troubled sleep

First, I would like to bring your attention to a title I acquired and edited. Open Up by Thomas Morris is a brilliant collection of surreal fiction that explores loss, family, masculinity, and the strangeness of contemporary life. It has one of the very very very VERY best stories I’ve ever read. It’s his American debut, and it would mean a lot if you checked it out and preordered. Coming 4/25 from Unnamed Press.

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I grew up in a family of smokers, in a single-wide trailer filled mold and mildew. I grew up on a farm surrounded by trees and vines and plants in rich, verdant bloom. For eighteen years, that was my life. The black and blue whorls spreading over the ceiling and down the walls to the floor. The white fuzz bristling at the corners of the windows. The powdery black smudges magnified through the dust of the curio cabinets set unevenly on rotting floors. Sticky vinyl coming up and showing its resinous dark undersides. Ashes on the lip of the tub. Ashes by the television. Ashes on my bedspread. Soot from the wood burning stoves in the winter dancing in the light when we dumped the pan out to make room for more ash. The yellow-green pollen spread out over the benches by the side of the house, stuck to the window screens, plastering the backs of the fan blades in the box fans set in the windows. That same pollen dispersed over the kitchen table like flour for the chicken and the porkchops. The wind moving over the leaves of the kudzu in the gully and the stout valley by the road, the white flowers of the maypops and the yellow flowers of the melon vines, the leaves going white-green-white-green under the sun. That was my childhood.

I tell you this because it only took a short period of time, a few months, the length of a semester, to destroy whatever resistance or acclimation I had for all of those things in the air. You will not believe me, maybe, but it is true. In August 2009, I went away to college, and in December 2009, I came home for winter break, and suddenly, I couldn’t breathe in my parents’ trailer. I couldn’t breathe in my grandparents’ house. I couldn’t breathe outside. Everywhere I went, I sneezed and coughed. My eyes filled with tears and stung so bad. Everything burned and hurt. Even my skin grew sensitive and hot to the touch, as if something in the air were stinging me over and over, everywhere. I had come into contact with something abrasive, and that something was the air itself. Over the course of three months spent in a mostly sterile dorm, white cinderblock with one window, a prison cell more than a dorm, I had shed a protective coating.

When I got to college in August 2009 and took my clothes out of trash bags, my room filled with the smell of smoke. I thought it was strange because I am not a smoker. It didn’t click then but it does now, obviously. I smelled like smoke because everyone in my life then was a smoker, and I had grown up among them. My father spent hours at a time in my bedroom smoking and watching my television. He and my mother did not get along and could not watch television together. His presence irritated her to the point of violence, so he stayed low. This meant that all of my clothes smelled like smoke. I didn’t realize this because everything I smelled at home smelled like smoke. Thinking about it now, I wonder what my friends must have made of this. But then, we washed our clothes weekly and let them dry outside on the line, and so maybe the clothes I wore most often didn’t smell like smoke after all. But I had brought almost every item of clothing I owned then. What my mother hadn’t burned during my first abortive attempt at college a year and a half ago. And as I took them out, they smelled thickly like cigarette smoke. That should have been some clue to me. But it was not. The clue I mean is that it should have dawned on me then that smoke is not just air. It doesn’t just disappear. It is made from particles and those particles, having mass, having substance, do not just pop out of existence. They settle and stick. The way soot settles and sticks. Just because you do not see it does not mean it isn’t there. Like God.

Eventually, the clothes lost that odor. I went about my college life. I came home for winter, and I could not breathe, and I thought, Oh my God, this is horrible. Like I was being rejected by the very air itself. Not to freight that incident with too much symbolism or meaning, but it is also true that that trip back at the end of the semester was the end of something, the end of a version of myself. I had tried to go to college once before and had done a year at Tulane before I ran out of money. And I’d come home defeated and sad and—again, not to do too much symbolism—on the bus ride home from New Orleans, I got my wallet and social security card stolen. I thought I’d never go to college after that. I had to be convinced to try again in 2009. But I was convinced, and I did try again. But it was not without fear.

