Non Dormire

A MAN’S HOME is his castle. That’s what they say.

Do you know what a castle is? A fortress that’s supposed to be impenetrable.

It’s my job to penetrate them.

Yeah, I’m a burglar. I challenge you to judge me on that fact alone. How many of you have ever taken a peek in someone else’s bedroom or medicine cabinet? How about filching a TV Guide? A pair of earrings? A condom for a long night of fun? Whatever you do, I take it one step further. Two if the homeowner deserves it. I’ve rescued cats and dogs from filthy dumps, along with one or two kids. I don’t play the hero, though. Along with the possibility of going to jail, that makes me sick. I see do-gooders with faces full of phony humility all the time on the six o’clock news. They get what they came for. I do, too, but I keep quiet.

I’ll have to keep double quiet on my next job.

Old Man Pagliai may not be the richest Italian in terms of stocks and bonds (or Mob connections), but his coin collections are worth an ungodly payout. He’s been a numismatist for more than fifty years. So far, no one’s pulled off this heist. I wonder why not. Word travels fast and dies hard in the underground. Good thing I’m familiar with that territory.

Lockpicks. Hammers. Slim Jims. Master keys. Pliers. Spark plugs. Rope.

I have all I need. Most importantly, I have a will to win. To own this place.

Getting to the second story is no problem, since the house is brick and I’m skilled at climbing on porch roofs, but – Holy cow. Who puts barbed wire in a window? I’m lucky I saw it before shredding myself to pieces. A few snips from my wire cutters and the threat’s gone. I climb inside a bedroom that smells like it hasn’t been aired out for several months.

Maybe Pagliai sleeps downstairs like some old people do.

The coins are somewhere else, so I begin my search. There’s enough moonlight for me to canvass room to room. I don’t hear much except for a grandfather clock ticking away – no dogs, no alarm systems, nothing that would tip anyone off to my presence. I don’t find anything upstairs, so I head down.

Just as I thought. He’s sleeping (and snoring) on a recliner in the living room. I do my best to sneak past him soundlessly, but several floorboards creak underneath me. I pace and grope until I find a doorknob on a locked door. It only takes a simple bobby pin, not one of my more advanced picks, to get the lock to yield. You’d think Pagliai would have better ones, but maybe he’s cheap and won’t install them. So much the better for me.

I’m in a study or den. Lots of books line one wall. I suspect that one hides a safe. One by one, I pull them out by their spines until I hear a click. A portion of the bookshelf shifts to reveal my target. I’ll have to crack it by force because I don’t know the combination. I lay my toolkit down on the nearby desk and open it.

“Chow. Non dor-MEER.”

Oh, no. It’s Pagliai. He’s standing next to me, right in my face, looking like he wants to poke my eyes out with two fingers in a V shape.

Fortunately, I have a gun and he doesn’t.

Wincing at his stale body odor, I press my pistol into his ribs. “Give me the code.”

No reply.

“Didn’t you hear me? I said give me the combination.”

“Non dor-MEER.”

Is he speaking English? Doesn’t sound like it. I’ll shut him up.

“If you don’t do what I say, I’ll plug you.” I jam the gun in deeper.

He curls the tips of his splayed fingers so they look like hooks. “Non dor-MEER.”

“NOW!”

He rattles off a series of more unintelligible words. I push a legal pad and a pencil on the desk toward him. “Write it down, and don’t try anything funny.”

He scribbles three numbers in a spidery scrawl. I can barely read it in the light of my flashlight. With the pistol still pointed at Pagliai, I take my first guess at the safe. No luck.

“Again.”

He rewrites the combination more legibly. Still, I can’t make head or tail of it.

“This is your last chance. Again.”

On his third try, his bony hands stop shaking and write three numbers I recognize. I twist the safe’s dial according to them, and it falls neatly open.

“Thanks, old timer. You’ve made me rich.”

Pagliai lurches forward, aiming to claw my face. I pull the trigger and fire.

He slumps to the floor, gurgling out his last moments.

I feel nothing – no regret, no sorrow, not even shock. I’m just numb.

This is my first kill, and hopefully my only one. Self-defense is legit. I still don’t want the cops anywhere near me, so I hurry and look in the safe. Empty.

“Goddammit!”

I check the desk. The bottom right drawer has a lock equal to the challenge of one of my master keys. Bingo! The coin collections greet me, winking in my flashlight’s beam. I stuff them all into my backpack, zip it up, and head for the back door.

It’s so dark outside that the streetlights do little to guide my way – or to reveal me. I slink through backyards and back alleys until I find my way home. Once inside, I remove my balaclava, gloves, and black clothes. Time for bed.

My head hits the pillow and my eyes close, but I can’t sleep. I’m too wired. I lie in the darkness, wondering how to get clear of my crimes. I have a rap sheet, but not so long as to make me one of the usual suspects. I tried to be as careful as I could during the job, but the old man caught me. His V-finger gesture gave me the creeps. He wasn’t so much flipping me off as he was – cursing me? What was that weird phrase?

I toss, turn, and sweat the whole night through. I don’t get any real sleep.

The next day, my eyes are sore and burning. I get up, shower, and shave, staring at my bloodshot reflection in the mirror. Throughout the morning, I find myself unable to concentrate for brief flashes. That phrase keeps running through my head – “Non dor-MEER. Non dor-MEER.” I try to Google it using text-to-speech, but for some reason that doesn’t work. Pushing it to the back of my mind, I go throughout my day, eating, drinking, and figuratively sitting on my hands because I’m so anxious. Still, last night’s effects linger, and I can’t wait to take a nap.

I crawl into bed but end up lying there bored and trying not to stare at the ceiling. Do you know how hard that is? I count backward from one hundred, then two hundred, but my mind stays awake. I get up and turn on the local news.

