The Insomniac

What's a guy gonna do when he can't get some shut-eye?

                Whatever it was about that dream, it jolted me awake.  I couldn’t even remember what I’d seen or felt but I my heart was racing.  My eyelids flutter open and I realize where I am, arm tensely clutched over my chest, neck wedged down letting my chin dig into my throat, lying on my side on the couch.  Late-night TV flickering, a talk-show audience roars with applause for some guest.  I dig through the couch cushions for the remote and turn it off.  Sitting up to catch my breath, I run my hand through my mussed hair.  It’s almost not fair, falling asleep on the couch, escaping the waking world without even being ready for it, then being interrupted because part of you knows you’re not where you belong.  Mouth tasting like unbrushed germs and food remains, muscles sore, clothes rumpled.  I try to slow my heart and remember what I’d seen in that dream but all that comes to mind was setting down to watch the news and gradually reclining in comfort before... jolt.  A half-full bottle of beer stands next to the magazines on my coffee table.

                I stand, unsteadily, grab the bottle, and go to the kitchen to pour the rest down the drain.  A waste.  My eyes clear up and adjust to the darkness of the place.  I stumble into the washroom to try to sleepwalk my way through my routine: brush, rinse, undress and all, but there’s no use pretending like I am still asleep.  Flick on the lights to see a bright-eyed and alert reflection with sleep-creases on his face.  Hardly a whole night’s sleep in months, dark circles under the eyes, but thoughts racing.  All I want at this point is to go to bed and wake up tomorrow morning, early for a Saturday, alert for the meeting, a meeting I’ve been roped into because there have been cutbacks at the company and I want to make myself essential.

                I’m sitting on my bed pulling off my socks when the thought occurs to me: the thought that I made an error in my paperwork that day.  All it took was the thought about the meeting to remind me.  I hadn’t seen any error but suddenly it hits me that it was very possible that my mind had skipped over one crucial detail in the data sheets I‘d been laying out before I left the office, and that my entire’s day work, and this entire client’s profit projections, were now worthless.

                There’s no reason for me to believe this was the case other than the fact that I think it might be the case: suddenly it becomes the only possibility.  I must have screwed this one up, there’s no way I didn’t.  What did I do?  What could I possibly have done?  Something just feels wrong.

                I roll over in bed and bury my face in the pillow.  When I close my eyes the only thing I can see is my hands pecking the keyboard, one small typographical error nullifying days of work.  One little mistake, my fault, my mistake, my responsibility.  I can’t even picture what the error actually was but I’m suddenly completely sure it was there.

                I want to reach over to the phone on the night stand, want to call the office and get confirmation from anyone there that things were okay.  It must be only paranoia, I just crave reassurance.  But it’s nearly midnight, I know Tad and Brynn sometimes stay late but they’d be long gone by now, and bothering them at home would get me nowhere.

                With obsession setting in, I try to change the tracks of my train of thought to something else.  Lunch.  Managed to get one of one of the good BLTs in the cafeteria today, no soggy bread, no limp bacon, a really solid sandwich.  Usually I work too hard, get too focussed to get down there in time to catch anything but the last remains of the lunch rush, the bottom of the barrel.  Which is what pissed me off so much, if I screwed up, which I know I did, because I’m usually so much better about that: that it was all for a sandwich.

                The hot August air creeps into my room and I sweat, rolling back over to face up.  Too hot in here, too many echoing street sounds from the ground below my bedroom window, too many creatures crawling around in the walls I’m sure.  Nothing I could do, no way I can get to sleep, and suddenly, after  recalling lunch, I’m hungry.

I push myself upright, swinging my legs over the side of the bed.  This should not be happening.  I’m a healthy functioning human being; I am obsessing.  If I had a woman she’d tell me to relax and go asleep, and maybe she’d wrap her arms around me.  Sleep and love: two things that are never there when you really need them.  I leave the room in the vain hope that I’ve still got a sleeping pill rattling around my medicine cabinet.  Nothing there but a night time formula cold pill.  I take it.

To ease the capsule down my throat, I pour a cup of water from the tap and gulp it down, then run my hand under the faucet to wipe the irritation from my face.  Relax, Rich, let your body be your pal.  The chemicals will do their work and you can rest easy.

In the meantime, I drag myself into the kitchen.  A late night snack.  I remember when I was a kid and I’d be awake after midnight, my mom would let me have cereal.  There was a box of Corn Flakes in my pantry.  If I made it out of this night alive, I decided to go to the store the next day and buy a box of Lucky Charms.  That is, after my meeting, the meeting for which I definitely screwed up the paperwork.

