37
Gambling for Redemption
Someone was screaming, a long, steady holler, so loud it woke me up. It was
dark. There were streetlights, pavement, the rumble of distant cars. I was
standing in the middle of Oxford Street, half a block from my dorm room.
My feet were bare, and I was wearing a tank top and flannel pajama bottoms.
It felt like people were gawking at me, but it was two in the morning and the
street was empty.
Somehow I got back into my building, then I sat on my bed and tried to
reconstruct what had happened. I remembered going to sleep. I remembered
the dream. What I did not remember was flying from my bed and sprinting
down the hall and into the street, shouting, but that is what I had done.
The dream had been of home. Dad had built a maze on Buck’s Peak and
trapped me inside it. The walls were ten feet high and made of supplies from
his root cellar—sacks of grain, cases of ammunition, drums of honey. I was
searching for something, something precious I could never replace. I had to
escape the maze to recover it, but I couldn’t find the way out, and Dad was
pursuing me, sealing the exits with sacks of grain stacked into barricades.
I stopped going to my French group, then to my sketching class. Instead of
reading in the library or attending lectures, I watched TV in my room,
working my way through every popular series from the past two decades.
When one episode ended, I would begin the next without thinking, the way
one breath follows another. I watched TV eighteen or twenty hours a day.
When I slept I dreamed of home, and at least once a week I awoke standing
in the street in the middle of the night, wondering if it was my own cry that
I’d heard just before waking.
I did not study. I tried to read but the sentences meant nothing. I needed
them to mean nothing. I couldn’t bear to string sentences into strands of
thought, or to weave those strands into ideas. Ideas were too similar to