SLEEP
by Haruki Murakami
translated by Jay Rubin
This is my seventeenth straight day without sleep.
I’m not talking about insomnia. I know what insomnia is. I had something like it in college―something like it because I’m not sure that what I had then was exactly the same as what people refer to as insomnia. I suppose a doctor could have told me. But I didn’t see a doctor. I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Not that I had any reason to think so. Call it woman’s intuition―I just felt they couldn’t help me. So I didn’t see a doctor, and I didn’t say anything to my parents or friends, because I knew that that was exactly what they would tell me to do.
Back then, my “something
like insomnia” went on for a month. I never really got to sleep that entire
time. I’d go to bed at night and say to myself, “All right now, time for some
sleep.” That was all it took to wake me up. It was instantaneous - like a
conditioned reflex. The harder I worked at sleeping, the wider awake I became.
I tried alcohol, I tried sleeping pills, but they had absolutely no effect.
Finally, as the sky began
to grow light in the morning, I’d feel that I might be drifting off. But this
wasn’t sleep. My fingertips were just barely brushing against the outermost
edge of sleep. And all the while my mind was wide-awake. I would feel a hint of
drowsiness, but my mind was there, in its own room, on the other side of a
transparent wall, watching me. My physical self was drifting through the feeble
morning light, and all the while I could feel my mind staring, breathing, close
beside it. I was both a body on the verge of sleep and a mind determined to
stay awake.
This incomplete drowsiness
would continue on and off all day. My head was always foggy. I couldn’t get an
accurate fix on the things around me―their distance or mass or tenure. The
drowsiness would overtake me at regular, wavelike intervals: on the subway, in
the classroom, at the dinner table. My mind would slip away from my body. The
world would sway soundlessly. I would drop things. My pencil or my purse or my
fork would clatter to the floor. All I wanted was to throw myself down and
sleep. But I couldn’t. The wakefulness was always there beside me. I could feel
its chilling shadow. It was the shadow of myself. Weird, I would think as the
drowsiness overtook me, I’m in my own shadow. I would walk and eat and talk to
people inside my drowsiness. And the strangest thing was that no one noticed. I
lost fifteen pounds that month, and no one noticed. No one in my family, not
one of my friends or classmates realized that I was going through life asleep.
It was literally true: I
was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned
corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A
strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the
earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would
separate forever. “Hold tight,” I would tell myself, but there was nothing for
me to hold on to.
And then, when night came,
the intense wakefulness would return. I was powerless to resist it. I was
locked in its core by an enormous force. All I could do was stay awake until
morning, eyes wide open in the dark. I couldn’t even think. As I lay there,
listening to the clock tick off the seconds, I did nothing but stare at the
darkness as it slowly deepened and slowly diminished.
And then one day it ended,
without warning, without any external cause. I started to lose consciousness at
the breakfast table. I stood up without saying anything. I may have knocked
something off the table. I think someone spoke to me. But I can’t be sure. I
staggered to my room, crawled into bed in my clothes, and fell fast asleep. I
stayed that way for twenty-seven hours. My mother became alarmed and tried to
shake me out of it. She actually slapped my cheek. But I went on sleeping for
twenty-seven hours without a break. And when I finally did awaken, I was my old
self again. Probably.
I have no idea why I became
an insomniac then nor why the condition suddenly cured itself. It was like a
thick, black cloud brought from somewhere by the wind, a cloud crammed full of
ominous things I have no knowledge of. No one knows where such a thing comes
from or where it goes. I can only be sure that it did descend on me for a time,
and then departed.
In any case, what I have
now is nothing like that insomnia, nothing at all. I just can’t sleep. Not for
one second. Aside from that simple fact, I’m perfectly normal. I don’t feel
sleepy, and my mind is as clear as ever. Clearer, if anything. Physically, too,
I’m normal: my appetite is fine; I’m not fatigued. In terms of everyday
reality, there’s nothing wrong with me. I just can’t sleep.
Neither my husband nor my
son has noticed that I’m not sleeping. And I haven’t mentioned it to them. I
don’t want to be told to see a doctor. I know it wouldn’t do any good. I just
know. Like before. This is myself.
So they don’t suspect a
thing. On the surface, our life flows on unchanged. Peaceful. Routine. After I
see my husband and son off in the morning. I take my car, and go shopping. My
husband is a dentist. His office is a ten-minute drive from our condo. He and a
dental-school friend own it as partners. That way they can afford to hire a
technician and a receptionist. One partner can take the other’s overflow. Both
of them are good, so for an office that has been in operation for only five
years, and that opened without any special connections, the place is doing very
well. Almost too well. “I didn’t want to work so hard,” says my husband. “But I
can’t complain.”
And I always say, “Really,
you can’t.” It’s true. We had to get an enormous bank loan to open the place. A
dental office requires a huge investment in equipment. And the competition is
fierce. Patients don’t start pouring in the minute you open your doors. Lots of
dental clinics have failed for lack of patients.
Back then, we were young
and poor and we had a brand-new baby. No one could guarantee that we would
survive in such a tough world. But we have survived, one way or another. Five
years. No. We really can’t complain. We’ve still got almost two-thirds of our
debt left to pay, though.
“I know why you’ve got so
many patients,” I always say to him. “It’s because you’re such a good-looking
guy.
This is our little joke.
He’s not good-looking at all. Actually, he’s kind of strange-looking. Even now
I sometimes wonder why I married such a strange-looking man. I had other
boyfriends who were far more handsome.
What makes his face so
strange? I can’t really say. It’s not a handsome face, but it’s not ugly,
either. Nor is it the kind that people would say has “character.” Honestly,
“strange” is about all that fits. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say
that it has no distinguishing features. Still, there must be some element that
makes his face have no distinguishing features, and if I could grasp whatever
that is, I might be able to understand the strangeness of the whole. I once
tried to draw his picture, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t remember what he
looked like. I sat there holding the pencil over the paper and couldn’t make a
mark. I was flabbergasted. How can you live with a man so long and not be able
to bring his face to mind? I knew how to recognize him, of course. I would even
get mental images of him now and then. But when it came to drawing his picture,
I realized that I didn’t remember anything about his face. What could I do? It
was like running into an invisible wall. The one thing I could remember was
that his face looked strange.
The memory of that often
makes me nervous.
Still, he’s one of those
men everybody likes. That’s a big plus in his business, obviously, but I think
he would have been a success at just about anything. People feel secure talking
to him. I had never met anyone like that before. All my women friends like him.
And I’m fond of him, of course. I think I even love him. But, strictly
speaking, I don’t actually like him.
Anyhow, he smiles in this
natural, innocent way, just like a child. Not many grownup men can do that. And
I guess you’d expect a dentist to have nice teeth, which he does.
“It’s not my fault I’m so
good-looking,” he always answers when we enjoy our little joke. We’re the only
ones who understand what it means. It’s a recognition of reality―the fact that
we have managed in one way or another to survive―and it’s an important ritual
for us.
He drives his Sentra out of
the condo parking garage every morning at eight-fifteen. Our son is in the seat
next to him. The elementary school is on the way to the office. “Be careful,” I
say. “Don’t worry” he answers. Always the same little dialogue. I can’t help
myself. I have to say it. “Be careful.” And my husband has to answer, “Don’t
worry.” He starts the engine, puts a Haydn or Mozart tape into the car stereo,
and hums along with the music. My two “men” always wave to me on the way out.