I spent a lot of time that first semester worrying about being kicked out because I had not been honest about having been in college before. I did well in all of my classes, exceptionally well, but I could not shake the feeling that I was cheating and being deceptive. Yet I did get to the end, and I thought, oh, okay, maybe I can do this after all. I got to the end and I went home, and I developed this profound and awful allergy to the air. That felt like an omen. Not at the time, I guess, it didn’t feel like an omen. I was sick, so fucking sick, I didn’t have time for omens. But a few months later, in the second semester, I realized that my fear was gone, and so the sneezing and coughing and awful burning took on the aura of a trial I had passed through in order to become a new version of myself.

Who I became later doesn’t really matter. This is really a story about the allergy to smoke. I had basically a month of winter break and I was not sure that I would survive it because literally, how could I? I’d be lying there wheezing in my bed in the middle of the day, and my dad would be sitting on a swivel chair not a foot from me, blowing smoke over me. When I meekly suggested that he smoke outside, he said, no, it’s okay, and he put out his cigarette. It lasted for five minutes before he lit the thing once more. I said, Please, and he said, it’ll be okay, it’s a cold.

It was not a cold. The only person with some sense about this was my aunt, who worked in a nursing home. More specifically, she worked in the nursing home part of the hospital. I had taught myself to read using her manuals and home guides. My cousin, her daughter, had also developed a bad allergy a couple years before that had caused her to lose patches of her thick hair. My aunt was very proud of this hair, as if it were her own, and she took great offense to it shedding. During the troubleshooting phase of the diagnosis, the doctor had given my cousin a prescription for some antihistamines. Half-way through the trip my eyes swelled shut and crusted over. She gave me the pill bottle and said to take one a day. I did this. It changed my life.

That sounds like an exaggeration, but it is not.

Here is another thing about my childhood. From a very young age, I have been plagued by nightmares and night terrors. I have incredibly detailed, incredibly mundane dreams about horrifying things. I like to blame some aspect of this on the fact that in my family, spiritual and supernatural matters are as ordinary to us as the chance of rain or the possibility of a tornado. We live astride a very narrow seam between this world and some other, stranger world in which God and the devil and spirits wage a constant and violent war for our souls. My family was incredibly frank about the spiritual world. I sometimes marvel at the way some parents fret over how to tell their children about death or about sex. I knew about the devil and the dangers of sin before I could even tie my shoes. I knew about Hell and I knew what might happen to me if I were to fall. As a child, I was told not to sleep on my a back because a witch might ride it and take me to the devil. I was taught my prayers and instructed never to point a picture of someone who had recently died because they might come for me in the night.

My family described frightening experiences of spiritual or demonic possession that I now recognize as being merely memory or flashbacks, but to them, these were wholesale spiritual visitations. Can you imagine being so alienated from the concept of memory that forming the image of a loved one in your mind feels like an approach from the beyond? This was particularly true of dreams. When a loved visited in a dream, it meant something ill awaited all involved. People would weep and say Don’t come for me yet, please, after such a dream, or even a memory. They would shiver and recount instances of remembering someone at an odd moment, as if this were a form of spiritual torture. It was the least Protestant spiritual experience imaginable, though we were steadfastly Baptist.

I had a very active dreamlife, most of it filled with scenes from the Bible or scenes from my life but inflected with the prospect of demonic harm. I’d wake up with deep scratches down my arms and back and legs and think that the devil had been sent for me. I would dream of being dragged down into hell only to wake into another dream and from that dream into another, so that there were moments when, falling and falling through the air, I’d really think that I was about to die. I do not have lucid dreams. The fiction is entire and complete when I dream. The boundaries of my dreams only front onto yet still more dreams.

