Vigilance

content warning for rape

            It is not until I move to New York at the age of eighteen that I realize there are things in South Louisiana that you can’t get anywhere else. You do not get time off from school or work for Mardi Gras. The French of your grandmother—whom you call Maw-Maw, a derivative of the French ma mère or mémé—is not the same as the French they taught at your friends’ private high schools in the Northeast. Their mothers say now instead of maintenant; they have barbecues instead of a cochon de lait. When they put their babies to bed, they say go to sleep instead of go do-do, from the French dormir and the term fais do-do—a dance party held by adults after the children are put to sleep. There are snow cones or shaved ice instead of snowballs, zeppole instead of beignets, subs or hoagies instead of po’ boys. No gumbo—and certainly no approximate. The rice and beans they eat is flavored with salt and pepper and cumin instead of aggressive amounts of garlic and Vidalia onion and bell pepper and celery and pork fat.

            In other places, they have werewolves, the chupacabra, Big Foot, the Jersey Devil. In Louisiana you have the rougarou, the Grunch, and the cauchemar. But these were never the things your Maw-Maw or your mother warned you about. The things they warned you about walked on two legs, looked like all the men you’d ever known. You can never be alone with a man who isn’t your father.

            Insomnia exists for me as far back as memory will take me, a sort of headlamp of continuity. Like other kids develop allergies or asthma or nearsightedness that shadows parts of their lives and activities, insomnia becomes my unique physical malady, one to be managed in the long-term rather than conquered in the short. As a child, I refuse to go to bed at whatever time my parents have scheduled, and I am impossible to rouse for school in the morning. I am routinely scolded for the lamplight that leaks through the crack at the bottom of my door. My mother teases me about being afraid of the dark when, really, I am reading The Baby-Sitters Club, knowing that I will be awake until well past midnight.

            My earliest specific memory of insomnia is during my second week of first grade. I watch my alarm clock turn from 1:59 to 2:00 from underneath my pink quilt. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to will myself to sleep, but after what feels like an hour, I get bored and look at the red glow again: 2:03. I repeat this process until eventually my eyes stop opening. When I tell my teacher I was up until past two o’clock in the morning, she says Wow in a fake-impressed manner that suggests she doesn’t believe me. It is not until we are reciting the months of the year in French and my eyes glaze over while I slur Septembre that I see her mind start to change.

            By middle school, when summer and holiday breaks eliminate a strict morning schedule, I don’t go to sleep at night at all. My body will not sleep until I have been awake for at least twenty-four hours, so I force myself to stay awake for thirty-six hours or longer so I can reset myself the next evening, to learn to sleep normally. But usually it only works for the first night: on the second, I lie awake in bed, reading or following the lines of cracks in the ceiling plaster or watching the moon through my window.

            I walk through most of my waking hours with adrenaline or sugar-motivated spurts of hard focus before fading into soft focus, my eyes stinging and blurry, like I’ve opened them underwater. I learn to fake enthusiasm and energy, and at home I force myself to reread textbook paragraphs and lessons that I couldn’t focus on in class.

            At sleepovers at friends’ houses, I watch other girls fall asleep one by one, exhausted from running around the backyard, swimming, and playing Light as a feather, Stiff as a board. I wonder what it’s like to fall asleep so naturally. I wonder what my body needs me to be awake for.

            In the storybook I read in the dusty yellow corner of the school library—in the YA section, even though you have to be in sixth grade to check out those books, and I am only in fourth—the illustration of the cauchemar was a stereotypical, Wizard of Oz type of witch: pale green-white skin; a long, hooked nose; cascades of knotted black hair; skin thick with warts. The word cauchemar directly translates to “nightmare,” and in its proper noun form in Cajun refers to the “nightmare witch.” In this story, a girl’s mother warns her about the nightmare witch, saying that if she stays up too late listening to rock and roll on her radio, the cauchemar will wake up and visit her. The cauchemar, so legend went, would come into your bedroom and “ride” you: pin you down by sitting on top of you or with her legs astride your chest while staring in your eyes, cackling. No matter how strong you are, you cannot fight her off. You will not be able to move at all, will not be able to breathe, and you will struggle against her until you are exhausted to death.

            My mother was notoriously strict, even among other Catholic parents. I wasn’t permitted to shave my legs until a humiliating age, and everything I wore was a suggestion. Every sideways glance or sudden move I made aroused her suspicion. She so feared burglars that my brother and I had babysitters until he was nearly fourteen and I was twelve, even in the daytime. If my parents were away overnight, we slept at my grandmother’s house. Social engagements at private residences without adult supervision were forbidden. Large swathes of the city were written off as too dangerous, too dark, too predatory. While my brother was permitted to walk home from school by himself or to go down the block to the deli to pick up French bread for po’ boys, I had to stay home. When salesmen or other unexpected door-knockers turned up on our porch, my mother sent me to my room. She didn’t want them to know I existed.

