Here is what happens at 4 a.m. in this house. Every single day. Like a Swiss watch, if the watch had a snout.
First, Vinny Van Meow knocks something off of something. Or Trouble grunts. It’s one or the other, and it doesn’t matter which, because they’re both just the starting gun.
Then Pickles whines.
Then Queso barks.
Then Remmi gets up and jumps straight up and down while facing a wall, because she’s blind and no wall has ever once corrected her.
Then Karie gets up. She lets them all out. She feeds them.
And I get the bed. The whole bed. Every inch of it.
That’s the show. 4 a.m., seven days a week, no dark days, no understudies.
(I awake at 3:50, by the way. My body likes to arrive early for things it hates.)
So I stretch out like a starfish that made good decisions, and I sleep like a...
Well…
Not last night
Nothing. Nobody. 4:00 and the house is in diorama-mode.
Karie didn’t stir. Not a twitch, not a sigh, breathing away like a woman who has never owned an animal in her entire life.
So suddenly this was MY issue.
I nudged the cat. Nothing. I nudged him again with intention, which in cat law is a felony, and he absorbed it like a bag of flour.
So I coughed. Loud. A big theatrical cough, the kind a guy does in a movie when he wants the room to look at him.
Which caused a real coughing fit. An actual one. Forty seconds of a man drowning eight inches from his wife.
Nothing. Not one critter. Not one PhD.
The lamp plan
Okay. So there’s a lamp by the dog beds that’s on the phone app timer switch thingy.
Simple. In my mind, at least. Light comes on, dogs wake up, dogs do the whole revue, Karie gets up, and I go back to being an innocent bystander in my own bed.
Except the light would be ON. And she would ask why the light was on. And there is no good answer to that question at 4 in the morning.
“It came on by itself” only works in this house six or seven times a month, and I had already spent all of those on the power surges that Central Virginia Electric Cooperative sends my way (They aren’t cooperating very well). Of course. THE one night I need the power to do something stupid, it just sits there... working normally.
Could I set it to come on and then go back off? Sure, dude. And then what? Clear the app history? Am I really going to lie under the covers (the phone is bright, smart ass) deleting evidence so I can get some sleep?
So I tried telepathy instead.
I’m not proud of it. I lay there and beamed a signal at four animals and one doctor of education. Wake up. Somebody. Anybody. Wake UP.
I got no reply at all.
Which is a Genesis song, my friends, and once it’s in there it does not leave. Phil Collins at 4:40 in the morning, real chipper about the whole thing. Over and over.
Eventually it started to morph into Bob Mould seeing a little light, which felt like spiritual progress until I figured out that was just the sun coming up.
And still nobody was stirring.
The theory… MY theory
So what if they were all dead?
I mean it. Five packages of heartbeats in this house, zero of them doing anything. That’s not sleep. That’s a scene.
So we all have it on the record, Karie falls asleep to murder podcasts. That’s her thing. Every night, a woman in Ohio gets into a van she should not get into, and by the second ad break Karie is out cold. I feel like I have slept next to an active crime scene for years.
So which podcast covers this? Because somebody has to.
Probably the two ladies. The one with the voice like a heating pad who says every town’s name like it’s a diagnosis. “Keswick. Virginia. Population not many. A quiet farm at the end of a quiet road...” and then the other one goes “oh no” and then they both laugh, and then... and then... they read an ad for a mattress. In the middle of it. MY very mattress situation. Use code BLUEDOG for fifteen percent off.
And then back into the podcast. No forced entry. No lights on. No signs of a struggle, except for the husband, who had nearly died coughing four feet from her earlier that same evening.
“And that... is when things took a turn.”
Then I realized that if Karie is dead too, she isn’t listening to any of it. She’d miss the whole episode. She’d miss HER episode.
And that’s when my brain gets me to the treats…
I hand out treats before bed. Everybody gets one. That’s the routine, that’s the deal, that’s the last thing I do every night.
Oh no.
Did I do this? Was I the guy? Am I the guy on the podcast, sitting in a folding chair in a bad shirt, saying I don’t know what happened? They were fine when I went to bed?
And a follow-up question I still cannot answer.
Why did I give Karie a dog treat?
The autopsy
Eventually, I got up to pee. That was not part of the investigation. It was just time.
On the way back, I picked up Vinny Van Meow and gently tossed him down the hall. Gently. This is important. He’s a half-eared cat with a documented history, and he understood the assignment, which he expressed by hissing at me out of the dark like a punctured tire.
Alive.
Which set off Queso, who barked.
They were ALIVE. Nobody was murdered. I was not the guy in the folding chair.
And then, from the bed, in the dark, an utterance a bit more than a mumble.
“Why are you trying to wake them up?”
I want you to picture a grown man in his own house, in his own hallway, ducking behind a chair.
“I am not. I was just helping Vinny with a hairball.”
The village
Then it was quiet again.
So I lay there with Bob Mould, Genesis, and two ladies laughing about a mattress, all going at once in my skull. Nobody asked for that supergroup.
And c’mon. This was MYYYY sleep time. This is MYYY window. This is when I get to have the dream about the magical village by the sea, and the nubile vixen who lures me down to the water for some shenanigans, and then has an “episode,” and then I go get an ice cream cone.
Every time. Same village. Same vixen. Same episode. Cone.
MY TIME.
6 a.m.
At 6, Pickles whined. As is normal. At 4. I guess we had all moved to Mountain Daylight Time.
Then the rest of the critters came in behind him, two hours late and not one of them apologizing. Remmi found her wall. The wall was right where she left it. So the telepathy did work... it just runs on the same schedule as our power.
Nobody was poisoned. Karie got out of bed.
And I sprawled. Boy, did I sprawl. All four corners of it. Overcome with joy.
And I farted.
It stunk so bad I couldn’t sleep.
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)
Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.
He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.
See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.
Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving TBD) and “Elliot Nessie.”
He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.
