What did he see? All that was out there were the unmown fields that belonged to the local college. On blue-black nights when my asthmatic coughing shook the house, my father was a sentry at my bedroom window, gazing out into the expansive night.

Afraid to rouse the other from our entrenched places. We tiptoed around each other, careful not to startle one another. But if there was a recurring dream to attach to my somnambulism, it was likely the one where I jumped from the top of the basement stairs, waking up before I cracked my head open on the squares of yellow-beige-red flooring.Ī form of sleepwalking continued for my father and me throughout my adolescence.

My episodes of sleepwalking were always followed by bouts of amnesia. He closely followed me, his flashlight pointed to the floor. Once a somnambulist himself, he knew not to rouse me from my sleepwalker’s twilight. But a few hours later I, his somnambulist child, suddenly appeared at the thresh- old of his bedroom. I liked my father best in the deepest of night when he lulled me to sleep, narrating the weather or describing the constellations. If I could have made a magical tapestry like Sheba’s, I would have used it to soothe my father into believing all was as well: it would have depicted night on the Pacific Ocean-waves gently rolling, the moon offering guidance from the bridge of his supply ship. When Solomon awoke in the morning he thought it was still night, and slept on. The Queen of Sheba tricked him into believing that night went on forever by hanging above his bed a black tapestry woven with diamond stars and pearl planets. There was a time when King Solomon, the wisest of men, could not tell day from night.

The Somnambulist by Clint Alonzo