Insomnia. He hadn?t slept in days. The hours crawled by with the weight of the world punishing every second. Twenty-four hours in a day times two. Or was it three? Or more? Fuck it. That wasn?t the worst thing. Sleepless nights are bearable if you have something to occupy your mind. Or even a goal. That?s why counting sheep works. Or rocks. It helps people eventually fall asleep, their minds are busy, their brains are feverishly counting. So they fall sleep. But not Nick. He couldn?t count sheep. He couldn?t even see anything in the dark or in his mind.
He couldn?t think about a damned thing. Even when he tried concentrating, his eyes started hurting. He couldn?t focus his thoughts. He lay in bed, lusting after unconsciousness, just a few hours of unknowledge. But lately, he could do nothing but stare into the semi-darkness. Hungry, he wanted food but could not get up the energy to move, so he continued to lie in bed. Starving and Conscious.
This wasn?t the worst thing either. Nick couldn?t get it up. He tried masturbating but all it did was rub raw and sore, with no ecstatic burst before the calming glow. Pictures didn?t help. In fact Nick got angry whenever he thought about pornography. The airbrushed images always showed the same pose, the same stupid grin on the same face. It was like they were mocking him, telling him he was a failure for not having his own sex life. The charade got inside him in a way that would have surprised him had he thought all of it through.
Normally, during the day, Nick was a writer. He was a writer at all times, but it was in the daylight hours that he got paid to put words on paper and pander to the public. Now, though, with no sleep, his mind was as empty during the day as it was at night. No inspiration existed. Trying to write with no fuel simply made Nick angry and depressed. He recognized the futility of being angry, but could not help himself. He thought about control. He thought he was in control, but somewhere, in the pit of his stomach, he felt like an infant.
Days, he would wander the streets looking for?his eyes would drift from person to person, hoping to see something; some spark to ignite his starving mind. Inside, he craved knowledge; outside, his shell didn?t care. His eyes were puffy and pale, bulbous and staring. He wondered if he was going insane, but after pondering the ramifications of such an idea, decided that if he was able to think about being insane, then he wasn?t, couldn?t possibly be insane. That?s what sleep deprivation does. It makes you think those kinds of things. You?re tired, exhausted, but not like you are when you force yourself to stay awake. It?s like your body compensates by slowly deteriorating your mind. The one thing insomnia does not make you is sleepy. It?s a morbid existence.
Out in the streets, under the strange sleepless power, Nick started seeing things. Wholly under the spell, Nick was drawn to the derelict sections, where despair hung like an ornament over the girders of abandoned warehouses and overpasses now crossed by fleets of urban racers. For some reason these areas meant something to him, as if he felt attached to them. In another life Nick may have struggled as a soul in the cavernous alleys and spaces, gray with age and unkempt waste.
So as nights passed, and sleep eluded him, he wandered alone. He felt no weariness, however, only a faint but unmistakable sense that something was out there, something he formerly possessed, but now was gone, leaving only the trace of existence, a shadowy mist that vanished as he neared it, like a star visible only in the periphery. Nick hungrily walked, his feet leading him down dark paths of oil-slick sidewalks, brown and green shards of broken bottles lining the paths of the once and future glory of a city gone to the devils and all dark things.
The oil slicks were replaced by painted messages that Nick could recognize, but not understand. He caught the faint sounds of shouting and screaming and running, but always turning the corner, revealed an empty alleyway, ghostly voices echoing off the bleak walls to a dying whisper. He would scream then, running wildly into the dark corners and cowering under the dingy lids of dumpsters tipped at crazy angles, full of bottles and body parts, clothes, teeth, and insects. The smell was gone though, and he shivered.
When day broke Nick found himself back in his room, not knowing how he had returned. It was as if his body craved the secret and safe containment it afforded through the walls and the things that lined the walls, pictures of a familiarity.
Now hyper-awake and alert, Nick analyzed his surroundings carefully, noting the placement of items, positions of continuity. It didn?t surprise him to note that nothing was changed from before. He was back in his room from yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. The food he had left on the paper plate still sat on the table. How long had it been there? Nick was sure he had left it there weeks and weeks ago, yet it didn?t appear to be rotting or moldy. The smell seemed okay.
A cockroach wandered out from a tiny hole in the baseboard, scurrying across the wall in a frenzied escape from the light, disappearing behind the refrigerator. It seemed to trace a path trodden often, a map of its journeys. Its tiny feet made invisible tracks that, seen with an infrared lens, formed an intricate web of interconnected nodes, a series of knotted windings that led to nowhere.
Nick couldn?t think. He whirled and spun himself into bed. Lying on his stomach, eyes wide open. The fabric of his bed sheets was stitched in a web of crosses and lines. He traced along the stitching and understood who he was. He became part of the web work and sank inside himself, falling, falling off the precipice into his mind.
Inside he walked the streets, searching the broken girders and overpasses where urban racers flowed through the broken cities. The glass-strewn sidewalks were a stained glass beauty, a memorium to the saints and disciples of the bottles, those who sucked at Daniels? breast and gave hand jobs to Morgan. Where once were streets now weeds sprung up in urban meadow flatness. There has to be something here worth seeing.