The thing about sleeping on your back is real, by the way. I don’t mean that witches are real and they’ll come spirit you away. I mean that sleeping on your back sometimes produces apneic events. Apneic events are one of the most common causes of sleep paralysis, that terrifying sensation of feeling awake but not being able to move. A study in the 1960s and later sleep science studies showed that certain populations experience sleep paralysis at a much higher rate of incidence than other groups. The thing these groups have in common is high stress. For example, medical students in Nigeria and high school students in South Korea both show higher rates of sleep paralysis than their general populations. In America, the relevant group that experiences sleep paralysis at an incredibly high rate is, well, you guessed it, black people.

One of the characteristics of sleep paralysis is the crone or sleep paralysis demon. You will perhaps be familiar with it from the meme, involving designating someone or something cringe as a person’s sleep paralysis demon. Fascinatingly, the crone appears across cultures and across history. I am not a Jungian. But it is interesting that the ultimate manifestation of people’s sensation of total helplessness is a spooky, shadowy woman leering at them from the darkness. I bring this up because you can see how the crone might figure as the witch in the imaginary of Southern blacks. And how that higher rate of incidence of sleep paralysis—it is also hereditary—would culminate in the idea that you shouldn’t sleep on your back because doing so would summon a witch. We do not sleep on our backs in my family.

In December 2009, because my father would not stop smoking in my room, I started sleeping at my grandparents’ house next door. My uncle had recently married and moved out, so I slept in his room. This suited me fine because my grandparents had cable and I could watch Toonami at night. I was really into a program called Kekkaishi then. It’s about two neighbors who are teenagers and whose families have been fighting demons for generations. They do so by erecting barriers and using them like weapons against demons. Once the demons are defeated, the kekkaishi send them to their eternal rest. You will perhaps wonder where this is going. I was never allowed to sleep in my grandparents’ house growing up. I sometimes wondered why. Until once, I finally did. I woke in the middle of the night and saw a pale figure gazing down at me. The figure moved on. I felt hands on me in the middle of the night. I didn’t sleep there again until years later.

The winter of the horrible allergy to smoke, I slept in my grandparents’ house, in my uncle’s old room, and I tell you that every night, I experienced the worst dreams of my life. They could scarcely be called dreams, so continuous were they with reality. I had taken up sleeping on my back because my roommate did, and no witch had ridden me yet. I was in the habit of debunking old family lore then, I guess, and since I hadn’t been haunted in college yet, I thought, well, I’ll show those spirits. It was a mistake. That winter, I’d wake or seem to wake at 3AM and there would be a hand pulling the blanket from my head, gripping my shoulders, pressing me flat to the floor. I could not see, but I could see, in that way dreams operate, when you are both yourself and not yourself, both in your body, and not in your body. There was not a figure, but I could sense a figure, could almost see a figure. The logic of how my body was being handled by this voidal figure presupposed hands and feet. And I always had the sense of being pulled somewhere, dragged somewhere, as when I was a child and dreamed of being pulled into hell. Sometimes, the voidal figure was a relative and I could sense them. Other times, it was just darkness.

In later years, this would happen sometimes even when I was in my dorm. I’d accidentally sleep on my back and wake to a crone in the corner of my dorm, staring at me. Once, the crone sprinted across the room and shoved the end of her staff into my throat and I woke gasping. I think I must have been lucky that first term or maybe the smoke fucked me up so bad that I was never quite the same. But never were these dreams more powerful or more unrelenting than in those days at my grandparents’ house.

What I am trying to get at is that even in the best of times, my sleep was fitful. So when I began to take the antihistamines, it was a relief to slip into dreamless sleep.

That is how it began. I took all of those pills, and when I ran out, I asked her how I could get more, and she told me that they were prescription, but Benadryl from the drug store would do about the same thing. I was back in my dorm, free of smoke, but I had come to crave not just the relief from the sneezing and coughing and burning, no. Because I had learned something about the pills. They could make an excruciating period of time pass faster. Because I could spend that time sleeping or dozing. I have never been able to sleep when the sun is up, but with those pills, time turned liquid and spilled rapidly into the past.