Their hands move in exactly the same way. It’s almost uncanny. They lean their
heads at exactly the same angle and turn their palms toward me, moving them
slightly from side to side in exactly the same way, as if they’d been trained
by a choreographer.
I have my own car, a used
Honda Civic. A girlfriend sold it to me two years ago for next to nothing. One
bumper is smashed in, and the body style is old-fashioned, with rust spots
showing up. The odometer has over a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers on
it. Sometimes―once or twice a month―the car is almost impossible to start. The engine
simply won’t catch. Still, it’s not bad enough to have the thing fixed. If you
baby it and let it rest for ten minutes or so, the engine will start up with a
nice, solid vroom. Oh, well, everything-everybody-gets out of whack once or
twice a month. That’s life. My husband calls my car “your donkey.” I don’t
care. It’s mine.
I drive my Civic to the
supermarket. After marketing I clean the house and do the laundry. Then I fix
lunch. I make a point of performing my morning chores with brisk, efficient movements.
If possible, I like to finish my dinner preparations in the morning, too. Then
the afternoon is all mine.
My husband comes home for
lunch. He doesn’t like to eat out. He says the restaurants are too crowded, the
food is no good, and the smell of tobacco smoke gets into his clothes. He
prefers eating at home, even with the extra travel time involved. Still, I
don’t make anything fancy for lunch. I warm up leftovers in the microwave or
boil a pot of noodles. So the actual time involved is minimal. And, of course,
it’s more fun to eat with my husband than all alone with no one to talk to.
Before, when the clinic was
just getting started, there would often be no patient in the first afternoon
slot, so the two of us would go to bed after lunch. Those were the loveliest
times with him. Everything was hushed, and the soft afternoon sunshine would
filter into the room. We were a lot younger then, and happier.
We're still happy, of
course. I really do think so. No domestic troubles cast shadows on our home. I
love him and trust him. And I’m sure he feels the same about me. But little by
little, as the months and years go by, your life changes. That’s just how it
is. There’s nothing you can do about it. Now all the afternoon slots are taken.
When we finish eating, my husband brushes his teeth, hurries out to his car,
and goes back to the office. He’s got all those sick teeth waiting for him. But
that’s all right. We both know you can't have everything your own way.
After my husband goes back
to the office, I take a bathing suit and towel and drive to the neighborhood
athletic club. I swim for half an hour. I swim hard. I’m not that crazy about
the swimming itself: I just want to keep the flab off. I’ve always liked my own
figure. Actually, I’ve never liked my face. It’s not bad, but I’ve never felt I
liked it. My body is another matter. I like to stand naked in front of the
mirror. I like to study the soft outlines I see there, the balanced vitality.
I’m not sure what it is, but I get the feeling that something inside there is
very important to me. Whatever it is, I don’t want to lose it.
I’m thirty. When you reach
thirty, you realize it’s not the end of the world. I’m not especially happy
about getting older, but it does make some things easier. It’s a question of
attitude. One thing I know for sure, though: if a thirty-year-old woman loves
her body and is serious about keeping it looking the way it should, she has to
put in a certain amount of effort. I learned that from my mother. She used to
be a slim, lovely woman, but not anymore. I don’t want the same thing to happen
to me.
After I’ve had my swim, I
use the rest of my afternoon in various ways. Sometimes I’ll wander over to the
station plaza and window-shop. Sometimes I’ll go home, curl up on the sofa and
read a book or listen to an FM station or just rest. Eventually my son comes
home from school. I help him change into his playclothes, and give him a snack.
When he’s through eating, he goes out to play with his friends. He’s too young
to go to an afternoon cram school, and we aren’t making him take piano lessons
or anything.
“Let him play,” says my
husband. “Let him grow up naturally.” When my son leaves the house, I have the
same little dialogue with him as I do with my husband. “Be careful,” I say, and
he answers, “Don’t worry.”
As evening approaches, I
begin preparing dinner. My son is always back by six. He watches cartoons on
TV. If no emergency patients show up, my husband is home before seven. He
doesn’t drink a drop and he’s not fond of pointless socializing. He almost
always comes straight home from work.
The three of us talk during
dinner, mostly about what we’ve done that day. My son always has the most to
say. Everything that happens in his life is fresh and full of mystery. He
talks, and we offer our comments. After dinner, he does what he likes ― watches
television or reads or plays some kind of game with my husband. When he has
homework, he shuts himself up in his room and does it. He goes to bed at
eight-thirty. I tuck him in and stroke his hair and say good night to him and
turn off the light.
Then it’s husband and wife
together. He sits on the sofa, reading the newspaper and talking to me now and
then about his patients or something in the paper. Then he listens to Haydn or
Mozart. I don’t mind listening to music, but I can never seem to tell the
difference between those two composers. They sound the same to me. When I say
that to my husband, he tells me it doesn’t matter. “It’s all beautiful. That’s
what counts.”
“Just like you,” I say.
“Just like me,” he answers
with a big smile. He seems genuinely pleased.
So that’s my life―or my
life before I stopped sleeping―each day pretty much a repetition of the one
before. I used to keep a simple diary, but if I forgot for two or three days,
I’d lose track of what happened on which day. Yesterday could have been the day
before yesterday, or vice versa. I’d sometimes wonder what kind of life this
was. Which is not to say that I found it empty. I was―very simply―amazed. At
the lack of demarcation between the days. At the fact that I was part of such a
life, a life that had swallowed me up so completely. As the fact that my
footprints were being blown away before I ever had a chance to turn and look at
them.
Whenever I felt like that,
I would look at my face in the bathroom mirror―just look at it for fifteen
minutes at a time, my mind a total blank. I’d stare at my face purely as a
physical object, and gradually it would disconnect from the rest of me,
becoming just some thing that happened to exist at the same time as myself. And
a realization would come to me: This is happening here and now. It’s got
nothing to do with footprints. Reality and I exist simultaneously at this
present moment. That’s the most important thing.
But now I can’t sleep
anymore. When I stopped sleeping, I stopped keeping a diary.
I remember with perfect
clarity that first night I lost the ability to sleep. I was having a repulsive
dream―a dark, slimy dream. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do
remember how it felt ominous and terrifying. I woke at the climatic moment―came
fully awake with a start, as if something had dragged me back at the last
moment from a fatal turning point. Had I remained immersed in the dream for
another second, I would have been lost forever. My breath came in painful gasps
for a time after I awoke. My arms and legs felt paralyzed. I lay there
immobilized, listening to my own labored breathing, as if I were stretched out
full length on the floor of a huge cavern.
“It was a dream,” I told
myself, and I waited for my breathing to calm down. Lying stiff on my back, I
felt my heart working violently, my lungs hurrying the blood to it with big,
slow, bellowslike contractions. I began to wonder what time it could be. I
wanted to look at the clock by my pillow, but I couldn’t turn my head far
enough. Just then I seemed to catch a glimpse of something at the foot of the
bed, something like a vague, black shadow. I caught my breath. My heart, my
lungs, everything inside me seemed to freeze in that instant. I strained to see
the black shadow.
The moment I tried to focus
on it, the shadow began to assume a definite shape, as if it had been waiting
for me to notice it. Its outline became distinct, and began to be filled with
substance, and then with details. It was a gaunt old man wearing a skintight
black shirt. His hair was gray and short, his cheeks sunken. He stood at my
feet, perfectly still. He said nothing, but his piercing eyes stared at me.
They were huge eyes, and I could see the red network of veins in them. The old
man’s face wore no expression at all. It told me nothing. It was like an
opening in the darkness.
