AWAKE
By JOSEPH L. CALABRESE

New York Lawyer
December 1, 2008

As I walked in the cold, in the middle of the night, it came to me that for the first time in my life, I was walking with direction . . . purpose, meaning, except, I had no idea where I was going.

It began, like so many journeys, with only a few steps. Late in the night, before I set out, everyone in the house slept. It never ceases to amaze me, that after the loudest of days, the house, and all its inhabitants sleep with such peace, albeit temporary and fleeting, just those few hours gave us all the rest we needed to stand up and face whatever lies ahead of us the next day.

I always felt so secure when I would look in on my son, my only child, Michael, and see him sleeping in his bed, breathing softly, gone to the world. Of course, that was when he was young, when he needed me to sing him to sleep, when he wanted me there like a security blanket, to let him know that he was safe and everything was always going to be ok.

He needed me to tell him that the shadows on the wall from the streetlights outside were really not monsters trying to get in the house and there was no one in his closet waiting to pop out when I left his room and closed his door. So many times I adjusted his shades so there would be no shadows, or walked into his closet, to show him there was no one there. One night when he was only five, and I had gone in his closet for what seemed like the thousandth time, did he say to me "Dad, thanks, you solve all my problems."

Now he was 19, and had drifted away from me, like so many people in my life. I should have held on tighter to those memories of his childhood, but I didn't, and now they are all but lost. What I do remember is that Michael was the little boy who used to continually beg me to play baseball with him in the backyard no matter what the weather or the hour. Over the years, Michael developed the social conscience that I never had, and grew truly disappointed in me.

He didn't like the fact that I worked for a plaintiff's firm and in his words "profited from the misery of others." He thought I should have done more with my law degree than make it a means to an end. Of course, he never remembered that I spent I5 years in the Legal Aid Society. He never had the time to think about that as he volunteered to work in food drives for the poor, or read at the library to struggling poor kids that had no fathers.

Michael knew what it was to struggle, born prematurely after a very difficult pregnancy and addled with learning disabilities. Nevertheless, he certainly overcame them and was now in his second year of college, choosing to live at home so he could keep volunteering at the church.

Over time, he begged me to get out of the rat race, told me I could teach at the local community college law school, and help those kids become lawyers so they could do good things. We argued about it far too often, and I eventually gave up, and let him drift away from me.

If I think about it too much, I either boil over with rage, or start to cry because I know that I'm not the hero to him that I used to be, when he was just six and only wanted to play ball or catch fireflies in the yard. No, I couldn't spend any more time torturing myself.

So tonight, everyone was asleep, everyone, except me. You see, for the least few weeks, I have been unable to sleep. Actually, it's been months. I lie there and stare in the dark, my wife sleeping beside me, breathing softly into her pillow, her heart murmuring quietly in her chest. Occasionally, turning as she unwrapped a dream in her head. I hadn't dreamed in so long, I had forgotten what it was like.

Most nights, I just stared at her. I remember when we were young, in bed in my five-floor walk-up in Brooklyn, watching her sleep. On one of those nights, I knew I loved her, that she would be the one. She's never known how much peace and joy I've experienced just watching her lie there, just breathing.

She loved Michael fiercely, and was his best friend, a friend I could never manage to be. During the heat of far too many arguments where she took his side, she would always say to me "What do you want me to do? He's all I have." That's usually where the conversation ended because I never understood why I wasn't the only thing she had.

So many of those nights, I would get up and stare out of our bedroom window, just out to the street, hearing the trees bend in the wind, maybe watching the family of raccoons trundle across our front lawn by as they foraged for food. Strange, now I was the nocturnal one like them.

I spent hours keeping my eye on the outside world. I just knew whatever I needed to get me on track, would be out there, somewhere, I just needed to find it and fast. My decent into madness was speeding up, and something out there had to slow it down for me.

They say that the average person sleeps 1/3 of their life away. I was losing more of my third than I could afford to. I read somewhere that, as you get older, the body produces less melatonin, the hormone that turns off our brain for a while. Maybe my brain had run out, except I was only 42, I would like to think there would be at least a few more years before it all broke down around me.