With the cereal, probably stale, poured in the bowl, I open the refrigerator to pour milk over it when I am both surprised and unsurprised to find that the milk’s been expired for three days.  How did I miss that?  Too busy with too many other thoughts.  It splashes unevenly as I pour it into the sink and wonder idly whether there is anyone I might actually be able to call at this hour, just to vent my frustration, just to connect to someone and ease my mind.

Dave, I think.

Dave’s been after me, trying to get me to join one of his Friday Night poker games for months.  Solid bunch of guys, he tells me, could really use a fifth though.  You play, right Rich?  Yeah, I play, but I’m not a big player, not for money, I’d rather keep my bird in my hands than go for the ones in the bush.  I didn’t think I needed the company, either, but now I see how wrong I was, and I pick up the phone to try to get at least a moment’s worth of contact with another human voice.

As I scramble through the drawers under my kitchen counter looking for a scrap of people on which I wrote his phone number, I think about everything.  Everything.  How I need to do my laundry tomorrow after work.  How there’s a war overseas.  How I need to change my cell phone provider.  How a man on the street spent 20 minutes trying to convince me we never landed on the moon.  How I haven’t been to a concert in a while.  How my milk has expired.  How I got into an argument with some anonymous dolt over the internet about something stupid.  How I need to masturbate less.  How my back aches.  How a girl named Rebecca cried her eyes out at my 7^th birthday party, over 20 years ago.  How I ended up trying to kiss her ten years later.  How the empty bottle of sleeping pills, which never did me any good anyway, sits next to a mostly-unused box of condoms in my medicine cabinet.  How my sink could use a scrub.  I find the paper and turn the light on to read it properly, suddenly aware that turning the light on would’ve made my search considerably easier to begin with.

I dial, the phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Dave?  It’s Rich.  Did I wake you?”

“Rich!  No, man, no, I’m just... surprised.  I didn’t expect... no, I’m still up.  We just finished playing a while ago.  The guys went home, I’ve just, I’ve been, I’m cleaning up right now.”

“Oh, that’s okay.  I mean, I couldn’t sleep and I didn’t know if you’d still be up.”

“Yeah,” he says, and I drop the conversation a moment trying to remember exactly what I thought I was going to say.  He continues, “Listen, feel free to come by next week, okay?  I haven’t seen you in months.”

“You’re right,” I say.  I can’t bring myself to actually say the words sure, I’ll come over, but I do intend to do so, so I just say, “Okay, I’ll see you.  Later, Dave.”  He says goodbye and I hang up the phone.  A moment of silences passes for that conversation.

I walk back toward the bedroom trying to coax myself into feeling groggy.  It’s after 1 AM and I need to get up in less than 5 hours to go to work.  But every time I get near that door, it growls at me, bares its teeth.  Something stupid clicks in my drug-addled, sleepless brain and I go to my shoes at the front door.  My pyjamas aren’t particularly thick so I cinch up my trench coat, making sure I’ve got my keys and my wallet in my front pocket, locking up, stepping toward the elevator.  The coat was a vintage store find I used for Halloween three years ago in a Private Eye costume, but lately I’ve just been wearing when it suits me.

Ding.

If I’m smart, I’ll just putter around the lobby a little and tire myself out.  Take one step out the front door and realize how ridiculous it would be for me to actually leave the building at this time of night.  Maybe go so far as to cross the street to the convenience store and buy a new carton of milk, but then come right back.

Ding.

The elevator stops at the third floor.  A woman, 50ish and small, gets on with a Pomeranian, or maybe it’s a Shih Tzu, I’m not so sure about little dogs.  She smiles at me.  “She was scratching at the door, sometimes a little walk around the neighbourhood tires her out, you know.”  I look down: the pup looks up at me.  We both know the feeling.

The elevator comes to a stop at the ground floor, and when we get to the front exit I hold the door open for her.  Politely whispering “Thanks,” she passes and turns left.  I go right, in the general direction of the office.  Part of me just wants to go over there and see if everything is all right, but even if I did, it would take so long that I’d have to go to the meeting in my pyjamas and coat.