This was no longer the
dream, I knew. From that, I had already awakened. And not just by drifting
awake but by having my eyes ripped open. No, this was no dream. This was
reality. And in reality an old man I had never seen before was standing at the
foot of my bed. I had to do something―turn on the light, wake my husband,
scream. I tried to move. I fought to make my limbs work, but it did no good. I
couldn’t move a finger. When it became clear to me that I would never be able
to move, I was filled with a hopeless terror, a primal fear such as I had never
experienced before, like a chill that rises silently from the bottomless well
of memory. I tried to scream, but I was incapable of producing a sound, or even
moving my tongue. All I could do was look at the old man.
Now I saw that he was
holding something―a tall, narrow, rounded thing that shone white. As I stared
at this object, wondering what it could be, it began to take on a definite
shape, just as the shadow had earlier. It was a pitcher, an old-fashioned
porcelain pitcher. After some time, the man raised the pitcher and began
pouring water from it onto my feet. I could not feel the water. I could see it
and hear it splashing down on my feet, but I couldn’t feel a thing.
The old man went on and on
pouring water over my feet. Strange―no matter how much he poured, the pitcher
never ran dry. I began to worry that my feet would eventually rot and melt
away. Yes, of course they would rot. What else could they do with so much water
pouring over them? When it occurred to me that my feet were going to rot and
melt away, I couldn’t take it any longer.
I closed my eyes and let
out a scream so loud it took every ounce of strength I had. But it never left my
body. It reverberated soundlessly inside, tearing through me, shutting down my
heart. Everything inside my head turned white for a moment as the scream
penetrated my every cell. Something inside me died. Something melted away,
leaving only a shuddering vacuum. An explosive flash incinerated everything my
existence depended on.
When I opened my eyes, the
old man was gone. The pitcher was gone. The bedspread was dry, and there was no
indication that anything near my feet had been wet. My body, though, was soaked
with sweat, a horrifying volume of sweat, more sweat than I ever imagined a
human being could produce. And yet, undeniably, it was sweat that had come from
me.
I moved one finger. Then
another, and another, and the rest. Next, I bent my arms and then my legs. I
rotated my feet and bent my knees. Nothing moved quite as it should have, but
at least it did move. After carefully checking to see that all my body parts
were working. I eased myself into a sitting position. In the dim light
filtering in from the sweet lamp, I scanned the entire room from corner to
corner. The old man was definitely not there.
The clock by my pillow said
twelve-thirty. I had been sleeping for only an hour and a half. My husband was
sound asleep in his bed. Even his breathing was inaudible. He always sleeps
like that, as if all mental activity in him had been obliterated. Almost
nothing can wake him.
I got out of bed and went
to the bathroom. I threw my sweat-soaked nightgown into the washing machine and
took a shower. After putting on a fresh pair of pajamas, I went to the living
room, switched on the floor lamp beside the sofa, and sat there drinking a full
glass of brandy. I almost never drink. Not that I have a physical
incompatibility with alcohol, as my husband does. In fact, I used to drink
quite a lot, but after marrying him I simply stopped. Sometimes when I had
trouble sleeping I would take a sip of brandy but that night I felt I wanted a
whole glass to quiet my overwrought nerves.
The only alcohol in the
house was a bottle of Remy Martin we kept in the sideboard. It had been a gift.
I don’t even remember who gave it to us, it was so long ago. The bottle wore a
thin layer of dust. We had no real brandy glasses, so I just poured it into a
regular tumbler and sipped it slowly.
I must have been in a
trance, I thought. I had never experienced such a thing, but I had heard about
trances from a college friend who had been through one. Everything was
incredibly clear, she had said. You can’t believe it’s a dream. “I didn’t believe
it was a dream when it was happening, and now I still don’t believe it was a
dream.” Which is exactly how I felt. Of course it had to be a dream-a kind of
dream that doesn’t feel like a dream.
Though the terror was
leaving me, the trembling of my body would not stop. It was in my skin, like
the circular ripples on water after an earthquake. I could see the slight
quivering. The scream had done it. The scream that had never found a voice was
still locked up in my body, making it tremble.
I closed my eyes and
swallowed another mouthful of brandy. The warmth spread from my throat to my
stomach. The sensation felt tremendously real.
With a start, I thought of
my son. Again my heart began pounding. I hurried from the sofa to his room. He
was sound asleep, one hand across his mouth, the other thrust out to the side,
looking just as secure and peaceful in sleep as my husband. I straightened his
blanket. Whatever it was that had so violently shattered my sleep, it had
attacked only me. Neither of them had felt a thing.
I returned to the living
room and wandered about there. I was not the least bit sleepy.
I considered drinking
another glass of brandy. In fact, I wanted to drink even more alcohol than
that. I wanted to warm my body more, to calm my nerves down more, and to feel
that strong, penetrating bouquet in my mouth again. After some hesitation, I
decided against it. I didn’t want to start the new day drunk. I put the brandy
back in the sideboard, brought the glass to the kitchen sink, and washed it. I
found some strawberries in the refrigerator and ate them.
I realized that the
trembling in my skin was almost gone.
What was that old man in black? I asked myself. I had never seen him before in my life. That black clothing of his was so strange, like a tight-fitting sweatsuit, and yet, at the same time, old-fashioned. I had never seen anything like it. And those eyes ― bloodshot, and never blinking. Who was he? Why did he pour water on my feet? Why did he have to do such a thing?
I had only questions, no
answers.
The time my friend went
into a trance, she was spending the night at her fiancé’s house. As she lay in
bed asleep, an angry-looking man in his early fifties approached and ordered
her out of the house. While that was happening, she couldn’t move a muscle.
And, like me, she became soaked with sweat. She was certain it must be the
ghost of her fiancé’s father, who was telling her to get out of his house. But
when she asked to see a photograph of the father the next day, it turned out to
be an entirely different man. “I must have been feeling tense,” she concluded.
“That’s what caused it.”
But I’m not tense. And this
is my own house. There shouldn’t be anything here to threaten me. Why did I
have to go into a trance?
I shook my head. Stop
thinking, I told myself. It won’t do any good. I had a realistic dream, nothing
more. I’ve probably been building up some kind of fatigue. The tennis I played
the day before yesterday must have done it. I met a friend at the club after my
swim and she invited me to play tennis and I overdid it a little, that’s all.
Sure ― my arms and legs felt tired and heavy for a while afterward.
When I finished my
strawberries, I stretched out on the sofa and tried closing my eyes.
I wasn’t sleepy at all.
“Oh, great,” I thought. “1 really don’t feel like sleeping.”
I thought I’d read a book
until I got tired again. I went to the bedroom and picked a novel from the
bookcase. My husband didn’t even twitch when I turned on the light to hunt for
it. I chose “Anna Karenina.” I was in the mood for a long Russian novel, and I
had only read “Anna Karenina” once, long ago, probably in high school. I
remembered just a few things about it: the first line, “All happy families
resemble one another, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and the
heroine’s throwing herself under a train at the end. And that early on there
was a hint of the final suicide. Wasn’t there a scene at a racetrack? Or was
that in another novel?
Whatever. I went back to
the sofa and opened the book. How many years had it been since I sat down and
relaxed like this with a book? True, I often spent half an hour or an hour of
my private time in the afternoon with a book open. But you couldn’t really call
that reading. I’d always find myself thinking about other things―my son, or
shopping, or the freezer’s needing to be fixed, or my having to find something
to wear to a relative’s wedding, or the stomach operation my father had last
month. That kind of stuff would drift into my mind, and then it would grow, and
take off in a million different directions. After a while I’d notice that the
only thing that had gone by was the time, and I had hardly turned any pages.
