THE SIDE OF THE BED

A work of fiction inspired by a personal experience

The first time someone sat on my bed, I was annoyed that they sat so close to the edge.

It was a twin bed. There was barely room for me, the pillow, and my habit of sleeping on my side. If someone was going to visit at that hour, the least they could do was find a chair.

I thought all that before remembering I lived alone.

The pressure was behind my back. The mattress had sunk slowly, first in one spot, then across a wider area. My body tilted toward the hollow, and I had to brace a knee to keep from rolling into it.

I opened my eyes.

On the wall, the rectangle of light from the window hadn't moved. The air conditioner hummed. I could move my fingers, my feet, my head. I lay still for a moment, checking.

Then I looked over my shoulder.

No one was there.

I ran my hand over the sheet. The surface seemed flat, though I still felt myself leaning slightly backward.

A spring, I thought. Weight distribution. Sleep.

I settled back into place.

Before drifting off, I added a possibility I wouldn't have defended in a serious conversation:

If it was someone I loved, they could stay.

I didn't believe in ghosts. I never had. I didn't belong to any religion either, or expect signs from another world. But I had relatives who'd died, and I still caught myself wanting to call them. If they were going to defy the laws of nature to visit me, I wasn't about to greet them with a scream.

I fell asleep before deciding which of them would have been so inconsiderate about the size of my bed.

The noises had started a few weeks earlier.

At first, in the kitchen: a chair scraping, what sounded like a drawer closing, something small falling to the floor. I knew those sounds well. For years, without leaving my desk, I'd been able to tell a dropped spoon from a lid sliding across the counter.

One afternoon, I heard a glass shatter.

I got up irritably, already thinking where I'd left the broom. I checked the kitchen, crouched beside the refrigerator, and shone a flashlight beneath the cabinets.

I didn't find a single shard.

I counted the glasses. They were all there.

Apartment buildings carry sounds in strange ways. A pipe can bring a bang from three floors above right into your kitchen. It seemed a reasonable explanation. I accepted it and went back to what I was writing.

Then came the knocks at the door.

Two or three, clear enough to make me get up. Through the peephole, I always found an empty hallway. Once, I opened the door and waited for the elevator to stop on some floor. It didn't move.

I considered a confused neighbor, children, wood adjusting to a change in temperature. So many possibilities occurred to me that I eventually lost interest.

The thing with the bed happened again.

Always when I was lying on my side. Always behind me.

Some nights, I barely felt a faint pressure. Other times, the mattress dipped so deeply that the sheet pulled tight beneath my waist. When I turned over, it disappeared.

I didn't feel cold. I didn't see shadows. What puzzled me most was how calm I was.

One night, I said:

“You can stay, but let me sleep.”

Speaking aloud made me laugh. It also embarrassed me a little, although there was no one to hear.

Then, in the kitchen, a teaspoon tapped the rim of a cup.

Just once.

My mother used to do that before tasting her coffee: tap the rim to shake the last drop off the spoon. I remembered her hand, her short nails, the cup she held from underneath because its handle had broken.

The coincidence kept me awake longer than the pressure on the mattress.

The next day, I bought a notebook.

I decided to record the times and the circumstances. I was used to analyzing problems; I could analyze this one. I'd note whether I'd slept poorly, whether the air conditioner was on, whether the noise coincided with the elevator.

On the first page, I wrote:

“Not knowing what causes it doesn't mean it has no explanation.”

Below that, I drew three columns: time, sound, possible cause.

For nine days, I recorded unremarkable observations. A vibration from the refrigerator. A draft. Someone slamming a door downstairs. I discovered that one leg of the bed wasn't resting firmly on the floor, and I put a shim beneath it.

On the tenth night, the mattress sank again.

I was wide awake.

The notebook lay open on the nightstand. I'd just finished noting the sound of water inside the wall. I set down the pen, switched off the lamp, and turned toward the window.

The pressure came slowly.

This time, I also felt a tug on the blanket: a few inches of fabric slipped behind my hip, as though caught beneath a thigh.

I reached for the switch.

The mattress regained its shape before I turned on the light.

I sat up. I checked the legs, the shim, the springs I could reach underneath. Then I sat in different places, trying to reproduce the movement.

I couldn't.

In the third column, I wrote: “Unresolved.”

I still had sleep as a possible explanation. Being certain you're awake isn't conclusive proof either.

I switched off the lamp again.

“If it's you, Mom, you know this bed isn't big enough.”

I wasn't expecting an answer. The words had slipped out, the way remarks to people who were no longer here sometimes did when I found a recipe or heard a song.

The blanket shifted gently over my shoulder.

I fell asleep.

The knock at the window came three nights later.

It was sharp, loud, made with knuckles.

I lifted my head from the pillow.

My apartment was on the thirteenth floor.

There was no balcony outside the bedroom. Beyond the glass was nothing but air and, far below, a brightly lit parking lot.

I waited.

A second knock made the glass vibrate.

