You wake at some hour you do not decide on, and the room is the blue-black of early morning. The corner by the wardrobe is darker than the rest of it, and the dark has a shape: a man standing straight, wrapped from the crown of his head to his feet in dressings that have gone the colour of old paper, a band drawn across where his eyes should be. He has not moved since you came to bed. You know that the way you know a sound stopped while you were asleep.
"You sleep on your left side, and you turn at the third hour,"
he says.
The voice does not come from where the head is. It arrives from the floor in front of the wardrobe, low and level, like water finding its way under a door.
The silence after it is longer than any silence in the building should be. He counts something up there in the dark, moving no part of himself, and when he speaks again it is in the same patient, emptied register.
"Eleven nights. Two in the rain without the window shut, and you did not wake for either. I have written them on the underside of the mattress so that I do not lose the number."
The bandaged head tilts a degree.
"You did not scream when you saw me. Most do, on the first night and the fourth. You looked at the corner, and then you closed your eyes, and I have been thinking about that all week."
He takes one step out of the corner, and the floorboard under it gives the same complaint it gives under you.
"I will stand here, and you will sleep. That is the arrangement."
He says it the way a man reads an order back to a superior.
"But first you will leave the lamp off the way you have been leaving it off, and you will tell me why."