many reasons why it’s important that JM get a full night of rest on his deluxe air mattress every night. Someone has to make sure the gas is turned off and the dog gets her food. Someone has to come looking for me when I get lost.
“We can run the blood work and get imaging of your back and knees,” the rheumatologist says, “but we’ve got to get you sleeping again. You won’t get better unless you catch up on sleep.”
The three of us are crammed into a little white treatment room with me sitting on the exam table. She has listened to my heart and taken my blood pressure, my temperature, my resting pulse. My tongue is still in my mouth and my eyes still firmly glued in their sockets. I’ve lost twelve pounds off my already small frame, but she doesn’t know that.
She wants to know when the trouble with sleeping started.
“My mother said I didn’t sleep as a baby. She would come in to check on me and I’d be wide awake in my crib, talking to the air and looking up at the mobile.” I know right away that I rewound the tape too far.
I skip past being a small child, my uniformed father waking me at three in the morning and taking me to another house—my mother’s house or another cop’s house or anywhere that would take me at that hour—because he worked the swing shift as a deputy. I don’t tell her how I would not be able to go back to sleep, how I would float in an inbetween state the rest of the day.
I don’t tell her that I went back-and-forth between my mother’s and father’s houses every other day from the age of four onward. My sleep was fractured at best. Then there was the 7.8 earthquake—my mother’s house too close to the epicenter—and what our next-door neighbor did to us a year later. Both happened in the night, and I was rattled. My body was supposed to do so much hard work at that time and there must have been all kinds of misfires, all kinds of bridges to nowhere, electrical wires connected to nothing. The builders of my city had to do the best they could with what they had, so they made sure the fascia was ok and hoped the intricate systems would take care of themselves.
I only have five minutes.
Inside treatment rooms, time speeds up faster than you can think or speak. The two-hour wait in the stiff-backed chairs with Fox News playing on all three televisions might as well have been two decades. We grew beards out there. The potted plants rose to Jurassic proportions. And then we stepped inside the treatment room—I turned my head to cough, and my five minutes were up.
“I’ve always had a difficult time with sleep but it got much worse in recent months when all the symptoms started.”
“Have you been prescribed Ambien before?” She’s looking at me over her shoulder with her feet aimed at the door.
I tell her “no” because my bridge-playing grandmother is not a prescriber, just a satisfied customer and part-time pusher.
The doctor is walking out of the treatment room when she says to no one in particular, “We’ll do the rapid release kind.” She leaves the door partially open behind her and we’re unsure if we should follow. In each direction the hallway looks the same and we end up in the janitor’s closet before finding our way back to the reception desk.
“Does she want to see you again?” the receptionist asks.
I turn my head in every direction, thinking I might glimpse the white of the doctor’s lab coat blurring by like a phantom. For half a second I think I see her, but it’s just the floater that’s been coming and going in my left eye.
“She wants to see me,” I say. “Yes.”
“Ok,” says the receptionist looking into her screen. “December 10th at 3:15.”
“Nothing sooner? That’s nearly three months away.”
The receptionist also possesses the skill of counting months on the Gregorian calendar and nods to confirm. She says she can add me to the cancellation list.
“Do people actually cancel?” I ask, looking around at the full waiting room of pained-looking senior citizens.
“Sometimes,” she says, leaning toward me and lowering her voice, “people die.”
That night I sip some gin and swallow the little, white pill. The pills my grandmother sent me were only half the strength, so I am feeling hopeful. We go outside now that the temperature is more humane and lie in the grass on our beach towels and look up at the sky and the tops of the San Bernardino mountains beyond the retaining wall. Bea happily chews a stick next to our feet. The air is buzzing with cicadae and nightly news and the voices of people talking on porches.
I tell JM that he might want to check on me when he wakes up for his midnight trip to the bathroom just to be sure I’m not online buying paper reams from U-Line or mountaineering gear from REI. He might want to make sure I’m not outside, squatting on the grass behind Buzz’s porch, emptying my bladder of its toxic female urine. I’m feeling less and less in control these days.
I tell him about my tutoring session with Sarah, the sixth-grade girl over in Bermuda Dunes. Just last week she knew her multiplication up to the 6’s. Today she barely got through the 4’s before breaking down into tears of frustration.
“I think my memory problems are wearing off on her,” I say.
“Job security,” says JM. We swat at the little gnats that want to drink from our tear ducts.
“As long as I can still remember my multiplication—sure.”
“It’s not you. It’s that her mom and dad fight. It’s the heat. It’s the parakeets dying in the cages of their living room. It’s their house falling apart.”
JM tutors Sarah’s older brother. Whenever one of us goes to the house, we give the parakeets water and seeds because the family forgets about them. We say to the kids, “Don’t forget to give your birds food and water so they don’t die,” and the kids nod or pretend not to hear us.
“It feels like there is so much to keep alive.”
It must be something in my voice that makes JM turn onto his side and face me.
“Are you feeling it? Are you feeling the Ambien?”
“I don’t think so. I think the only time I’ve really slept was when I got knee surgery at nineteen. The nurse had me count backwards from one hundred and I only got to ninety-nine.”
“Do you want to try counting? I’ll carry you inside if you fall asleep. Or we can just sleep on the grass together until the sprinklers go off.”
Bea has stopped chewing her stick and is snoring softly, dreaming her young dog dreams. I can barely make out JM’s handsome features in the half darkness. I close my eyes. Together we start counting backwards as though we are a two-person crew aboard a rocket.
As I count, I try to conjure the dream. My hand is on the wall and I’m following it past the row of houses.
“Ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven.”
My birthplace is not all that far from here. In the car, it would take an hour. By foot it would take much longer. In the dream it takes just seconds. The grass turns brown and crunchy beneath my feet. Palms turn into Joshua trees. The stars grow brighter and brighter until they nearly pierce. I travel beneath them wide-eyed and glowing like a desert iguana or a pallid bat or a woman lost.
“Seventy-one, seventy, sixty-nine.”
The past and present sometimes seem far apart. Irreconcilably so. And yet, there I am right where I left me in that crib full of brightly colored toys, talking, trying to figure it all out—Here is what I will do if this happens, here is what I’ll do if that happens. The world will not catch me unaware.
At some point in the night, I feel JM’s fingers slide beneath my body and his strong arms lift me into the air. Against his warm chest, he carries me into the house. And I can’t help but think about my father and how tired he must have been on all of those dark mornings. I remember the sound of him trying to make his breakfast of eggs and toast so quietly in the kitchen, the sound of him putting on his Kevlar vest, his boots. He didn’t want to wake me, I know. I could hear it in his movements how much he didn’t want to wake me. I have memorized the sound of a person, out of love, trying to be quiet.
I keep my eyes closed. JM sets me down onto my bed with such tenderness that I can’t bear for him to know I am awake.
L.I. Henley was born and raised in the Mojave Desert town of Joshua Tree, California. A mixed-media artist and writer, she is the author of six books including Starshine Road, which won the 2017 Perugia Press Prize, the novella-in-verse, Whole Night Through, and the poetry and art book From the moon, as I fell with artist Zara Kand. Her work has recently appeared in The Indianapolis Review, Waxwing, Tupelo, Diode, Zone 3, Tinderbox, The American Literary Review, Thrush, Ninth Letter, and Arts & Letters. Her essay, “Drive!” was chosen by Jason Allen as the winner of the Arts & Letters/Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction in 2020. Visit her at www.lihenley.com.