MY NIGHT RITUAL WOULDN’T work anymore. It was strange and frightening, as if there can be an expiration date on experience. Or maybe it was all in the natural order of things. Jay was dying and so was everything that had existed between us.
Sleep should be easier, I thought, as simple as all the other body functions. But it wasn’t. I used to sleep quickly and well after lovemaking. Then talk was an effort, a valiant attempt at continued companionship. Our heads were as heavy as those of children kept up past their bedtime.
Jay was the bearer of water and oranges, the one to check windows and door locks. I’d watch him in his rounds through half-lidded eyes, feeling thirsty, and sleepy, and warm. I lay across the bed, into his territory, still looking for warm places his body had left. Still trying to fit us together, our shadows and our thoughts. Jay came back to bed bearing two brimming glasses of water, an absurd and naked waiter. His hair even darker with dampness, his chest hair flattened, his penis still half-erect, as if in fond memory. “You have a lovely, lovely body,” I once said.
“We aim to please, missus,” he answered and the water sloshed over the sides of the glasses. I could hardly stay awake long enough to drink it. Ah, sweet and natural sleep.
I tried to bring that back now, tried to conjure up the past again, willing to take whatever came along, the good moments or the bad. But nothing came at all. There is no life after death, I was convinced of that. But the life before it should be a more tangible and solid thing.
I kept the light on in the room the way I did when I was a child, but now it was a seduction. I wanted ghosts to enter. When I slept finally I always came awake abruptly, as if someone shook me, and then it was to that strange mixture of natural and artificial light. I tried to bring back the lovemaking, or the quarrels, or even ordinary domestic moments, but nothing held. There were other people awake in the building. Lumber creaked, plumbing complained, and the real world intruded. Maybe I had outgrown the need for sleep. There was a hot dry energy I had never known before. But I couldn’t apply it to anything. Books refused to be read, food became inedible, and simple television programs couldn’t be followed, as if language itself had become obsolete. I walked back and forth in the bedroom saying, I have to think, I have to think.
I opened the drawer of the night table. Next to my diaphragm, to old check stubs and some loose pennies, was the vial of sleeping capsules. I took one and held it up to the bed lamp, trying to see through it. But its redness was as dense and mysterious as sleep itself. I could just take it and be done with it. It would be like a swift and painless blow to the head. But I hesitated. It would be the end of something that I dreaded to give up. The end of my control over things, that was one part. The end of memory as fantasy, of Jay entering this room through the magic of my will. His voice and his presence. It was a leave-taking in a way, a rehearsal for the real thing. Good-bye. Good-bye then, I thought, weary and sick with the knowledge.
I put the capsule on the back of my tongue and forced it down my throat without water. I gagged slightly and then it was gone. I climbed back into bed again, half sitting against both pillows, waiting for its journey and mine to begin.