Some things are more important than sleep

I shook my head. The body is the plaything of the mind, not the other way around. Sleeping now would dull the details I still had. And there weren’t many. I had to try to make things make sense before I gave in to the achey feeling in my arms and legs. “I can’t,” I said.

Eden looked hard at me. There were times when a friend had to disregard what you say and make you do something else instead. Peering into my face, she must have decided this wasn’t one of those times. “This really threw you for a loop, didn’t it?”

My face creaked like a haunted house as I forced a smile. “Have you ever forgotten a threesome?” I said.

“God, I hope not,” she answered with a grin. “How bad are we talking here? Like, what do you remember? Since you at least know you had a threesome.”

I dredged up all my memories of the past twelvish hours. Measuring time in hindsight was never easy. There were so few points of reference in these, too. It was dark when I woke up in bed with Rania to the sound of water running in the bathroom. And, when I had my episode with the guy in the bus station fuck, the guy in the bus station! Okay, circle back to that as soon as you can , it was full light. Early morning. I got to Eden’s at tennish. What time did I remember from Le Mythe? As if I was looking at my phone. I’m sure I answered texts at some point, but if I did, I sure wasn’t paying attention to the time. One advantage of going out on the town with people who could afford to party on Le Mythe’s catwalk was that nobody kicks you out at last call. Midnight was the earliest we would’ve gotten there. That left--yes, okay, a maximum of twelvish hours, elevenish, in fact, to account for.

But if I knew what those eleven hours held for me, it still didn’t explain--

“There was a guy at the bus station. I was planning on going home.” I was sure of that. Some things felt very solid and that was one. “You can see that I was a mess.”

“A hot mess.”

“Thank you, thank you.”

“Go on.”

“There was still this guy staring at me.”

“So?” said Eden, pouring coffee for the both of us from her Keurig. “Guys don’t care if you’re all fucked up. That makes them think you’re easier pickings. He probably thought he could get some in an alley somewhere.”

That was true, but not. She was a nice person. A good person, and that’s rare, especially in this city. She sympathized with me, but that doesn’t mean she grasped what I was trying to convey. “He said he couldn’t believe I was real.”

Again, Eden pulled a sympathetic face, not a comprehending one. “That’s an old line,” she said.

I shook my head, screwed up my eyes. “He said, ‘I didn’t think you were real.’ Like he’d seen me before but thought I was CGI, or something.” Trusting solely in the words we exchanged, I could see the shadow of the world where Eden’s interpretation was true. The problem was that, just like I knew things about last night that I didn’t really know, that I couldn’t piece together into a solid memory, I knew that wasn’t what he meant. His face was very vivid in my head. Its mouth was open just a little. A vein on his bald and slightly leathery skull was pronounced. The eyes sunk back into their sockets. I didn’t know what could prompt someone to react like that to another human being.

“‘I didn’t know you were real,’” Eden repeated, running her tongue along the words. And looking as aghast as my pal from the station.