My eyes dart around the darkened buildings bouncing orange streetlight back onto the sidewalk.  I don’t know this place, not at night: the alleyways in daytime were merely grungy shortcuts, playgrounds for graffiti artists, but nothing so threatening as a dark, ominous cave the way they are at night.  Anything, I think to myself, could be lurking there: anyone.  A relatively safe city is still a city, still a place of millions people, people constantly bumping up against each others’ spaces, and right now, it isn’t even the city I know.  And I’m not even myself.

A shiver goes up my spine.  Familiar stores, restaurants, dry cleaners, all blocked off by metal gates, all shadows of themselves under the streetlights.  The computer shop and the coffee joint are closed, but the bars and the clubs and the porno shops are open.  I pass by a favourite book store of mine, which has an iron grate along its walkway.  I run my fingers along the bars to make a deep metallic ping sound like a xylophone.  Between the silhouette of a cable car grid, lights flicker overhead in apartment windows.  No stars, though.

Through the front window of the convenience store is an old Middle Eastern man who looks to be asleep with his eyes open, or dead, or both.  Instead of going in to buy milk, I keep going.  As I pass, a disembodied voice asks “Hey man, you got any papers?  J’wanna get high?” but I just shake my head and mutter “No thanks” without looking in its direction.  I don’t want to turn back yet, not the way I came.  The street smells like wet garbage.  I don’t see any open dumpsters around, so maybe that’s just the natural state of things.  There are thin puddles on the ground.  It must’ve been raining earlier.

I walk on and reach the crosswalk.  I ask myself, I’m not really going to keep going, am I? But I see no reason to stop.  A man in a windbreaker walks up next to me.  The walk signal changes and we end up side-by-side.  I stare down at my feet.  I lag to let him get ahead, and he keeps walking in my same direction.  Four young girls in tight, sparkly club dresses pass in our opposite direction.  He turns to check them out from behind.  I wait until he’s fixed his eyes forward again to do the same.  Not bad.

At the next crosswalk, we’re side by side again.  The signal changes and he goes.  I stay behind looking at the sleepy eyes of a mascara model posted on a bus shelter, until he’s halfway across and the signal has changed from a walking man to a flashing hand saying “don’t start.”  I pace myself to try not to catch up to him, but I want to make it before the light changes.  A black Ford Escape jets quickly behind me and I think for a second that it almost hit me.  What an awful end that would’ve been.  But if I’d rolled up onto the windshield, separated my shoulder, spent the night in the hospital, there’d be no meeting for me.  I reach the curb and try to settle my nerves.  The windbreaker is gone.  At the front door of an apartment building, a bald man mutters exhaustedly into his cell phone.

The further I get from home, the more vibrant the culture gets: more people, larger crowds, louder conversations, greater volume of drunkenness.  “Dude, call a cab, I’m done for the night,” someone says.  I’m not.  In the distance, a siren wails.  I’m still looking at my feet so when I feel someone brush past me coming the opposite way, I feel startled and annoyed: with so much air out here, how could he not leave some between us?

“’Scuse me,” a woman walks over, “Do you know where there’s a subway around here?”

“Yeah,” I instinctively answer.  I know where I am, geographically, but I look around at the buildings and try to get my bearings.  I’ve taken the subway here plenty of times, I know the stop but it still takes a moment to point her in the right direction.  When she goes off, I’m not even sure I was correct.  I watch her disappear, her heels clicking on the sidewalk, and I hope for the best for her.

My destination, which I must’ve secretly known was my real destination without ever admitting it to myself, is the Red Lyon pub.  I arrive at the front door and look up at the sign, an Olde English rendering of the name, flanked by St. George’s Cross and a regal illustration of a dragon that probably relates to some House of English rulers or other.  It also says last call is at 2 on Friday nights, so if I’m ever going to drink here, now would be the exact right time.  I have walked past this bar, six blocks east of my apartment, too many times to recall, and I have never been in.  Behind me, a black Honda Accord cruises by.  I turn to see a black-haired young man driving, with a pretty redhead in the passenger’s seat, and a troubled-looking blonde in the back with gobs of mascara on her face.  Through the window I hear the muffled riff of Van Halen’s “Jump.”  I let myself believe the blonde makes eye contact with me.  I turn and push through the entrance.

Inside, the air rumbles with conversation.  I think when you drink, and you talk to someone, your mouth forms an alcoholic filter on your breath.  A room filled with drunken conversationalists creates a headier atmosphere, like a sauna that can get you buzzed.  Conversations blend, the answer to the question “What did you end up doing last night?” becomes “This weekend, I promise.”  I sit down at the bar and order a pint, one eye on the door.  The guys flirt with waitresses, the girls flirt with guys.  The old men grumble about the baseball highlights on the TV screen, the college kids shoot pool.