Without noticing it, I had
become accustomed in this way to a life without books. How strange, now that I
think of it. Reading had been the center of my life when I was young. I had
read every book in the grade-school library, and almost my entire allowance
would go for books. I’d even scrimp on lunches to buy books I wanted to read.
And this went on into junior high and high school. Nobody read as much as I
did. I was the middle one of five children, and both my parents worked, so
nobody paid much attention to me. I could read alone as much as I liked. I’d
always enter the essay contests on books so I could win a gift certificate for
more books. And I usually won. In college I majored in English literature and
got good grades. My graduation thesis on Katherine Mansfield won top honors,
and my thesis adviser urged me to apply to graduate school. I wanted to go out
into the world, though, and I knew that I was no scholar. I just enjoyed
reading books. And, even if I had wanted to go on studying, my family didn’t
have the financial wherewithal to send me to graduate school. We weren’t poor
by any means, but there were two sisters coming along after me, so once I
graduated from college I simply had to begin supporting myself.
When had I really read a
book last? And what had it been? I couldn’t recall anything. Why did a person’s
life have to change so completely? Where had the old me gone, the one who used
to read a book as if possessed by it? What had those days―and that almost
abnormally intense passion―meant to me?
That night, I found myself
capable of reading “Anna Karenina” with unbroken concentration. I went on
turning pages without another thought in mind. In one sitting, I read as far as
the scene where Anna and Vronsky first see each other in the Moscow train
station. At that point, I stuck my bookmark in and poured myself another glass
of brandy.
Though it hadn’t occurred
to me before, I couldn’t help thinking what an odd novel this was. You don’t
see the heroine, Anna, until Chapter 18. I wondered if it didn’t seem unusual
to readers in Tolstoy’s day. What did they do when the book went on and on with
a detailed description of the life of a minor character named Oblonsky―just sit
there, waiting for the beautiful heroine to appear? Maybe that was it. Maybe
people in those days had lots of time to kill―at least the part of society that
read novels.
Then I noticed how late it
was. Three in the morning! And still I wasn’t sleepy.
What should I do? I don’t
feel sleepy at all, I thought. I could just keep on reading. I’d love to find
out what happens in the story. But I have to sleep.
I remembered my ordeal with
insomnia and how I had gone through each day back then, wrapped in a cloud. No,
never again. I was still a student in those days. It was still possible for me
to get away with something like that. But not now, I thought. Now I’m a wife. A
mother. I have responsibilities. I have to make my husband’s lunches and take
care of my son.
But even if I get into bed
now, I know I won’t be able to sleep a wink.
I shook my head.
Let’s face it, I’m just not
sleepy, I told myself. And I want to read the rest of the book.
I sighed and stole a glance
at the big volume lying on the table. And that was that. I plunged into “Anna
Karenina” and kept reading until the sun came up. Anna and Vronsky stared at
each other at the ball and fell into their doomed love. Anna went to pieces
when Vronsky’s horse fell at the racetrack (so there was a racetrack scene,
after all!) and confessed her infidelity to her husband. I was there with
Vronsky when he spurred his horse over the obstacles. I heard the crowd
cheering him on. And I was there in the stands watching his horse go down. When
the window brightened with the morning light, I laid the book down and went to
the kitchen for a cup of coffee. My mind was filled with scenes from the novel
and with a tremendous hunger, obliterating any other thought. I cut two slices
of bread, spread them with butter and mustard, and had a cheese sandwich. My
hunger pangs were almost unbearable. It was rare for me to feel that hungry. I
had trouble breathing, I was so hungry. One sandwich did hardly anything for
me, so I made another one and had another cup of coffee with it.
To my husband I said
nothing about either my trance or my night without sleep. Not that I was
hiding them from him. It just seemed to me that there was no point in telling
him. What good would it have done? And besides, I had simply missed a night’s
sleep. That much happens to everyone now and then.
I made my husband his usual
cup of coffee and gave my son a glass of warm milk. My husband ate toast and my
son a bowl of cornflakes. My husband skimmed the morning paper and my son
hummed a new song he had learned in school. The two of them got into the Sentra
and left. “Be careful,” I said to my husband. “Don’t worry,” he answered. The
two of them waved. A typical morning.
After they were gone, I sat
on the sofa and thought about how to spend the rest of the day. What should I
do? What did I have to do? I went to the kitchen to inspect the contents of the
refrigerator. I could get by without shopping. We had bread, milk, and eggs,
and there was meat in the freezer. Plenty of vegetables, too. Everything I’d
need through tomorrow’s lunch.
I had business at the bank,
but it was nothing I absolutely had to take care of immediately. Letting it go
a day longer wouldn’t hurt.
I went back to the sofa and
started reading the rest of “Anna Karenina.” Until that reading, I hadn’t
realized how little I remembered of what goes on in the book. I recognized
virtually nothing―the characters, the scenes, nothing. I might as well have
been reading a whole new book. How strange. I must have been deeply moved at
the time I first read it, but now there was nothing left. Without my noticing,
the memories of all the shuddering, soaring emotions had slipped away and
vanished.
What, then, of the enormous
fund of time I had consumed back then reading books? What had all that meant?
I stopped reading and
thought about that for a while. None of it made sense to me, though, and soon I
even lost track of what I was thinking about. I caught myself staring at the
tree that stood outside the window. I shook my head and went back to the book.
Just after the middle of
Volume III, I found a few crumbling flakes of chocolate stuck between the
pages. I must have been eating chocolate as I read the novel when I was in high
school. I used to like to eat and read. Come to think of it, I hadn’t touched
chocolate since my marriage. My husband doesn’t like me to eat sweets, and we
almost never give them to our son. We don’t usually keep that kind of thing
around the house.
As I looked at the whitened
flakes of chocolate from over a decade ago, I felt a tremendous urge to have
the real thing. I wanted to eat chocolate while reading “Anna Karenina,” the
way I did back then. I couldn’t hear to be denied it for another moment. Every
cell in my body seemed to be panting with this hunger for chocolate.
I slipped a cardigan over
my shoulder and took the elevator down. I walked straight to the neighborhood
candy shop and bought two of the sweetest-looking milk-chocolate bars they had.
As soon as I left the shop, I tore one open, and started eating it while
walking home. The luscious taste of milk chocolate spread through my mouth. I
could feel the sweetness being absorbed directly into every part of my body. I
continued eating in the elevator, steeping myself in the wonderful aroma that
filled the tiny space.
Heading straight for the
sofa, I started reading “Anna Karenina” and eating my chocolate. I wasn’t the
least bit sleepy. I felt no physical fatigue, either. I could have gone on
reading forever. When I finished the first chocolate bar, I opened the second
and ate half of that. About two-thirds of the way through Volume III, I looked
at my watch. Eleven-forty.
Eleven-forty!
My husband would be home
soon. I closed the book and hurried to the kitchen. I put water in a pot and
turned on the gas. Then I minced some scallions and took out a handful of
buckwheat noodles for boiling. While the water was heating, I soaked some dried
seaweed, cut it up, and topped it with a vinegar dressing. I took a block of
tofu from the refrigerator and cut it into cubes. Finally, I went to the
bathroom and brushed my teeth to get rid of the chocolate smell.
At almost the exact moment
the water came to a boil, my husband walked in. He had finished work a little
earlier than usual, he said.
