Stories I Tell Myself When the Alarm Clock’s Glow Keeps Me from Sleeping
Markus Dickinson
1
I met him when he was half asleep, and he had a glow that came not only from the lights bouncing off the carrots, but also from his partial alertness, thriving in and loving every minute of being less than conscious. The freedom to wake up completely, but having no need to. No need to dream, and able to miss the point if he did.
We were in the supermarket, hitting the sales in produce, and he kept saying, “You should come see me tomorrow. You should come see me tomorrow.” It was 2:00 a.m., and you would think his passion was derived from, inversely proportional to, the number of people out and about. He shook wobbly asparagus at me. “Tomorrow. You should definitely come see me tomorrow.”
Which I did, despite disjoint fruit selections.
2
The first thing I noticed was not the amount of gray hair creeping into the blond, but the fact that, when I arrived, there was some amazing song playing, sounding somewhat faint at the end of the driveway, but apparently blaring wherever he was. As I approached, though, the music just hung in the air, as if the volume was diffused evenly over the whole zip code.
This scenario is vital to understand, and it explains why, the night before, in the midst of tiny register beeps, soft rock, and general quiet, he looked at the checkout girl—Bridget, I think it was—and shouted “I got my nights back!”
This was a step in the right direction for someone like himself, suffering from insomnia. He was meant to have music around him. Or, “ if not music,” he told me, “then anything else.”
In the dark corner of his garage, I saw a mariachi band playing a dead-on cover of Crazy Horse. They were good, and they were so mariachi they didn’t need to play mariachi to be mariachi.
“They’re with me,” he said.
“You’re in a band?” I asked, thinking this is what he’d wanted me to see, a performance.
“No. I hired them. They’re my backing band.”
I continued to be puzzled, which perhaps comes from having a very straightforward job. “Backing band for what?”
He replied quickly. “For the rest of my life.”
3
Except for the blond hair, you could sketch him with a piece of fine charcoal, provided the paper is white. He is tall, lanky, pale, and his body has pronounced edges, which, upon closer inspection, are roughly-edged, like the stubble on his chin.
This man, as he told me at a time when I had to get going, looked at himself in a mirror one day and decided that he needed something in his life. It was the shortest day of the year, he claimed, and he had talked to no one for days. He had hardly slept, and when he did, a sensation that the night was not his own sent him to bed. His beard wasn’t growing so much as it was increasing in itchiness. His eyes, he said, were red one minute and redder the next. He couldn’t sort out one thought from another—last name was first, first was last, often no name at all. It wasn’t clear if he still had a job, or, if he did, what it was. And to the extent that he wasn’t confused, he was lonely.
To be in touch with the world, he needed to hire a band. To find his purpose, to be less lonely—in some strange, impersonal sense—he required a backing band.
“Why a mariachi band?”
He frowned at me. “I was very lonely.”
4
Leonard—that’s the man’s name, if it must be said—once told me a story about photosynthesis as we were walking around Miller- Showers Park at dusk, killing time. This story could go a long way toward explaining a lot of things.
“Imagine you wake up in the middle of the night and have to go to the bathroom,” he began, and to this day I don’t know whether the story was hypothetical.
“You stumble down the hallway toward the bathroom, because you really have to go, and on the way you pass your den, and something feels off, doesn’t feel quite right, and you stop because you realize that, hey, there’s some guy sitting in a chair in your den, just minding his own in the moonlight. And even though you have to go to the bathroom you come back and poke your head in.
“The guy starts talking. He doesn’t explain who he is or how he came to be there—he just starts in on the wonders of photosynthesis. The process by which plants convert light to energy. And in the hands of this guy sitting in your den, photosynthesis is amazing. Downright amazing.
“More than that, photosynthesis explains everything! It ties together so many natural, biological, religious, and philosophical questions it can hardly be fathomed. Yes, you knew about photosynthesis, but never did you see it this way, never was it the driving force of life like this. Photosynthesis is the start of everything, it’s where it’s at. He goes on and on, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard.
“So, the guy is calmly explaining what is by now to you earth-shaking information, the ins and outs of photosynthesis, its ups and downs, where it can be improved, the mysticism of the color green, and everything is making total sense.”
He paused. Leonard was good at pausing. “And that’s when it hits you.”
“What hits you?” I asked.
“You still have to go to the bathroom, and there’s not a damn thing photosynthesis can do about it!”
After he tells that story, he tends to stomp away.
