Wrong Side of the Bed by Kealan Patrick Burke
Nick remembered the storm, but only as much as one will remember a conversation that disturbs sleep. It might have been a dream, or a memory of turbulent nights long in the past. He had been awake only long enough to hear the rumbling of the heavens, his hooded eyes drawn briefly to the shadows of the leafless branches of the walnut trees as curiously colored lightning made them dance like a magician’s fingers across his bedroom ceiling. Red lightning, it had seemed, though whether or not he had imagined that particular detail or had his night’s overindulgence to thank for the peculiar effect, he couldn’t tell. Perhaps he had literally watched it through bloodshot eyes while it seared the walls, the wind battering the house like a hungry thing, slipping its tongue through the cracks and shrieking.
A vague memory, at best, and not, he decided, one worth dwelling on, as he squinted into the golden sunlight pouring in through the bedroom window. The light struck him as odd somehow, but then most things seemed odd first thing in the morning, particularly when he’d been drinking to excess the night before. And the summer had only recently died. As Carla liked to remind him in that breathless tone of endless appreciation for all earthly things, “With every season comes a change in the light.”
He yawned and fingered the sand of sleep from his eyes, dimly aware that the digital display on the clock beside him was blinking a quartet of zeros. The storm, no doubt, which made it a good thing that he didn’t have to work today, or he’d certainly have been late.
Doves sang a song of mourning in the trees. Nick straightened and slipped his legs over the side of the bed. The faintest whisper of a breeze caressed his toes and he shivered, stepping his way blindly to the spot where his slippers usually sat awaiting his cold clumsy feet. After a moment, he gave up and, with a frown, peered down at the floor.
His slippers, seldom anywhere but beside the bed if they weren’t on his feet, nevertheless, were not there. He looked around, confused. It took him only a moment to realize his mistake, and with that dawning came a mischievous smile. He was on the wrong side of the bed. Obviously he’d rolled over in his sleep and had risen on Carla’s side. A rare violation of one of her anal-retentive rules, her adherence to which he had often suspected might be a disorder of some kind. Whatever the source, he could joke all he wanted to about it but was still thankful she was not here to see it. Had she been, she would have treated his transgression with preposterous severity, as if she’d not just caught him on her side of the bed, but in bed with another woman. It made little sense to him, but he knew better than to question it, or needlessly aggravate her peculiar sensibilities. Using her towels, her favorite cup, leaving one of her books opened face down so the spine cracked, using her computer, leaving the toilet seat up…all things guaranteed to elicit a response from her that verged on outright mania, and after years of dating her, and another year of marriage, he had quit trying to rationalize it, or get her to talk about it with him. She was his wife, and ninety percent of the time, their relationship was a healthy happy one. She didn’t consider her rigid rules anything out of the ordinary, and Nick supposed she was just raised that way. Or maybe it was her way of maintaining a little bit of independence. After all, she had latched onto the idea of marriage a little too easily, too quickly, and he doubted she’d given much thought to what their union would cost her. In fact, he was positive she hadn’t. And neither had he.
He rose from the bed, staring down at his bare feet and feeling a guilty little pulse of pleasure. It occurred to him that he might be developing some neuroses of his own because standing there in his boxer shorts, gooseflesh stippling his exposed skin, he felt like a child who had stolen into a forbidden room. He didn’t know quite what to do with himself. Feeling superior in a way he couldn’t quite justify, he laughed out loud and did a small jig, stopping only when the impact of his feet on the floor began to register in his temples.
He rounded the bed and headed back to his own side of the bed to retrieve his robe. To his surprise, it wasn’t there. And neither was the hook. Puzzled, he turned, wondering if perhaps in a sleep-addled daze he’d already yanked it down and left it on the bed. But the bed held only a chaos of rumpled sheets. Then, he spotted it, hanging just as it always was, except of course, that it was on the wrong wall. This in turn made him realize what had bothered him about the sunlight that had greeted him upon waking.
Until this morning, the window through which that sunlight shone had been on his side of the bed.
+ + +
After standing there gaping at the out of place window and robe, Nick hurried from the bedroom and almost broke his neck when his outstretched hand missed the banister on the stairs. He slipped and fell heavily on his ass, bruising his tailbone on the hard uncarpeted steps.
“Jesus,” he breathed and looked up. Where the banister had been, there was now only bare, unmarked wall. With a mounting sense of dread, Nick slowly looked to his left and surveyed the wall opposite. The banister, dark mahogany, was affixed to the plaster as if it always had been. He laughed an uneasy laugh and put his hands over his face.
“All right,” he told himself. “Don’t freak out just yet. This is weird shit for sure, but you’re still half-drunk and half-asleep. The main thing here is not to wig out completely. A cup of coffee and things will go back to where they belong. You were drinking last night. Some of that weird Irish shit Bill said they made from potatoes. So what we have here ladies and gentlemen is the mother of all hangovers, complete with rearranging fixtures.”
