Sixteen Floors Up

This will be the first actual autobiographical piece that I post up here. I may add it to a larger collection.

"So what would the shortest path be?" Faina asked me.

I squinted my eyes at the brainteaser book and considered the related illustration to no avail.

"Through...the edge?"

"I don't know. Should we look at the answers in the back?"
"Ya!"

While she riffled through the pages, I look up at the balcony and Los Angeles night sky above me. We were laying on a mattress on the balcony of our sixteenth floor apartment. A cold breeze would occasionally come by and I would hide my legs under my blanket. If I leaned my head back far enough, I could see even more balconies and the lights that shone out of their respective apartments.

"Huh. I guess that would be the shortest path." My mother showed me the answer.

"What? Really?"

"Looks like it. I liked the other problems better," She closed the book. "Especially the ones that we got right!"

"Same! Maybe we can do some more tomorrow."

"Of course. But we better get some rest tonight."

"Okay. Goodnight!"

"Goodnight!"

She turned off the lamp that we had also brought out on the balcony and we covered ourselves with the blanket. Faina fell asleep faster than I did, partially because I had a lot I wanted to think about. I was ten years old and my dad decided to punish me by making me sleep out on the balcony for a night. My crime? Peeing my bed. Only recently have I discovered that habitual peeing the bed in later years is a sign of psychopathy. I have mixed feelings about that diagnosis and its implication because I never felt like I wanted to the pee the bed. Either I went to sleep and forgot to use the bathroom beforehand or I was afraid of the ghost that haunted the hallway so I stayed put and the inevitable happened.

My mother didn't have to sleep with me that night. I forget whether I asked her to or whether she decided to when we moved the bed onto the balcony. Or whether it wasn't even an active decision. My dad slept alone that night on their king sized bed. I, as restless as I was, imagined the worse. What if I peed the bed tonight? Then how would my dad punish me? Between that fear and the fear of heights that permeated my childhood, I had a lot to consider that night. Faina fell into a rhythmic, light snoring and I practiced breathing along with her. Inhale and exhaling and making a sort of strange, midnight breathing symphony. I figured that if I breathed when she did, I would fall asleep too, and as far as I remember it worked.

The sun itself served as our alarm clock since our apartment was on the east side of the building complex. We moved the bed back in and I packed my bag for elementary school. We never talked about that night again. I think it may have been some combination of a need to forget the whole night and a lack of need to discuss it. But more realistically, we probably never talked about it again since we haven't talked in years.