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outside a shade short of black, parrots cawing across the building’s courtyard. He woke not peacefully but with the sound of his own screams competing with the cries of the parrots. In the dream that receded too slowly, he was being chased by something terrifying and deadly. The mother of the family, a stout woman with a mustache, held him and shushed him brusquely, and the youngest brother stared in annoyance. This was the summer Graham grew his first white hair. By the time he was twenty, there would be no brown left at all.
    Because we met through sleep, people assumed that our troubles were similar, or at least neighbors on the same spectrum. But my sleep troubles and Graham’s were never related, not in symptom or treatment or prognosis. Nothing that helped me could have helped him. The furthest reach of my troubles—the long hours, the heavy pharmaceutical coating that remained after pill-induced sleep, and the terrible humming alertness that followed the shattering of such sleep, like the vibration of a gong after being struck—were insignificant compared to the terrifying unpredictability of extreme parasomnia.
    Although it might have seemed as if we were in the same place, working toward the same goal—healthy sleep—we were not at all. By the time we met, Graham knew that no real cure existed for him. I was still hopeful on leaving Detention that the long hours might end. I’d fooled myself into thinking that my insomnia was a sleep disorder, or I’d been fooled by doctors. I don’t sleep well—it’s a problem, yes, but it’s a problem on a par with losing your grocery list before getting to the store. I don’t talk about it, but when it does come up, people are sympathetic. Most people have a passing association with insomnia, and they know it’s an experience they don’t care to repeat. I want to tell them how much worse it can be. Perhaps the closest relative to Graham’s experience is chronic pain—recurrent migraines or crippling arthritis, for example. Living under the thumb not only of the pain itself, but also of the threat of full-on outbreak. People with these conditions know a bit about what it’s like to live as Graham did, in perpetual discomfort and perpetual fear.
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    THERE WAS A BRASS BELL suspended from the wide trim alongside the Lullaby ’s sliding doors, and this was how Lidia announced her presence the first morning I was expected at Stiltsville. She didn’t wait for an answer. The screen’s metal track was chalky and warped, and the door stuck in phases—s tut stut stut —as she strong-armed it open.
    â€œ Madre de dios ,” she said. “You must fix that.”
    â€œIt’s on the list,” I said.
    I wore a towel around my torso and another around my hair. Frankie was on a colorful patterned rug in the corner of the salon, practicing his monkey jumps. He signed to Lidia, two fingers pointing at his own eyes: Watch! Watch!
    â€œHe wants you to watch him,” I said to Lidia.
    â€œCertainly!”
    He placed his hands on the rug, fingers splayed and head tucked, then bucked and twisted in one motion. Then he thrust both hands into the air, smiling largely, showing his boxy little teeth. There were times when I could almost hear the sounds he would make if he spoke: Ta-da! he might have said. A few times, in reality, he’d laughed faintly; there had been days when getting him to laugh was my singular objective. There were sounds of pain sometimes, if he skinned a knee or whacked his head, a cry muffled by closed lips. Otherwise, I hadn’t heard him form a word—an intentional, coherent word—in eighteen months, almost half his lifetime, and back then the only words he’d spoken had been mama , dada , flower , doggie , and ball . Just as he’d started to speak words, he’d stopped. We’d dragged him to the doctor, had speech therapists out to the