It made sense, despite the fact that in no other way did he feel hungover. No headache, though his mouth was a little dry. No shakes, sweats. A mild headache, but nothing he couldn’t handle. Except of course, for the old hallucinatory architectural switcheroo.
“This too…” he said, grabbing the rail — despite the peculiarity of it actually being within reach of the wrong hand — and hoisting himself up, “…shall pass.”
Swallowing, he carefully navigated the steps and emerged into the kitchen.
He paled.
Just the hangover, he reminded himself, but even his inner voice didn’t sound convinced.
Like the bedroom, the light in the kitchen lit the walls and the floor in a way he had never seen before. He stared in amazement, recalling a thousand mornings in which he’d stood in this very spot, watching Carla at the table, the sun warming her neck. Now, breakfast would leave her squinting into the sun streaming through a window on the wall above the table. The wrong wall. A wall that had once held a picture of two children holding hands as they walked through a sepia-toned cornfield. That picture, of course, was now hanging by the bathroom. Except the bathroom was not where it should have been either. Nothing was. It was as if someone had mounted mirrors around the house, reflecting a shifted likeness of reality just to torment him.
Without thinking, and more than a little inspired by rising panic and the first few sparks of hysteria, Nick stalked across the room and was about to reach for the back door when he remembered, with a giggle that sounded dangerously like an expression of insanity, that the door ahead of him would more than likely lead him out to the front of the house now. The conviction was solidified by the fact that the handle was on the left side of the oaken panel, not the right, where it should have been. Sickened, he grabbed it and wrenched the door open.
His breath left him.
Sagging against the open doorframe, Nick gazed out onto a neighborhood that, despite his feverish hopes, had apparently, impossibly, rebuilt itself while he’d slept. The street, which had always snaked between the houses and curved around to the left, now slithered away in the opposite direction. The cheerful yellow hydrant on the curb had turned to watch. The houses themselves still stared out at the sea, but they’d moved to suit the relocation of that sea, the foam-topped waves lapping against an inexplicably foreign shore. And in the distance, the hills, hazed by the morning sun, were the wrong shape.
“What the fuck?” Nick said aloud, his mind unable to fully register what he was seeing.
The monkey-puzzle tree in his neighbor’s yard, the bus stop, the school just visible between the houses, the park, the slide and the swing set…none of it was where it belonged. But how was this possible? Everything couldn’t just reorder itself without the world noticing. Why was he the only one out on the street bug-eyed with shock and struggling to maintain his sanity at this hellish transformation? Where were the news trucks, the reporters, the emergency services, the cops, the scientists? Where were the people whose job it was to study and understand such an incredible phenomenon, if that was indeed the proper term for it. For Nick, “nightmare” was a better one. And he prayed that was what this was. Otherwise, perhaps Carla wasn’t the unstable one in their relationship after all.
On the mailboxes, the house numbers were backwards.
Oh God.
The idea of the hangover, from which he’d siphoned only the faintest trace of comfort, abandoned him. No alcohol, no matter how potent, could induce such madness. But madness itself could, quite easily.
He stepped back and slammed the door.
Okay, Nick. Get a grip. We can figure this out. Most likely it’s just a wire in your head come loose. Nothing irreparable. The main thing is to stay ca –
On the dresser, which stood in its proper place, had the place itself not moved to a location dictated by its mirror image, smiling faces stared back at him. Friends, wedding pictures, deceased relatives…all grinning from within their frames. All their positions switched. In one, Nick’s father scowled in jest at having his picture taken. The scar he’d earned from a fistfight twenty years ago had traded eyebrows.
He found a newspaper, the print backwards, unreadable.
Paintings on the walls had been touched up to suit the new natural order.
This was not his house. It was alien to him, an unwelcoming, dangerous thing, and he walked through it like a man in a dream desperate to wake up, numb and frightened.
Have to talk to Carla. The decision, the thought of action, made him feel a little less terrified. He’d call her at work, she’d tell him to go back to bed and sleep it off and that’s just what he’d do. She’d tell him that where she was, nothing had changed and that he was being an idiot. In this case at least, he’d be willing to accept any suggestions or opinions she might have to offer. She’d be a cold fresh dose of rationality that would set him straight.
But when he reached the phone, he realized he should have guessed that the numbers would not be in their proper places. The top left hand corner was a backward three. Resisting the urge to shatter the phone against the wall, he drew a deep breath and looked again at the numbers. Focused. Slowly, he dialed the number of his wife’s office.
After the third ring, a receptionist answered.
When she began to speak in reverse, Nick screamed.
Dazed, he stumbled to the bathroom mirror and stood just out of sight of his reflection out of fear of what he might see in it. After all, he concluded, if the world had been reversed, then wouldn’t the people have been reversed too? What if the human alteration had been something far worse than just a forelock appearing on the wrong side of a brow, or a mole switching cheeks? What if the reversal occurred inside too? Or worse, what if the reversal meant being turned inside out?
Trembling violently, he closed his eyes and braced his hands against the cold porcelain of the sink. His breath came in ragged gasps, the sound of it unsettling him further. It did not sound human. Animal perhaps. Or victim.
When at last he found the courage to open his eyes, he saw to his overwhelming relief that his reflection showed what it was supposed to, what it had always shown. A little paler and more terrified looking than he had ever seen it perhaps, but it was still the Nick Lewis he knew, with everything as it should be. Slightly crooked teeth, dark hair, dark eyes — not a face he had ever been too proud of, but he loved the sight of it now. Strange relocating bathroom aside, it made him feel better to know he hadn’t undergone some bizarre transfiguration while he’d slept. Unlike the rest of the world. But soon, that summoned another question. Why hadn’t he been changed? The woman on the phone certainly had, unless it had been a recording. No. It hadn’t. He’d known the voice — Sheryl something-or-other, the receptionist at Carla’s office. He’d spoken to her a thousand times. It had been her, and yet not her. Speaking reverse English.
Thoughts of bizarre science experiments and insidious meteors bearing alien viruses flashed through his head. He knew it was all ridiculously far-fetched, but awakening to a mirror-image world had seriously skewed his idea of what ‘far-fetched’ entailed.
Then he remembered the storm, the peculiar red lightning. He still wasn’t sure if he had dreamed it or not, but he needed something, anything to hang this insanity from. And if indeed he had been awake, if indeed he’d really seen red lightning, what did it mean? Was this bizarre reversal something the world or nature had just decided to do? For what purpose? And what kind of a storm could alter the very fabric of reality?
Unless…
Unless the only reality being altered was his own, which would certainly explain the absence of panicked people on the street. Maybe he really was imagining it all, or something had broken in his brain and he was seeing things backwards because…
…Because what? He didn’t know, and it hurt his head to keep trying.
He wanted to call Bill Ryan, his friend and drinking partner, to ask if he had put something in his drink as a lark, some new drug maybe, but feared what it might do to him if, like the receptionist, his best friend started speaking in reverse.
He wanted to call Carla direct, maybe on her cell phone, but again, if all he got was gibberish, it might be the end of him.
In the end, after bracing his nerves with a sizable glass of whiskey, he decided on the only course of action available to him. He would sleep. For he had decided that the only viable, the only rational explanation for what had happened, was that it hadn’t happened at all. He was dreaming, and while he’d never experienced such a vivid dream before, he was willing to accept this as an illuminating introduction to that area of the subconscious.
Once the decision was made, he began to feel better. His trembling subsided — a development he reasoned was due to the fact that he had uncovered his own mind’s nefarious scheme and, with the villain exposed, the charade could now be dealt with.
He stood, and slowly made his way up the stairs at the wrong side of the house, his hand on the banister to steady himself. And then he was in his bedroom, colored by the misplaced sunlight through the relocated window.
He collapsed on the bed, his eyes clamped shut against the hostile reality around him.
At length, sleep claimed him.
From dreams of ordinary lightning, he drifted awake and lay still.
Confusion spun through him. He tried to focus on where he was and soon he remembered the other dream, the nightmare of the reversed world, and quickly sat up.
The light in the room had faded, become tinged with red and for a moment he almost wept, sure the queer reality hadn’t been imagination at all, but a curse he would have to endure until he died. But then he registered the dappling light on the ceiling, and realized what he was seeing were no more than echoes of dusk as night encroached on the world.
He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face.
There came a slow, unsteady clacking sound from beyond the bedroom door. Nick flinched, his fingers gripping the covers tightly.
The stairs. Someone on the stairs.
He let his body relax and felt a new wave of exhaustion overcome him. He was in no hurry to leap from the bed and check to ensure that everything was in its rightful place, that he hadn’t awoken again into a world that had turned to look inside itself.
Carla’s smile would be reassurance enough.
The clacking drew closer, the familiar sound of heels on wooden steps, and then they paused outside the bedroom door, as they always did when she was trying to be quiet, trying not to rouse him. Such consideration always tickled him. She was polite enough to try to avoid waking him, but when he did wake, she would immediately chastise him for sleeping the day away.
Take a look at yourself in the mirror sometime, she’d say. A good look…
Nick thought it might be some time before he’d be able to accede to that particular wish without trembling.
The door to the bedroom swung open.
“Hey babe,” he said, squinting to make out her shadowy form in the doorway.
And froze.
He thought he couldn’t see her face because of the frail light in the room. He thought maybe she was facing away from him, looking back down the stairs.
“Carla?”
Then he saw that he was right.
“Kin,” she whispered, as she took a back-step into the room.
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