Nothing (31 page)

This is what we want from sleeping pills—lights out, mind out, exit. Obliterate the room. No option. Help me forget me. Under the reign of endless choices, we want none. This is the function of the medication—it delivers an intended punctuation of effect. It is to flip a switch, a removal of the I, and so therein the removal of the remembering of dream state seems distinctive, integral to this kind of sleep—as in the removal of the struggle, of the self ’s descent into self, the descent is rendered slightly other, slightly off. Sleep becomes less the state of reckoning of unconscious self in its translation, and more a coverlet, a box. Pill sleep, even when remembered, wears a ring around it, another rubber, something off inside the waking self eating the curve of what the day fights to hold onto in the leak. In one instance, in 2010 in China, a man was stopped from killing himself when he took fifty sleeping pills before going to throw himself off a roof, unable to decide between two twin ways to die. The pills knocked him out before his death drive could be completed and were not strong enough to do the job themselves, so he survived, living now with his wife inside that knowing.
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Herein the snuffing of the self provided the self ’s ultimate defense, blocking in the nothing of the nothing before the last black.

If sleep is for the self, then invented sleep is an invented version of the same, slightly askew, like digging into memory flesh you have not yet worn, or wore in other years, none of it quite yours. In one commercial for Lunesta, a neon lime-green butterfly flits around a bedroom among the glow of magic forests. As the insect hovers over the shape of a sleeping woman, a breathy, listless female voice-over monologues in monotonizing ad-speak the pleasures of our rest, and on in equally dreamy drabble begins to list its legal-bound strata of side effects, including dream-driving, dependency, contemplation of suicide, and so on. Oblivious to such threats, the butterfly flits down to tuck the woman in. The enormous neon bug then wobbles off to some other nowhere, remaindering the house in much less light. Lunesta does not portend to hide its strange presence even in waking, where its chemic chalky aftertaste resides inside the mouth—a second breath fit over the day’s breath. This chronic flavor, at first terrible and in want of masking in early users, can become, in its familiarity, a waking residue, a pleasured thing, a sublime tang.

Lunesta dug into my blood. These I ate quicker, with the promise of more mostly when I needed. I packed the sample packets in the long drawer of the bathroom and counted them along the road, planning nights before I’d need more. Under this black banner, everything was fine. Perhaps still slower in my days, and of a gross kiss with the stink all on my gums, but when I lay down I could be down, and stay there. Good. I talked more out loud than I would normally. In the days I would find sentence fragments written on slips of paper, in folds of books, or on my hands. Things were remembered or they were not. The room I lived in had high ceilings, and in the nights the sounds of slamming doors and people shouting would bump around the night. In the pill there was the whir. My computer sat on my bedside desk, at all times watching, its beeping lights flecking the dark. I could turn it on or off. I heard its guts sigh. I got up and got down.

Each time I ran out of the samples, I would thereafter swear no more. Then I would spend the five nights between eating, screeching, sobbing. I would get another couple and feel okay again. The supply was not as deep as it had seemed. I would wait, or wonder, calling my friend with supplies, asking. Days knowing I wouldn’t have an easy out to end it made halls in buildings seem to stretch a little longer, oddly colored—food might taste slightly off, or sound might seem more loud. Sometime two days deep in no pills I went to renew my vehicle at the county tag office, a massive building located in the heart of downtown, with no easy parking. Sidewalks to glass doors to escalators, same in day as in the night. Suddenly I found myself sitting at the glass window talking through it to a large woman and I was supposed to give her my ID, and I couldn’t find my ID, it was gone, and I have a ton of shit in my wallet and I was taking all of it out and sweating and talking to myself and my hand was bleeding as I’d cut it open somehow coming through the metal detector to get into the building, and the woman said, “Sir, you can take your time,” and I was laughing and almost crying and my stuff was everywhere and I was sucking the blood out of my hand so it wouldn’t drip and I looked at her and said something like, “God took my ID,” and the woman didn’t blink and the woman just watched me put my stuff back in my wallet and stand up and leave.

