#Javelina knocking at my door full
#Javelina knocking at my door series

We’ve been together a few years now, he says. As he’s getting dressed to leave, she asks, And what about your sex life? He looks at me.

#Javelina knocking at my door series

She hands him a laminated chart with a series of stretches and breathing exercises. She recommends not eating late at night, says he should avoid alcohol. She paces the room while he talks, says Mmm to everything as though it’s revealed a universal truth. In his dreams, he says, he’s a javelina, trampling through desert. Tell me about your dreams, the sleep specialist says in the morning. Below the hang of his belly, he is erect.

He rips off the cheap Sleep Center pajamas with their pattern of Zs. He jumps from the bed and gallops around the room, knocking a jar of pens off a desk. He has climbed up on all fours, snorting, his eyes open and wild. There is a cot set up for me, and I’m drifting off when she says, Look. She asked me to stay and observe with her, to help provide context. Clayman, but she insists I call her Jane, as though we’re going to be slumber party pals, spit sisters. The sleep specialist and I watch him sleep through the two-way mirror. The snoring is a problem, he feels bad for me, but these sleepwalking spells scare him-he hates waking up somewhere, not knowing how he got there, betrayed by his own body, his own mind. Once, the police brought him home after he tore through the neighborhood wearing only boxer shorts, knocking over garbage bins. Or I turn the corner and see him charging into the sofa, ripping the stuffing out of pillows with his teeth. I find him in the kitchen, digging through the crisper drawer face-first, the tiles littered with scraps of lettuce and onionskin. The more is that I’ve woken up in the middle of the night, surprised at my own sleeping, then seeing why: his side of the bed empty, cold. The snoring was a problem, but there’s more, of course. Seeing the sleep specialist, it’s not only because of the snoring. She is an angular woman, whose glasses and movements give her the appearance of a mantis.

The only clue that we’re where we’re supposed to be is the medical machinery built into the side of the bed and the glare of the two-way mirror on the wall across from us. He sits on a bed with a plastic racecar frame. We’ve tried almost everything: sleep strips stuck across the bridge of his nose, snore-be-gone throat spray, earplugs for me, white noise machines.Īt the Sleep Center, we wait in an examination room that looks more like a childhood bedroom, colorful and bright, with boxes of toys and picture books. Sometimes I spot him cradling his beer belly sadly in my full-length mirror, turning to see himself in profile, but I love the way he covers me, the way he traces his thick finger gently along the bags beneath my eyes.

#Javelina knocking at my door full

He is a big man, and soft, and full of love. He wakes up well-rested, bear-hugs me tight to him, kisses me as I throw away uneaten eggs. I racket around early mornings, make myself breakfast even though I’m not hungry, just for the clang of pans, the fixed swing and slam of cabinet doors. Even when I move to the couch, his snores rumble through the walls, vibrate up through the floor and shiver through me. I didn’t realize how different it would be-the occasional sleepless night didn’t matter so much when I could go home to my own bed and pass out the next day, but now there’s no escape. They are detectable on the Richter scale, these loud grunting breaths, these wild piggy snorts ripping through the silence of our tiny apartment. They are jets buzzing over the valleys our bodies make beneath blankets. They are locomotives howling from the tunnels of his nose.