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It started with insomnia.  Just me, lying awake at night, listening to the radiator tick, listening to something in the basement hissing away (it might have been the hot water heater, I’m not sure), listening to my roommate shuffle around upstairs with his insomnia, to the cars on the street that sometimes pass by at one in the morning and leave en masse at two in the morning when all the bars close, and everyone drunkenly tools along home.  I have never heard an accident while lying awake at night,  and sometimes I wonder what I would do if I did hear an accident.  Would I go out and help?  I like to think that I would help, but, in the first place, I’m not sure what I could do that would be helpful, and in the second place, sometimes it’s very cold outside.

Like, really cold.  Not the coldest I’ve ever been.  The coldest I’ve ever been was one time I was driving across the country to California with a girlfriend (now ex), and we had to stop in Ohio to get gas.  When I got out of the car, it was so blisteringly, aggressively, oppressively cold that it felt like the first gust of wind just sucked every last kelvin out of me, and my face was blue and my teeth were chattering in seconds.  I don’t know how people survive it.  I guess it helps that no one important lives in Ohio.

Uhm.  Treppenwitz.  Inferential.  Calumny.  Audible.

There are a lot of sounds that you hear at night when you’ve got insomnia, and I heard every single one of them every night, for a week.  I didn’t sleep at all.  I know I didn’t sleep.  Sometimes, when you’ve got the insomnia you think that you’re staying up all night, but really you’re kind of dozing off for a couple minutes here and there.  This wasn’t like that.  This was me, awake, from ten o’clock when I got into bed, until the sun came up and I was too bored to stay in bed and went to get some orange juice.

Christ, I lost five minutes after that last sentence.  I can’t think of what to say next.  I don’t have five minutes.  Atemporal.  Serial.  Egregious.

I’m doing this wrong.  I can’t say everything I want to say about insomnia now, because I don’t have time to think of it all.  This is like a stream-of-consciousness, only not as weird as James Joyce and his stream of consciousness which, frankly, I suspect he was largely doing for the sake of a laugh.  Whatever else happens, I have to keep going.

After a week of zero sleep, my mom made me go to the hospital.  You’re not supposed to never sleep; it’s not even possible, biologically, without going insane (and I think that I kind of am going insane a little bit).  Except in extreme cases of alcoholism, or certain lesions on parts of the brain, or…well.  The Or is a big deal, isn’t it?  I’m saving that, even though I shouldn’t.  I know that I have to write it, but I’m scared of it, so I’m working up to it.  It’s like taking a kind of a running start, you know?

I have to keep writing because of how much I thought I would write, but never did.  My room is all full of those little black moleskine notebooks–they’re the ones that Hemmingway used.  Actually, they’re not, they just LOOK like the ones that Hemmingway used, but who cares?  You buy them because you want to be like Hemmingway, only you don’t really want to be like Hemmingway because, frankly, he was kind of a dick.  But you want to be regarded like Hemmingway, recognized as being as significant as Hemmingway, considered as relevant as Hemmingway.  You want all the kids you went to school with, who never even had lofty dreams to give up on and so didn’t so much fall back on teaching as they gently eased into it, to have to assign your books to their incoming freshmen.

I’m not Hemmingway, anyway, which is why all of my notebooks have writing on the first fifteen pages, and then get stuffed under the bed, or onto a bookshelf, and I never even bother looking at them again.  This is a kind of foolishness.  Or numbskullery.  Tommyrot.

My great uncle was very old for as long as I knew him.  I asked him once, when I was young and fearless, what it was like being old.  He told me the worst part is that he couldn’t run anymore.  Just take off and run, as fast as he could, feet pounding pavement, blood pounding in his ears, legs and arms and lungs all flailing.  Your body just doesn’t let you do that when you’re old, and when you get to be eighty five, sometimes on the bad days you find yourself regretting all of the times that you could have run but didn’t.  Maybe you didn’t do it because you thought you neededa reason to run as fast as you can.  It turns out, the only reason to run as fast as you can is because you can, and then one day you can’t, and you’ll find yourself sorry that you didn’t.

My great uncle is dead, now.  I’m not sure if I believe in Heaven.  If there is one, I assume running as fast as he can will comprise a substantial portion of his activities there.  Possibly so will hosannas.

I do not know what a hosanna is, or why it is important that they be sung; I know only that this is a routinely reported activity of angels, and can only conclude that the activity is of some special significance to them.

My mom made me go to the hospital for my insomnia, and they took an x-ray of my brain.  Or, an MRI, I guess.  A CAT scan, something.  Whatever they look at your brain with.  Magnetic Resonance Imaging.  Nuclear Medicine.  (Nuclear Medicine is a great name for a kind of medicine).  Everyone was pretty happy with the result, but I think they didn’t really understand.  The implications.  Implicit.

I have a tumor in my brain, it’s interfering with my ability to sleep.  Bad news, right?  No!  Turns out, they can get to it pretty easily.  Just pop it out, then I’m good as new, and can finally get back to bed.  So, good news!  That’s why my mom was happy.  Elated.  Ecstatic. Blithe.  Convivial, blissful, exultant, jubilant.  What the doctors told me, though…to get to the tumor, there’s a good chance that they’ll end up damaging the part of my brain that let’s me understand words.

There was another lacuna there.  Or a hiatus.  There’s a difference, I assume, but I haven’t got the time to investigate it.  You couldn’t see it, but I stopped writing for a couple minutes, and that terrifies me.  I go into surgery tomorrow, and then I won’t be able to understand words anymore.  Obviously, all of my books are trash, now.  All of my notebooks, whatever I did manage to write in them, it’s worthless now.  Even if I meant to go back and read them, which I might have!  Even if I did, there’s no point.  I won’t even be able to have someone read them to me.

The doctors say that people can be functional aphasics.  That you can understand a lot of what another person is saying by tone of voice and context, and so even if you can’t understand words, you can still have healthy relationships.  I don’t know about all this.  How does tone of voice convey the meaning of something like “ephemeral,” or “iconic”?  Those are good words, and tomorrow they’ll be gibberish.  But it’s worse than that, because I THINK in words.  I don’t know if you do it, but I definitely do.

What does that mean, if I lose words?  Am I going to start thinking in shapes and colors?  Images?  What does that mean?  Can you even think the same things if you use pictures to think instead of words?  A painting–a million paintings–isn’t a book.  Am I the same person if I’m thinking in paintings now?  I’m going to go into surgery, and they’re going to kill me.  A new man is going to wake up, living in a strange afterlife, where everything is exactly what it looks like, and nothing means anything.

So I’m writing now.  Not because I think any of this is important or even very good.  Not even because I have something to say.  And, obviously, not because I have something I want to remember.  It’s just because tomorrow I won’t be able to do it at all.  This is my last night to use words, and god-damn if I’m not going to use every one I can think of.

At least I don’t have to sleep.

Utter.

Imbroglio.

Legerdemain.

Somnolent.

Pleonastic.

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This entry was posted on January 12, 2009 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Braak with tags Braak, Short Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.