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"Now blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep: it covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; 'Tis meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. 'Tis the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap; and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man even. There is only one thing that I dislike in sleep; 'Tis that it resembles death.?
- Don Quixote
?I have to practice staying alive and preparing to die at the same time.?
- Christopher Hitchens
?Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.?
- Theodor Adorno
CW: substance abuse
Sleep Story
by John Merino
Insomnia runs in my family, afflicting both sides of it with equal intensity. That's nearly four centuries of Mexican tossing and Italian turning, with fits of German cursing and crying in between. A long heritage of discomfort, and, according to family gossip, one that has only been interrupted by the rotting medicines that tempt anyone who's had to put up with an extended period of lost sleep ? drugs, alcohol, compulsive anger, and every possible combination of the three. With the advent of psychotherapy, and the discovery that trauma is an actual illness and not a defect of character, many of us have learned to deal with insomnia in less destructive ways.
In 2010, my father was prescribed a small dose of the sleep aid Zolpidem, brand name Ambien, by his psychiatrist - a neat, gentle little drug that has chemical kinship with tranquilizers like Valium and Xanax, but without their addictive and narcotic qualities. To my dad, who had long suffered from sleepless nights and long days spent dragging himself through his work as an electrician, this was the answer to all of his prayers. After his inaugural dose, he smiled and drifted off into what I'm sure was the finest sleep he'd had in decades. I'm also sure this is all he remembers of that first night, and he's better off for it. Zolpidem has a blackout effect on the mind, like a drinking binge without the hangover. My mother and I recall it in deeper, less relaxing ways. For her, it brought on the uncomfortable squeeze of an abused past, and, for me, it brought forth the very shadow of death. It was an alien shape seen in my peripheral vision that night. We all have to see that shape at least once in our lives. Knowing I'll have to see it twice frightens me.
Watching my dad's face slacken at the dinner table after taking his first dose was distressing. It bore the stamp of deep intoxication, and it was immediate, without any intervening period of jollity or talkativeness. No time to acclimate to it. Only a high-school junior at the time, I was unfamiliar with the actual sensation of being drunk, but I would later come to know it well as a solitary confinement for the soul.
In certain quantities, liquor utterly disables your ability to step outside yourself. For the constructive drinker, often an artist, leaving this ability behind is useful and focusing, like a monk retreating into his cell to pray. Booze simply becomes a chemical means of getting to that same, isolated room. For the drunk however, who often harbors a deep hatred for what he sees in the mirror, this blind isolation is an addictive, absolute deliverance, and an absolute terror for those around him. There are few things in this world as wonderful as being drunk, and even fewer as awful as seeing someone else drunk. (This is why I've always thought of the designated-driver concept as something nice in theory and unimaginable in practice. Drunk people are only bearable when you're also drunk, and being sober among drinkers has the same world-shattering effect as catching a glimpse of yourself having sex. ?Is this what it really looks like when I do this??) Blissfully sliding about inside his cell without mirrors, or even the faint reflectivity of a window, it becomes nearly impossible for anyone to make the drunk see that he is trapped, or that there is a world outside. My mother watched helplessly from outside like this for most of her childhood as my grandfather, Andrew, committed himself to this living death, dumping frightening amounts of alcohol into himself and raging as if there were no one else in the room. My dad's face that night, so relaxed it might have melted right off of his skull, brought these times closer to her than she'd felt in years.
By the time I began to know him, Andrew had long been sober, and the sleep story he told me when I was seven was an isolated horror from an age so far away I could barely imagine it. I had no idea that he was, in his own way, doing a dry run of the apology he would never get to make to his own children. A veteran of the Battle of Iwo Jima, the Second World War's bloodiest passage in the Pacific, and the first and only battle in which American casualties exceeded the Japanese, he recalled trying to sleep in the rare moments between fighting, curled up against the black volcanic dust that blankets the island like a mourning veil. This dust is soft and pliant, and might have been comfortable for him to lay on, drawing him down into sleep for seconds so split they barely existed. The Japanese had dug a vast network of bunkers and tunnels through the island before he arrived, and he would wake up again, and again, and again, to their muffled voices only a few feet underneath him. Imagine drifting off to the sounds of men planning how best to kill you. It's the boogeyman in the childhood closet made real. It's the suppressed nightmare of ancient humanity, resting in caves and clearings while hungry beasts waited behind the trees. Who wouldn't try to drink until they'd totally drowned such a memory?