That same day, in the grip of desperation, I went to a local walk-in clinic, having been so long without a regular doctor that I didn’t know where to begin. I weighed in in the lobby. I weighed more than I realized, in all my clothes. They took me to another smaller room in their room queue where I would need to sit and wait. A woman who was not the woman who could give me pills wrote down things about me. I told the story of my young sleep rot oncoming, and the things I’d done to no effect. She watched me, scribbled, offered questions. She left me in the room. Some time passed with sounds through walls therein repeating. Voices in the house. Voices from bodies also sick in their own ways, asking, needing answers, needing help. I felt funny in my body there in the small room waiting. I shifted places, sat on paper. I flipped through the spindle of magazines supplied to keep your mind attuned in passing time. The doctor came in without knocking. She asked the same questions there again. She looked at the page and wrote notes down. There we were. I probably fidgeted. I tried to sound right. After further stringing, checking my chest sound, my holes and eyes, my frame, she told me she would give me a few more samples. Then I would need to see another doctor. She left the room. I waited more time. I tried to stretch some, seeing herein that the end to this light was coming soon. After this I would not need more pills, I decided. I would wean me off in rungs. This, a last door. A help to helping. Listen, I said to myself. The first nurse came back in quiet. She handed me a page, a bill. She left in quiet, left the door cracked. The paper said, “No Lunesta. Recommend Tylenol PM.” I walked out unwatched from the office, feeling a further kind of air, sunk slightly deeper. Just past the front desk, where the new sick were, I did not argue, paid the bill. I stopped to piss in their men’s room, talking to no one, my limbs reflected in the bathroom mirror in that light. There I was, me. There.

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I never took the pills again. I don’t know what I have been doing. Time since then has came and went—both in past tense. There have been people with their bodies and the hours and some food. I eat still and get tired. I run and smell the sound. Sometimes I sleep better. Sometimes the air inside my home and this bed’s placement are conceived ill even just walking in the door. Days go by and by inside the body. The day begins again and ends again. The beginning often feels more like the end, while all the moments between then and the end itself feel more like nothing, though there is speaking, and there are buttons, and there are people, and there are rooms.

The waking sleep and sleeping wake feed on each other. Where neither ever fully is the either or the other or itself. This veil of space wedged between spaces. A series of selves circling a leaving self. As to each eye and mouth and tongue and body there connected, the brain flesh wrinkling again. Bound in that mother body, every hour spent around her, every word, the light of rooms where you have stood together, the things you did or did not say in return. A mode of intuition held in instance. A whole life contained inside one nod, one second walking in a night. Always still another house inside this house. All those holes as little portals, rooms where one might stop and lie or turn around. Where through any wall could be another person, mouth wide open, among weather, light, water, and time. An unseen corridor around our walking. The event of no event.

So what goes on then—what turns in turning, going on alone again surrounded. What is there inside the turning off and turning on among no center in no spin and the noise and the night and the hours going, all after something that by definition, in its want, cannot be had, where the question asks itself the same question as it asked. You go on because you do. You do because in doing nothing is the going—at death, the going—in every inch toward the end—where between each lobe of time there are the days, the shapeless language. The people in you are.

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I go to get a glass of water. I’m watching my dad again today so Mom can go to quilt guild and get out of the house. Dad in time has gotten stranger, more far gone from knowing who or when or where he is or was. Around the house he walks and knocks on glass and punches his own hand, in endless iteration. He seems continually waiting for something to happen, though when things do happen, it’s not the thing. In the late years of his life, he seems newborn in certain ways, definitionless, no longer knowing where to aim, though in his eyes and in the knocking and the skin around him, you can see that he has lived. None of this is his fault, or anyone’s. It is days.

When I come into the kitchen, Dad is leaning on the kitchen counter. There are no lights on in the room, which in this day of muted sun seems dark even at noon.

“What’s up?” I say. “What are you doing?”

“Lost,” he says. He looks not directly at me, but off to something just beside. Like I’m standing next to myself.