You will think, why would you want your winter break to go fast? The answer is obvious, no? I wanted to leave the ghosts as quickly as I could.

For the last fifteen or so years, I have taken Benadryl almost every night. During periods of particular anxiety, I grind up two or three tablets and gulp them down. The sleep I have on the Benadryl is blank, fathomless. The dreams that come are still charged with some horrible darkness, though the logic of that darkness is less ostensibly frightening. As in, if I were to explain the dreams to you, you wouldn’t know they were scary. I’d have to tell you why they were scary. Though my dreams are still frightening to me, they issue from a deeper region of my fear. The Benadryl has certainly changed the texture of the dreams, taken some of the edge off so that I can, at times, almost will things to happen. There have even been moments over the last fifteen years when I’ve been able to tell myself, No dreams tonight, and wake to no memory or recall of dreams at all.

During hard periods, when I am seeking a particular obliterating black sleep, I take four pills. Oblivion comes swift and silent. That’s how I got through my grandfather’s death. Through a period of time when I had no health insurance and a chronic health problem to manage. During the Nazi activities of 2015 and 2016. During periods of emotional distress—break ups, friendship dissolutions, ugly arguments and spats, tough assignments, waiting to hear about applications and more—I sought the blankness of the pills. They have been a steady dark bridge over uncertain times. I don’t know when it transpired that I required them to sleep at all, but I did. This was fine in America because you can get them in any store. You can even have them delivered.

But Benadryl is not a thing you can readily acquire in Europe. This I found out only when I began to travel there the last couple of years. I sometimes forget to pack enough, which results in choppy, fitful, awful sleep. And a pounding headache that persists through the rest of the day. Benadryl is a very old antihistamine. It is mostly not encouraged these days because it induces sleepiness, the very thing I crave, and also can cause a mild amnesia. A sensation described a mental fog descends on many people who take it, and this fog can last hours after waking. It is also habit-forming both psychologically and physically if taken at sufficient quantities for long enough. Withdrawal is unpleasant—headache, dizziness, fatigue, fuzziness, nausea.

These symptoms might be familiar to anyone who is taking an SSRI. There is for this. Benadryl’s active ingredient, diphenhydramine, exhibits a weak inhibitory response in the uptake of serotonin. Indeed, Prozac, one of the first SSRIs was developed as a result of experiments and studies on diphenhydramine along these lines in the 1960s. Many early SSRIs descend from antihistamines. You can see the echoes in their structures. In nature, structure is, well, function.

Later, when I was pursuing a PhD in biochemsitry, I took a class called Protein Structure/Function, where we learned about the mechanical and structural basis of bimolecular function. Sometimes, people imagine that things just happen in nature and in the body. With smoke, they imagine it’s air you can see. With biomolecules, I don’t know, I guess they think it’s like, magic or something. But no. There is always a material basis. And where there is material, there is structure. That is how the world is fit together. Legos. What I’m getting here is that when I forget my Benadryl, as I sometimes did, a knowledge of chemistry is useful. Because you can find things that have the same active ingredients.

This summer, while I was teaching in Paris for a month, I was grinding up two, three tablets a night to sleep. I ran out of Benadryl. I went on Google and looked for analogs or compounds related to diphenhydramine, which I knew would be hard to get in Europe because, well, the whole brain chemistry thing. I found that there is a close relative of diphenhydramine, classed a different kind of chemical. This compound was Dimenhydrinate, which is a salt of diphenhydramine and a different compound. It is the active ingredient in many medicines for what the French call mal des transports. Motionsickness. In particular, it is the active ingredient in Mercalm, a medication for motion sickness. You do not need a prescription for Mercalm. So I went out to get it.

More accurately, I sent my friend Adam out in Paris to buy seasickness medicine for me. My French is better, but I like to make Adam speak French to Parisians. It’s funny. I took the medicine, my symptoms of withdrawal abated.