It had definitely broken down for the woman who lived alone in the house next door to me. She was 92 and had the dubious honor of outliving all the people in her life that loved or meant anything to her. Her name was Gerry, actually Geraldine, everyone on the block called her Aunt Gerry. Think about it, how many people under the age of 80 do you know named "Geraldine?"

She led a simple life, tending to her small flower garden and painting seascapes. She showed them to me once; they were all over her house. She had a small studio on her back porch. Most of them looked very "paint by number", but she used to tell me about all the oil paint she used and how she was hoping someday to perfect her craft.

Her life had not always been so carefree. Her first child when he was only nine, killed by a car, in front of my house, I've been told, riding his bike around the corner to get a quart of milk for his mom. That, of course, was in the 30's when around the corner was a general store and not a strip mall. A drunk behind the wheel did this to her. She never actually told me that, I think I heard it from a neighbor, but how she lost him didn't matter to her. It was just that he was gone.

On many nights, I would stare at her house, always dark, but in time, I would see the light from her room on the first floor come on, just a gentle orange glow from behind the thick velvet curtains. I always looked forward to that light. It just made me feel a little less alone and a little more connected because I knew someone out there was awake, just like me.

I knew she was in there, alone and awake. She was awake for so many different reasons than I. She was awake because all that melatonin had dripped away over the years. I don't know what she did there in the hours before sunrise but I do know, unlike me, she was at peace, having lived a good life, now patiently waiting for it to end.

Once the light was on, it wouldn't go off until the pink sun began to peek its head up over the horizon behind her house and the sunlight slowly swallowed and drowned it out. Like most of the houses in our neighborhood, both of our homes were built before the turn of the century. She had been there since she was a young girl, the wife of a soldier just back from the war. They built their entire life in that house next to mine, raising their five children. Just like, I had raised Michael here. The stumps of wood in her garden are the only remnants of a swing set that last creaked with use when Eisenhower was president.

In time, all those children grew, moved away, and eventually, much like their youngest sibling, died. Now it was just her, alone in that house, alone in the night.... just like me. We had our own separate worlds, even though we were only a driveway apart.

Across that driveway, she once told me about her son. She told me his name was Cliff, but she called him "Cliffy." He was her youngest. She referred to him as her sweet little angel, who used to love catching fireflies at night in the summer.

I remember my own son used to love to do that. He would spend all this time running around in the dusk of so many summer nights. I never understood how he found so much joy in such a futile act. He would never catch them all, and they all flew out of his hand before he could get them into the mayonnaise jar my wife gave him. But every time he got one, he would come running to me full of excitement. I never understood that excitement and never returned his gift of innocence. I usually just read the paper until it was time to take him back in the house for his bath.

She told me all this early one morning as she weeded her garden and I sipped my coffee standing on her lawn. You could tell the way she talked about her son that she still loved him like the day he rode his bike away for the last time. For her, even sixty years later, he was still her little boy, frozen in her mind, as if it was yesterday; frozen in a memory that would be with her until she died.

Eventually, she drifted off the subject and told me she was impressed that I was up so early. I don't know how impressed she would be if she knew that I had never actually been to sleep that night, that I had stared at her house waiting for the light to come on, the light that kept me company all those nights. But she didn't need to know that. For the moment, she was happy she had a friend to talk to. Honestly, I felt the same way.

There, was, of course, so much she that didn't know about me. Like the relationship I had with a man named Guillermo LaMarca. Guillermo was a Mexican gardener who, after years of backbreaking work, owned his own little landscaping service. One day, he ran his truck off the road, killing the three guys riding in the back, all of them his cousins of some degree or another. Guillermo had become my pet project that year. The family of one of the dead cousins had sued him. Only because they couldn't afford the to send the body back to Mexico and one of the paralegals in my office who was a family friend told them that my firm might be able to get them some money. We happily advanced the funeral expenses for them right after they signed the retainer.

I concocted a compelling case that he was drunk and recklessly killed three members of his own family. I had deposed him later in the same day that I had spoken to Gerry about her little angel. It was the first time I made him cry.

The second time had been earlier today as I examined him during the trial. Today, there were two people in the courtroom that knew the story I was selling to the jury wasn't remotely true, him and me.

Right after the accident, he was so distraught that he had killed his cousins, his English was so bad, and his head wound so deep, that he never really explained to the police that a dog had run out in the street in front of him and he swerved to miss it. I knew that this was what happened, because the neighbors told me. No one ever heard them testify because I never told anyone they existed. I also knew he was not drunk, but it wasn't hard for a jury of suburbanites to believe that he was, merely because I said so.

The whole case was really just an act of vengeance on our firm's part. Guillermo had little to no insurance and whatever verdict we got in this case would clearly wipe him out. He would have to sell the two broken down trucks land get on the back of another one as a worker, not an owner, right back where he started.

We tried the case because the owner of the lawn, on which the truck came to rest, was a buddy of a local assemblyman who had helped my firm win some zoning cases for some influential clients. He had a real hard-on for these "aliens" as he called them, and his $10,000.00 marble birdbath had been obliterated by the front of the truck. According to him, "We needed to teach these people a lesson."

Long before the trial started, the families of the cousins had forgiven Guillermo and told me they wanted the case over. He never told them about the dog, because he felt that he could not make excuses for what happened. He never told anyone, and, of course, I never asked him. I sold the family some story that once we started a case, we had to finish or they would be punished for filing it in the first case. It was a thin lie that only worked on people who did not understand enough to ask anyone else. During everyday of the trial they came to court and sat behind Guillermo, not me. I don't know who was more miserable, him, them, or me.

The case was going in very well, lots of crying and sobbing, mostly by Guillermo and the family of the dead cousins. During my examination, I found it was not hard to get him to cry and easily wash over the lack of evidence with his heartfelt guilt. He had no money, so the only think I could take from him, with every single question, was his dignity.

The judge knew what I was doing, and was perpetually angry that I was perpetually late for every day. We had taken many adjournments because my investigators with friends in the police department had been mining Guillermo's criminal record for DWl's and needed some extra time to grease the right people to pull court files that had been sealed. The judge made it very clear to me today that one more delay and she would dismiss the case.

The lawyer on the other side was no help to Guillermo. Since he had no money or insurance he hired a family friend who had just graduated CUNY Law school and had never seen the inside of a courtroom. The whole thing was a circus, and I was the ringmaster.

Since the cousin's family all sat behind Guillermo, who sat at the defense table like a man on trial for murder, the only ones in the gallery sitting behind me were the assemblyman and the man with no birdbath. They were very happy with me. It was like having Satan and his best buddy come to your wake, staring at you in the casket, just waiting for your soul.

No, there's no doubt that my old friend Geraldine certainly didn't need to know anything about my new friend Guillermo and my satanic comrades in the back row. I wanted to keep her turning on that light every night; I needed that to keep the few strings of sanity I had left in tact.

Lost in these thoughts I found myself again at the window waiting for her light to come on. I cannot tell you what time it was because I gave up looking at the clock months ago. I just used to know when to go over and look. But tonight, for some reason, she seemed late. The light was not on when it should have been.

I drifted away from my window back to bed. One thing about insomnia is that is just doesn't affect the way you sleep, but your perception of whether you actually are sleeping.

So I can't tell you if I actually was asleep when I heard glass breaking outside my window. It wasn't just breaking, though; it was almost like popping and breaking, like little shards of ice hitting the floor.

I bolted up and ran to the window, I thought maybe it was her house; maybe someone was breaking in there, thinking she'd be asleep. But the light was still off, and everything was very still in the cold February air. The leafless trees rustled a little, the evergreen outside my window swooned back and forth and rubbed against the house.

I walked back to the bed, checked the front window for my friends the raccoons, they were due by now, as I pushed the lace curtain away, I saw what changed my life.

