would brand me: it would go through my brain, and make
pictures there of itself: every figure of horror would escape the
night and enter my brain: and each mundane piece of a living
day, the coming light, would grow huge and induce fear: a
drip under the sink was a torrent, irresolvable, menacing: so
there was no time to sleep: and the plaster falling from the
ceiling would become the promised disaster: and there was no
time to sleep: and the crack in the toilet threatened sewage and
flood: and so, it was impossible to sleep: and there was the
landlord to be called, and the windows were open, and congestion in the chest, and shopping to do, and noises on the roof, and some strange sounds from below: and so it was
impossible to sleep. The drip under the sink would mean calling
the super: and this meant no sleep: because he was a small,
mean, angry man, aloof but radiating hot cruelty, one little
man knotted into one fist of a man. His wife, having no English, would answer the phone and in terror stammer out
“ asleep” or “ not here” or “ no, no. ” Once she begged me in
splatters of languages I did not speak: do not make me get
him, miss, he will hurt me. The sink would be stopped up
beyond help, or there would be no heat or no hot water, for us
in this cold place a disaster of unparalleled dimensions, and
she would whisper in chokes: do not make me get him, miss,
he will hurt me. I knew the sound of the swollen larynx waiting
to burst.
The day would be solidly established, that graceless light,
and the people of the day would begin moving on the street,
the buses would come one after another, the traffic would rev
up for the day ahead, the smoke from all the motor engines
would begin escalating up, the noise would become fearsome,
the chatter from the street would become loud and busy, the
click click click of shoes and boots would swallow up the
cement, the voices would become various and in many languages: and I would make my way down the hall to the small 112
room with the broken springs in the mattress under the open
window and try to sleep.
I dreamed, for instance, of being in a tropical place. It was all
green, that same steady bright unchanging green under too
much light that one finds in the steamy tropics, that too-lush
green that hurts the eyes with its awful brightness, only it was
duller because it seemed to know it was in a dream. And in the
steaming heat of this too-green jungle with its long thin sharp
leaves and branches resembling each other, more like hungry
animals than plants, stretched out sideways not up, growing
out wide not up, but still taller than me, there was a clearing,
a sort of burnt-out, brown-yellow clearing, short grass, flat, a
circle surrounded by the wild green bush. There were chairs,
like the kinds used in auditoriums, folding chairs set up, about
eight of them in a circle like for a consciousness-raising group
or a small seminar. The sun burned down. I was standing.
