mysteriously lost the ability to type, my body had lost its capacity to sleep. During my first nights back in New York, I came awake about four in the morning and spent the rest of the night lying in bed with my eyes closed, waiting until long past dawn for the gradual mental slippage, the loosening of rationality, which signals the beginning of unconsciousness. To make up for the lost sleep, I took hour-long naps after lunch. Then I began waking at three in the morning, with the same results. I tried reading and wound up reading until morning. By the end of the first week, I was going to bed at eleven and waking up at two in the morning. After another four or five nights, I never went to sleep at all. I took off my clothes and brushed my teeth, got into bed, and instantly felt as though I'd just gulped down a double espresso.
I couldn't blame the cast or the pains in my back and shoulder. These were uncomfortable, awkward, and irritating, but they were not the problem. My body had forgotten how to sleep at night. I went back to my doctor, who gave me sleeping pills. For two nights, I took the pills before going to bed, with the alarming result that I'd come out of a lengthy daze at six in the morning, standing by the window or sitting on the couch, with no memory of what had happened since I had stretched out on my bed. Instead of sleep, I'd had amnesia. I threw the pills away, took two-hour naps in the middle of the day, and waited it out. By the time I began writing fresh material, I had stopped going to bed—I took a shower around midnight, changed clothes, and alternately worked, read, and walked around my loft. Sometimes I turned off the lights and wrote in the dark. I took a lot of aspirin and vitamin C. Sometimes I wandered into the kitchen and gazed at the surreal buildings that Tom's computer had invented. Then I went back to my desk and lost myself in my made-up world.
Despite my fatigue, my work went leaping ahead of me like some animal, tiger or gazelle, that I was trying to capture. I was scarcely conscious of writing—the experience was more like
Sometimes I noticed that I had spent an entire night writing
All of this should have been joyous, and most of the time it was. But even when I was most absorbed in my work, during those periods when I had no personal existence, some dormant part of me flailed about in an emotional extremity. After I stopped typing, my fingers trembled—even the fingers trapped in the cast were quivering. I had entered the childhood of Fielding Bandolier, and dread and terror were his familiars. But not all of the trouble came from what I was writing.
During my two-hour naps, I dreamed of being back on the body squad and plunging my hands into dead and dismembered bodies. I encountered the skinny young VC on Striker Tiger and froze, blank and mindless, while he raised his ancient rifle and sent a bullet into my brain. I stepped on a mine and turned into red mist, like Bobby Swett. I walked across a clearing so crowded with dead men that I had to step over their bodies, looked down to see purple-and-silver entrails spilling out of my gut, and fell down in acknowledgment of my own death. Paul Fontaine sat up on his gurney with his gun in his hand and said,
For twenty years, the afternoons had been the hours when I did the bulk of my work. After I forgot how to sleep at night, after I began walking into hell every time I took a nap, those hours turned to stone. What I wrote came out forced and spiritless. I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't write. So I tucked my notebook into my pocket and went out on long walks.
I trudged through Soho. I passed unseeing through Washington Square. I hovered distracted in the Three Lives bookstore and came back to myself in Books & Co., miles away. Now and then, some grudging little incident found its way into the notebook, but most of the time I was in Millhaven. People I had never seen before turned into John Ransom and Tom Pasmore. The lightless eyes and rusty face of Ross McCandless slanted toward me from the window of a passing bus. Block after block, I walked along Livermore Avenue, finally saw the sign outside the White Horse Tavern, and realized that I was on Hudson Street.
Around seven o'clock on what turned out to be the last of these miserable journeys, I walked past a liquor store, stopped moving, and went back and bought a bottle of vodka. If what I needed was unconsciousness, I knew how to get it. I carried the bottle home in the white plastic carrier bag, set it on the kitchen shelf and stared at it. Sweating, I paced around the loft for a long time. Then I went back into the kitchen, twisted the cap off the bottle, and poured the vodka into the sink.
As soon as the last of it disappeared into the drain, I went downstairs for dinner and told everybody I was feeling much better today, thank you, just a little trouble sleeping. I forced myself to eat at least half of the food on my plate, and drank three bottles of mineral water. Maggie Lah came out of the kitchen, took a long look at me, and sat down across the table. 'You're in trouble,' she said. 'What's going on?'
I said I wasn't too sure.
'Sometimes I hear you walking around in the middle of the night. You can't sleep?'
'That's about it.'
'You could try going to one of those veterans' meetings. They might help you.'
'Veterans of Millhaven don't have meetings,' I said, and told her not to worry about me.
She said something about therapy, stood up, kissed the top of my head, and left me alone again.
When I got back into my loft, I double-checked my locks, something I'd been doing four and five times a night since my return, took a shower, put on clean clothes, and went to my desk and turned on the computer. When I saw that my hands were still shaking, Maggie's words came back to me. They sounded no more acceptable now than they had the first time. Years before, I'd gone twice to a veterans' group, but the people there had been in another war altogether. As for therapy, I'd rather go directly to the padded rooms and the electroshock table. I tried to get back into the world of my work and found that I could not even remember the last words I'd written. I called up the chapter, pushed HOME HOME and the button with the arrow that pointed down, which instantly delivered me to the point where I had stopped work that morning. Then the nightly miracle took place once again, and I fell down into the throat of my novel.
Something astounding, no other word will do, happened to me the next day. Its cause was an ordinary moment, banal in every outward way; but what it called up was another moment, not at all ordinary, from the archaic story ringed with warnings about looking back I had imagined concealed behind Orpheus and Lot's wife, and this glimpse did turn me into something like a pillar of salt, at least for a while.
My own cries had jerked me up out of the usual daymares, napmares mingling Vietnam and Millhaven. My shirt was stuck to my skin, and the cushion I used as a pillow was slick with sweat. I ripped off the shirt and groaned my way into the bathroom to splash cold water over my face. In a fresh shirt, I went up to my desk, sat down before the computer and searched for that capacity for surrender which gave me access to my book. I hated the whole idea of going outside again. As it had on every other afternoon for the past two weeks, the door into the book refused to open. I gave up, left the machine, and paced around my loft in a state suspended between life and death. My loft seemed like a cage built for some other prisoner altogether. It came to me that my strange afternoon treks around Manhattan might be an essential part of the night's work—that they might be what allowed my imagination to fill itself up again. It also came to me that this was magical thinking. But worthless as it was, it was the best idea I had, and I let myself out of the cage and went out onto Grand Street.
Warm summer light shone on the windows of art galleries and clothing stores, and women from New Jersey and Connecticut strolled like travelers from a more affluent planet among the locals. Today, most of the locals seemed to be young men in pressed jeans and rugby shirts. They were Wall Street trainees, embryo versions of Dick Mueller, who had taken over artists' lofts when the rents in Soho had pushed the artists into Hoboken and Brooklyn. I tried to picture Dick Mueller hovering over the arugula at Dean & DeLuca, but failed. Neither could I see Dick bragging to his friends about the Cindy Sherman photograph he had picked up for a good price at Metro Gallery. My mood began to improve.
I stopped in front of my local video shop, thinking about renting
