Going Nocturnal

Autumn was flushing red for the last time when my mother’s Turned. It was both expected ans surprising.

It didn’t have a name for a long time, and then it was christened by a group of fanatics with a Dungeons and Dragons book filled with monsters and too much time on their hands. Nightwalker probably sounded better than any sort of “itis” or “flu”, or whatever they might call gang green’s cousin. Nothing fell off, but it was undeniably necrotic. Nothing on the outside died, but once a patient Turned, everything inside of them seemed to decay.

It wasn’t airborn. There was nothing to protect the healthy from the sick, so there were no precautions to take. Without precaution, the healthy could gaze at the sick as much as they liked. Behind homemade casserole gifts they could wonder whether the Nigthwalker got to their mouth first, their skin, or if it would be their arms that changed first. When the casseroles became useless, it was harder to disguise the interest. I wondered how my mother felt when her sickness transformed her into spectacle. I thought it was better than turning her family against her, like our neighbour’s family and their son with AIDS.

Once Nightwalking spread, the clinics spread as well. There were pamphlets upon pamphlets of information about how to tell one’s loved ones that they were plagued with Nightwalking, and what to expect in the following weeks, and about how the world did not stop turning just because Nightwalking had ruined one’s life. There was information about invasive treatments and homeopathic medicines that I did not believe for a second. No one bothered with homeopathy anymore, unless they were feeling nostalgic, and beneath the homeopathy was a steady treatment of science and research. I was in my room, adjusting my sun lamp, when my mother walked past my door and detoured into the frame.

“Do you think you’ll want to look at these?” she asked, holding up the pamphlets. There were pictures on them that looked like the pamphlets I’m been handed at school, now that we were supposed to think about university, and our future.

I inspected the faces on the pamphlets. They had roman features and beatific smiles. They were jubilant and probably poorly paid models. My mother twisted them this way and that so I could get a look at the titles. It didn’t look like anything I couldn’t find with five minutes and Google. I leaned back in my bed. The sun lamp made my room feel like morning and sleeplessness. “What would I do with them?” I asked. I didn’t need to read about coming out to one’s family members: my mother had done that already, and no one had expected any less of her.

My mother rubbed her temples. It was dark outside, but my lamp probably hurt her eyes. She would have them the longest, and most people did. Nightwalking didn’t destroy them, but some patients came out of treatments wishing that they did. There was nothing to be done about those. Curiously, the dark eyes almost never made it into the pamphlets. I suppose, as glossy as they were, the eyes would have looked abnormal and dark, like black water. There was no room for those black eyes when they could instead photograph the long limbs of a Nightwalker playing tennis as though nothing at all had changed. They cold have been the pamphlets for the universities I’d looked at. For campus gyms. For life insurance. For gardening programs.

I pulled the curtain shut and turned up my sun lamp. I could almost always stay awake. It was easier to accomplish when I could no longer see the dark night beyond my lamp. My mother looked abruptly away from the window. She looked exhausted to have been caught looking out of it in the first place. She rolled her eyes at me as though I’d just said something particularly childish. “Learn something. About what’s going to happen to me, and what will happen to you after. Find support.”

I didn’t think there was support to be found. I was good at accepting inevitable things, even then. I could see what would happen come winter, to my mother, and how it would change our lives. If there was something I forgot to take into account, it would be solved or discovered soon anyway. My mother gave me more pamphlets than I could have asked for and than I read. I preferred National Geographic, or wildlife photographers. There were a lot of segments and stories then about diurnal and nocturnal creatures and the way were impressed our own lifestyles on them. I would read them at night, when my brain still thought it was daytime.

My mother threw out the rest of the pamphlets, and then the ones I had when she realized I wasn’t going to read them. The clinic had given her some medicine to ease the transition, a sort of holding off of the worst effects, and some painkillers for the bone growth.

She read the sides of the pill bottles to my sister and I first. “Side effects may include nauseau, vomiting, feelings of hopelessness,” she read. It said something similar on my grandmother’s depression medication, which always seemed wrong to me, or incorrect.