            Even friends become subjects of suspicion. At a (parent-sanctioned and supervised) party my brother and I host, my bedroom is used as the handbag and coat room. When I linger too long in conversation with a male friend—who is openly gay, three years younger than me, and has been known by my entire family for several years—my mother drags me outside by her fingernails, berating me for having a Boy in My Room. “He’s like my little brother, and he’s gay,” I say. “You know this.” But she says she doesn’t care.

            My mother also doesn’t sleep. She wakes up at every noise, every vibration of footsteps through the floor. Throughout adolescence, I joke that at night she would wake up if I coughed in China. Every night that I come home late she is awake, and her voice, calling my name to confirm my presence, drifts down the hallway like smoke. This continues until I am well past my teens, well past my twenties, years after I have moved to New York. She says she has to know that I have made it home, even though I only sleep at her home for a few days out of every year.

            I knew my mother wanted me to be safe, that fear was instrumental to safety. I try to trace the history of various family neuroses through this pathway of protection. My mother is, among other things, claustrophobic. My brother is terrified of dogs for no real reason. My grandmother was afraid of driving with her grandchildren in the car, afraid of putting them in harm’s way. And I have always been phobic about people touching my neck. I screeched during doctor appointments that involved fingers probing my lymph nodes; I shuddered at hairdressers pulling my long hair behind my shoulders. My mother says that this started when I was a baby, crying out if my neck was cradled in a certain way. By high school, my friends like to tease me by standing behind me, out of my field of vision, pointing a single finger an inch away from my neck. They wait for me to sense it and I always do. 

            There are other words for the cauchemar in other cultures: In Chinese cultures, there is pinyin; in Japanese, kanashibari; in parts of Africa and the Middle East, jinn; in Mexico, subirse el muerto; in Brazil; pisadeira.

            The suffix -mar comes from mare, the Middle Dutch word for phantom or spirit, from the Old Norse mara. In Germanic and Slavic folklore, the mare is a creature based on the mythology of the incubus, a demon who sits on your chest while you sleep, pinning you so you can’t move. Incubare: the Latin verb for “to lie upon.” The incubus, or its female counterpart, the succubus, lies on top of you, specifically with sexual intentions. All of the mythology surrounding the incubus or the mare tells of an inability to move, of a witch or demon or other being riding you or pinning you down. The cauche- prefix of cauchemar comes from the Old French cahuchier, meaning “to press.”

            In the story I read in the school library, the girl scoffs at her mother’s warning of the cauchemar, shrugging it off as a fairy tale used to scare children into going to bed early.

            Mare, Dutch for phantom. Mère, French for mother.

            I am sixteen when my eyes open to the darkness of my room, constellations aligning in the ceiling plaster: Orion, Perseus, Cassiopeia. I try to turn my head to read the time on my alarm clock, but I can’t move. Not my head, not my hands, not my legs, not my jaw. I try to force air through my lips to scream, to make any kind of sound, but my voice stays put, like an animal pinned to a dissection tray. I wonder if I’m even breathing, or if I am having some kind of stroke. For fifteen minutes I am terrified that I’m dying. But eventually, some sort of internal plug is pulled, and sleep darkens my vision again. When I wake up, I tell myself it was a dream—until it happens the following week, and the next. Every time it happens, my heart starts racing as my limbs refuse to move, and I wonder if I’ll die this time. Or worse, if I’ll awaken, but never be able to move again.

            When it happens again, I Google “waking up paralyzed.” I have long forgotten the book of Cajun folktales I read in my elementary school’s library. I learn that sleep paralysis is an actual phenomenon of waking in between phases of sleep and not some phantom stroke I seem to be having. It can be fostered by irregular sleep cycles, and is often accompanied by hallucinations of dark, shadowy figures. At least I didn’t see those, I thought. At least all I see is darkness.

            But the more I read, the more it happens, so I stop researching. For a while, when I choose to ignore it, the sleep paralysis fades. Years later, a documentary I start to watch about sleep paralysis will present interview subjects citing the same phenomenon: when they talk about it too much, think about it too much, they prompt it to happen again. I turn off the documentary as soon as this is suggested, afraid of what I might invite back into my bedroom.

            My parents’ grip tightens at the suggestion of dating. Teenage boys only want one thing, and they will do whatever it takes to get it was stated more times than there are words in the Bible. They focus on what they believe they can control, and what level of supervision they incorrectly assume all other parents and adults provide.

            What my mother doesn’t see is what happens in school hallways and bathrooms, in friends’ houses, in buses, in alleys ten feet from mothers and fathers and teachers. Sometimes at school events on campus, sometimes in church, sometimes at houses where dozens of adults are present. Things that emerge like late afternoon shadows: the rumored happenings between the popular girls in sixth grade and their eighth-grade boyfriends in their surreptitious meetings under the bleachers. The inexplicable hatred a friend has for their father or grandfather or uncle. The uneven gazes of the male teachers that your friends’ older sisters warn you about. A party host’s parents ignoring a closed bedroom door. The promise of forever taking the form of a bruise around a friend’s eye when she is only thirteen.