Some, but not all, of these thoughts were with me as my dad began to nod off over his unfinished dinner. The absent ones, the adult ones, the ones I've laid down here, made themselves known that night as a warm tightness in my chest, my body figuring things out for me long before my brain did. My mother and I woke him up with a gentle shake and told him it was time for bed, but he simply hovered above his seat for a moment and plopped back down under the weight of his medication. We approached him, realizing we would have to actually walk him to his bedroom, but before we arrived, he pointed across the table and into the kitchen, calmly informing us there was a little girl standing in front of our refrigerator.
I once saw a production of The Crucible in Austin, Texas, and at a climax in the play, one of the bewitched girls feigned seeing a demonic bird perched just beyond the tribunal. The actress pointed to it, and roughly half the audience turned around in their seats to look where she had pointed. I looked at them looking, and silently judged them fools. It was only a play. Did they really expect something to be there? I can't remember if either one of us turned around to see the little girl. Such a decision, to look or not to look, is the whole ancient struggle with the material world in embryo, and it is too freighted with pride for me to remember it accurately. I'd like to say I didn't look, my refusal a harbinger of the staunch atheism that would eventually develop out of my catholic upbringing, but that's just wishful thinking.
If my mother and I had bothered to read the literature that came with my dad's prescription, we would have known that hallucinations are a common accessory in Zolpidem's package deal of side effects, especially upon its first dose. This harmless hiccup in my father's nervous system nonetheless had a chilling effect on us, and we quickly gathered him up from his chair and into bed, where he curled up and left us to stew in our thoughts. Here is where I must speculate entirely, because, after my dad fell asleep, there is a patch of nothing in my head that looks to be about the length of an hour. Guided by my current habits, I can safely assume that, in my distress, I listened to an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on my iPhone while I milled around the kitchen, munching on a hastily stacked turkey sandwich, the kind where the lunch meat is constantly sliding out from between the bread on a slick of mustard. There was a threat in the air that I had to escape. Birds come down onto branches and stay put before a thunderstorm, and cows lay down to sleep. I should have just stayed in the kitchen.
My memory picks up again as I cross from the kitchen into the dining room, feeling in the corner of my eye the tall window that looks out onto the lawn. A warm flood light brightens the first few feet of our concrete driveway and the right edge of our boxwood hedge. Beyond that is total darkness after nine P.M, and nothing can be seen for twenty yards except the neighbors' porchlights across the street. Although small and narrow, it is a picture window in the most wonderful sense. At any time of night, you can see raccoons, opossums, squirrels, cats, dogs, and all manner of mammalian life slinking by to sniff and enjoy the food and water we leave out for the neighborhood strays. Sometimes, an enormous moth of exquisite pattern will flutter over and land with a thump on the glass, allowing anyone who happens to be in the dining room to admire it for hours. It's like our own private zoo. But that night, there wasn't a creature stirring anywhere. No crickets, no thumping moths, no hideously sleek roaches trying to get inside ? a bad stillness that made me want to look away from the window as I sat down at the table to finish my sandwich.
But it still beckoned my gaze, pulling my eyes towards it like a private letter left open on someone's desk, and, as I looked up from my sandwich, the little girl my father had seen passed by the window. I remember snapping my head back towards the kitchen, thinking my mother had come into the dining room and that I was seeing her reflection, but I was alone. When I looked back, the little girl was gone, but I was sure I had seen a tan, diaphanous dress, fluttering in the humid summer air, and young skin on a solid face, free of any adolescent blemish, shining in the porch light as thick and alive as my own. I can still see the turn-of-the-century brocade of her outfit, and the unsettling way she quickly floated by the window, as if on roller skates.
A trick of the light no doubt, primed for a ghostly vision by my father's hallucination, could easily explain away what I saw that night. But, in my memory, I can feel the weight of that girl's body. Her reality is indisputable for me, but reality has shrunk for me as I write this. All of us are pining for physical connection like we've never done before. The world we miss, the one we think will finally satisfy us, is the unmasked closeness of parties and movie theaters and sex that we once knew without limit. Perhaps, for the first time in history, we wish that this really was all that there is. Hamlet's terrifying assertion that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy has only been sharpened in the meantime, and our reunion with material life will find us totally unequipped, or, worse, totally unwilling, to confront it.
