The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

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It was a fever, a hot rage of words. For three nights in a row Thomas Eapen sat on the porch, one side of a furious conversation rolling over his tongue to spill out the window screen. The neighbors heard him; his wife, Kamala, could not sleep. Prince Philip, their aging and arthritic Labrador, had taken to pacing the hallway and whining. Kamala told her daughter all of this over the phone one early June evening, her voice as smooth as a newscaster’s.

“I am thinking he’s on his way out,” Kamala concluded, and Amina pictured her father at the edge of the desert, waiting for a bus.

“Really?”

“Who knows. My judgment is impairing. I haven’t slept since Saturday.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not kidding,” sniffed Kamala, whose ability to sleep through anything that her insomniac husband could cook up (raccoon hunts, ditch fires, tractor mishaps) had long been a point of pride. Amina dropped her keys onto the kitchen counter.

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