Free The Innocent Sleep by Karen Perry Page B

Tangier was a transit point for all sorts of drugs; the place was drenched in them. There were parties where you could hardly avoid cocaine, pills, hash—anything you wanted or had ever heard of was there.
    “I don’t think Robin will be into it,” I said to Coz.
    “Okay, so we’ll do it when she is out.”
    After work, Robin often liked to walk at night. I’m not saying it was safe or that I approved, but she took in the sights, cleared her head, and very often went to an Internet café or somewhere she could make or receive a phone call. She liked to stay in regular contact with her parents, and when I say “regular,” I mean every second day. I did not have that problem. Even if my parents had been alive, I don’t think I would have been in touch that often. But it was Robin’s business. In any case, that and her work at the bar allowed me to join in with the séances. I remembered something about Yeats getting involved in séances, way back when, and I thought Cozimo’s flighty idea might generate some ideas for my own work, my painting, and that it might be some fun. Yes, I was curious. And I was high.
    The thing was, before that first séance, Dillon had fallen asleep on the dinner table at the apartment. I know it sounds strange, but things were free and easy and often out of kilter. The large oak table we ate at also had a dip at the end of it, where Dillon sometimes climbed. I often put a cushion up there, and late at night he would climb up and fall asleep. I think he was about two when we had this first séance. Two Spanish sisters I had never met before and a local couple Cozimo had befriended the previous week were there, too. “What about Dillon?” Cozimo asked. “Can you put him to bed?”
    “I’d hate to wake him,” I said.
    Dillon was a bad sleeper. Straight and simple. In the past it had had nothing to do with teething or growth spurts or the noise from outside, the hawkers or touts, the music from across the street, the heaving mass of the city, none of it; he was like his father, pure and simple, a bad sleeper. No, wait a minute; he was worse. Probably, if we had gone to check it out, we would have been told it was some kind of condition. But we didn’t. We struggled on. It was like this; he could stay awake for hours. I’m talking all night. Now, Robin and I had been night owls, back in our college days, but in Tangier we were super conscious of the light, the daylight. We had to have as much of it as possible. That’s what we had come for. That’s what made the paintings possible. The strange and beautiful light of Tangier, its radiant and dusty history.
    But we became exhausted. Missing the morning light because of lack of sleep made me sick. I started taking pills to either keep me going when I woke or to get me to sleep at night so I could be up to catch that fiery dawn light I wanted in my paintings. Cozimo had a cabinet full of pills. In one pencil case, he kept the pills he needed for a week; a generous soul, he offered me pretty much what I wanted or what he thought I needed. Of course, I didn’t tell Robin about taking these pills. But to paint, to be ready for the canvas, I needed to be there; I couldn’t afford to be exhausted from lack of sleep.
    The first pill I tried was a sleeping pill. I took it at half eleven at night and slept till seven A.M. Robin wasn’t suspicious. She was happy I had gotten some rest. “If only I could sleep like that,” she said. “Dillon was awake half the night.”
    When the lack of sleep started to take something of a toll and Robin lost weight and dark rings formed about her eyes, I thought that, rather than offering her a pill, I would get the little man to sleep with a quarter of a pill. Then maybe she could rest. I crushed the pill up in the kitchen and poured it into a glass of warm milk. It dissolved, and Dillon never noticed. I know I should never have done that. But it felt almost as if someone else was doing it. Somewhere in