The Haunted Refrigerator

Snap Weaver wakes up early and we mean early—the red numbers on the bedside clock read 4:59 AM—and all the worse because she’d climbed into the king-sized bed at 4:45. In the last fourteen minutes she’s plunged into a lack of consciousness so profound that when she wakes up she’s completely disoriented. In an instant, the very idea of sleep drains away. Psychologists call it “the armpit of the night:” the unfettered horror of just before dawn, when unbidden thought elbows like a dire clown into the passive and helpless brain: Uncle Fuck. Eight months later, it’s no easier to process. The numb disbelief is still there, the fact like a wedged-in splinter; terror from unexpected angles, despair like a black lake behind. Amerigo Vespucci turns back from the ocean blue, spooked by a bloated whale: Uncle Fuck. George Washington’s fire goes out at Valley Forge: Uncle Fuck. J.W. Booth’s bullet deep into Abraham Lincoln’s brain: Uncle John Fuck—exceeding his ration of El León, arms folded, chin up, eyes squeezed to slits in his pink face. Small comfort that she knows (from long and exhausting experience) that the hours must eventually pass. Because after that? No end is conceivable. And, worse, no reversal—ever—after that. The house is silent around her. It’s a fight to the death, her exhausted brain vs. Uncle Fuck, for her brain is all she has left. And Uncle Fuck has a new advantage now: The Russians have meddled. The Dems have bungled. But enough Americans in enough strategic places had voted for Uncle Fuck so that he won the election. He’s valid. He’s real. He’s here to stay. The next time she looks at the clock the red letters read 5:21. Her eyes make out the outlines of a window. These days the calendar is conducive to early light. It’s not advisable to get up in a strange house in semi-darkness. but she swings her legs out anyway, bare feet on the nap of carpet, finds a robe left by someone other than herself at the end of the bed, and by the red numbers of the clock—5:22—finds a door which is not a closet and steps onto the cool polished hardwood floor of a hallway. Again she waits. A ghost of light appears. The top of the stairs. She looks the other way. At the end of the hallway a dim rectangle takes shape. Henry B’s door is to the left of that window. The door is open. Her feet are back on carpet. She remembers where the bed is or thinks she does. And here it is. The little boy is curled up under a mound of covers, a heartbreaking lump. She can’t hear him breathing and bends close, eye to eye with Freddie the dog who’s under there with him. Her hand touches his chest—a slow but regular rise and fall. She kisses the top of his tousled head. He doesn’t move. Leaving both doors open, she returns to her own bed and lies down. The red letters read 5:25. The sheets are still warm from her body. The silence of the house presses down. She listens for a sound, a wayward breeze, a wave on an unseen beach, but nothing comes. She looks at the faint rectangle of the open doorway and for a moment thinks she sees another figure—a woman in a satin robe. There’s a theory with some scientific credence that insomnia loses its grip at the first light of dawn, a holdover from pre-historic days when our cave-dwelling forebears could not relax until the hunters of the night retired. Until then they kept alert, ready to fight or flee—spared the unresolvable twist of modern times, a terrorized brew of panic and paralysis when neither is possible. Snap closes her eyes and at first there’s just the residual peace of her sleeping child. But then the seething in her brain returns as if never gone away: the events of the previous night, dark hours still unprocessed, analyzed, and impossible to resolve. In her mind she opens her eyes and in the rearview mirror sees the twin brake-lights of two motorcycles, disappearing around a curve ... Reaching Santa Maria and heading south on 101 ... Passing through Santa Barbara—the off-ramp with a compression in her chest—the two-lane road winding among Monterrey pines, the red dot and the soft dulcet voice of Circe in the dashboard nudging her on ... They’d climbed a hill and come to a driveway and a gate. She’d pressed a button and the gate had opened and she’d driven through to a house with a front door between tapered pillars where an overhead light was on and a slim angular being in a satin gown appeared purporting to be Santa Barbara Sheila, along with a wide-shouldered strong-armed centurion who’d lifted and carried Henry with Freddie in his arms through the door and up the stairs with Snap behind them. They’d put Henry to bed, he was out like a light, and she’d returned to this room, and blacked out, and came awake again in the pit of this night that reminds her of the well by the green barn in Pindo-í, dark water below, clay walls smooth and impossible to climb, the tiny circle of sky above without light so that it might be night or the end of the world— A custom special, that well. Courtesy of Uncle Fuck.