It was just beginning to turn into Autumn when we heard about cousin Christopher. It wasn’t often that someone found a way to hurt themselves before the Nightwalking took them completely. He didn’t seem to want to take the pamphlets’ suggestion to learn to live with Nightwalking and incorporate it into his daily life. When his mouth began to close, he stuffed it full of all sorts of things to try and keep it open. It didn’t work, he only succeeded in suffocating himself and having to be taking to the emergency room to keep him breathing while they tried to figure out a way to remove what was in his mouth without actually opening it.

We got very little news about Christopher after that.

My mother watched her intake after that. Her intake of water and food and sugarless gum. None of it would have stayed in her mouth anyway, but she wasn’t about to risk it. She measured the edges of her mouth by poking at them with her tongue. She measures her arms with a meter stick and combed her fingers through her hair like it was already gone.

My sister didn’t like to see it, but she dealt with these things like she might deal with gossip she didn’t want to see, or one of those chases on the Animal Planet channel. She turned away from it. My mother didn’t say anything about it.

She took us outside on a sunny day, despite what the pamphlets said. I could imagine her skin feeling more and more sensitive to the light. She tugged her shirt sleeves all the way down her arms, but they didn’t quite reach her wrists.

My sister drove us to the park, and then to the farmer’s market. The sky was darker today than before. The clouds that swirled across it were the kinds we learned about in school, light with debris and particulate matter, but dark because of how poorly the clouds reflected the light of the city. The street lamps were turned up nearly to baking temperatures and light, as the city liked to do at the end of the summer. It was always better to simulate summer than to let it go completely, they always said.

Under the sun lamps, we went through the farmer’s market while my mother and sister tried not to loose their minds too quickly. Late in the summer, there were advertisements everywhere for iced lollies made from phosphorescent citrus fruit. People ran past us, some with Nightwalking, getting the last of the sunlight in their bones and skin before it began to hurt them too. They ran a little faster than the others of course. My sister ignored my mother when she stalled to look at the extra joints in the Nightwalkers’ arms and legs. My sister showed me a sign for gelato made from synthetic eggs, which were supposed to taste just like real eggs except they didn’t come from infected chickens, only vegetables from the infected ground. We all went out for tea, which tasted like grave loam and made my tongue itch. My sister downed half of her mug before her bravery began to falter. My mother educated herself on the virtues of the tea, via the pamphlet that came with our cups, and then decided that regulated bowels and slight euphoria were not worth the liquid in her cup, which she spat into a patch of artificial flowers. We went looking for food after that, anything that my mother could stomach before the flesh began to fall off her ribs. My mother glanced at the reflective cutting board in one booth, and the side of a knife in another. My mother tapped her on the elbow when she spent too long inspecting her hairline and her eyes and her wide mouth.

“Don’t drag at me like that,” my mother snapped when my sister began to haul her away from her reflection. Her tone told me that it didn’t matter how stir-crazy we all felt in our house with two other people and a diagnosis, it would get more uncomfortable here in a minute if we didn’t leave. My family was always trying to one up one another by humiliating them in public. But none of us were really humiliated by causing a scene. Except me.

“If I don’t, you’ll calcify or Turn before you actually leave your reflection alone,” my sister said. “You want to do something useful about it? Re-read the pamphlets the clinic gives you. Don’t poke anything into your mouth. Go to the therapy your doctor talked about.” She didn’t sound furious at first, then all of a sudden she was. That was her anger. It heard that it was invited to the conversation and instead of leaking in bit by bit, it charged in. Now she was comfortable in it, she wouldn’t let it go.

“Therapy won’t make it go away. I’m not feeling hopeless, anyway, so I’m all right,” Mother said.

“You’re not all right, you’re being a shit,” my sister said. I clamped a hand over my mouth. I couldn’t imagine calling my mother a shit. My mother looked like she couldn’t imagine it either, or couldn’t believe it had happened at all. “You’re pretending to be all right with it and letting your condition worsen. Just because it isn’t the end of the world doesn’t mean you should stop fighting.”

