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  • Welcome to My World
  • Paul Kilgore (bio)

For a year I watchedas something—terror? happiness? grief?—entered and then left my body.

Not knowing how it came in,Not knowing how it went out.

—Jane Hirshfield, "The Envoy"

He was never able to name the date. It had just . . . begun. Spotty nights of bad sleep had become more frequent, eventually stringing into a week that spilled into a second week, extended into the next month, consumed the winter's entirety. Imagine that each night is a tv show, he told Ingrid, where instead of clumping the commercials they decide to space them evenly, a thirty-second image of acquisition interjecting itself every minute or two. It would make the show untenable, no? Well, Allman said, welcome to my world.

"So what do the commercials represent?"

"Interrupted sleep. Periods of restlessness."

"That happens to everyone," Ingrid said. "We all have our share of time staring at the ceiling."

"That's not what I'm talking about. I never lie awake. I'm asleep within a minute of eleven, every night. An hour or two are blissful. And then something awakens me. Something tells me to stop sleeping."

Ingrid said nothing. Something about the way her husband described the problem—the personification, his willingness to allow it a voice—gave her a look of worry.

"So I settle back in and ten minutes later it happens again. By six I'm so disgusted, it's a relief to get out of bed."

"Maybe," Ingrid said after awhile, "we need a new alarm clock. One you won't worry will fail."

"Now you're on the right track. I sleep like it's the night before an early job interview and I've got an unreliable alarm clock."

"OK then." [End Page 99]

"But our alarm clock's fine. So was the one I replaced last month."

No one at school had an inkling. Allman arrived on time and taught devotedly. No complaints, no missed days, no dozing off before the students' very eyes. There was a grimness about him at times, but of course there was a grimness. How could a twenty-year teacher of high school students not be grim?

"Have you ever thought through the folly of space exploration?" Allman asked John Hoyer, the biology teacher, in the faculty lounge. "The very thing we're looking for, life, a single drop of water, will likely carry the virus that will kill us all. We'll bring back to Earth the seed of our own destruction. There's not much to do when you've come face to face with a virus from Mars."

"Have you been dipping into the science fiction again, Walter?"

"Maybe I have. Maybe I need someone who majored in left brain to tell me it couldn't possibly happen."

"Couldn't possibly happen? Who could ever say that, that it couldn't possibly happen?"

Which was the problem. In Allman's world, everything was possible.

For the longest time Allman told no one but Ingrid. Who would understand? Allman didn't need the advice he would surely have received. He couldn't cut back on caffeine—coffee, soda, and chocolate had never played much of a role in his diet. He didn't often drink. He never smoked and had no weight to lose. He exercised daily.

"Teaching can be stressful," was Ingrid's diagnosis.

"Grading all those papers?" Allman said doubtfully.

"You tell me. Is that the part that's most stressful? What about just having to put up with everything? Kids on one side, administration on the other . . ."

Well, Allman thought, sure. Over the years he had composed for Ingrid—who was not a teacher—a long list of complaints. But Allman couldn't fairly say the complaints amounted to much more than aggravations. Stress? His job was secure. It had its rewards. The governor had said teachers were the custodians of our common culture. No, he should not have winked when he said it. But Allman enjoyed the embattled camaraderie this had created in the faculty lounge. Teaching was not at the root of Allman's new problem.

Nor was money. Ingrid...

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