Beyond Measure

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Rachel Z. Arndt. Beyond Measure

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She woke up sounding the walls of her memory

for particulars

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I fell asleep in four minutes. I dreamed I was in a plywood-lined elevator that got stuck oscillating between the twenty-third and twenty-seventh floors until I pulled the stop lever and went plummeting, down, down into an echoey atrium where the elevator car careened into glass walls and sent me, hands outstretched, through open doors into open water. There I swam, electrified by the wires in my hands and the water, naked with an old high school friend, gazed upon by other high school friends, less mortified than I should have been, less mortified than I was when I woke up, ten and a half hours later, to a blinds-drawn sunlight and voice through the intercom: Ma’am, are you awake?

Stay where you are, I’ll be right in, the voice said. Five minutes later, a woman knocked as she was opening the door and asked how I slept—better than normal? I don’t recall her face but I do remember it was vastly older than the face on the ID around her neck: A football pin obscured the word “hospitals,” and below smiled a young woman with bangs. Did she spend all her mornings greeting people? Did she tuck them in at night too?

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