I take a seat at the end of the bar, away from the drunk old guys.  As I am served, in walk the trio from the black Honda.  The redhead beelines for the ladies’ room while the driver sits at an open booth.  The blonde leans her elbows on the bar to order a pitcher.  I avert my eyes.  She asks how much the pitcher costs, then takes it back to her friend at the table.  She returns to pay, bringing her glass of beer, then instead of going back to her friends, she turns to me.

“Look at you,” she says like an aunt seeing a newborn dressed up for his baptism, “All dressed up for a night out.”  I’d forgotten I’m still in my PJ’s and coat.

“I didn’t know there was a dress code,” I say, buried nearly so far under my breath as to be inaudible.

“There should be,” she nods playfully, “Sleepwear for everyone.  I like it.  I’ve got this great pair of flannel shorts that are totally ready for the club.”

I took a sip.  “Would you believe I’m a sleep-drinker?”

“Sounds like my kind of problem.”

I turned to face her.  She was looking right at me.  For a moment I forgot myself and just stared, unaware of how I must appear.  With my lack of sleep, I think I look older than I am, and in this soft light she looks like just a kid.  Embarrassed, I look away.

She doesn’t, though.

“Look, I’m sorry if I’m bothering you.  I don’t usually... well, that’s not true, I’ve been drinking so I could do anything, really.  I’m just not...”

I cut off her rambling, “No, you weren’t bothering me.  Don’t worry about it.”

Enough air enters the conversation for me to extend my hand.  “I’m Rich.”  She looks at me quizzically for a second before I add, “-chard.  Richard.  That’s my name.  I’m not... I’m kind of broke, really.”  Laugh, please.  She kind of does.  She puts her hand in mine but doesn’t grip hard.  But she does smile.

“Ashley.”

Getting my hopes up, I ask, “You from around here?”

She winces a painful Band-aid-ripping hesitation before she replies, “Not really.  Just passing through on our way back from a party in the East Ravine.  I go to Helena University, so I’m... not close.”  If I remember correctly, Helena’s located on the western edge of the city.

“Yeah,” I look back down through my beer to the bottom of my glass, “I’m not close either.”

“Well, you sure look like you’re at home.  You look like you’re about ready to fall right asleep on this bar.”

“That’s the plan.”

I don’t know why she says what she says next, but she does: “I once dated this guy, years ago.  I really liked him.  Maybe love, but it was so long ago I don’t know.  He was such a great person, and we got along well, but what bothered me about him was, he never made a move on me.  He’d come over, we’d watch a movie and maybe, maybe fool around, but he had no drive to take it to the bedroom.  I don’t think it was a religious thing either, I just think he was too awkward about it.  Then after about three months, he takes me to a carnival.  I don’t know why he did it, he was the kind of guy who hated crowds, but it was his idea.  And we spent twenty minutes in line for the Ferris wheel, and when we get up there, up to the top, the point where you just sit there and stare out over all the land for miles ahead, and I decide I’ve had enough, and I say, Look Andrew �" that was his name, Andrew Caleb Pryce �" Andrew, you either f**k me on this Ferris wheel, or it’s over.”  She pauses and looks out of the corner over her eye, before sighing and continuing, “So it was over.  I had to sit there with him for another half an hour.  Trapped.  So I know, y’know, how sometimes you need to get away.”

I blush at the odd frankness of her story.  “Yeah, I guess that’s what I needed here.”

 “I don’t know what made me think of that.”  She pauses to choose her next words carefully: “So, I’ve been having kind of a crappy night, right?  So maybe I’m just drunk and lonely.”  My ears perk up.  She digs into her purse for a pen and scrawls a number on the other side of her coaster.  “I wanna say I’m not the kind of girl who does this, because if I am, that takes away from what we, um... not that we have anything, but it’s not the same as other times.  You get me, right?”  Sure I do.

“When we’re sober,” I say, pretending like I’m drunk on anything but sleeplessness and the active ingredient of a cold pill that suddenly kicked in between the elevator and here, “I’ll call you, and you can tell me about it.”

She finishes her drink and stands, “How about we talk about something else.  Anything, really.  When we’re sober.”

“When we’re sober.”

I look over her shoulder and see that with impeccable timing, her friends have stood to leave as well.  She brushes her fingers along the arm of my trench coat.