“I’m the only one here,” he says.

“Do you want something to eat?” I say.

“Nah, we don’t need that,” he says.

On the counter there’s a bunch of loose-leaf paper. On the paper he’s written numbers, his name, illegible words. I pick one up and he says it is his ticket.

“Ticket to where?” I say.

He says, “Right.”

He walks across the room toward the door. The door is glass. The light comes through it. He knocks his fists against the glass and knocks and knocks. He hasn’t held a key to a door in this house for a year now.

I touch his shoulder. He doesn’t look. He rubs his hands together in strong fury. He punches one hand with the other. There is something there behind his face; something awake in his aging and erasing. He hits and hits and hits his hand against his hand.

I’ve said most everything I can ever think of to him in these moments. The house around us.

All words seem the same words.

I leave my father and the glass door and go and walk back down the hall. I come back into the room here where the desk is and I sit down at the machine. The house is quiet when he’s not banging, beyond the low whir of the hard drive and the phones. I leave the door open so I can hear him. I look and look into the white space of this file. There are all these words here.

There is the blinking cursor, its forced command prompt, waiting.

I minimize the file and cross the room and close the door.

Back at the desk, in the web browser, I look at the sites I’ve already likely refreshed several dozen times. I follow a link from one of the social networking websites to a video chat website.

I click a button to begin.

In the frame I am connected to the image of a gush of yellow glow inside some dark.

> Connected, feel free to talk now

Stranger: hi

[me]: u r a light?

Stranger: yea

Stranger: i m god

[me]: what should i do

> Your partner disconnected.

> Reconnecting . . .

I close the site and lie down on the floor.

Nowhere

In my head the light goes white. I’m lying face-up on a surface, the space above me full of flattened color. There seems no sound here. Another day here. The light continues. It is a gone light, feeding off of where it is. Through my whole fat head, a warming; blood moves; I think about my knees and feel my knees. A burr wakes in my brain inside the thinking and seems to move through my cerebrum down my neck, filling my chest up, threading in the chub around my ribs. Cold fireworks squirt along my lungs where I am again aware of breathing, around the shapes that make my sternum and the cellular walls vibrate all through my guts, my organs in transmission flipping, sizzled, then again in furied silence, as if erasing in their places, into pins along my stomach. I am awake again, and I am naked. I am in here again. Here is where.

Fed with the light the stretch marks on me where I was fat once begin to glow: tiny webs of slightly lighter skin trails like water systems in a leaf packed in where I forced my flesh to spread beyond itself—my want for anything around me to live inside of solid again burnt off, leaving the kiss of where it’d been—a pack of fat of air always around me in my mind, holding the slur. I feel glow move to curl through my intestines, colon, kidneys, to my sacs, the harbored swill of multimillions that could each become another man, become a son or daughter, though I cannot imagine—there compacted, there to be burst into the light, gobs of me abandoned in small rooms somewhere like all those years here I’ve made my motions, though now again awake in here again, I never want to move. If seen from elsewhere than my body, I imagine, the pattern of my spreading cells would reveal their endless errors, their rashness of wish and malnutrition and nights alone, and any billion other catalogued evidence of how I’ve gone wrong or stupid, the true conduit of sleepless nights, the true milk of what could never feed me in how I’ve steered this body backward and in horror and ill fit for any air, in the remembrance of nothing, in small pleasings. Here again in here again in here.

Along my legs, the hairs are standing up, strobing the order of my veins. A color I cannot smell or feel or see quite circles my kneecaps in numbing silence, washing as with cloths along the inside of great glass domes. I am thinking of saying something but I don’t—I can’t think of what to say—no good words to fill the space of this continuing instant I am aging in with—this awareness does not stop the want. I breathe air in spreading see-through through me, circling downward somehow to my heels and toes and soles, and held in long breaths through my body, blood networking, lit and lit with all this time burnt up in rooms and thoughts and want for feed and time and typing. I’m supposed to sit up. The day is daying. I am right here. I am me.