It was a column, no, more like a tower, pushing its way to the sky about a block away from me. At least I think it was a block, it was hard to gauge in the dark. I squinted a little. Nothing helped. I looked over to my sleeping wife; she turned over and rustled the covers. I looked back and tried to count the trees to gauge the distance but they all morphed into masses of shadows that melted from one into another.

I needed to know what was out there, so I started walking, out of our room, down the dark front hall stairs and out the front door.

In all these months of being awake, I never left the security of our room. I never could leave without seeing that light in the window come on, I couldn't leave until I knew my fellow night owl was ok and awake. . . Safe.

But not tonight, tonight I just started walking out of the house and towards that tower in the dark. I had nothing to lose.

I don't know how far I went, or how long I had been walking, but the tower over the trees got bigger as I walked closer. Slowly, I felt the purpose that had been missing in my life, I had direction and the will to move and breathe in a way I had forgotten about, of course, I had no idea why. It didn't matter at the time, it just felt good, so I kept moving, kept breathing, I just needed to keep breathing.

It was the heat that finally slowed me down. I found myself walking through yards and bushes and my face got hotter, I started to sweat and the cold air braced against my face. It wasn't that heart attack I had been waiting for, no, as I peered through the bushes in the last yard I crossed, I saw what had pushed that tower into the sky, it was a fire, a huge fire. The house behind that tree was burning, completely burning. There wasn't a window on any floor that wasn't orange and belching thick black smoke. The glass had exploded out of each and every one of them, maybe, even from blocks away, that's what I had heard.

I never heard the fire engines roaring down the street behind me, or the neighbors screaming and running. I just kept walking, into the back yard of the burning house where somebody's kids had probably been playing earlier in that day.

Then, out of nowhere I felt a hard push in my chest. It was a fireman. Who am I kidding, he was only just a kid, and he might have been 18 on a good day. "Get back before you get killed," he screamed. I saw the look in his eyes. He was terrified. He ran right past me to join the rest of the firemen who were desperately trying to get control of a situation that was probably long lost long before they even got there. There was no doubt in my mind that if they had ever had control, it was quickly slipping away from them.

As the frigid February wind picked up, the fire that had chewed its way through the roof roared above the whole neighborhood spinning into the night sky like a tornado. Burning shingles burst from the gaping hole and rained on the lawn and everyone near the house. The chimney cracked and fell three stories, pulling away from the house like a zipper, tearing a hole along its side and destroying a car in the driveway. Fire quickly spit out of the gaping line left by all the falling brick and mortar. Some of the neighbors screamed and ran for cover; most of the firemen did the same.

I saw all this chaos around me, but I heard very little of it. But I did hear the crying, coming from a basement window which was now right at my feet. In all that mayhem, I must have drifted closer while everyone else backed away. Why had no one else heard this? Why not the neighbors or the firemen? I know why. You see, sometimes lack of sleep gives you the clarity that no one else has, and tonight, it brought me to the edge of that hole in the ground that would either kill me or give me back everything I had lost.

I should have yelled for help. I should have run back to get someone, I should never have slipped myself into that window in the basement.

I was sure as I fell in and the broken glass scraped the back of my neck, that I was probably never going to walk out of this, but it didn't matter. This is where I had to be.

I landed hard on my right arm. I heard it break on the concrete floor before I felt it. Once I sat up, I realized that I couldn't see anything, except the fire licking down from the floorboards above my head. But I heard the crying. So I just crawled to it. I pushed past things I could not see, old books, toys, lawn chairs. As long as whoever it was kept crying, I would keep pushing always aware of the fire licking its ay in and out of the floor boards above me. Reaching with my hands I finally found a laundry basket, right under the chute in the rapidly deteriorating ceiling. In that basket I found the one person in this world more scared than I. He couldn't have been more that two, he was crying, but he was O.K. He was old enough to walk, but not walk out. Did he crawl into the laundry chute? Did some one throw him in there in a desperate attempt to save him? How could anyone have left him behind?

I understood, I had left a lot of people behind in my life, but I wasn't leaving him. I held him as close as I could and crawled into a corner that seemed safe for the time being. There was no way out of this. I couldn't see the window anymore, and the steps to the ground floor had burned away. We seemed safe for the moment in this corner. That was until the house convulsed above us and embers rained on our heads. I leaned over and covered my new friend as best as I could, my broken arm would not cooperate.