“Stay warm, PJs,” she says just softly enough for me to barely hear in the noise of the room.  With that, she leaves.

The barmaid calls out, “Last call, all.  Last call of the night.”

Queasy from mixing medications, I drop some cash on the bar and split, let her work out for herself what if anything her tip is.

I know my apartment is this way, but I go that way.  That way is the way I believe Ashley would be driving.  Westward, toward Helena, away from the city lights, toward the lake.  The city street ends at the water’s edge and I find a dimly lit path that seems ideal for muggers.  If I keep going in this direction, I will get to my office in about 40 minutes.  In daylight, I would be able to see it.  In the distance, a fire engine roars, but that’s about all I can hear.  No more city, even though it’s just a five minute walk behind me.  A smoky fog rolls in over the water’s surface.  I can’t see any boats, but here, against the dark horizon, I can at least make out some semblance of a constellation.  I just sit down on a bench to take it in, hand in my pocket clutching the coaster with Ashley’s phone number written on it.

 

I don’t know what it was, but something jolted me out of that dream, and it’s a damn good thing.  One moment I’m fast asleep, the next I’m awake, slumped over on a park bench half an hour’s walk from home in my pyjamas.  I suspect for a moment that I sleepwalked here before vividly recalling my walk over here, my one beer, and the girl at the bar.  I check my pocket.  The coaster is still there.

There’s one digit I can’t discern whether it’s a 4 or a 9.  When the time comes, I’ll try both.  If the time comes, if I could let myself think a girl who looks and lives like she does would want to know the real Rich, the one who may or may not be fired from his data entry job very soon.

In an instant I remember why I left the house in the first place.  The mythical error on my spreadsheet.  The meeting this morning.  It’s 8:30.  My meeting is in a half an hour.  I have three missed calls on my phone.  As I begin to jog lightly back toward my building �" quietly marvelling at the fact that I wasn’t pick-pocketed or stabbed in the night �" I dial the last caller.  It was Brynn.

“Brynn!” I pant, “Hey, you were calling me this morning?  Sorry, I was... asleep.”

“Yeah, that’s great, Rich,” she mutters bitterly.

I attempt to blurt, “I might be running a little late to the meeting--” but as I try to improvise a suitable excuse she interrupts.

“That’s what I’m trying to call you about, there is no meeting.  There was a fire last night, our whole floor was destroyed.”

I stop in my tracks and slowly begin to walk back toward the water’s edge.  “Wh-what?”

“Yeah, it must’ve been an electrical thing,” she sighed, “One in a million chance, really.  Good thing too, because our preparations for this presentation weren’t up to par.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”  I want to ask if she means me in particular or the office in general, but I refrain.  Looking out over the water, I can see a few plumes of smoke in the distance.  I had seen them last night too but didn’t realize they were from my building.

“So, we’ll e-mail you the updated details, and try to start fresh when we get our new office in order.”

“Sounds good.”

“Oh, and Rich...” she added, “Make sure your electrical outlets are properly grounded and everything, okay?”

I chuckled, “Okay.” 

What luck.  I close the phone up and turn back toward my building.  Past the Red Lyon, past the dry cleaners, past the alleyways now just bricks without shadow, through the fog of garbage-smelling city air, under the cable-car grid.  I walk up to the convenience store.  Instead of the dead-eyed Middle Eastern man, there’s a fresh-faced teenage girl who waves me “Good morning!”  I go to the refrigerator case and pick the carton of milk with the most distant expiration date.

Reviews

[LipglossKiller]

This was a long read...but every word had me hooked. I read the first two paragraphs almost in disbelief...were you in my house that night? Because this has certainly happened. Like last week. And maybe a few weeks before that. Every insomniac (every writer?) has had a night like this. You described it perfectly. The first two paragraphs, and the entire story, are very realistic. Great job at being descriptive without being rambly. I like how you mention little things like the blt and the dead eyed Middle Eastern man. It makes the city feel real.
The rambling paragraph where he thinks about the expired milk and not having gone to a concert in a while and Rebecca made me laugh.
I think I've seen Ashley in a bar before..
This is just all around awesome.

[Timothy Lawmowe]

awesome. seems like you really know your way around a sleepless night. I know i do. great job!

[Dana Kathryn]

Very very well done,Excellent description...I too know the craziness of Insomnia!! I enjoyed this piece very much!! Awesome job!! :0)

[Blue tailed kite]

This was extremely good.... I really love the way you have written and described the story.... great job!!!