Dead Hour

by Jeff Smith

At about 4am when you just got to sleep at 12am, for the billionth night in a row, the world seems like a lucid dream. It is dark. What light there is, swims around on blurry eyes. The late night and early morning meet at this time every day. The late nighters and the early morningers pass the baton of "day" back and forth every morning around 3 to 4am. I am not really either one of them. I was never a late nighter, I usually went to bed around 11pm at the latest. I never usually got up before 8am. I like to sleep, and dream, and sleep some more. The late nights are for the partiers and swing shift workers, maybe even the creative stay up late types. The mornings seem to be for the old and the sprightly younger folks, and the early morning workers, delivering papers and stuff. I am none of those people. I would rather be in bed. There is a stillness at this time of the morning that is creepy. It is like the world has gone away and there is just me and the air. There is no noise, even though I live in the city. There are no lights, other than the usual backyard kind and the streetlights, and the folks that seem to like to leave lights on all night. There is no movement, it is the null zone of the day. I can feel the passing of the torch from the late nighters to the early morningers going on around me, but it is not an active thing really. It’s more like an acknowledgment in the null zone that is 3-4am. I am not a part of this. I am not one of the ones passing the torch, nor taking it. I am in a special place, aware of this magic and stateless time but not a part of it. I am awake because of another reason. The baby is now 4 months old. The baby is not really part of this time either, babies have no time. The baby is outside of time altogether. The baby is its own world and time is not a factor. The factors are food and poop and warmth and sleep. Time does not play in to this at all. At least not for the baby. For me, it is different, I am a part of time. From what I gather, from the other parents, this timeless state will end at some point. I don’t see it. I am stuck every night in this frozen space, 3-4am. I am alone in it. Well, I am here with the baby, but alone. My wife sleeps. The baby cries and eats and poops and does what babies do. There is no difference for the baby. The baby is not aware of time, it is all the same time. That is why I am alone in this time. I am the only one stuck here. Well I am sure there are others but, all of us are still alone, not a part, of this time.

