Three O’Clock in the Morning
You wake up in the middle of the night and reach out to touch your husband, but feel only mattress. The sound of police sirens jolts you completely awake.
Then you hear—louder than the sirens—the sound of a sultry voice promising callers the woman of their dreams for only three-ninety-five a minute. Your husband has fallen asleep in the living room with the TV on.
You’re not sure what woke you up. Light from the corner streetlamp filters around the edges of the blinds. You can see the outlines of your furniture—the fake teak dressers, the bookcase full of gothic romances. Nothing different.
You were dreaming. But you don’t remember what about.
What you do remember is that you didn’t finish that report for work on the percentage of insurance claims correctly filed. You’re hoping to get in early and do it.
You switch on the radio. The soothing voice of a BBC announcer tells you about genocide somewhere in Africa. You fall back asleep.
When you next wake up, sunlight is peeking in. It’s seven-fifteen. You’ve overslept. You put on your robe, hurry to the kitchen to make coffee.
Your husband is still lying in his brown naugahyde recliner, half-awake, watching the news. His pants are unbuttoned and he’s rotating his head, as if he has a crick in his neck.
On the TV, a perky, young woman with short blonde hair says, “In local news, a wall appeared in the middle of town last night.” The screen fills with a great expanse of concrete. A reporter stands next to it, talking into a microphone. The wall extends way above his head.
He says, “The wall appeared sometime between two and four this morning.”
You know the wall going up woke you at three a.m. Though that makes no sense. The wall is a long way away from your house. It runs along the train tracks that divide the right side of town from the wrong side.
Your husband says, “Good idea. We don’t need their kind.” He sits up abruptly, exits the chair, and goes and parks himself in the bathroom. You don’t get to take a shower until a quarter of eight, so you leave late, hit a traffic snarl, and get to work after nine.
A crisis has just occurred: The senior executive vice president for cost reduction needs to know why your department is using 3.2 percent more supplies than the other claims review departments. You join in to help the office clerk document that no supplies are wasted, which makes you forget about your report until almost noon when your boss asks for it. So you skip lunch to finish it.
A woman in purchasing lives on the other side of the wall, and didn’t show up. No one talks about this.
On your way home the radio announcer says, in a hearty voice, “Local authorities report that there is no way across or over the wall. In sports, the hometown boys lose another one. And we’re going to have some rain tonight.”
You want to watch the news, but your husband is watching a rerun of a sit-com in which madcap young people sharing an impossibly chic apartment talk about sex non-stop but never actually do it. During the commercials he clicks through the other channels at a rapid rate, only stopping for a moment when buxom but otherwise skinny blondes in bathing suits show up on the screen.
You serve dinner in front of the TV, and sit there watching a game show in which all the questions are about television programs. Even though you know all the answers, you don’t call them out. Finally you go to bed.
And wake up again at three a.m. You change the radio over to local news, and listen for fifteen minutes before they tell you anything about the wall. It’s moved. It’s closer to your house.
The next day, more people don’t show up for work. You stare at your computer, and try to concentrate on looking for the mistakes in the insurance claims in front of you. It’s hard to settle down to work. You email a coworker across the room to ask what she has heard about the walls. When a reply comes, it’s from human resources, reminding you not to use email for personal purposes.
The day after, two are missing from your department, and your boss gives a speech about everyone needing to do a little extra during the crisis. He assigns you another region. You stay late, and when you get home your husband has ordered pizza and eaten it all. You eat cold cereal.