5
What Leonard likes to do best—and I don’t know if this is part of his full-time job or what—is to constantly walk around town with his backing band in tow.
His favorite places to walk include: cobblestone streets, blind alleys, the edges of European parks, and—as I had already discovered—the aisles of freely-flowing supermarkets. Not to mention neighborhoods of cartoonish yellow houses with shiny people indoors and out.
Somehow this walking doesn’t draw a crowd. Perhaps it’s because, with the exception of the supermarkets, we don’t have these places to walk. So, he just keeps going, unfazed and undisappointed. Like there’s a European park around the next corner.
6
When I prodded Leonard a bit about loneliness, we were on Southdowns, which had been my best guess at the time for finding cobblestone streets.
He signaled to the band, and they increased the volume, blocking me out. This was the first, but not the last time he did this to me.
Is it wrong that I began to look for such opportunities?
7
He called me up one day, now that we were what you might call friends, and I could hear his band playing a favorite song softly in the background.
“Oh, good, you’re home.” This was his idea of routine.
“I made a list this morning, and the first item on the list said, very clearly, ‘Burn this list!’”
The band started getting worked up.
“So, that’s exactly what I did. I burned it to oblivion. And now I have no idea what the hell I’m supposed to do the rest of the day!”
I was dumbfounded. What do you say to that? “Kudos to you for sticking to your arbitrary principles?” “It must have been a bright fire?”
Before I could respond, he had hung up. I suspect he had a variety of other people to call with the same story.
8
His greatest fear? It’s very similar to one of my own.
He is afraid that some of his internal organs will slip out of his body at night, but he won’t be able to see which ones, or even know for sure if they’re gone, because there won’t be any light.
Replace internal organs with sanity, and that’s me to a T.
9
I ran into him at the grocery store all the time then, always late at night, and almost always when I needed some refreshment.
This is how it would go: He would point his finger at me and tell me something like, “You need to get your nights back.” The whole store could hear him.
No, he would point a can of beans at me. We were usually in the bean aisle. The halogen lighting in that aisle is unearthly and so are the beans.
So, I would say, “Leonard, what the hell are you talking about?” Because it was starting to piss me off, the way he said these casually profound things.
By way of response he would throw another can into my cart, whipping it past my hip. Pinto beans, typically. Just for the record.
10
Did you know he had a formula to calculate how many hours of sleep a person needs every night?
He told me that, according to these calculations, he used to need twelve hours a night, but he had gotten the equations out again and discovered that, with his life the way it was these days, he needed negative two hours of sleep per night.
I’m sure he’s figuring out a way to pull that off.
11
We were in Bryan Park for a cookout—when weren’t we in Bryan Park for a cookout?— waiting for a few friends to show up, grabbing one of those shelters where people claim to see specters at night.
He quieted the band to a background murmur. “What if when you get to the afterlife,” he asked, “Saint Peter or whoever makes you relive your life on a smell-by-smell basis? A sort of name that smell, if you will.”
This was after discussing the writing of his will, a long document largely covering the inheritance of ideas. I think he was disappointed in me for not fighting more for the ideas I wanted most.
“Maybe just the smells you sought out, and not including those you happened upon. Like, the dirty diaper just happened, but the smell of trespassing is yours, and that’s the one you have to account for. I mean, what if you had to review every smell in heaven? Would it be absolutely unbearable or the best experience you’ve ever had?”
“I guess this explains why you smell every fruit in the grocery store,” I said, proud of my pragmatic tone.
He breathed deeply and motioned towards the band. “They don’t do smells, but they take requests, you know.”
I left soon after.
12
One day he invited me over to his place for a reason I thought he’d eventually reveal, but he didn’t speak for the longest time. He just sat there with a big, beaming smile, like he had gotten that grocery store lighting installed in his head. He just sat there smiling.
I suspect he had quit his job that day—his mysterious job—and his smile wouldn’t allow him to talk about it. He couldn’t get his face to move.
At some point, I excused myself—hard to do when no one is speaking—and in the bathroom started rooting through his medicine cabinet, trying to find some kind of aspirin. But—and this is what was frustrating—the cabinet was cleared out. On the one end, there were a few Q-tips and a stranded toothpick; on the other, some unspecified pills in a Ziploc. In between was dust, at best.
Somewhere nearby, his band was playing a throwback to an era I couldn’t name. They sounded extremely close. I was afraid to close the mirror, in case they’d jump out and appear there, reflected.
