The Night Shift Broke My Sleep and Something Moved Into the Gap

I work nights at a hospital, on a unit I will not name, and if you want to break a human being down to the studs, put them on rotating shifts for two years. Your body never knows what time it is. You sleep at noon with foil on the windows. You eat breakfast at ten at night. Somewhere in there the machinery that is supposed to hand you cleanly from waking to sleeping gets bent, and things start slipping through the seam.

For me it started as waking up unable to move. I would come out of sleep at, say, one in the afternoon, curtains blacked out, and find my body switched off. I knew where I was. I could hear traffic outside and a neighbor mowing. But I was pinned flat, arms leaden, chest compressed like there was a sandbag on my sternum, and the harder I tried to move the more the panic climbed.

I actually knew what it was, because of my job. Sleep paralysis. The transition out of REM sleep going wrong, the muscle atonia that keeps you from acting out your dreams lingering into wakefulness. Disrupted sleep schedules make it worse, and mine were as disrupted as they come. I even explained it to a colleague over coffee, very calm, very clinical. It is fascinating, I said, the brain is awake and the body is not.

It stopped being fascinating the afternoon I heard the footsteps.

I was frozen, as usual, staring at the ceiling I had come to know intimately, waiting it out the way you wait out turbulence. And then, from the hallway of my little apartment, I heard footsteps. Slow. Deliberate. Coming toward the bedroom. Bare feet on the laminate, that soft tacky sound. I live alone. My door was locked. I had checked it, I always check it, the night shift makes you check everything twice.

The footsteps reached the doorway and stopped.

I could not turn my head to look. That is the specific hell of it. You lie facing the ceiling and the thing is at the edge of your vision, in the doorway, and you cannot make your eyes go there and you cannot make them come to you, you can only feel the arrival of a presence, the way a room changes when someone walks in, that pressure of another awareness sharing your air.

The weight on my chest got heavier. Not metaphorically. It pressed until my breathing went shallow and whistling, until I was pulling threads of air, and I thought, absurdly, clinically, that if a patient presented like this I would be calling for help. But I could not call for anything. My throat was a closed door.

The presence came closer. I felt it lean over the bed. And the mattress by my head took a weight, a real weight, the springs giving with a sound I have heard ten thousand times when I sit on the edge of a bed to talk to someone frightened in the dark.

I have sat on that edge for other people so many times. I did not like being on the other side of it.

Nothing touched me. It just stayed there, leaning, breathing in a way I could hear now, a wet and unhurried sound, until my body came back online in a rush of pins and needles and I sat up flailing and hit the light and the room was empty and locked and mine.

I told the sleep clinic everything except the footsteps and the weight on the mattress. I told them the clinical parts. They adjusted my schedule, gave me light therapy, a whole protocol. It is better now. Mostly I sleep through.

But I transferred off nights last month, and when my manager asked why, I gave her the medical reasons, all true. What I did not say is that I could not keep waking up in a locked apartment to the sound of something coming down my hallway to sit with me. I take care of people who cannot move or speak for a living. I know now, from the inside, exactly how alone they are in there. That knowledge is the only thing I brought back with me, and I would give it back if I could.