The house began to creak and moan under its own weight. It was giving up. It wouldn't stand on its own much longer. I could hear the wood above me splitting and cracking. After a hundred years it was going to finally come down and take everything with it, including the two of us.

I knew it; those firemen above me knew it. They were abandoning ship when I got there. Can't say I blame them. They thought everyone was out and safe. They were wrong.

I looked down into my arms. He was just the perfect little boy, if he could only stay that wav, running after a baseball, or catching fireflies at dusk. In my mind I saw my six-year-old Michael, running around in endless circles on the lawn trying to catch all those fireflies. He would disappear behind a tree or get just far enough away so that I couldn’t see him. I could smell the grass that I had cut that afternoon. Then he’d come running out of the dusk, yearning to show me the latest one he caught. Then, as soon as he opened his hands, it would fly away. He would jump and swipe at the air that just rushed between his little innocent fingers. He'd run back into the dusk to find another one, he would have stayed out there all night if I let him.

Just and endless circle of complete innocence, Just like Gerry's son, forever riding his hike trapped in I940. He'd never grow up. Somewhere he was playing stickball or catching all the fireflies that Michael let slip away.

And now, as I looked into the eyes of the little boy in my arms, I saw the innocence that Michael once had, that slipped away, while I pushed past it. For the first time I knew what Gerry lost, what she must have been thinking about all those long deep nights I saw the light on in her window. I finally realized what she had lost, because in a way I had lost it myself, and now, as this fire roared around us, someone out there looking for the baby they left behind in this house, was going lo lose the same thing.

I could handle dying down here, I knew no one would really miss me, but those parents out there in the street; they would never recover from this. And this little boy in my arms, I could see him riding his bike forever, trapped in his little bubble, like all those other kids who just never made it to becoming grown-ups, I could see him catching all the fireflies that Michael missed, I could see...

...a hand.

Oh my God, there it was, a hand reaching down into that widow pane, then a voice screaming at me, "Come on . . .give him to me!" It was the kid I ran passed on the lawn, he must have seen me, he went for help. How long had I been down here?

I almost couldn't let him go, I was afraid that if I let go I'd never get that comfort of innocence again, I needed him to get me back to my son, the one I let slip away, I just couldn't hand him over just to be alone and hopelessly awake again.

The hand reached down and pulled away from me the one thing that probably saved me front a life of being awake. In only a second, that little boy was gone, pulled up like a rag doll. I decided he wasn't going alone. I pushed up on my good side and pulled my way out. I only saw the back of that kid running with the little boy, and the mother and the father running to him, screaming with joy and relief.

With that, I was shoved to the ground by a rush of hot air, ash and wood. The house had collapsed into its basement, its own grave.

I pulled a cherry hot nail out of the back of my neck, threw it to the ground, got up, and started walking...away back through the bushes, back home. It wasn't until my feet touched the icy pavement that I realized for the first time that I wasn't wearing my shoes.

I decided that I was never going back to court that day. The case would be dismissed, and I would be fired. That was o.k. I owed that to Guillermo. It bought me time, time to teach, time to earn back all that I had had lost, including Michael.

I don't know how long it took me to get home. As I walked up the driveway, I saw the sun start to peer over the horizon behind Gerry's house. The light in the window wasn't on. My friend across the driveway was gone, gone to meet her little boy. Silently, I wished her well, and thanked her for always being there for me. I kissed my hand and touched the outside of her window with it.

I climbed the steps inside my house and crawled back into bed. My wife stirred like she always did. She looked at me in the early dawn light with sleepy eyes and whispered softly, "Are you O.K.?"

"I'm just fine."

I put my hand on her cheek and whispered back, "I've always loved you."

She smiled and closed her eyes. Then, I leaned over, gently kissed her on the forehead, put my head on the pillow, and for the first time, in more time than I can remember ... I slept.

Link to: All the finalists