I went back to the dining room, and he was beaming, just beaming.
13
This is how bad it got: I began to have dreams with Leonard in them.
In one—actually, in quite a few—he was hosting a holiday party. It was snowing constantly, but lightly, outside, and the dozens of us at the party were all wearing festive sweaters and getting to know one another.
But Leonard had hired a local band for the evening, specializing in smooth jazz and pop rock. They played a tune from one genre when they couldn’t think of one from the other, and they never took a break between what were truly awful songs.
The problem—and the turmoil I faced in the dream—was that Leonard didn’t seem to remember that he already had his own band, and that they were already playing everywhere he went. They were very loud, and possibly drunk.
So, as the guests tried to have conversations over egg nog, we all failed to hear each other. And we all got extremely pissed because we couldn’t hear. And because everybody was pissed and looked pissed, we started to assume that everybody else was being pissy. Things didn’t go well. I nearly got punched because a man in a derby—totally out of place at the party, and at this point in the dream totally badass—didn’t understand my compliment on his hat.
I mean, did Leonard somehow fail to remember that he already had his own band? Did he just not care? Were there contractual details that required his band’s presence in each and every situation, even if he didn’t want them anymore?
When I woke up, I felt like I had been kicked in the head, and I was angry, very angry, at his carelessness. I have thought about this attitude of mine, in moments of great mental acuity, and I continue to feel justified in my anger.
14
I’m looking over my notes, and there are statements I don’t remember the context of. This one I jotted down while fighting a cold on the couch, which may help put it in perspective:
“In some ways, I admire kids with fake IDs. There’s at least an aspiration to be something better than they are.”
It was quiet enough in my house to hear the pen scratching.
15
We are no longer friends.
It depends on exactly how you define friendship, of course, but we are both comfortable with calling our current status a non-friendship.
After he had flown back from a trip and we decided to end the friendship, he told me his latest news.
“I never fall asleep when my head hits the pillow, it takes hours. But on this trip, I leaned back in my seat—didn’t even recline it, I just leaned back—and I immediately fell asleep. This isn’t me! It’s completely uncharacteristic. And they even had to wake me up when we landed, and when they did, I up and walked out, totally forgetting my book in the seat pocket. I never do that! That’s not who I am.”
He started to walk away, but immediately turned back around. “But, apparently, this is me! I do leave things behind. This is what I do. I fall asleep. After years of trying, this is who I am. In an instant, this is who I am.”
We shook hands, his face turned somber, the band played on, and it was a fitting end to our friendship.
16
When we were done ending our friendship, the band stayed put as we both began to walk away. I was walking quickly and using the last of the daylight, so this fact didn’t dawn on me until later.
I suppose I could wonder where Leonard was going, and I suppose I could wonder where I was going—but no amount of remembering can bring these things back, only images of Leonard walking perpendicular to me, both of us walking quickly. I think I said that.
Only after I was far away did the band move in Leonard’s direction.
17
A couple weeks after our falling out, I was wandering the area south of campus late at night, working through a crisis in my head and getting yelled at by drunken students. I yelled back, and they ran off like they should, like they were just waiting to obey me.
I got to the corner of Second and Lincoln, and a little noise inside my head became louder, so loud it had to be real. And in fact, even though it was a spot-on cover of the Replacements, and even though I was half-drunk, I could still recognize Leonard’s band. They were mariachi, and they were that good.
They were playing on the lawn of a historic house, in their most comfortable shoes. Leonard must have been nearby, maybe flat on the lawn, maybe behind the house. But there was some type of miscue, because as I began to walk away, the band started following me. Casually, like they just wanted to hang out a bit. Like their playing my type of music was a coincidence.
I ran. Playing my favorite song twice couldn’t keep me at that corner.
18
One more fond memory, back from when we were friends.
We were in an alley downtown, around midnight, and we slipped into a dive. Leonard wistfully said to me, “You know, someday I’d like to break into the Sistine Chapel.”
“I’ve heard of that,” I said. As far as his statements went, this one was at least ambitious, like an addict switching to methadone.
“Seriously.” He grabbed my wrist. “I mean, you know the one part of the painting, Let There Be Light?”
I didn’t, but nodded anyway.
He pointed to himself. “That’s what I want. That’s me.”
A month later, he showed me some blueprints of the Sistine Chapel and walked me through the details. As far as I could tell, his plan to break in was a sound one.
God speed, Leonard. God speed.