The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,48

let him go, and finally he turned to grab his young employee by the shoulders and give her a good strong shove, but when he did this he heard a screaming that brought the fuzzy movie running in his head to an abrupt halt and transported him in an instant to his darkened bedroom and the sound of his daughter’s voice crying from the baby monitor.

“Wah! Wah! Wah!”

Maureen, a comforter and a pillow thrown over her head, gave a murmur that sounded like the word “yes” but showed no signs of waking up as Scott stood up from the bed and made his way to the nursery. His wife had built up so much sleep debt that she was immune to Sa-mantha’s screams, and Scott felt a strange combination of sympathy for her and annoyance at the general situation as he walked through the darkened hallways. When they went to bed there was always the hope that this night would be different from the others over the past fifteen months, that this might be the night when their youngest progeny released her grip on their biological clocks, bringing forth a morning in which the California sunlight returned to its normal soothing hues, losing the stark whiteness that had assaulted their eyes since Samantha’s birth. But no, here Scott was again, awake at 2:06 a.m., according to his watch—I fell asleep with my watch on, Jesus. He noticed that he was still wearing his button-down shirt from the workday, though he had managed to get his pajama bottoms on. He reached the nursery and found his daughter, as usual, standing up in her crib with her favorite yellow blanket, looking disoriented and confused, her rust-colored locks in a sweaty disorder. Come to me, my little girl, while I get you your milk. One day soon you’ll be a big girl and this torture will stop.

While Scott tended to their daughter, waiting in the kitchen for the microwave to warm her milk, Maureen slipped in and out of various episodic dreams, and then into the longest one, whose images would linger in her consciousness after she woke up. Mexican day laborers were tramping about her home, eating her food, sitting on the tables, playing with Samantha. A man with stringy and shiny hair that resembled black hay was trying to take apart her coffee table with the point of his machete, using it like a screwdriver. What are you doing here? Please leave. Please. Dirt encrusted their faces and their fingernails, and they bumped into one another and into the furniture as they walked about the house. They were leaving small piles of red sand on the living room floor and she pleaded with them again, but they answered her in Spanish, or rather in a jumble of words that resembled Spanish: la cosa mosa; la llaga es una plaga; waga, waga, waga. After she woke up, Maureen would think, I’ve never dreamed in Spanish before. The men were filling their mouths with salad greens and big gulps from plastic milk jugs, and she started to look for Scott because maybe he could get them to leave, but she couldn’t find him. She walked into the kitchen, where someone had turned on a garden hose that was spraying water into the air, causing her to run back into another room lined with closet doors, which she opened, looking for her husband in between the brooms and boxes until Samantha’s cries sounded in her dream and she opened her eyes.

The baby monitor was flashing red lights as it broadcast Samantha’s wailing. The clock on her nightstand said 4:29 a.m. and Scott was snoring almost as loud as Samantha was crying. Thank you, Scott. It would be nice if my husband could get up at one of these middle-of-the-night feedings and tend to the baby and allow me to get a full night’s sleep. When she reached the nursery and saw the empty bottle on the floor she realized that he must have been up earlier. I slept through the baby crying again. It was always a somewhat disturbing realization, that you could sleep through the ambulance-siren blasts of a baby girl.

While Maureen carried Samantha and tried to soothe her back to sleep with a lullaby, “turban man” and “binocular lady” were running inside Scott’s final dream. He was trying to force his software creations to take a seat in the back of his car, but they were busy running through the fences and