Together, we ate the
buckwheat noodles. My husband talked about a new piece of dental equipment he
was considering bringing into the office, a machine that would remove plaque
from patients’ teeth far more thoroughly than anything he had used before, and
in less time. Like all such equipment, it was quite expensive, but it would pay
for itself soon enough, since these days more and more patients were coming in
just for a cleaning.
“What do you think?’ he
asked me.
I didn’t want to think
about plaque on people’s teeth, and I especially didn’t want to hear or think
about it while I was eating. My mind was filled with hazy images of Vronsky
falling off his horse. But of course I couldn’t tell my husband that. He was
deadly serious about the equipment. I asked him the price and pretended to
think about it. “Why not buy it if you need it?” I said. “The money will work
out one way or another. You wouldn’t be spending it for fun, after all.”
“That’s true,” he said. “I
wouldn’t be spending it for fun.” Then he continued eating his noodles in
silence.
Perched on a branch of the
tree outside the window, a pair of large birds were chirping. I watched them
half consciously. I wasn’t sleepy. I wasn’t the least bit sleepy. Why not?
While I cleared the table,
my husband sat on the sofa reading the paper. “Anna Karenina” lay there beside
him, but he didn’t seem to notice. He had no interest in whether I read books.
After I finished washing
the dishes, my husband said, “I’ve got a nice surprise today. What do you think
it is?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“My first afternoon patient
has cancelled. I don’t have to be back in the office until one-thirty.” He
smiled.
I couldn’t figure out why
this was supposed to be such a nice surprise. I wonder why I couldn’t.
It was only after my
husband stood up and drew me toward the bedroom that I realized what he had in
mind. I wasn’t in the mood for it at all. I didn’t understand why I should have
sex then. All I wanted was to get back to my book. I wanted to stretch out
alone on the sofa and munch on chocolate while I turned the pages of “Anna
Karenina.” All the time I had been washing the dishes, my only thoughts had
been of Vronsky and of how an author like Tolstoy managed to control his
characters so skillfully. He described them with such wonderful precision. But
that very precision somehow denied them a kind of salvation. And this finally―
I closed my eyes and
pressed my fingertips to my temple.
“I’m sorry, I’ve had a kind
of headache all day. What awful timing.”
I had often had some truly
terrible headaches, so he accepted my explanation without a murmur.
“You’d better lie down and get
some rest,” he said. “You’ve been working too hard.”
“It’s really not that bad,”
I said.
He relaxed on the sofa
until one o’clock, listening to music and reading the paper. And he talked
about dental equipment again. You bought the latest high-tech staff and it was
obsolete in two or three years... So then you had to keep replacing everything.
The only ones who made any money were the equipment manufacturers―that kind of
talk. I offered a few clucks, but I was hardly listening.
After my husband went back
to the office, I folded the paper and pounded the sofa cushions until they were
puffed up again. Then I leaned on the windowsill, surveying the room. I
couldn’t figure out what was happening. Why wasn’t I sleepy? In the old days I
had done all-nighters any number of times, but I had never stayed awake this
long. Ordinarily, I would have been sound asleep after so many hours, or, if
not asleep, impossibly tired. But I wasn’t the least bit sleepy. My mind was
perfectly clear.
I went into the kitchen and
warmed up some coffee. I thought, Now what should I do? Of course I wanted to
read the rest of “Anna Karenina,” but I also wanted to go to the pool for my
swim. After a good deal of agonizing, I decided to go swimming. I don’t know
how to explain this, but I wanted to purge my body of something by exercising
it to the limit. Purge it―of what? I spent some time wondering about that.
Purge it of what?
I didn’t know.
But this thing, whatever it
was, this mistlike something, hung there inside my body like a certain kind of
potential. I wanted to give it a name, but the word refused to come to mind.
I’m terrible at finding the right word, for things. I’m sure Tolstoy would have
been able to come up with exactly the right word.
Anyhow, I put my swimsuit
in my bag and, as always, drove my Civic to the athletic club. There were only
two other people in the pool―a young man and a middle-aged woman―and I didn’t
know either of them. A bored-looking lifeguard was on duty.
I changed into my bathing
suit, put on my goggles, and swam my usual thirty minutes. But thirty minutes
wasn’t enough. I swam another fifteen minutes, ending with a crawl for two full
lengths at maximum speed. I was out of breath, but I still felt nothing but
energy welling up inside my body. The others were staring at me when I left the
pool.
It was still a little
before three o’clock, so I drove to the bank and finished my business
there. I considered doing some shopping at the supermarket, but I decided
instead to head straight for home. There, I picked up “Anna Karenina” where I
had left off, eating what was left of the chocolate. When my son came
home at four o’clock, I gave him a glass of juice, and some fruit gelatin
that I had made. Then I started on dinner. I defrosted some meat from the freezer
and cut up some vegetables in preparation for stir-frying. I made miso soup and
cooked the rice. All of these tasks I took care of with tremendous mechanical
efficiency.
I went back to Anna
Karenina.
I was not tired.
At ten o’clock I got
into my bed, pretending that I would be sleeping there near my husband. He fell
asleep right away, practically the moment the light went out, as if there were
some cord connecting the lamp with his brain.
Amazing. People like that
are rare. There are far more people who have trouble falling asleep. My father
was one of those. He’d always complain about how shallow his sleep was. Not
only did he find it hard to get to sleep, but the slightest sound or movement
would wake him up for the rest of the night.
Not my husband, though.
Once he was asleep nothing could wake him until morning. We were still
newly-weds when it struck me how odd this was. I even experimented to see what
it would take to wake him. I sprinkled water on his face and tickled his nose
with a brush and that kind of thing. I never once got him to wake up. If I kept
at it, I could get him to groan once, but that was all. And he never dreamed.
At least he never remembered what his dreams were about. Needless to say, he
never went into any paralytic trances. He slept. He slept like a turtle buried
in mud.
Amazing. But it helped with
what quickly became my nightly routine.
After ten minutes of lying
near him, I would get out of bed. I would go to the living room, turn on the
floor lamp, and pour myself a glass of brandy. Then I would sit on the sofa and
read my book, taking tiny sips of brandy and letting the smooth liquid glide
over my tongue. Whenever I felt like it, would eat a cookie or a piece of
chocolate that I had hidden in the sideboard. After a while, morning would
come. When that happened, I would close my book and make myself a cup of
coffee. Then I would make a sandwich and eat it.
My days became just as
regulated.
I would hurry through my
housework and spend the rest of the morning reading. Just before noon, I would
put my book down and fix my husband’s lunch. When he left, before one. I’d
drive to the club and have my swim. I would swim for a full hour. Once I stopped
sleeping, thirty minutes was never enough. While I was in the water I
concentrated my entire mind on swimming. I thought about nothing but how to
move my body most effectively, and I inhaled and exhaled with perfect
regularity. If I met someone I knew, I hardly said a word―just the basic
civilities. I refused all invitations. “Sorry,” I’d say. “I’m going straight
home today. There’s something I have to do.” I didn’t want to get involved with
anybody. I didn’t want to have to waste time on endless gossiping. When I was
through swimming as hard as I could, all I wanted was to hurry home and read.
I went through the
motions―shopping, cooking, playing with my son, having sex with my husband. It
was easy once I got the hang of it. All I had to do was break the connection
between my mind and my body. While my body went about its business, my mind
floated in its own inner space. I ran the house without a thought in my head,
feeding snacks to my son, chatting with my husband.
