Sleep

An old story

Whilst snooping on my own Google drive the other day, looking for an reference in an old essay, I came across some fiction I wrote during lockdown. It’s not long, it’s not fully formed and I’m not entirely convinced it’s even any good. But it did remind me of an idea that I was very attached to for a long time; a story that I really wanted to tell and had made notes on, started to research, even started to actually visit some churches in the hopes of being more accurate with some of the descriptions. I don’t know if I’ll do anything with it but it was nice to be reminded of a previous preoccupation, something I was cognitively stuck on and had forgotten about until now. Be nice - it’s very much an old draft.

The sheets yawned open, releasing him from a salty cocoon. Unstuck every morning, prised out of the folds and into a lemon light that seemed a bad host to a sleepless body. It had been three months and seventeen days. He measured his days like he did the nights, roll-calling obsessively through hours, sometimes minutes, each second gnawing at him and making him restless. Seventeen days and, roughly, eight hours. The eight hours had been spent staring at the dust and cobwebs intermingling, spiders crawling over each, transforming the product of his bad cleaning habits into a reputable spider show home.

“Again?” Peter quipped, barely looking up from his cup of, annoyingly unnecessary, coffee.

“How d’you guess?”

“The bags. Man. Seen a mirror?” Another furtive and fleeting glance above the rim of his mug. Enough of a glance to raise one of his eyebrows in a strange mix of concern and the wonder of a child seeing water and potassium mix for the first time. A lazy sense of awe.

“Dark? Yeah. It’s getting better though. Nearly got six hours.” The lie hung there, saturating the air. Another manifestation of his laziness: he couldn’t even be bothered to be convincing.

“Yeah. Okay. Whatever you say. They look bruised today man. Have you showered? Eaten? Want some coffee?” The smell of Peter’s wafted over in a nauseating haze. But without the sharp and raw-edged reaction the coffee, a poor man’s defibrillator, would give him, the next seven hours of work would be excruciating.

“Thanks.” He held out his hand tentatively, fingers quivering, wrist hardly strong enough to hold the mug when it was passed to him.

“Seriously though. Quit bullshitting. How long has it been since you, I dunno, didn’t wake up five times? Do you even get to sleep? I don’t know why you won’t just lemme give you this guy’s number. One hypnosis session and - “ snap of his free hand “all subsequent bedtimes I was conked”.

The truth is that Arian had tried the (very expensive) hypnotherapist. He’d tried valerian root tea, valerian root tincture, meditation, an app that played rain sounds (very specifically, the sound of rain on a tent). He’d tried running in the morning and in the evening. He’d tried reading before bed. He’d attacked his TV, albeit modestly, with a crowbar, and attempted to make the dismantled hunk of wires and glass a more acceptable thing to fly tip. He’d started leaving his laptop downstairs, unplugged, with the WiFi turned off. And he still had a left eye twitch, shaking that travelled all over his body, and what appeared to be two miniature kidneys protruding from under his eyes.

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He wrung his hands together, feeling the callouses, small interruptions in the smoothness of his sweaty palms. His hands were sentences, fast but disjointed, incoherent and spoken in a hushed rush. Each palm punctuated by signs of his roughness with himself and his refusal to be gentle with his mind, as well as his body.

“The thing is…” explanation drifting off into oblivion. He wanted to turn Paul into a reader. Couldn’t he just fill this in for him? The unscrambling of his thoughts matched his hands, rough and unfinished, protruding and nonlinear. He couldn’t figure this out for himself but he felt tempted to attempt to explain. Maybe if he just talked. Free fall. Talking without consequence. Could he treat the diagnosis of his pathetic life like freewriting? Couldn’t somebody swoop in and unscramble this for him? This is what he wanted of Paul. To somehow interpret what was forming in his mind, before it was formed, and present it to him as it unfurled, already settled and brought into the sensical.

“The thing is?” Paul asked, scratching his chin in a bored, nervous way, feeling his three day stubble uncannily similar to the hard skin he’d brushed on Arian’s palm when he shook his hand earlier. “You’ve gotta help me out here. I’m not telling you what I think you’ll just bite my fucking head off, and then I’ll be the psycho-analysey guy who pissed you off. I wanna help but I can’t do this for you. Need to hear you say it for yourself mate.”