Over the course of the summer, I took a couple tennis lessons in Paris. It was cool and damp. It was my first time playing on clay. The instructor was tall, handsome. His hands were thick, and I wanted very much to impress him. But about twenty minutes into my lesson, I found I couldn’t breathe. I was wheezing. I thought, if I do not stop this moment, this very moment, I will pass out. I will die. He recognized it right away and told me to sit and to slow my breathing. Each time it happens—it does not happen often, not even close to often, maybe once a year, if that, once every couple years—I think of my cousin Brandon. I have two cousins named Brandon. But one of them died when we were teenagers. He died of an asthma attack. Just like that, gone. We are not, by nature, a family of asthmatics on either side. Brandon was an outlier. There was some talk that he had inherited it from his mother’s side. I grew up in a place that still talked about inherited traits like were in Russian novel.

I did some Googling after the tennis lesson and found that I’d probably developed some exercise-induced asthma and that was temporary. A short while later, I sent Adam on the quest for the Mercalm, the medicine for seasickness, so that I could sleep.

After Adam brought me the medicine, he said that it sounded like I had an addiction to the Benadryl.

“I absolutely do not,” I said as I crushed the tablets and took them and felt the immediate release of tension in my head. “That’s crazy.

A couple weeks later, I went to London to see the Sargent show. I also wanted to maybe meet up with a guy I had been texting. By then, I was course out of Benadryl and out of Mercalm. But I could get some sleep medicine from the pharmacy if I spoke to the pharmacist.

“This is dangerous. You must absolutely promise me not to take any more of this. Okay?”

I was alarmed at her alarm. She was treating me like I was exhibiting drug-seeking behavior. I was, of course, seeking drugs. But I thought, if this is how you treat addicts, wow, someone needs a sensitivity and diversion course. But I promised her I would absolutely not seek any more of the medicine. I bought two boxes. She asked why I needed two boxes if I was only going to take it for three days, and I think we both knew the answer to that question but I told her, Well, what if I lose one?

You know, I never did meet up with that guy in London. I did see the Sargent show. And the sleep medicine worked a treat. I slept deeply and with no dreams. I got on the train and went back to Paris and then back to New York and then to my apartment.

Do you know what I did when I got home? I chewed three Benadryl tablets and slept. When I woke, my headache was gone. The fogginess was gone. I felt I could see the world more clearly.

This was fine until recently. In August, I went to Stockholm and left all of my medication, including Benadryl, at home on my table. After a scramble, I managed to get everything except the Benadryl, which was not necessary for survival, but I did need it to live, if you know what I mean. But it was okay, I was well-versed by this point in tracking down substitutes. I bought a medication with the same active ingredient as the seasickness medicine I had bought in Paris. This medicine was for nausea, but I thought, well, same thing.

I crunched up two tablets and went to sleep. It was the first true sleep I had in Stockholm. I had been there for almost ten days at that point, I believe. I slept. And then, after five hours, I woke with a very strange feeling. I woke, out of breath, with a tightness pulling in my stomach and chest. I felt like I’d been filled with silicone jelly and everything felt so fucking tight. I went to get up, and a wave of nausea passed over me. The world tilted. My hotel room was dim and there was a pale light in the curtains. I stood. The world tilted further. I held myself up against the wall. Then, an upward lurching. I burped. I barfed all over the floor, clear, at first like spit, and then bubbles, like melted agar poured too quickly. I thought for a moment that I had somehow ingested silicone gel and now it was all coming out of me. Then more vomit, yellow. I panted. Gathered myself. I made it into the bathroom to vomit more.

I was vomiting profusely in Stockholm, all alone, in the middle of that strange period the Swedes call night even though there is still so much light in the sky, spilling across the bay.

I won’t tell you the rest. Suffice it to say, it was very bad for most of the night and morning. It was horrific. But it passed. I felt attenuated, but alive. I told a friend I wouldn’t be able to make it to his birthday party— the reason I had come to Stockholm—because I was sick. He told me it was okay, but I was texting him this from the car on the way over. When I appeared at the door, he gasped in surprise and then hugged me. I felt better for having gone to the party.