After I gave up sleeping,
it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it
work. It’s just reality. Just housework. Just a home. Like running a simple
machine. Once you learn to run it, it’s just a matter of repetition. You push
this button and pull that lever. You adjust a gauge, put on the lid, set the
timer. The same thing, over and over.
Of course there were
variations now and then. My mother-in-law had dinner with us. On Sunday, the
three of us went to the zoo. My son had a terrible case of diarrhea.
But none of these events
had any effect on my being. They swept past me like a silent breeze. I chatted
with my mother-in-law, made dinner for four, took a picture in front of the
bear cage, put a hot-water bottle on my son’s stomach, and gave him his
medicine.
No one noticed that I had
changed―that I had given up sleeping entirely, that I was spending all my time
reading, that my mind was someplace a hundred years―and hundreds of miles―from
reality. No matter how mechanically I worked, no matter how little love or
emotion I invested in my handling of reality, my husband and my son and my
mother-in-law went on relating to me as they always had. If anything, they
seemed more at ease with me than before.
And so a week went by.
Once my constant
wakefulness entered its second week, though, it started to worry me. It was
simply not normal. People are supposed to sleep. All people sleep. Once, some
years ago, I had read about a form of torture in which the victim is prevented
from sleeping. Something the Nazis did, I think. They’d lock the person in a
tiny room, fasten his eyelids open, and keep shining lights in his face and
making loud noises without a break. Eventually, the person would go mad and
die.
I couldn’t recall how long
the article said it took for the madness to set in, but it couldn’t have been
much more than three days or four. In my case, a whole week had gone by. This
was simply too much. Still, my health was not suffering. Far from it. I had
more energy than ever.
One day, after showering, I
stood naked in front of the mirror. I was amazed to discover that my body
appeared to be almost bursting with vitality. I studied every inch of myself,
head to toe, but I could find not the slightest hint of excess flesh, not one
wrinkle. I no longer had the body of a young girl, of course, but my skin had
far more glow, far more tautness than it had before. I took a pinch of flesh
near my waist, and found it almost hard, with a wonderful elasticity.
It dawned on me that I was
prettier than I had realized. I looked so much younger than before that it was
almost shocking. I could probably pass for twenty-four. My skin was smooth. My
eyes were bright, lips moist. The shadowed area beneath my protruding
cheekbones (the one feature I really hated about myself) was no longer
noticeable―at all. I sat down and looked at my face in the mirror for a good
thirty minutes. I studied it from all angles, objectively. No, I had not been
mistaken: I was really pretty.
What was happening to me?
I thought about seeing a
doctor.
I had a doctor who had been
taking care of me since I was a child and to whom I felt close, but the more I
thought about how he might react to my story the less inclined I felt to tell
it to him. Would he take me at my word? He’d probably think I was crazy if I
said I hadn’t slept in a week. Or he might dismiss it as a kind of neurotic
insomnia. But if he did believe I was telling the truth he might send me to
some big research hospital for testing.
And then what would happen?
I’d be locked up and sent
from one lab to another to be experimented on. They’d do EEGs and EKGs and
urinalyses and blood tests and psychological screening and who knows what else.
I couldn’t take that. I
just wanted to stay by myself and quietly read my book I wanted to have my hour
of swimming every day. I wanted my freedom: that’s what I wanted more than
anything. I didn’t want to go to any hospitals. And, even if they did get me
into a hospital, what would they find? They’d do a mountain of tests and
formulate a mountain of hypotheses, and that would be the end of it. I didn’t
want to be locked up in a place like that.
One afternoon I went to the
library and read some books on sleep. The few books I could find didn’t tell me
much. In fact, they all had only one thing to say: that sleep is rest. Like
turning off a car engine. If you keep a motor running constantly, sooner or
later it will break down. A running engine must produce heat, and the
accumulated heat fatigues the machinery itself. Which is why you have to let
the engine rest. Cool down. Turning off the engine-that, finally, is what sleep
is. In a human being, sleep provides rest for both the flesh and the spirit
When a person lies down and rests her muscles, she simultaneously closes her
eyes and cuts off the thought processes. And excess thoughts release an
electrical discharge in the form of dreams.
One book did have a
fascinating point to make. The author maintained that human beings, by their
very nature, are incapable of escaping from certain fixed idiosyncratic drives both
in their thought processes and in their physical movements. People
unconsciously fashion their own action- and thought-drives, which under normal
circumstances never disappear. In other words, people live in the prison cells
of their own drives. What modulates these drives and keeps them in check―so the
organism doesn’t wear down as the heel of a shoe does, at a particular angle,
as the author puts it―is nothing other than sleep. Sleep therapeutically
counteracts the tendency. In sleep, people naturally relax muscles that have
been consistently used in only one direction; sleep both calms and provides a
discharge for thought circuits that have likewise been used in only one
direction. This is how people are cooled down. Sleeping is an act that has been
programmed, with Karmic inevitability, into the human system, and no one can
diverge from it. If a person were to diverge from it, the person’s very “ground
of being” would be threatened.
“Drives?” I asked myself.
The only “drive” of mine
that I could think of was housework―those chores I perform day after day like
an unfeeling machine. Cooking and shopping and laundry and mothering: what were
they if not “drives”? I could do them with my eyes closed. Push the buttons.
Pull the levers. Pretty soon, reality just flows off and away. The same
physical movements over and over. Drives. They were consuming me, wearing me
down on one side like the heel of a shoe. I needed sleep every day to adjust
them and cool me down.
Was that it?
I read the passage once
more, with intense concentration. And I nodded. Yes, almost certainly, that was
it.
So, then, what was this
life of mine? I was being consumed by my drives and then sleeping to repair the
damage. My life was nothing but a repetition of this cycle. It was going
nowhere.
Sitting at the library
table, I shook my head.
I’m through with sleep! So
what if I go mad? So what if I lose my “ground of being”? I will not be
consumed by my “drives.” If sleep is nothing more than a periodic repairing of
the parts of me that are being worn away, I don’t want it anymore. I don’t need
it anymore. My flesh may have to be consumed, but my mind belongs to me. I’m
keeping it for myself. I will not hand it over to anyone. I don’t want to be
“repaired.” I will not sleep.
I left the library filled
with a new determination.
Now my inability to sleep
ceased to frighten me. What was there to be afraid of? Think of the advantages!
Now the hours from ten at night to six in the morning belonged to me alone.
Until now, a third of every day had been used up by sleep. But no more. No
more. Now it was mine, just mine, nobody else’s, all mine. I could use this
time in any way I liked. No one would get in my way. No one would make demands
on me. Yes, that was it. I had expanded my life. I had increased it by a third.
You are probably going to
tell me that this is biologically abnormal. And you may be right. And maybe
someday in the future I’ll have to pay back the debt I’m building up by
continuing to do this biologically abnormal thing. Maybe life will try to
collect on the expanded part―this “advance” it is paying me now. This is a
groundless hypothesis, but there is no ground for negating it, and it feels
right to me somehow. Which means that in the end the balance sheet of borrowed
time will even out.
Honestly, though, I didn’t
give a damn, even if I had to die young. The best thing to do with a hypothesis
is to let it run any course it pleases. Now, at least, I was expanding my life,
and it was wonderful. My hands weren’t empty anymore. Here I was―alive, and I
could feel it. It was real. I wasn’t being consumed any longer. Or at least
there was a part of me in existence that was not being consumed, and that was
what gave me this intensely real feeling of being alive. A life without that
feeling might go on forever, but it would have no meaning at all. I saw that
with absolute clarity now.