He was reminded of a story he had heard years ago about an LA whore ? nineteen year old Gloria who worked the Sunset Strip ? found in an alley in a drug-induced coma behind a Dunkin? Donuts shop. She said she left her body on the hospital table and hovered over it for a while. Then she was bathed in an incredible white light and a voice said, ?Gloria, you?ve still got some work to do.? When she awoke, there was some religious nut screaming God-knows-what on the tv. Strange words that made some sort of sense. As she prayed, the spectre seeped in through the hospital heating vents and enveloped her. Then it disappeared. She swore, and still swears to this day, it stole her heart away.
He wondered what that meant. Why did he think of it here, now? He stepped lightly over the weeds careful not to disturb them. Turning the corner he saw rows and rows of buildings. Businesses prospered here once, but they had been abandoned long ago to the streets, and now they were gray too, like everything else. Those shops made Nick sing inside his head:
Would you like a drink of water
From the fountain of youth?
Can I show you a laughing statue
And a magic mirror?
Down dubious halls, past fatuous faces
We?ll follow colored lanterns to
Distant doorways and rooms.
It was all unwinding then. The thread that held the city had collapsed, and now sagged like so many warehouse rooftops. He felt that he didn?t belong in the wide-open spaces. So he began to creep along the sides of dusty brick building walls, dark with graffiti, words covered in scrawl. He thought if he could only tear away the paint, the unblemished brick under it would shine. What he saw on those walls made him want to close his eyes, but he couldn?t. He couldn?t read the signs; there was no legible writing there, just crazy scrawls and logos. No words, just fragments, like puzzle pieces scattered. There were many things one might write on a wall in scrawl. Why weren?t any of them words? Some way to communicate to the next person who came along. But here he was, and seeing, he couldn?t understand.
Now skirting along the wall made him cautious. Especially with all the noise in his head. He couldn?t tell from where it came or who made it. The awful shouting, curses and screams echoed up and down the long corridors, past dark doorways and fatuous faces on faded billboards. The shouting seemed to be coming from within himself, but his mouth was closed, and his ears heard it coming from the corners.
He wished he was in an organ bar, drinking by himself and content, not wandering the dark and scary streets in search of?he could imagine sitting in one of the corners, shadows playing in his suitcase, not wanting to leave now that they were here. He was talking with his friend Bob, sallow-faced, the caretaker, a former owner of a bar running pinball chickens shocked by jolts from an invisible electric grid, now repented and trying to make it in the seedy side of town. He called his best friend ?Ghost? and had eventually disappeared. Bob said he was working undercover, turning the place inside out.
He wished he could disappear, right there on the pavement. His soul ran in rivulets in sidewalk gutters and into the grates and pipes underneath. In that way he felt he was the foundation of this sorry state. His strength was its strength, his mind its mind. It scared him because he was so small. In his mind, it was the worst thing to be caught in a torrent of your own tears. But he couldn?t stop it, not now, with all the thoughts running through his head.
And then there, as he turned the corner, a scuffling in the back alley aroused his attention. It was coming from between the dingy building and the chain-link fence that kept in the vermin and kept out the sheep. He stalked cautiously forward, only obeying his feet. His mind screamed at him, yet wondered what it was that crouched so hideously beneath the shadows. In his body a pitch began, not in his diaphragm, but in his head, and it traveled slowly downward, toward his neck, his chest, his loins, his legs, finally resting at his feet. When his feet heard the noise, they moved ? fast. He ran forward and yelling, jumped into the shadow, tearing away the gray and black like a blanket. His head collided with the fence and he slumped forward, spinning around and jacked back to see a frightened face peering back at him, two eyes and a straight nose.
Why don?t you come out into the light? I?m not here to hurt you. I just want to see who you really are. I?ve been looking all over to find you. I heard you all over this city, but this is the first time I?ve seen you. Now come out and let me see you. I want to look at your face. I want to see your body. I want to know what it is I have been chasing.
He came out, slowly, like a frightened rabbit will sit, just inching forward. Come out! And then, like the Spirit himself rested upon Jesus? shoulder, one square shaft of light landed full on his face. And he spun back, because he didn?t like looking at himself so old and wrinkled like that. He was smaller, and his hair was stringy, face sagging and withered. But it was him. He was staring into his face. And Nick stared back.
When he woke up in his bed, Nick tried to recall what had happened. The night was fuzzy to him. For that matter, so was the day. He didn?t even remember seeing himself in the withered old man hiding in the alleyway. All that remained in his mind was what he said. A voice that echoed dangerously close to the limits of his memory clambered inside the chamber.
I don?t know you son, any more than you know me. I?ve been out here longer than you, but you know that, don?t you? You?re headed for this too, and nothing you do can change it. It?s inside you; your genes carry it; your cells and atoms carry it. It?s inside your head, and inside you, and one day, it?ll bust its way out. Don?t fight it. Stop looking for a way out. Because you like being where you are. See you around, son.
Nick kept it inside his thoughts as he cleaned up around his room. He threw out the food that had collected a thick cloud of flies around it. He opened up his door and a bright sun opened up to him, and he breathed in, deeply and softly, before closing the door and turning back. Many deadlines were approaching, and he had promised his editor four new pieces by the end of the week. What else could he do?