Broken Sleep Read Free

spyglass distance from
my
home
, Moses thought. What a cosmic joke. “West on Venice, north on Ocean. All the way to—”
    “Hey, Ms. Cherry, stop.” Damn, how he wished his father had been dead. Until he again remembered that he needed him alive.
    “Professor, there’s more.”
    Professor? He hadn’t told Cherry that he was a professor of American history in the irrelevant department in the Southern California College of Art and Music (aka SCCAM) in Pasadena.
    “Okay. Slowly, though.”
    “He also has a place in Rio, not sure of that address, where it seems he spends most of his time. As of last night, he was
here
, in L.A. According to all official records, Hannah is your birth mother. Are you positive she is not your mother?”
    Nothing about Moses’s past made sense anymore. Malcolm Teumer had slept with his mom. Hell, they were married. Moses was born on December 8, 1958, and for forty years he had believed Hannah had given birth to him.
    “Unfortunately, I’m sure.”
    “If she doesn’t know who your actual mother is, I don’t think there’s anyone left alive who can help, except your father.”
    This “father” had stuck around for two years after Moses’s birth before (according to Hannah) evaporating into the suburban air. Except for a failed search at the age of seventeen, where certain scents before going dead had hinted toward South America as his ultimate landing place, Moses remained unknowing of where Malcolm lived. Or if he was even still alive.
    Cherry waited on the other end of the phone for an answer as he began to imagine for the umpteenth time, in another of what he termed his “daymares,” a new version of his father’s journey, this time from New York to Destination Do-Over Land.
    He gazes up at the gray clouds of the October sky, unmoved by his sister’s goodbye wave from the open window of her olive green Pontiac, and before her eyes he vaporizes into the futuristic Pan Am terminal and emerges a new man, wading in the Pacific tides of Avalon among breathless sea maidens, his exhalations emptying the toxic fumes of the Nazis’ total war, a survivor reborn with no past … and with no son
.
    “Yo, Hamlet, you faint or something? You want your father’s address?”
    “Yes. Fax it to me now. Thanks. I’ll call you.” Almost too cautiously, Moses returned the phone to its bright yellow cradle.
    His insides clenched; instead of relieved, he was livid. Now that his father was alive and so damn close, there would be, he hoped, no more forays into scores of imaginary pasts. He slumped in his swivel chair in the room that he kept dimly lit and New York winter dark. Despite two decades in L.A., Moses had subconsciously re-created New York in his room: a groggy Decemberish gray filled with the aura of dread and the resounding roar of an onrushing subway at midnight, even when it was silent. Right then, the sound in his room couldn’t have been more quiet and the bursting cacophony of confusion in his head any louder.
    Eleven months before, Moses had been diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia. Immediately upon hearing the news, Hannah flew from New York, and after a hail of apologies, diversions, and self-recriminations, unveiled the preposterous notion that she and he did not share DNA. Believing them both to be adoptive parents, it was only after Teumer disappeared that she uncovered the truth that Malcolm was Moses’s biological father. She bemoaned her inability to help save him, for whom she had sacrificed so much. Moses and his mom fell farther into their abyss of sighs, adding yet another step to their dance of indecipherable silences.
    While Moses suffered with his body’s cancerous disintegration, trying various treatments that counted as a holding-the-lineaction of staving off death (not a bad thing unless you had a more sanguine worldview than Moses), they attempted, without success, to find Teumer’s whereabouts. Finally, he and his doctor had engaged in a blunt