I still don't believe in ghosts, or gods, or prayers, or blessings and mystical vibrations, or any of the lies people tell themselves and their children so that life doesn't seem like a succession of random cruelties. This is a function of privilege. I've never really known the dire, physical desperation that is a rule for most of the proletariat world ? desperation for food, for shelter, for a face that doesn't regard you as an obstacle, for a day spent without the wounding anxiety of poverty and parenthood. My worries have been wholly neurotic. There's no inherent honor or intelligence in being worried about death and the process of dying. It's a cheap anxiety that everyone buys the moment they are born, and it's most sharp for me whenever I'm falling asleep. It's how I react to this fear, when I'm clamped inside the space between consciousness and sleep, between life and death, that seems most important to me now. My generation likes to sneer at the ones that came before it. They were all asleep at the wheel of history and willing to take whatever heinous orders they were given to preserve their sense of security, but us millennials are still utterly unable to be alone with our thoughts. Sensing the responsibility we carry as stewards of a rapidly crumbling world, we search for disciplines that will show us the way forward, and healthier ways of beating back the impish mental chatter that comes for us when all the lights are off and there's no one to talk to ? meditation, exercise, natural supplements like melatonin and valerian root, soothing whispers and roleplays ? but, come morning, we still find ourselves upright and emptyhanded, like every generation before us.
I still do believe that my father's drug, by bringing him closer to real sleep, brought him closer to death, and that this closeness allowed death to bleed into my waking life. It doesn't matter if what I saw was real in the supernatural sense, and I don't claim to have a better grasp on my own life because of it. Cigarettes, Benadryl, booze, and my phone are still the only ways I can get to sleep, and I remain as slavishly dependent upon artificial tranquilizers for comfort as any child with his favorite blanket. What matters is the telling of this sleep story. What matters is that I don't keep what I saw to myself and pridefully let the strain of keeping it a secret rot my insides and emaciate my conscience until I start denying that it ever happened. What matters is that we take pride in our collective heritage of insomnia, and recognize our resistance to sleep as an impulse against death and towards life, as if the history of every society's struggle against its own demise were being recapitulated every time we close our eyes. This is what distinguishes us from the birds and the cows that land and lay down in the face of extinction.
As I finish typing this story, there is a pleasant drowsiness tugging at my eyes. I hope that as I fall asleep tonight, no matter how drugged or drunk or distracted I am, I will try and feel myself sink into it, fighting all the time while knowing I am, like everyone, destined to lose. I hope my sleep is long and restoring, and that I lift myself up in the morning like a wiser, stronger generation, knowing the enemy better and ready to face it in the light of the new day.
Everything was ready for the ritual. I had counted down the days, or more precisely, the nights - since I turned eleven.
Looking out over Delltree town, I stood back a little from the sandstone cliff. Holding my torch in one hand, I pulled newspaper and twigs from my rucksack. I roughly fashioned the base of a small fire behind the concrete trig point, partially sheltered from the breeze. Larger sticks and bits of branch from the tree line behind completed my construction.
Unpacking the ornate wooden boxes from my rucksack on top of that moonlit hill was exhilarating. As each one emerged from the canvas bag I ran my fingers over its hand-carved lid, mouthing the words to myself. Seven boxes, each containing a license to another world of experience.
?Scent'
?Swiftness'
?Song'
?Sound'
?Sight'
?Slyness'
?Soaring'
Five strong hearts and one perfect bloom I had consumed at that point. Six items, each one at midnight on consecutive birthdays. And the seventh was to come now on my seventeenth. At the point where three counties met, the highest ground in each.
I rummaged in the side pocket of my pack, pulling out a small sweet tin and tapping my fingernails on the lid in a satisfying rhythm. With the tin laid at my feet, I tugged off my boots and socks. The grass was damp, and the earth soft, but at least it wasn't raining now. My coat and jumper followed my footwear into an untidy pile on the ground, topped off by my jeans. I wondered for a moment if stepping out of my underwear was really necessary but then, who was going to see me? I took them off. Clothes would only hamper my spell.
It took three attempts to light the fire. The breeze didn't help at first, but eventually the newspaper kindled. The heat rose as larger sticks found their way onto the pile.
The muscular heart inside the sweet tin was fresher than some of the others had been. I had only removed it that morning. Once it was impaled on a metal skewer, I crouched down towards the fire. I held the wooden handle, keeping the heart steady in the dancing flames. Like most of the others, it tasted similar to beef, but with a subtle metallic tang.
Licking my lips, I turned my attention to the wooden boxes and their contents. I remembered the acquisition of each one, starting with the violets, gathered from the woods at age ten. My mother had reluctantly helped me to crush and boil the petals. The heady perfume, matured all that time in a glass bottle, was ready for this moment. The taste of the remaining intact flower on my eleventh birthday was easy to recall, though it was six years since I had eaten it.