“A manhunt has ensued for the alleged killer of Giovanni Pagliai…”

Shit. Shit! Do I dare leave my apartment? If I get caught, I might get the death penalty. If you commit murder during a felony, that’s all she wrote. I’ve also broken my number-two and number-three rules: Never go too long between jobs. Don’t stretch yourself too thin. That’s why I panicked at Pagliai’s. If I didn’t get my hands on those collections, I’d be short more than a couple of paydays.

The thing is, now that he’s dead and they’re mine, I can’t do anything with them.

I turn off the TV and go through my options. I could contact my usual fence, but he’d rat me out in a half-second once he found out what I had. I could try to sell them online, but that takes a while, and I wouldn’t get the money right away. I could pawn them. A slow sale over time. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll scrape by for several months, then unload the mother lode. My pawnbroker doesn’t ask too many questions. However, he might this time. Collectible coins aren’t my regular loot, and he’ll wonder – No. I can’t allow myself to think like that. I won’t go over to Frank’s shop immediately. I’ll keep the sets until I’m desperate, then start pawning them one by one. In the meantime, I’ll lay low.

What’s that out of the corner of my eye?

I blink. Nothing. I thought I saw a shadow.

Over the next week, my sleep problems continue. No matter what I try, I can’t get some shuteye. I drink NyQuil by the bottle. That makes my body warm and weak but doesn’t knock me out like I thought it would. Night after night, I remember wasting Pagliai.

He attacked me first, right?

My pistol has a silencer, so no one heard the shot, right?

I’m safe, right?

In the daytime, I see more peripheral shadows cast by nothing and “floaters” in my direct field of vision. These specks of light annoy me to no end, because I think that gnats are buzzing around my head. I don’t get worried, though, until they swarm together and form faces with wide-open eyes and a wide-open mouth in a silent scream. I only see them for a moment, but they’re enough to make goosebumps prickle all over my body and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. So familiar, these faces, each bearing an expression of surprised horror. They’re not my victim, but somehow I know every one of them.

I start using a sleep mask so I won’t have to rely on closing my eyes for darkness. That helps, but only a little. The repetition of “Non dor-MEER” continues in my mind, and my body starts suffering. I drag my feet and shuffle my steps. My eyelids weigh a hundred pounds, and they ache. So do my muscles. When you keep yourself busy with pointless tasks during the day and spend most of the night lying awake, you get stiff as a board. Feverish, too, at least in my case.

When I see the caterpillars, I scream out loud.

Literal insects are crawling around on my limbs. They’re black and thick, with spikes all over their bodies. Every time they move, their pinching legs sink deeper into my flesh. They also consume it bit by bit.
Did you know caterpillars take dumps? It’s true. They squeeze out these black pellets. When I squeeze one of them on the surface of my arm, it turns bright red.

I scratch until I bleed some more, thinking that’ll frighten the little fuckers away. It doesn’t. It only makes them hungrier, their forms relentlessly bloating.

They grow from tiny to huge in a matter of minutes. They then clamp onto a lower layer of my skin and shed their own. Their pupas writhe with the larvae’s efforts at rebirth.

One crawls into my mouth – I try to spit it out – but it hangs and pupates there.

I DON’T wake up.

One thing I realize as dawn arrives and the chrysalises shrivel up and disappear was that Pagliai collected not only coins but butterflies and moths. He’ll collect me if this fucking insomnia continues.

Three things keep me from going mad: trying to figure out the shadows, the faces, and what “non dor-MEER” means. The shadows are probably nothing since they’re cast by nothing. The faces? Replicas of my own. The phrase? At long last I get Google’s text-to-speech to work: “Non dormire.” “Don’t sleep.”

I have been cursed, and the only person who can undo it is dead by my hand.

Maybe if I give the coins back – but why? Why would I give up the only thing I gained from killing Pagliai? Besides, I need them to get me through the next few months. I dare not risk another job. Not while the manhunt’s still on and my victim is still in the local headlines. That leaves what? Gouging my eyes out and replacing them with a couple of his stupid collectible State quarters?

Now, there’s a thought.

Mine grow more disjointed with each day that passes. Each hour, each minute, each second. The shadows lengthen and turn into ghostly forms that slither up to me and let me see their floater-swarming faces. Intuition tells me that they’re the burglars who came before me, one by one, to steal Pagliai’s prized possessions. They failed. He found them and cursed them. I’m the last in a line.

What can I do?

One thing I won’t do is confess. No matter how long I go without sleep, I’d rather be in a mental hospital than in prison. I don’t think my argument of self-defense is going to fly. The State will say I was sane when I committed burglary and shot the old man. That much is true. That much will lead me to the lethal injection chamber. It’s the one time that being declared competent is not a compliment.

In desperation, which has devoured me like a caterpillar devouring a leaf, I turn to Frank at the pawnshop with the first set of coins. I promise him half of what I make selling them. Half, not a measly ten percent.

The rat bastard turns me in, and I trade my cluttered apartment for a jail cell not even half its size. I still can’t sleep.

The insects don’t appear anymore, but something worse does: needles. Needles penetrating every major vein. I shiver all over, sweating and stinking up the cell, but no one cares. Someone gives me a couple of Tylenol but no sleeping pills. They don’t work anyway.

Eventually, the State rules that I’m unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity. I’m moved to a nice, clean facility with a nice antiseptic atmosphere. I endure the needles not once, but every day when I’m sedated.

The old man comes to me as I finally fall into slumber, saying “Dormi bene!” “Sleep well.”

Once I’m declared competent – and once I face my final needle – I will.

Credit: Tenet