In the morning, when you awaken, the light that fills your room is that of a sun pushing through a sky thick with clouds. You hear the light sound of drizzle outside, and on the exposed skin of your shoulders and neck and head you feel damp cold air, and you pull the light blanket a little higher. For a moment, you tell yourself, for just a moment you’ll stay in bed. In a moment you reset the alarm for an hour hence, and when that hour comes you push it back another hour. You half sleep during those two hours: your body is rested, what it’s doing now is languishing; you merely lie in bed. Your eyes are closed, your mind neither dreaming nor focusing on anything as definite as a thought. When the alarm rings again you shut it off. By now you’ve abandoned the day, and you turn the clock around, turn off the ringer on the bedside phone, turn your body over and feel, more than anything else, the pressure of your pierced right nipple on the mattress. But masturbation, you feel, would be wrong, a break in the pact you’re making with laziness, and, slowly, you convince your body to relax. You’re hungry, but when you realize you’re not going to do anything that requires energy that hunger becomes less important, ignorable, eventually unnoticeable; in the same way the pressure from your bladder recedes. The rainy day passes: sometimes you lie awake and sometimes you sleep; when you sleep you dream sometimes, and your dreams are deep and vivid but disappear each time you wake. When you’re awake you notice the gradations of light in the room, morning’s gray, afternoon’s silver, evening’s almost brown shadows, and then, inevitably, it’s black again. There’s no strength anywhere in your body; the urge to stay in bed all day, whatever else it was, wasn’t vampiric: you’re tired, and ready to sleep the night away. You set the alarm for tomorrow, and in the few minutes before you fall into a sound sleep you have the only clear thought you’ve had all day (because your mind, too, your mind was lazy today). You have done nothing today, absolutely nothing. But you haven’t wasted this day; you have, instead, erased it. When tomorrow comes you will be no closer to death than you were yesterday.