Laying the boxes in order, starting with the violet perfume and ending with the raven's feathers, I opened the first one. As soon as the lid was off the bottle the scent took me right back to that childhood summer in the woods. After one deep breath of the floral essence, I poured the liquid into the flames. It hissed between the crackles of burning wood. This would surround me with eternal sweetness.
Next were the fluffy hind paws of a rabbit. It had taken several days of disappointment and empty snares before success. But finally my prize was a healthy young buck. He'd struggled as I worked to remove him from the trap, so it was easier to kill him first. It had been a whole week until my birthday, so his heart was a little grey by the time I cooked and ate it. It tasted stale, but it was worth it to gain that speed. As the feet dropped into the brutal flames, the smell of singeing fur caught in my nose.
On my thirteenth birthday, I consumed the heart of a nightingale. Too difficult to capture, it had taken three weeks' pocket money to purchase the bird. The farmer's son didn't ask questions but did demand a kiss for his troubles. A small creature, it was tricky to cut apart without damaging the organs, but I extracted the heart and removed the head and body from the neck with a craft knife. And so as I placed the feathered throat on top of the kindling, my beautiful voice was secured.
The following year came the dog. By then I considered myself fairly strong-stomached, but I couldn't take the life of man's best friend. Fortunately, the farmer's son from the year before had buried his much-loved Labrador on a suitable day. It took a few hours but I dug her up from the bottom of his field, taking what I needed almost before she was cold. The blood that spilled was contained in the grave. I stroked her head before covering her over once more. Her ear flaps dried well, remaining silky to the touch even now. I dropped them into the flames wondering what I would hear first with my upgraded sense.
The doe hadn't been on my original list. But she added something valuable to the collection, as well as adding another year to my project. It was well worth the wait. She had literally been caught in the headlights of my dad's pickup as he drove me home from late-night hockey practice. As he slammed on the brakes I stared into those shining and perfectly almond-shaped eyes. Startled and unblinking, the deer had stuck to her spot as the red and black bonnet of the truck collided with her dun and white chest. She'd been thrown into the bushes, and I'd gone back for her the following morning. She wasn't hard to find, but was big and difficult to butcher. Once I finally parted her ribs the rest felt easy. I opened the box and removed the dried-out eyes. They no longer gleamed but that was fine; I'd eaten the enormous heart very fresh. The gloom-shaded eyes reduced to ashes in my fire.
The penultimate year's extract had been the forebrain of a fox. By then I had honed my skills and the operation was easy once the skull was open. I sliced and dried the cortex ready for storage. The fox's heart was similar to the Labrador's and took some time to eat. Both of them were a little tougher than expected. It was a small price to pay for that level of cunning. I opened the box and one by one dropped slices of dehydrated brain into the curling flames.
My attention turned to the final offering. The last box contained the raven's flight feathers. Holding them up to the firelight allowed me to glimpse their purple iridescence. Ah, the raven, the bold and confident raven. He was perfect. I'd killed him, supposedly by mistake, when taking the first aim of the day at a clay pigeon shoot. My dad knew I was a better shot than that and must have suspected something. But he didn't see me collect the carcass and didn't ask any questions. After all, shooting was my birthday treat; he didn't want to rub it in that I'd missed an easy target. I hadn't been sure what kind of bird I'd acquire that day, just that it had to be stronger than a nightingale. Half expecting to make do with a dove, the raven was an excellent prize.
I placed the feathers among the burning wood and recited my chant.
?Your precious and beautiful parts,
Give me magical gifts through your hearts,
By fire and by smoke in this perfect place,
I take in your powers with enduring grace.
Where lay lines of three counties meet,
Come to me and make me complete,
Make me your subject and make me your mage,
Come alive in my body as I come of age'
I inhaled wisps of smoke to the bottom of my lungs, and waited.
The sweet smell of violets rose around me, subtle on the night air. Swishing my arms from side to side did not dissipate the scent. It was part of me now. My eyes refocussed and I could see further down the hill, make out more detail in the distance. The fence and stile I had crossed to get there were visible. The rustling of nocturnal animals in the woods behind me became apparent, perhaps mice or a badger. Sounds that had eluded me until now.
After a few quiet minutes a change swept through me. It started at my feet, with power being drawn from the hilltop itself. Then my ankles and calves tingled. My legs were toning and shaping ready for action. My body became lighter as the rabbit's swiftness came over me. The feeling reached my shoulder blades and my back strengthened and bulged slightly. A prickle started in the skin, as the beginnings of a pair of wings materialised from either side of my spine. Flexing and tensing the new muscles in my back would move them. The weight of them grew and a sensation of pins and needles spread through the emerging tissue.