The warmth of the down comforter surrounds me. My feet are warm in a cozy fold. I am aware again, and feel the peace of the warmness and softness and snugly pillowness. But there is something that is not right and it creeps in around my brain. It is that time again I can feel it. It is time again for the torch to be passed from night to day. I am awake. My feet are caught in a fold of the comforter, no longer cozy. There is a stifling warmness under the blanket. My head is in a strange position, so I turn my body over in a swirl. Stop and I listen. The baby isn’t awake yet I guess. I just woke up on my own. I can go back to sleep. I curl the pillow under my head and begin to think that, this time the frozen place, the dead hour doesn’t have me. I begin to cherish the warmth again. My feet pushing in to the down and finding that perfect place again. But you know what happens. It is the waking before your alarm kind of thing. There is the muted muffle of a cry and some stirring in the baby’s room. The little stirrings. There is that, and then there is the awakening. The cry that comes after, as you lay there, in the warmth and comfort of your bed, hoping that it is just the stirring and readjustment of sleep. The baby will hopefully just stir and go back to sleep. Just make a little cry, a small peep and fall back in to slumber and sleep through the dead hour.
The dread hour.
There is no more awake time, for me, than this one. The moment when I am fully aware of every little thing around me. The slightest breath from my wife. The dog breathing heavily on his dog bed next to me. The dull motor noise of the fridge in the kitchen. Every little noise is about 40 decibels higher in this moment. The tension is making me squeeze my pillow like a vice. I begin to sweat. It is what I imagine it is like to be in combat on a night patrol. Every hair is aware and feeding information to you in case of danger.
So, he cries.
It is my job to get up and take care of him at night. My wife does most of the other stuff so it falls on me to do my duty and get up at night. She used to be like me. She would awake and spring from bed at the slightest noise from the baby. She was the baby fireman, jumping from bed, into her slippers and sliding down the pole to the baby’s room just in the nick of time to save the day and give him the breast that he so craved and putting out the fire in his belly. She was the truest hero I know in those moments. I would get up too, but much slower and then go in to watch. The beauty of a mother breast feeding a child makes my heart bleed. I can feel it in my chest even now when I recall it. There is a noise the baby makes when feeding from the breast at night that is like no other. It is the sound of timelessness. They were at peace in the dead hour, the two of them. They did not seem to feel the dead hour around them. I was not used to it yet, had no idea there was such an hour. I think I felt it then but I was too involved in watching the feeding.
She isn’t like that now that the baby is on formula. It is now my job to get up at night and feed the baby from my fake breast. The baby knows it’s not the same. The baby knows. There is no magic moment for us. It is just feeding. There is eating and then going back to sleep, leaving me awake in the dead hour.
I am floating in the sky again. There are some birds around me. Like gulls, but nice ones. They are playing on an updraft. They swirl around and around, coming by and smiling at me. Then they all swoop down towards the ground and I follow. I am sitting at the beach, feeling the sand in my toes crunch. The gulls are milling around me looking for scraps. The sun is bright so I shade my eyes with my hand and look out to sea, past the waves as they crash on the shore. One of the gulls is crying out and crying out and crying out. I am awake. 3:07am, it is the dead hour again. It is all around me. The baby cries like a gull. I slide out of bed to get the bottle.
The car stereo plays some sort of music but I can’t really hear it. I am driving on a city street. There are shops and people and cars. I am taking my time. Just cruising. I can feel the naughahyde at my back and the feel of the steering wheel in my hand, the little ridges in plastic of the wheel. In my rear view mirror I see a motorcycle, a dirt bike of some kind. There is a person on it all in black leather with a mirrored visor on their helmet. I am stopped at a light waiting to turn right at a v shaped intersection. I look back in my rear view mirror again. The person on the motorcycle pulls out pistol. Shoots me in the back a few times. I can feel the warm blood pour gently down my back. I let my foot off the brake and roll through the red light. My car slams into the side of the nearby liquor store and I slump into the wheel. I am awake. I am covered in sweat and my heart beats like mad. I look over at my clock. 3:15am, it is the dead hour again. My breathing begins to ease back a bit and my heart stops pounding in my chest. While recalling my dream and its vividness I begin to hear the baby stir. Feeding time again. The dead hour all around me.
All of my drams are vivid. They are real, or they seem real. There is nothing fanciful, like dragons or funny aliens or weird distorted figures, you know, weird stuff. All of my dreams are very real. Ok, the flying isn’t so real and there is some stuff like that but, over all, they are pretty realistic. I have heard others tell of dreams in all kinds of fantastic kinds of situations and things happening like Salvador Dali paintings. I never have those. When I awake and go over my dreams, the stuff I can remember anyway, it’s like I could really have done those things. I wonder sometimes if they aren’t. Like traveling or living in someone else’s life for a moment. Perhaps myself in another life or time or dimension. I love dreams. They are better than television.
The swings are full in the park. Little kids running all over. Lots of laughter and screams of joy. The grass is almost Day-Glo green. The sun is bright and yellow and happy. But the swings are all full. So I sit and look at the colorful striped shirts and the smiling, laughing child faces. One of the kids gets off of a swing and waves me over. There is no expression on the child’s face. Just deadpan but waving me over urgently. More and more urgently but still with no expression. I rise but can’t seem to move my feet. The sand is up around my ankles and is rising. It rises to my waist. The child is waving frantically at me to come over to the swings, still no expression just the deadpan slack face. I am trying to cry out that I am stuck but I can’t seem to yell or talk or even whisper. The scream HELP ME is rolling around in my head as the sand rises up to my neck. The child is still waving at me and is the last thing I see as I go under the sand. I am awake. My throat is dry, really dry. It is dark, and quiet. I look over at the clock on my bedside table. 3:24am, the dead hour. Why didn’t the baby wake up yet? I get up and slam my hand into the doorjamb while I enter the kitchen for a glass of water. After I yell, I hear the muffled crying coming from the baby’s room. Time for the bottle.
I have never died in a dream. I have a theory, you can’t die in a dream. If you do then you die in real life. I am sure there are people out there who do actually die in dreams but for me it would be death I am sure. I remember a dream I had when I was a kid, there was a dark man, chasing me through three feet of snow and he was gaining on me. I couldn’t run very fast in the snow but it didn’t seem to stop him. I knew for certain that if he caught me in my dram I would die in real life. I knew it for sure and I knew it was a dream but it didn’t matter. I knew for certain.
I am here again. The playground. The swings, full again. The running and playing and laughing and screaming. The sun and the grass. This time I see the kid swinging. Same kid, same lack of expression, just swinging and swinging. Not looking at me, not looking at anything, just off in to the distance. Then he looks at me. Right at me so fast I didn’t see his head move. One moment staring in the distance the next looking right in to me. I am shy and turn away. I am going to go use the slide. Stay away from that kid. But I hear him crying out for me to come to him. Crying out in a high pitched scream. I am awake. The baby is crying. I look over at the clock. 3:15am, the dead hour again. I don’t have time to be aware of it now, I go get the bottle for the baby. He is crying like crazy.
It is the same again. The same playground. My days in real life have become pretty much the same day in, day out. My nights too. Now my dreams are as well. I don’t think it can get much worse than this. Every day and night the same and my dreams too. That and living in the dead hour every night. The kids are playing and screaming and running and laughing. The sun and grass the swings full. I seem to fast forward through the beginning I have seen a few times now. There he is, the little boy swinging and staring in to the distance again. I am watching him now but he is ignoring me. He is no longer just looking in to the distance, he is ignoring me by looking in to the distance. Still there is no expression. No sign of what is in there. So I stare at him. Then I call out to him. He looks over at me and stops swinging. He gets off his swing and motions for me to come over. This time I can cross the sand. It doesn’t grab at my feet and try to drag me down. I come up to him and he is the same size as me. I am a kid too it seems. He looks in to my eyes. I smile and say HI. He says YOU CAN TAKE MY SWING IF YOU WANT and gives me a kind smile. IT’S FUN he says handing me the chain. I am swinging. He is watching and smiling. I am awake. I wake with a start. Something is wrong, I can feel it. The light is wrong, the sounds are all wrong. I hear the trash truck beep beeping. I look at my bedside clock. 5:45am, it’s late, I missed the dead hour. I jump from bed and run over to the room where my son sleeps. I crack the door open and peer in and listen. I hear the calm breathing of deep sleep. My boy finally slept through the night.

© Jeff Smith 2001