I live with a sleep disorder that makes me initiate sex in my sleep. Before I learned from it, I feared it deeply.
My mouth is wet against her neck. Her taste—the oil, the sweat, whatever it is—it's like lime sucked right off the rind. And I can't get enough.
But I'm not really there. I'm far away, up in the rafters somewhere. I'm watching him turn her over. She's moaning, waking up with his tongue in her mouth. His hands scrape down her bare back, he claws away her shorts, and then he presses himself into place when she asks, "Are you awake?"
"Uh . . . yes," he says with a greedy self-assurance. He goes to penetrate, but she stops him. She can tell. Sitting up, she watches as the space behind his eyes begins to light up. The grin goes away. He recedes. I come to. These brands have the good stuff—from featherlight linen to organic cotton to sweat-proof duvets. When the temperature drops, reach for these caps. The day the world shut down, Emily St. John Mandel was no better prepared than anyone else. Like so many people free-falling through March 2020, Mandel pulled her daughter out of school, battened down the hatches at her Brooklyn home, and descended into blindsided shock. Then, something strange happened: suddenly, invitations to write essays and op-eds poured into her inbox. Readers tweeted at her in droves, with some informing her that 'Station Eleven', her 2014 novel about a ravaged world rebuilding after a global pandemic, was becoming their Covid-19 life raft; others announced that they were staying the hell away from it. Throughout it all, the eerie refrain: "'Station Eleven' predicted the future." When life suddenly, terrifyingly resembled her fiction, the literary world was desperate for Mandel to make sense of it all. Social media can destroy you. Especially when you're a fading celebrity who's drunk and looking for attention and has a decently-cropped picture with Tom Hanks. This original work of fiction is the best argument yet for hiding your phone when you're drinking—especially in a pandemic. The year was a banner showing for literary treasures.  One night in the spring of 2017, Michelle Campbell was in her kitchen, cooking hot dogs for a few friends, when she heard the boom of her front door breaking. It was the narcotics unit of the Mount Vernon, New York, police. They carried a search warrant and a battering ram. They swarmed in, guns drawn.
The police ordered Campbell and her guests onto the floor and cuffed them. One officer, a detective in a tactical vest and a black hat named Camilo Antonini, surveyed the bodies. He singled out Campbell's nephew, a skinny man with a scruffy beard and big eyes named Reginald Gallman.
As Gallman would later testify in a civil case, Antonini pulled him into the bathroom, threw him against the water pipe, and pummeled his rib cage with swift, tight punches. Gallman asked why he was being beaten. "You know why, you stupid motherfucker, you dumb-ass nigger," he recalls the detective saying. The unit's commander, a sergeant named Sean Fegan, came in and told Antonini to chill out. After five minutes, Gallman testified, he finally did. |
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