As the feeling stopped, I cautiously stretched my newly born wings. The dying firelight was just enough to make them shine. When closed together they almost brushed the floor. But they were lighter than expected and I carried them with ease. Looking back over my shoulder I could see the shimmering apex of the right hand wing as it rose and fell away behind my back. I stretched again, this time wrapping the wings around in front of me, a black, feathered shroud. They were warm and comforting, shielding my naked body from the night like a dark yet iridescent angel.
A smile sparked across my face and a few joyful tears left my eyes. I pulled my jeans and boots back on. They were tighter now, but I could just squeeze into them. I opened my bag again, looking for something to fit my new physique. There were several options. A halter-neck top, perfect. It would cover my breasts while leaving my back conveniently exposed. Once all the boxes and clothing were back in my rucksack I poured a bottle of water over the remains of the fire, then stashed the backpack in the hollow of a tree. Flying was going to be tricky to start with and the extra weight would unbalance me.
The trig point seemed a little shorter than before. I pushed my toes into the grass and raised my heels, lifting my hands above my head, reaching for the sky and spreading my enormous, opalescent wings. My new form felt powerful, godlike. Bending my knees, I sprung up from the grass in one easy bound. It wasn't just speed I'd gained from that rabbit's feet. One leap and I was standing proud on top of the trig point, perfectly balanced in spite of the movement in the air.
Looking down into the valley, my improved night-vision allowed me to track the road heading out towards Blycester It gave me a quiet and familiar route to follow. I stretched each wing in turn, surprised by how natural they felt. I beat them a few times and folded them together again before springing down easily from the trig point, landing as softly as a feather.
I flapped my wings again and gave a little jump. They generated great lift and moved the air with ease. As I beat them again and again, I rose off the grass, but not enough to call flight.
I looked back to the sheer sandstone cliff between me and the field below.
I took a run up, on my strengthened legs, bounding at speed across the hilltop towards the drop, wings outstretched, catching that breeze. I hadn't even reached the edge before I took off. Within seconds I was soaring over the field, over the fence, over the valley. Trying a few changes of direction to check my control, it felt easy to manoeuvre across the sky. Once I got over the initial shock of how well it had worked, I found myself laughing like a child, clapping my hands together and singing. Singing! The nightingale had blessed me with the voice of an angel! Clear and sweet and perfectly in tune, and so well appreciated by my upgraded ears.
To avoid getting lost, I flew low into the valley, lining myself up above the road out of town. It wove its way through the hills for a few miles offering a good chance to practice altering my speed, lifting and lowering my flight path and taking in my familiar surroundings from a very unfamiliar viewpoint. Goose bumps and shivers ran all over my body but the sense of freedom was phenomenal.
After half an hour of elation I was craving a warm fireside. Also, I wanted to show my birthday gift to my parents. My mum especially had doubted my ability to cast this spell. On the day we crushed those violets, over six years ago, she took pleasure in telling me that I was setting myself up for disappointment. ?It will all end in tears,' she had said, more than once. The preparations had been a secret from her since then.
Circling round Pan's Hill set me up to follow the road back towards town. My village was only two more miles out the other side and flying home wouldn't take long. Then it occurred to me. I should try out my improved legs and feet. I reduced my altitude until I was gliding above the main road, level with the treetops. I slowed right down ?til almost hovering in the air, then dropped myself gracefully onto the pavement with a few slow beats.
There was renewed bounce in my step, a spring as my ankles absorbed the tension and released it with ease. My rapid walk became a jog, which quickly became a sprint, covering the ground effortlessly, bounding through the night. I approached a bend in the road and broke free of the pavement, cutting across the tarmac to minimise the distance and maximise my speed. There was the hum of a car engine but with my enhanced hearing it was probably miles away. I continued to run down the centre of the road.
A second later, headlights swept around the corner ahead and I stopped stock still, impressed with how quickly I could reduce my speed. As the shining lights approached, the squeal of brakes cut the night. My fox brain gave me a score of suggestions of how to remove myself from harm's way but I could not react. The edges of the picture around the dazzling glare showed me that it wasn't any car. It was a truck. A red and black pickup truck, probably looking for me.
My mother's words rang true. There was crushing disappointment in the last two things I ever experienced. Just before I gave up all of my newly granted gifts, to the tall, hooded man with the scythe. They were the agonising impact of the corner of my dad's bonnet and the fleeting reflection I caught in the windscreen, of tears in my perfectly almond-shaped eyes.
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