When I got home, I didn’t immediately go back on the Benadryl. I had been taking it for so long that the natural texture of my own sleep was foreign to me. I had so tried to outrun this native texture that I’d quite literally poisoned myself in a foreign city with no facility in the language, and if I had tried to explain to a doctor what had happened, I would not have known where to begin. So in September, I stopped. It was hard, but I stopped, not at all at once, but slowly. Down to one pill. Then half a pill. Then no pills.

The sleep was confused and harsh at first. I entered a loop of dreams uniquely painful to me. And then it gave way to other, more normal dreams. Dreams about friends and parties. Dreams about things I had said or done the day or week before. Dreams about the subway. About stopped clocks. About missed flights. About being stuck at home in the same place where I’d had those first, terrifying dreams as a child. Dreams about my mother. About my father. Dreams about my brother. Dreams in which I did things so singularly disgusting they will haunt me as though they were real things I did. Things about real things I did that were so disgusting they deform the dreams in which they appear. I have had many dreams over the last couple of months, and I have taken them all as they have come.

The other thing about being off the juice is that my natural sleep rhythm has returned. I mean the rhythm of the farm. Down at ten or eleven, up at six, seven. Early enough to catch my grandfather in the field. Early enough for the first and perhaps only cool hours of the day in Alabama. I’ve been trying to figure out what is so familiar about the quiet of the New York streets at these hours. And I think it’s that. The quiet. It reminds me of home. When I’d get up and go to my grandparents’ house to have coffee with my grandpa. Or with my aunt. I’d catch her on her way to work, and when I grew up, we’d have a cup together after she made it. Places and people and things that are lost to me forever because I will never return and they can never return, except in dreams.

Here is another thing that feels like an overdetermined symbol: increased use of Benadryl is associated with a heightened risk of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. How about that. When people told me this, I thought, okay, but that’s a problem for my future self, and it’s not like I’ll remember anyway. And perhaps I won’t. Fifteen years, that’s a long time. I’m probably toast.

I don’t know what scared me so very much in that hotel in Stockholm, but certainly something did. That feeling of breathlessness, perhaps. I remember being asleep. And I remember in the deep shadow of that dreamless sleep, a voice saying that if you do not wake up now, you will never wake. And I remember feeling frightened at that, and wrenching myself up to find that, yes, in fact, I was breathless and not breathing and the world was off-kilter. I have had that sense a couple of times in my life. There was a time during the pandemic, right at the very beginning of lockdown, when I got home from my cancelled book tour. I was taking a plate from the microwave, and there just a little hitch in my breathing, a small gap in breath—that was all it took. I couldn’t breathe. I called an ambulance. They told me that I was very close to having a stroke. My pulse was incredibly high. They took me. It was not the last time.

When I was throwing up in Stockholm. And, okay, let’s just say, it was coming from both ends, it was so profoundly bad. When I was sick, on my hands and knees, retching in a position of perfect abjection, I thought of Adam’s words. “You sound like you are addicted.” And something in those words entered the bathroom with me then. I could see how I looked for the first time in a long time. Like in a dream. I could see how I looked to myself and when I ran back the sequence of events that brought me there, I thought, oh, at a certain point, Brandon, you were supposed to stop and you didn’t, and I had a premonition that if I didn’t stop then, right then, that moment, I’d never stop, and who knew how many bathrooms in how many hotels in how many countries I’d crawl into on my hands and knees to vomit and shit myself. It was not the lowest point in my life, and I don’t even know that I feel shame about being that sick. People get sick. Who cares. It’s not a moral failing to be sick. I think what I feel when I look back that moment is a sudden clarity about my responsibility to myself. Like, if I don’t want to do that again, I need to take some responsibility for my choices and make different ones. Not to attach a moral value to the choice, but to just say, okay, I would like for that not to happen again, let’s make some other decisions here.