After checking to see that
my husband was asleep I would go sit on the living-room sofa, drink brandy by
myself, and open my book. I read “Anna Karenina” three times. Each time, I made
new discoveries. This enormous novel was full of revelations and riddles. Like
a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside
those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single
universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the
reader. The old me had been able to understand only the tiniest fragment of it,
but the gaze of this new me could penetrate to the core with perfect
understanding. I knew exactly what the great Tolstoy wanted to say, what he wanted
the reader to get from his book; I could see how his message had organically
crystallized as a novel, and what in that novel had surpassed the author
himself.
No matter how hard I
concentrated, I never tired. After reading “Anna Karenina” as many times as I
could, I read Dostoyevski. I could read book after book with utter
concentration and never tire. I could understand the most difficult passages
without effort. And I responded with deep emotion.
I felt that I had always
been meant to be like this. By abandoning sleep I had expanded myself. The
power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power
would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.
Eventually, my bottle of
brandy ran out. I had drunk almost all of it by myself. I went to the gourmet
department of a big store for another bottle of Remy Martin. As long as I was
there, I figured, I might as well buy a bottle of red wine, too. And a fine
crystal brandy glass. And chocolate and cookies.
Sometimes while reading I
would become overexcited. When that happened, I would put my book down and
exercise―do calisthenics or just walk around the room. Depending on my mood, I
might go out for a nighttime drive. I’d change clothes, get into my Civic, and
drive aimlessly around the neighborhood. Sometimes I’d drop into an all-night
fast-food place for a cup of coffee, but it was such a bother to have to deal
with other people that I’d usually stay in the car. I’d stop in some
safe-looking spot and just let my mind wander. Or I’d go all the way to the
harbor and watch the boats.
One time, though, I was
questioned by a policeman. It was two-thirty in the morning, and I was parked
under a street lamp near the pier, listening to the car stereo and watching the
lights of the ships passing by. He knocked on my window. I lowered the glass.
He was young and handsome, and very polite. I explained to him that I couldn’t
sleep. He asked for my license and studied it for a while. “There was a murder
here last month,” he said. “Three young men attacked a couple, killed the man,
and raped the woman.” I remembered having read about the incident. I nodded.
“If you don’t have any business here, Ma’am, you’d better not hang around here
at night.” I thanked him and said I would leave. He gave my license back. I
drove away.
That was the only time
anyone talked to me. Usually I would drift through the streets at night for an
hour or more and no one would bother me. Then I would park in our underground
garage. Right next to my husband’s white Sentra; he was upstairs sleeping
soundly in the darkness. I’d listen to the crackle of the hot engine cooling
down, and when the sound died I’d go upstairs.
The first thing I would do
when I got inside was check to make sure my husband was asleep. And he always
was. Then I’d check my son, who was always sound asleep, too. They didn’t know
a thing. They believed that the world was as it always had been, unchanging.
But they were wrong. It was changing in ways they could never guess. Changing a
lot. Changing fast. It would never be the same again.
One time I stood and stared
at my sleeping husband’s face. I had heard a thump in the bedroom and rushed
in. The alarm clock was on the floor. He had probably knocked it down in his
sleep. But he was sleeping as soundly as ever, completely unaware of what he
had done. What would it take to wake this man? I picked up the clock and put it
back on the night table. Then I folded my arms and stared at my husband. How
long had it been―years?―since the last time I had studied his face as he slept?
I had done it a lot when we
were first married. That was all it took to relax me and put me in a peaceful
mood. “I’ll be safe as long as he goes on sleeping peacefully like this,” I’d
tell myself. Which is why I spent a lot of time watching him in his sleep.
But, somewhere along the
way, I had given up the habit. When had that been? I tried to remember. It had
probably happened back when my mother-in-law and I were sort of quarreling over
what name to give my son. She was big on some religious-cult kind of thing, and
had asked her priest to “bestow” a name on the baby. I don’t remember exactly
the name she was given. but I had no intention of letting some priest ‘bestow”
a name on my child. We had some pretty violent arguments at the time, but my
husband couldn’t say a thing to either of us. He stood by and tried to calm us.
After that I lost the
feeling that my husband was my protector. The one thing I thought I wanted from
him he had failed to give me. All he had managed to do was make me furious.
This all happened a long time ago, of course. My mother-in-law and I have long
since made up. I gave my son the name I wanted to give him. My husband and I
made up right away, too.
I’m pretty sure that was
the end, though, of my watching him in his sleep.
So there I stood, looking
at him sleeping.. soundly as always. One bare foot stuck out from under the
covers at a strange angle―so strange that the foot could have belonged to
someone else. It was a big, chunky foot. My husband’s mouth hung open, the
lower lip drooping. Every once in a while, his nostrils would twitch. There was
a mole under his eye that bothered me. It was so big and vulgar-looking. There
was something vulgar about the way his eyes were closed, the lids slack, covers
made of faded human flesh. He looked like an absolute fool. This was what they
mean by “dead to the world.” How incredibly ugly! He sleeps with such an ugly
face! It’s just too gruesome, I thought. He couldn’t have been like this in the
old days. I’m sure he must have had a better face when we were first married,
one that was taut and alert. Even sound asleep, he couldn’t have been such a
blob.
I tried to remember what
his sleeping face had looked like back then, but I couldn’t do it, though I
tried hard enough. All I could be sure of was that he couldn’t have had such a
terrible face. Or was I just deceiving myself? Maybe he had always looked like
this in his sleep and I had been indulging in some kind of emotional
projection. I’m sure that’s what my mother would say. That sort of thinking was
a specialty of hen. “All that lovey-dovey stuff lasts two years―three years
tops,” she always used to insist. “You were a new bride,” I’m sure she would
tell me now. “Of course your little hubby looked like a darling in his sleep.”
I’m sure she would say
something like that, but I’m just as sure that she’d be wrong. He had grown
ugly over the years. The firmness had gone out of his face. That’s what growing
old is all about. He was old now, and tired. Worn out. He’d get even uglier in
the years ahead, that much was certain. And I had no choice but to go along
with it, put up with it, resign myself to it.
I let out a sigh as I stood
there watching him. It was a deep sigh, a noisy one as sighs go, but of course
he didn’t move a muscle. The loudest sigh in the world would never wake him up.
I left the bedroom and went
back to the living room. I poured myself a brandy and started reading. But
something wouldn’t let me concentrate. I put the book down and went to my son’s
room. Opening the door. I stared at his face in the light spilling in from the
hallway. He was sleeping just as soundly as my husband was. As he always did. I
watched him in his sleep, looked at his smooth, nearly featureless face. It was
very different from my husband’s: it was still a child’s face, after all. The
skin still glowed; it still had nothing vulgar about it.
And yet something about my
son’s face annoyed me. I had never felt anything like this about him before.
What could be making me feel this way? I stood there, looking, with my arms
folded. Yes, of course I loved my son, loved him tremendously. But still,
undeniably, that something was bothering me, getting on my nerves.
I shook my head.
I closed my eyes and kept
them shut. Then I opened them and looked at my son’s face again. And then it
hit me. What bothered me about my son’s sleeping face was that it looked
exactly like my husband’s. And exactly like my mother-in-law’s. Stubborn.