            But I don’t look at these situations too closely. I don’t recognize the demons yet. But one day, in several years, when I am twenty-one and alone, they will all crystallize. They will all take the sudden face of my mother’s worst nightmare coming true.

            For the rest of high school, I am too busy to sleep, and insomnia becomes the only way I know how to function—by way of whatever adrenaline rush pushes through the exhaustion. By the time I get to college, the awkward misery of sharing a bedroom in a dormitory makes me consult a campus nurse practitioner about the insomnia that has shadowed me for my whole life. Other doctors I saw in high school attributed it—like so many other things that women experience—to stress, anxiety, something otherwise psychological. But nothing they can prescribe me helps me feel rested.

            I try to explain to the nurse that my body just doesn’t want to sleep before dawn, that no matter how tired I am, no matter how hard I have worked, it is not when my mind turns off. She suggests blood work for a hormonal imbalance, a thyroid problem. But my insurance won’t cover the tests, so the insomnia stays.

            Then, shortly after I turn twenty-one, in my first non-dormitory apartment, I wake up, frozen: my limbs feel like they are cast in iron, and my head can’t turn toward the light from the window. My lower jaw clamps like a bear trap. While I don’t see any lurking creatures in the darkness when my eyes open, I awake with the feeling that someone or something is pointing me towards looking in a certain direction. Someone wants to show me something. But I can’t see anything in the dark.

            In some stories, the cauchemar, in her intent to destroy you, drags you to the action of your own demise: to the ledge of a window from which you will leap, to a source of water that you will walk into until your nose and mouth sink below the surface. In some, she strangles you, and this is why your voice disappears even though you are awake.

            In the story I read in the school library, the girl’s mother thinks she conjured the cauchemar by saying her name out loud when she was reminding her daughter of the witch’s existence. If you talk about her too much, think about her too much, you’ll summon her. You’ll imagine her into existence, a subconscious conjuring. If you fear something, you will start to look for it, and if you look for it, you will always find it.

            It will be a few months after this final episode of sleep paralysis when my mother’s worst nightmare comes true. It will not happen in the dark. It will not come when I am asleep. I will be fully awake and present, and a sun that is caught between morning and afternoon will light my window: the kind of brightness that keeps fear far from consideration. But it will highlight that horrible word—the one that starts with an R and rhymes with Shape—in its blazing yellow-white. And something I don’t fully recognize despite its human form will be on top of me, rendering me immobile, squeezing its hands around my neck. I cannot move, I cannot scream, I cannot breathe.

            If you think about it too much, talk about it too much, fear it too much, you will summon it.

            The first nightmare comes like this. I am running along the levee by Lake Pontchartrain at night. I am barefoot in a white linen nightgown, my hair loose and trailing behind me. I am running faster because I know something is right behind me and is only an arm’s length from grabbing a fistful of my hair and yanking me backwards. My feet are caked with wet mud as the grass becomes more waterlogged. I am running and running and running until I wake up with air bursting through my lungs like a popped balloon, both of my feet planted firmly on the cold hardwood floor. For the rest of the night I wake up every hour, exactly on the hour: 3:16, 4:16, 5:16, the numbers glowing like fired coal.

            I try to explain to doctors that I am used to not sleeping, that it is normal for me to not sleep, that I cannot tell where my normal insomnia ends and trauma-induced insomnia begins. So, they give me the more extreme pills: quetiapine, an antipsychotic normally prescribed in larger doses to people with bipolar disorder for periods of mania. The doctor says that it will be a low dose of twenty-five milligrams, but she accidentally writes in fifty milligrams on the script pad. She simultaneously prescribes an antidepressant for the daytime. The first time I take them concurrently, I sleep for close to fifteen hours. I miss two classes and then a shift at work.

            But I still have the same dreams. I am running, faster and faster, something close behind me, until I wake up gasping for breath with a vague sensation of hands lingering around the skin of my neck.

            In the story I once read in the library twenty years ago, the narrative ends with mother and daughter both having experienced the cauchemar, with each saving the other. The cauchemar first drags the daughter to a window, trying to force her to jump, when her mother is driven by some mysterious impulse to check on her and is able to pull her from the ledge, out of the cauchemar’s long, yellowing fingernails. But the daughter saves her mother from a subsequent cauchemar visit by turning on the radio she was scolded for listening to. It plays a preacher’s voice, banishing demons, telling them to get out.

            Mare: phantom, demon. Mère, mother.

            Mothers teach the fear of monsters to protect their young. Guard against the thing that scares you, the thing that might come for you, so you can see it clearly. But fear won’t stop every witch or monster from finding you, from hunting you, from strangling you twenty years after you read its story in a library book. Fear will take a form and leave a legacy. The bedroom shadows and ceiling plaster shapes will peel themselves from walls, grow their own legs, and follow every generation, mamère à mère à fille.

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