The next day, my ribs were so sore I thought I’d cracked them. It hurt to laugh or breathe or move too sharply. Every gesture was a reminder of what had happened.

I still don’t know if I am allowed to say I was addicted to the pills. When I look back over the last fifteen years, I think, probably. I was raised by addicts among addicts to be an addict. I always imagined that I would be able to spot it in myself. I am very vigilant about this sort of thing. But that vigilance sometimes leads to harshness and judgement. It leads me to think with a certain vindictiveness about weakness in myself and sometimes those who have wronged me. It happened so innocently. It happened so gently. It happened with such a feeling of relief and the opening of possibility. How could it have been an addiction, I wonder. And yet—Benadryl is habit-forming. I know that. I knew that. Chemically. Intellectually. Physiologically. I knew that. But I couldn’t square that with what I knew addiction to mean emotionally, spiritually, which is to say that I couldn’t square it with being a victim of addiction, as I had been my parents’ victim and the victim of others. I couldn’t understand how I could be a victim of myself. Or that the Benadryl was taking something from me.

I was just sleeping well. Or trying to. What harm was there in that? And maybe there was no harm. Maybe the simple fact is that I was reliant on a chemical. And something happened to make me not want to be reliant on it anymore. That my reliance on it had brought me to a place and caused me to do things I did not enjoy and so I was seeking independence from the chemical.

On election night, I thought about taking the pills. That was how I got through other nights I wanted not to experience. But then, I thought about the hangover, the morning grog, the temporary amnesia. I thought about that and having to teach feeling as though I were wading through cotton, with a scrim between me and the world. There was a certain allure to that, sure, but more than that, I thought, how unfair to the people who rely on me. How unfair to show up compromised. How dare I? But also, unfair to myself. Not that it is a sin or morally awful to give in or to partake in substances. But you should do so because you want to. Not because you feel you need to. And not if it will make you hate yourself after. Instead, I turned off the internet and read Mrs. Bridge, a novel I am reading for book club. I listened to music and made a sandwich. Then I watched a movie, and at bed time, I read all of a Webtoon about a writer and a college student working to put himself through university. This will also sound like a symbol, but I promise it is not. The writer has insomnia, and the only way he can work or sleep is if someone is in the room with him. So he hires the student to whom he feels an attraction to be that spare body in the room. I didn’t pick it because of its themes or plot. I picked it because the men are both very attractive and the art is pretty.

I read the whole thing in one night, and then I went to sleep and when I woke, I woke as many of you did, to the horrible news of the results. You will perhaps not believe me. But I was on the NYT website the very second they updated it show that Trump had crossed 270 in the Electoral College. I mean, I saw that checkmark go live. One instant it wasn’t there and the next it was. I saw it. The page refreshed itself and presented a new reality to me.

I thought of dawn in Stockholm. The way the light spread over the bay and sliced into the shadows of the hotel’s tall edifice. That day when I woke with sore ribs, after I’d been so horribly sick. How one instant, it was still night and the next, it was day, how quickly, how swiftly, one reality replaced another. That’s what it was when I woke on Wednesday and saw the NYT change its face. I had come through something. And now we were all heading—we are all heading into something else.

I am scared like many of you. I am anxious. I do not know what it is ahead—certainly, there will be troubled sleep. One of my favorite meditations on sleep comes, cornily enough, I know, from Hamlet:

To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause

I have been thinking about these lines a lot over the last couple months. My thought about these lines is that the blankness of my sleep is but an illusion. And that just because I don’t remember the nightmares does not mean that they did not happen. It only means that there’s a version of myself I’ve abandoned out of fear, out of terror, out insufficient courage, and that I’ve had something taken from me. A region of my experience made inaccessible. Indeed, I think we are better like Hamlet, asking ourselves what we surrender when we seek oblivion and when we seek to escape from the nightmare present. Because what awaits us may not be the calm darkness we imagine.

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