The Missing Nickel

It is strange.  I fell asleep in the library with my head on a book, but when I woke up I did not believe I was awake.  

Before the unplanned nap I had wandered through the library’s used book sale and found a book  that I wanted to buy but I was afraid that I did not have the cash to do so.  I searched my wallet and found some change in a special compartment for that purpose.  At a glance I had everything but pennies and as I pushed my finger through the coins I was happy to find three quarters, two dimes, and two nickels.

I don’t typically carry change or have bills in my wallet.  Everywhere I go these days they take credit card and I accumulate points to pay for our hotels on vacation.  So it was odd to have change, but then I remembered I’d recently found some coins in the kitchen that had sat there for several days with no one claiming them.  I claimed them for the sake of decluttering the countertop but had forgotten I had done so.

I was happy to find them because the sign for the book sale indicated the paperback book I wanted was one dollar.  I could manage that, if my math was correct, with a nickel to spare.  So I put the correct change on the top of the book and walked to a study carrel to sit and read a different book that I’d checked out earlier in the week (The Land Across by Gene Wolfe if you must know).  

I laid the used book with the change balanced on top of it on the carrel desktop and started reading my library book after taking a seat.  It is a strange book where the man travels to a land that is somehow off the grid and things are not as they seem, both literally and figuratively.  A chapter into it I became exceedingly somnolent and almost involuntarily laid my head on the book and fell asleep.

I did not dream per se, but I could hear voices coming from different parts of the large open building and I felt kind of floaty.  It was not unlike the experience of reading PIRANESI by Susanna Clarke.

When I awoke I was surprised to find I was in the library.  I stretched out my arms, rolled my neck in a circle, and curved my back to unkink myself and buy some time to reorient.  When I was in college I would oftentimes take a nap in the mid to late afternoon much like this but there was a price to pay.  If I slept more than a few minutes, say one hour or more, for the next few hours and sometimes for the rest of the day I would feel there was something fundamentally different about the world I had awakened to.  My frame of reference would have shifted just enough to feel like I was living and breathing in the 3^rd person (“he walked across the quad”) and not the typical 1^st person (“I walked across the quad”).  It’s like that long midday nap had somehow bumped me into a dissociative state and the dreaming world was reluctant to release me.

I looked at the change on top of the book and counted it.  There were the three quarters and two dimes but no nickel!  I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me.  I looked all around the study carrel and on the floor.  I checked my lap, the chair, and even the opening of my bag in case it had somehow fallen in there while I slept.  Surely no one would have bothered to reach over my sleeping form to snag one solitary nickel.

I suddenly felt like I was in that dissociative state from my younger years.  I was pretty darn sure I was awake, but how to explain the uncanny disappearance of the coin?  Fortunately I had that extra nickel in my wallet and I was able to buy the book which was Gregory Maguire’s “WICKED”.  As I shuffled to the library exit in a state of dreamy wakefulness my thumb felt a slight bulge under the book cover.  As it turns out the center of the cover of the book has a large hole in it framing an image of the Wicked Witch of the West which lies on the page underneath the cover.  The nickel had simply slid under the lip of that hole.  

This confirmed to me that I was not in fact still dreaming and could go on with my life in the usual manner without fear of a dinosaur crushing my car or discovering I was only in my underwear in the middle of the parking lot.  Life’s little consolations, I suppose.