I switched on the lamp and approached without drawing the curtain all the way back. From the side, I could see the whole window. No trapped bird, no branch, no dangling object. It wasn't raining either.

The third knock came while I was watching.

In the center of the pane.

I stepped back.

I went into the living room, turned on the lights, and picked up my phone. I checked the front door. Locked. Chain fastened. I told myself there must be work going on outside the building, although it was absurd to be doing it in the middle of the night without warning.

I returned to the bedroom to look for a cable or platform I might have missed.

The mattress had sunk beside my pillow.

I stopped in the doorway.

The blanket formed a crease sloping toward the hollow. I watched it for several seconds. It didn't change.

From the window came two quick knocks, then a third after a pause.

I knew that rhythm.

My mother used to knock on my bedroom door like that. Two impatient little taps and a final, softer one. She'd done it when I was studying, when I shut myself away to listen to music, when we argued and she came back with some excuse.

Two. A pause. One.

I looked at the bed, then at the glass.

For the first time, the thought that it might be my mother brought me no joy.

“Who's there?” I asked.

There was no answer.

The window's latch had been stiff for months. I'd put off fixing it because I hardly ever opened the window. I took a step toward it.

The hollow in the mattress deepened.

The bed creaked so loudly that I turned.

Then all sound stopped: the air conditioner, the refrigerator farther away, even the usual murmur of traffic. I don't know whether the sounds ceased or I stopped hearing them. I only remember how hard it was to swallow.

Something brushed the sheet.

A long, narrow depression had appeared in the blanket, stretching from the edge of the bed to the pillow. It looked like the space an outstretched arm would leave.

The phone was still in my hand. I opened the camera and pointed it at the bed.

On the screen was an unmade bed.

I lowered the phone.

The depression was still there.

I raised it again, looking for another angle.

My voice came from the window.

“You can stay, but let me sleep.”

I recognized it by the slight hoarseness I get when I haven't spoken for a long time. I even heard the brief laugh I'd given that night, embarrassed to be talking to an empty room.

I said nothing.

The phone was recording. The red timer told me so. I propped it on the dresser, facing the window, and backed away until I was sitting on the edge of the bed, as far from the pillow as possible.

The pressure remained behind me.

My voice sounded again from the other side of the glass:

“If it's you, Mom, you know this bed isn't big enough.”

This time, it didn't reproduce the sentence exactly. The last word came slowly, broken into syllables, as though whoever was saying it had needed to learn it.

I stared at the window latch.

A speaker, I thought. Someone had recorded me. A cruel joke. There had to be a device somewhere.

I searched the frame with my eyes, the folds of the curtain, the space behind the phone. I would have bent down to look beneath the dresser, but the blanket tightened around my hand.

I wasn't holding it.

I'd rested my palm on it, and the fabric had gathered between my fingers.

At the window, someone began knocking faster.

It was no longer my mother's rhythm.

The frame shook. The latch gave a metallic rattle. I stayed seated, watching for it to give way, thinking I should leave the bedroom, call someone, do anything I could explain afterward.

But the pressure behind my back felt familiar.

I didn't know what was on the bed. I didn't know what was outside. At that moment, the difference between them seemed enough.

“I'm not opening it,” I said.

The knocking stopped.

Not gradually. The last knock was cut short, as though one hand had stopped the other before it reached the glass.

I waited with the phone on the dresser and all the lights on.

Several minutes passed.

The blanket loosened beneath my palm. I could hear the air conditioner again. In the parking lot, a car backed up.

I checked the time: three seventeen.

My back ached from sitting like that. I lay down without switching off the lamp, leaving the phone recording. As I settled onto my side, I felt the familiar dip in the mattress.

“All right,” I murmured.

I don't know who I said it to.

I don't know when I fell asleep either.

In the morning, the recording was forty-three minutes long.

I listened to it first by the window, then through headphones. I could hear my footsteps, the creaking bed, my breathing. Where I remembered hearing the sentences from beyond the glass, the recording picked up only a low rustle, like a sleeve brushing the microphone.

My “I'm not opening it” was there too.

I listened to it several times. My voice sounded steady. Steadier than I'd felt.

I called the building management. There had been no work on the exterior. I checked the frame and found a small white mark beside the latch, but I couldn't be sure it was new.

I wrote it all down.

In the possible causes column, I wrote “Unresolved.”

I still think there's an explanation. Perhaps several. One for the kitchen sounds, another for the mattress, another for what I thought I heard that night. I haven't decided that one proves the other.

I still sleep in my twin bed.

Sometimes I feel someone sit down behind me. Some nights I turn over; other nights I'm too tired and leave it until tomorrow. When I think of my loved ones, I think of them with affection. I wouldn't want a few noises to take that from me.

But I had the window latch repaired.

And when I went through the recording one last time, I found something I'd overlooked.

It happened at the end, when my breathing was already slow and even.

There were three knocks at the apartment door.

Then the mattress creaked.

The sheet rustled very close to the phone.

And footsteps left my bedroom.

I was still snoring when someone unfastened the chain.