“The thing is. I’m fucking tired. I don’t know what else to say. I’m petrified. To go to sleep. If I don’t go to sleep I can’t wake up. And if I don’t wake up there’s this weird haze to everything. Stuff started to seem surreal like a week into the not sleeping. I don’t even know what I would call this now. Not surreal but almost like…extrareal? Hyperreal - that’s a word isn’t it? I dunno it’s hard to explain…” without missing a beat Paul gave him a nudge to continue.

“No go on.”

“Nothing feels real anymore. But it didn’t before. I dunno. It’s different but it’s the same. If I don’t go to sleep then I’m extending the time I’m supposed to be myself. I should be the most self aware person in the world. I’m in contact with me more than the average person is ever actually conscious. I’m aware of eight hours more thoughts than a normal person. I’m buried in my head constantly. But with this new haze it’s like a dream. It’s like a different me that I’m confronted with. And I’ve completely forgotten what the me was before I stopped sleeping. Do you remember? Genuinely. Like, what the fuck was I like?” He winced as he said this last ‘fuck’ and held out his hand slightly to Paul, his fingers asking the question too.

“Quiet. You never said much. You don’t seem any more in a daze now than you did before. I’m gonna say something now that goes against what I said before. I’m gonna piss you off potentially, you okay with that?” Met with only a casual nod, a retreat of the hand into his pocket, a ruffle of his hair, and a slow upward glance.

“You can’t switch off if you’re never switched on.”

A long beat, drawn out and slow, an itching silence filled with notes too low for human ears.

“What’s that supposed to…”

“I mean you were never there to begin with! You can’t go missing if you’re never present. I don’t know how else to say it. You can’t sleep because you were never awake. You can’t switch yourself off because you never let yourself be on, present, here, aware. You’re spending eight extra hours, staring into an abyss before you ever reached out to anyone. In the time I’ve known you, you’ve never had friends that I’ve been aware of. You haven’t had a partner. You never mention family. Or a pet. You don’t talk in work, you don’t have any pictures, you don’t invite people to do things, you sit alone and wander around alone at the staff parties and you leave surreptitiously before anybody can notice.”

Another beat filled only with one very precise nod.

“You need other people to be a person. A real person. Not just a body. Or a mind. How do you know who you are if you’ve got nobody to contrast against? How do you know what you like, what you believe in, what kind of values you have?”

“I don’t…I dunno. I’ve had friends.” All he could muster. He began to shake his head before the sentence was even over, hearing its boring emptiness before he’d spoken. The chasm he was trying to fill was just eroding the edges of the hole even more.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Exactly! You don’t know how to talk. You don’t know how to be around other people. You can’t live in your fucking head. And you can’t sleep if your consciousness is constantly only in company with itself. It’s an echo chamber in there. How can you relax when you’re a shell? You’re a ghost.” He looked sad and his fingers fluttered slightly at his side. Arian thought this was probably Paul attempting to put his hand on Arian’s arm but immediately thinking better of it.

“Did I tell you I’ve been going to church?” He was barely audible now but his eyes lifted and he started skirting his gaze around. Eventually settling on Paul’s eyes, screwing up his fists, feeling his cheeks flush with the awkwardness of making direct, and unflinching, eye contact with someone.

“No. You could be a devout Quaker for all I know. Are you?”

“I have no idea. I don’t think I’m anything. I think you’re right.” His fingers loosened to feel the crescent moons he’d dug into his palm. “I’ve been going to a different place of worship three times a week, every week, for the past three months. And nothing. No epiphany. No feeling of peace. No sleep. No rest. No conversation with God, whoever that is, not even a whisper. It’s had the reverse effect: I feel more alone now than I ever have. Even God doesn’t wanna know me.” He smirked. “Why can’t I get anything out of this? This is supposedly the most profound reality a person can feel, right? The most emotional? The most spiritual? Just SOMETHING. I don’t feel anything. And not in, like, a leather-jacket-wearing-I’m-cool-and-nihilist kinda way but like…nothing. I don’t even know if I can call it sad. I feel empty and I guess that kinda feels painful but it’s not acute enough. I just feel totally adrift.”

He had become a hologram. All of the elements were somewhere there, just not in the right place, copies of a copy of what must have been original at some point.

“I can’t grasp it.” Palm up and a slap to the leg with a tired shrug. “Is this making any sense?”