“Fighting what?” my mother snarled. “There isn’t much to fight for the next few months. It will be easier to just let it happen. And do you know what I think about when I see it happening to me? I think about what it’s going to be like for you when I can’t go out in the day, and when I start to really fall apart. Or about how you might not be able to tell me apart from the others. My sister was almost invisible when she had it. She could have been any Nightwalker. She walked straight into the sunlight when I didn’t recognize her. Right in front of me. I don’t want to do that to you, you understand?”

My sister was too shocked to flush at first, but when she did it was a terrible, guilty flush. She told my mother that she did understand, and she was sorry for upsetting her. She wasn’t sorry for what she’d said, or that she meant it, only that my mother had had to see her sister go. Mother never mentioned that I was there when it happened. It was a regular visit to my mother’s sister, but combined with the sudden outburst of Nightwalking outside of the city, there were several Nightwalkers on my aunt’s property, and no way to tell which one was which. I watched my mother trying to puzzle it out while I sat in the front of the car.

I wished we would leave, even if we didn’t find my aunt. I didn’t want to see any more Nightwalkers than I already could. I didn’t like the way they were mostly human, but not. Excessively long-limbed, with dark alien-eyes, the ridged heads and a rib cage as desiccated as a great Dane. The mouthless-ness was the worst, because there was nothing a Nightwalker could say once they Turned. There was no expression they could make that was less frightening than the ones conjured by their dark eyes and liplessness. I knew that inside of them, their organs were slowly turning to sand. It was the worst part, and many Nightwalkers couldn’t take it, but opening their mouths was as good as exposing every organ to the outside world. A gust of wind would blow them away. They died in increments.

It was an inefficient death, but easy to clean up after.

My mother rooted through the barns on her sister’s property and found several Nightwalkers. I could tell from her wrinkled brow that she could not immediately dismiss them all, even when she was sure they were not her sister. There was no way to explain to her sister that this was more a function of my mother’s forgetfulness than my aunt’s appearance, if that was her concern. Many eerie faces peered at her from the dim barn. Not one of them made a sound. For such tall people, with such drooping arms, they made very little sound. My mother only found her sister because her sister still was of mind to garden.

My mother saw what she was about to do before her sister did it. She shouted her sister’s name as she ran toward her, across the driveway and the garden.

My aunt had had her eye on my mother for minutes, though, and she had already made her decision. No amount of running could stop her. She flicked on her garden’s sun lamp and stood beneath it. A couple of Nightwalkers fled from the light, but two other joined her. They always joined one another right before they died. They looked like they were drifting when they lay down in the tall grass and stopped moving, black aliens in a green sea.

My mother was different after that, in a way that hurt my eyes more than the sight of her Nightwalking. She did not want to tell my sister what happened, but when we drove back from the park, I got the idea she was glad she had. If she was in complete control of her body, I’m sure she wouldn’t have been crying. She didn’t make a noise as she cried, but that was the Nightwalking, I think.

My mother found sunlight in a local schoolyard after she Turned. Before that she was a part of several events to raise money for Nightwalking Research Foundations and Funds. She tied ribbons around her fingers and the fingers of strangers. She read up on the latest advances and stayed out of my room when my sun lamp was on. She drank non-allergenic juices and gardened in the dark. She smiled in front of a camera at a benefit jazz concert outside of city hall and smiled with her small mouth when a neighbour called that night five minutes after eleven to tell my mother that she was a celebrity.

In February, my mother walked into the schoolyard in the dead of night. I went to collect her ashes and what was left of her in the morning. I showed them to my sister and went to watch a program on television about mole rats that only emerged in the sunlight, and the number of endangered diurnal species, which was on the rise. I poked my tongue at the corners of my mouth, just to make sure they hadn’t gotten closer together.

Art by Alex Diaz

Text by Lucie MacAulay