The poem arrived at The Harlem Review on a Monday and was published two months later under the pseudonym "J.B."—short enough to be real, vague enough to be denied.

It was called "The Man Who Sits on My Bed When I Sleep." It was the best thing Julianne Brooks had ever written and the thing she was most afraid of having written.

Julianne had come to Harlem from Jackson, Mississippi, in January of 1962, carrying two suitcases and a stack of poems that made her mother cry because they were too beautiful for someone who had not yet seen thirty. She found a room in a boarding house on Lenox Avenue run by a man called Mr. Desai, who spoke with an Indian accent that seemed to belong to no specific region and who asked no questions about anyone's past.

The room cost eighteen dollars a month. It had a window that faced a brick wall, a bed that squeaked when you turned over, and a desk by the window where Julianne wrote.

She wrote at night. Always at night. The poems came like water from a broken pipe—fast, uncontrollable, and eventually flooding everything they touched. She wrote about jazz. She wrote about her grandmother's prayers in the Pentecostal church back in Mississippi. She wrote about the way the sky over the Mississippi looked at 4 AM, which was not blue but a color that had no name, a color that existed only in the space between sleep and waking.

And she wrote about the man who sat on her bed when she slept.

He appeared every night. Tall, silent, wearing a suit that looked like it belonged to a dead man—cut in a style that was out of fashion by at least ten years, dark wool, slightly too wide in the shoulders. He sat at the foot of her bed, watching her sleep, and when she opened her eyes, he spoke.

His words were in English but the cadence was wrong. Archaic. Formal. Like a passage from a book no one had written.

"You are beautiful," he said on the first night.

Julianne sat up. "What?"

"In the way a storm is beautiful. In the way the moment before lightning strikes is beautiful."

"Who are you?"

"I am what waits."

"For what?"

"For you to stop running."

She threw a glass of water at him. It passed through his chest and soaked the brick wall behind him. He did not flinch.

"You are a dream," she said.

"I am what is real about your dreams."

She stopped sleeping for three days. She drank whiskey, smoked cigarettes, and wrote poems until her hand cramped. On the fourth night, she fell asleep at her desk and he was there, sitting in a chair by the window, reading her poems.

"You write like somebody who has seen the other side," he said, "and decided to come back and write down what she saw."

"Is this real?" Julianne asked. "Are you real?"

"Define real."

She laughed. It was a bitter sound. "You sound like someone I went to college with."

"I am older than college. I am older than Harlem. I am older than the river you crossed when you came north."

His name, he told her, was Marion. Not the Marion her sister kept writing on her apartment walls. A different Marion. A Marion who had been around since before the slaves were brought to this coast, who had watched this city—this country—this continent—change and change and change and never, ever change.

"Why me?" Julianne asked.

"Because you listen. Even when you do not know you are listening. You listened when your grandmother prayed. You listened when the jazz musicians played at two in the morning. You listened when the sky made that color that has no name. You have been listening your whole life. I am the thing you are listening for."

Isabelle died on a Thursday. The official cause was an overdose. Julianne knew it was not an overdose. Isabelle would never destroy herself. But Julianne said nothing at the funeral, stood at the graveside in a black dress that belonged to her mother, and watched the rain fall on the casket.

That night, Marion came. He did not speak. He sat on the bed and held Julianne's hand. His hand was warm. This was impossible—he had never been able to touch her before.

"You are afraid," he said.

"Of what?"

"Of what happens if you say yes."

"Say yes to what?"

"To the thing that is coming. To the thing that has been coming since you were a child in Mississippi, standing in your grandmother's kitchen, hearing voices in the steam rising from the okra stew. You have been hearing them since then. You just thought they were your imagination."

Julianne pulled her hand away. "If you are God, then God has terrible timing."

"Timing is not mine to control. I am not the one who decides when. I am the one who decides what."

Julianne stopped writing for three months. She did not know if it was depression, recovery, or surrender. When she began again, the poems were different—darker, clearer, less concerned with beauty and more concerned with truth.

She published them in The Occult Quarterly under the pseudonym "J.B." No one knew it was her.

Mr. Desai read them and said nothing, but the next night he brought her a bottle of Indian whiskey and two glasses.

"You write like someone who has made a bargain," he said.

"With whom?"

"With whatever is waiting on the other side of the page."

Julianne drank the whiskey. It burned going down. She sat at her desk and opened a new notebook. On the first page, she wrote one word.

Begin.

Marion was there when she looked up. He was sitting in the corner, in a chair that was not there yesterday. He was smiling. It was the first time she had seen him smile.

The notebook filled. Page after page of writing that Julianne did not remember writing—text in a handwriting that was not hers, describing scenes she had never witnessed, in a voice that sounded like Marion's but in written form.

She closed the notebook, locked it in her desk drawer, and threw away the key.

The next morning, the drawer was open. The notebook was on her desk. A new page had been filled.

OTMES-v2-D2A8-270deg-M4-270R90B120F4 | TI: 55.0 (T3) | Style: Psychological Thriller | E: 12.0

Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: