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Often as an infant I would not recognize my mother in the night. She would come to me there in my crib and see me screaming, skulking from her as she stood. She’d reach to lift me up and I would cower, a bright terror mirrored in my eyes. Other nights she’d find me walking blank along the hallway, lit unconscious. In the living room I’d stand and shriek, “I WANT MY MOMMY I WANT MY MOMMY.”
I am your mommy
, my mom would say, in a younger version of her current voice, and yet transfixed inside of nowhere, she was no one to me at all. Other nights I’d wake to find myself having moved inside my sleep to different rooms, or upside-down or backward on the mattress, or underneath it, not knowing what I’d done.

Today, when I ask my mother about my young sleep terror, she reenacts me walking backward from her in the low light, her eyes stretched wide, mimicking mine. My mother in recent years has been getting shorter, her size sinking back into itself. Seeing her perform the reenactment even now to me seems horrific—the idea still vivid enough in her I can almost see who she was then in her eyes. The years have not stuttered her recall. Her skin is paler, her fingers thin. Her silver hair reflects all light. Her eyes are just the same. In my asking how I’d been then, in my sleep trouble, she describes the way I seemed unable to see her there before me, how I seemed to not even see the house. “Terror was real to you and that was it,” she says, her other self there just inside—the other selves of all of us surrounding all of us, each of us at the center of our own being, each aging in our own frame, sprawling forward into each instant going, gone; every minute the most packed minute, the furthest point along the curve.

After explaining my young terror in her language, my mother goes to look more for the baby books in which throughout those years she wrote us down—sentences rendered in her looped handwriting, making claim of what she’d feed me, how I’d laugh. It’s a practice she still has not given up—each evening before bed now ends with her writing out the full day of her life, word by word. She is often up late into what is called the witching hour, sewing, singing, awake alone in the house, as my father has always been prone to nodding out early. My sleep complications, as is so much of me, are likely sewn from her: aura transferred into flesh in bridging time—a pattern printed on the lengths of lymph that make my brain and lung meat, which, if I decide to mate, I may too funnel into another body, here, a child. My mother’s journals—there must be a dozen of them now, each fat with ink and clippings from her hands: I already feel my skin tightening against me at their existence, as my incessant selves insist on realizing how one day, under the event of a thing I will not name here, those pages will become a tunnel back through and into her, her own sleeplessness, her longing, her days in step and click—the words the image of her thoughts and ways and ideas given from her as each day passes, written into text instead of me—as for every instant I am not there, her child, or anything I was not there for her to say, will be another wall that breaks my body in a maze that will not end.

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Whereas sleep may be an exit from the hours, a temporary forgoing of our ability to respond, while unconscious we are alarmless until something breaks the seal. By earliest definition, in the first edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
from 1771, sleep is the body “perfectly at rest, [where] external objects move the organs of sense as usual, without exciting the usual sensations.” Here the body forgoes of the silent suspicions of the terror, such as of the many openings in any home: those we recognize and center around (windows, doors, and vents); those we in certain times attend to, incompletely (entrances for insects, rodents, wet); as well as those we imagine perhaps somewhere, those we never know (dream holes, fantasies like Santa’s entrance, power connected via wires and other air); through these holes come the outer air; the sound and light each night drunken into the prone body, feeding. As well, the house around you goes on unwatched. We assume by default that nothing shifts under our absence, inside our body, still right there—no shift of drawer or door, nothing unforeseen rising up or breaking in among the night. We relinquish all control to sleep, slow pulsed and breathing, off but open, taking in.

All throughout this, somewhere in here, in us each the
me
goes on: the mechanism at the center of the meat. The me becomes a thing in us that there repeats—a module both automated as a flesh thing and in full selecting larger motions as we do each instant what we do or do not do: fidgets, scratching, walking, thinking, talking, looking, and so on. The repetition of repetition of the trending patterns of these actions makes days seem nearer, more ours, in our own image, less a clothing, more a skin, from more general preoccupations (rising, working, marriage, travel, ideas, passing on our names), down to smaller, taste-based gestures (humor, impulse, preference, pleasure routines, habits of how to sit or stand). Comfort comes in copied action as it makes our surroundings feel like somewhere we have been. The self emerges through holes in the self’s body as speech and gesture, spatial relations with the bodies and objects in our field, the days of trees and heads and houses, of glass and clothes and our machines we select to make the space around us seem slightly more like ours.

For years when renting movies with my family as a child, I often picked the same tape every time. Among the reams of new and unseen, I wanted the one I already knew I liked, and anyway each time it could seem a little different, little bits picked up different or from other angles or burned better with reiteration. The movie, as it stands, was
Flight of the Navigator
, a Disney picture about outer space. We must have paid to take the thing home at least several dozen times, never bothering to pick up our own copy—sticking instead to the versions shared with all the unnamed others having had it too in their own houses, touching what I touched on the cartridge, doing what they did before the screen. As an adult now, despite the repetition, I can’t recall more than chunks about the film: something about a kid inside an alien orb guided by a talking machine eye; the boy’s body shuttling through time, ending up returning to a future version of his home having been thought disappeared, his family all quite aged. The story in my mind beyond that basic outline is all a blob, lost among junk I’ve watched and done since then. Even all that seeing, wanting, staring, did not bring the thing inside me, beyond my knowing of its entrance; though it is in here, somewhere sleeping—it has been part of my body and will be and is and is.

Also inside the video store was an aisle labeled Horror, which I remember mostly for its long array of sequels of
Friday the 13th
, a finite but sprawling archive of oblong dark cardboard cases in numbered order, which, assembled as one body, freaked me out: Part One’s image of a hollow torso holding a blood-lined knife, its innards replaced with the image of a forest, four smaller bodies looking back into my gaze, a lake, a moon. Each edition spawned thereafter in a version of that same image, a glow on black, sometimes the body full instead of letters and a thick blank, sometimes simply the image of the mask with the knife stuck inside its eye, or sometimes an intense light gushing from the mask’s holes, unholy glow. These black cases and the cartridges inside them held further rooms in replication, enveloping their own odd objects, a new arm waiting to be brought on into any house, though they scared me more by simply being, a doorway waiting through which many others too had passed, doors which made the doors inside my own house seem that much thinner, holding at night whatever passed around there out. Their presence alone in the light of the store kept me awake, left me up late in the hours fearing what could be coming in the silence, something seeming always on the verge.

Of me at two and a half years, my mother writes:
sometimes thinks there’s a giant in the bedroom when it’s time to go to sleep
. The entry ends there, without interpretation—she does not mention there was not a giant in my room. She doesn’t need to, does she? For her to say so on paper might seem insane—might seem, to someone reading, as if she were explaining the idea away for herself. And yet there seems something ominous about the implication—my childish thought unanswered remaining there an unsaid door left open, perhaps leading on into some long hall. The very word
giant
—as opposed to, say, a werewolf or demon, or the vague and yet for some reason widespread young fear of the term
robber
, or whatever other beasts might terrify a toddler—seems particular for its threat of malformation, a shape too large to fit into the house, a thing that coming in would break my very home wide open, shuck the roof off into the night, allowing whatever else might also want in to flood the space there, eternally exposed.

I can’t help but admit that all this thinking about the rooms and what is in them makes me suddenly hyperconscious about the room behind me even now. I don’t want to have to let myself turn around and confirm the fact that there is no one other in here—notwithstanding all the rooms beyond this one, through the walls, and on and into other houses, none of which from here I can see.
Why am I in here, what am I doing
. Any instant of any day as an adult one must simply assume there is no giant, mostly before the thought ever occurs. Today, I let me look . . . and of course there’s no one, just a bookshelf and a bed, an empty room—the room the way it’s always been for years—and yet now I know inside my looking there’s this other space I can’t see behind my head, the focus shifted—something always left out of the frame—as when the body does its turning, the unseen space behind you is turning too—anywhere, all day. The use of mirrors is problematic in its own way and with its own terror—the deepening, the double. To go on, you must concede—every hour, as a human requires constant unexamined minor concessions, otherwise you’d never move—to attend such things is considered ill—each moment passing all surrounded by whatever in its silence—an irreducible, indestructible, indescribable undefined all through all hours—the ever-spinning, all wide open, unto every instant, any door—a mouthless, baseless, unnamed hole surrounding all holes—god of terror, and of boredom, both. The resulting logic of the need for something palpable, recorded, in the face of any minute, is the same evidence many use against the presence of a god—
where is nowhere
—
where am I
—
how can I prove that I exist and still exist
.

Among all these ongoing unrecorded ways, sleep operates as the definitive product of any method of want for rest—another fleshy house with unlocked doors always impending. We nod out to allow time and space to feed, regroup, turn off. A restriction from this wallless, doorless room—insomnia—which might turn on under a variety of means—denies the body of its respite, turns the flesh sickly, makes disruption of the brain, forcing the waking body into diffusion, invoking a sleeplike helpless state while still aware. In not finding rest where we would want it, we end up straining even harder after something always the most where nothing is and wanting more—and in the having of something that is not sleep, never coming to feel quite full—wanting more doors to the house to fill the house with, ever-expanding, giving deeper presence to something that isn’t there. Even the fear of having trouble sleeping, or the fear of the fear of it, the fear of drifting off into something stuck beyond our self, the want for nowhere, for a silence, becomes stronger, fills through the body via the same corridors of emotions such as want or love.

As if in wish to precontrol such ways of access, at age three, I would refuse to leave the house without a ring of keys. I’d see my parents need their keys to open doors and wake up machines and for this I knew I would need them too. My mother issued me a white loop with several differently colored and oblong chips of plastic forming toy teeth rounder than my thumb. The keys directly locked or unlocked nothing, and yet with their shape inside my pocket I felt I could open any door that was not there—the doors the house was hiding—locks I meant to keep locked or unlocked, or to lock or unlock soon in the future. With these keys too I’d open other portions of the earth. I would rub the nub of the green key against the end strut of a shelving unit at the grocery store and hear the sound of some whoosh burst from my mouth. I would insert the red key’s tip into a knothole in a bit of backyard fencing and feel through my body where a space had opened up. I spent many hours in the evenings also with the keys shoved in my mouth, sitting around sucking on their ridged sides one after another or in fat packs, after the keyhole in my head. That these keys all did actually open something I feel now rather sure—though at the time their potential and perhaps their false form held me imagining my body locked, helped me move pleased and safe among the unnamed air.

Every inch of me like these my mother transcribed in years before I in my own head can remember has been somewhere inside me ever since. So much of this I would not have recalled without devices, the photographs and speech. I only know what I have done so many days and hours of my life because there is the image and the word passed on, held in totems, symbols, other bodies. Most of these moments remain unnamed. The day passes fast and silent, unseen. Even up to here inside this sentence, typing, there are minutes having just blipped by that I will never think about again—this instant my
right now
and then my
gone
, and the instant ever-coming, still there buried in the blood, and cropping up in glossed ways in incidental scrimmage or in my sleep brain, where all days feels the same day, and how a house at night might seem to pause. I do remember countless nights when, alone, still up haunted by doors or tapes or thinking well after my parents had killed the lights and gone to bed, I lay still inside the air holding my own breath, gauging our home’s false-seeming sense of silence for any small intimation of sound, watching the empty space for what might suddenly occupy it—the blank by now far more terrifying than the touch. In such a way I could not go to sleep some nights until the light had risen up again and my parents were moving in the house around me, proved again alive, and light filled again the spaces of the night surrounding,
night not gone but covered up
, always in the process of returning, the body aging, growing tired,
sometime sleeping
. The house around us going on.