Self-satisfied. It was in their blood―a kind of arrogance I hated in my
husband’s family. True, my husband is good to me. He’s sweet and gentle and
he’s careful to take my feelings into account He’s never fooled around with
other women, and he works hard. He’s serious, and he’s kind to everybody. My
friends all tell me how lucky I am to have him. And I can’t fault him, either.
Which is exactly what galls me sometimes. His very absence of faults makes for
a strange rigidity that excludes imagination. That’s what grates on me so.
And that was exactly the
kind of expression my son had on his face as he slept.
I shook my head again. This
little boy is a stranger to me, finally. Even after he grows up, he’ll never be
able to understand me, just as my husband can hardly understand what I feel
now.
I love my son, no question.
But I sensed that someday I would no longer be able to love this boy with the
same intensity. Not a very maternal thought. Most mothers never have thoughts
like that. But as I stood there looking at him asleep, I knew with absolute
certainty that one day I would come to despise him.
The thought made me
terribly sad. I closed his door and turned out the hall light I went to the
living-room sofa, sat down, and opened my book. After reading a few pages. I
closed it again. I looked at the clock. A little before three.
I wondered how many days it
had been since I stopped sleeping. The sleeplessness started the Tuesday before
last. Which made this the seventeenth day. Not one wink of sleep in seventeen
days. Seventeen days and seventeen nights. A long, long time. I couldn’t even
recall what sleep was like.
I closed my eyes and tried
to recall the sensation of sleeping, but all that existed for me inside was a
wakeful darkness. A wakeful darkness: what it called to mind was death.
Was I about to die?
And if I died now, what
would my life have amounted to?
There was no way I could
answer that.
All right, then, what
death?
Until now I had conceived
of sleep as a kind of model for death. I had imagined death as an extension of
sleep. A far deeper sleep than ordinary sleep. A sleep devoid of all
consciousness. Eternal rest. A total blackout.
But now I wondered if I had
been wrong. Perhaps death was a state entirely unlike sleep, something that
belonged to a different category altogether―like the deep, endless, wakeful
darkness I was seeing now.
No, that would be too
terrible. If the state of death was not to be a rest for us, then what was
going to redeem this imperfect life of ours, so fraught with exhaustion?
Finally, though, no one knows what death is. Who has ever truly seen it? No
one. Except the ones who are dead. No one living knows what death is like. They
can only guess. And the best guess is still a guess. Maybe death is a kind of
rest, but reasoning can’t tell us that. The only way to find out what death is
is to die. Death can be anything at all.
An intense terror
overwhelmed me at the thought. A stiffening chill ran down my spine. My eyes
were still shut tight. I had lost the power to open them. I stared at the thick
darkness that stood planted in front of me, a darkness as deep and hopeless as
the universe itself. I was all alone. My mind was in deep concentration, and
expanding. If I had wanted to, I could have seen into the uttermost depths of
the universe. But I decided not to look. It was too soon for that.
If death was like this, if
to die meant being eternally awake and staring into the darkness like this,
what should I do?
At last, I managed to open
my eyes. I gulped down the brandy that was left in my glass.
I’m taking off my pajamas
and putting on jeans, T-shirt, and a windbreaker. I tie my hair back in a tight
ponytail, tuck it under the windbreaker, and put on a baseball cap of my
husband's. In the mirror I look like a boy. Good. I put on sneakers and go down
to the garage.
I slip in behind the
steering wheel, turn the key, and listen m the engine hum. It sounds normal.
Hands on the wheel, I take a few deep breaths. Then I shift into gear and drive
out of the building. The car is running better than usual. It seems to be
gliding across a sheet of ice. I ease it into higher gear, move out of the
neighborhood, and enter the highway to Yokohama.
It's only three in the
morning, but the number of cars on the road is by no means small. Huge semis
roll past, shaking the ground as they head east. Those guys don't sleep at
night. They sleep in the daytime and work at night for greater efficiency.
What a waste. I could work
day and night. I don't have to sleep.
This is biologically
unnatural, I suppose, but who really knows what is natural? They just infer it
inductively. I’m beyond that. A priori. An evolutionary leap. A woman who never
sleeps. An expansion of consciousness.
I have to smile. A priori.
An evolutionary leap.
Listening to the car radio,
I drive to the harbor. I want classical music, but I can’t find a station that
broadcasts it at night. Stupid Japanese rock music. Love songs sweet enough to
rot your teeth. I give up searching and listen to those. They make me feel I’m
in a far-off place, far away from Mozart and Haydn.
I pull into one of the
white-outlined spaces in the big parking lot at the waterfront park and cut my
engine. This is the brightest area of the lot, under a lamp, and wide open all
around. Only one other car is parked here―an old, white two-door coupé of the kind
that young people like to drive. Probably a couple in there now, making love―no
money for a hotel room. To avoid trouble, I pull my hat low, trying not to look
like a woman. I check to see that my doors are locked.
Half consciously, I let my
eyes wander through the surrounding darkness, when all of a sudden I remember a
drive I took with my boyfriend the year I was a college freshman. We parked and
got into some heavy petting. He couldn’t stop, he said, and he begged me to let
him put it in. But I refused. Hands on the steering wheel, listening to the
music, I try to bring back the scene, but I can’t recall his face. It all seems
to have happened such an incredibly long time ago.
All the memories I have
from the time before I stopped sleeping seem to be moving away with
accelerating speed. It feels so strange, as if the me who used to go to sleep
every night is not the real me, and the memories from back then are not really
mine. This is how people change. But nobody realizes it. Nobody notices. Only I
know what happens. I could try to tell them, but they wouldn’t understand. They
wouldn’t believe me. Or if they did believe me, they would have absolutely no
idea what I’m feeling. They would only see me as a threat to their inductive
world view.
I am changing, though.
Really changing.
How long have I been
sitting here? Hands on the wheel. Eyes closed. Staring into the sleepless
darkness.
Suddenly I’m aware of a
human presence, and I come to myself again. There’s somebody out there. I open
my eyes and look around; someone is outside the car. Trying to open the door.
But the doors are locked. Dark shadows on either side of the car, one at each
door. Can’t see their faces. Can’t make out their clothing. Just two dark
shadows, standing there.
Sandwiched between them, my
Civic feels tiny―like a little pastry box. It’s being rocked from side to side.
A fist is pounding on the right-hand window. I know it’s not a policeman. A
policeman would never pound on the glass like this and would never shake my
car. I hold my breath. What should I do? I can’t think straight. My underarms
are soaked. I’ve got to get out of here. The key. Turn the key. I reach out for
it and turn it to the right. The starter grinds.
The engine doesn’t catch.
My hand is shaking. I close my eyes and turn the key again. No good. A sound
like fingernails clawing a giant wall. The motor turns and turns. The men―the
dark shadows―keep shaking my car. The swings get bigger and bigger. They’re
going to tip me over!
There’s something wrong.
Just calm down and think, then everything will be O.K. Think. Just think.
Slowly. Carefully. Something is wrong.
Something is wrong.
But what? I can’t tell. My
mind is crammed full of thick darkness. It’s not taking me anywhere. My hands
are shaking. I try pulling out the key and putting it back in again. But my
shaking hand can’t find the hole. I try again and drop the key. I curl over and
try to pick it up. But I can’t get hold of it. The car is rocking back and
forth. My forehead slams against the steering wheel.
I’ll never get the key. I
fall back against the seat, cover my face with my hands. I’m crying. All I can
do is cry. The tears keep pouring out. Locked inside this little box, I can’t
go anywhere. It’s the middle of the night. The men keep rocking the car back
and forth. They’re going to turn it over.
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