One, one, one, one, one, one, I go, whispering. One, one, one, one!, like I’m pissed off, like I’m ready to punch myself in the face. I flip my bedroom pillow to the cooler side. I count sheep until the sheep melt into potatoes, and the potatoes stretch into pills, and the pills elongate into hospital stretchers.
Because when the paramedics strapped down Wicked College John, one paramedic folded up the wheels of the gurney while the other slid it into the ambulance. When I’d always thought maybe the wheels folded on their own, or always imagined how what if they separated from the gurney and coasted away, in a slow, infinite straight line that ignored gravity, the way a space shuttle peels from its tanks. And I figure out that I might be falling asleep, that tiredness has won only for now, and I’m finally no longer thinking about the zombie-mint smell of the hospital waiting area, or whether or not it’s weird that Necro really wanted to sleep in his own bed and drove us back to our cars instead of waiting there longer.
But once the actual shape of my room appears through my closed eyelids—the sliding closet door with the WEASE bumper sticker on it, or, on my dresser, the Don Mattingly puppet I made from a milk carton in third grade—my brain thinks: Sleep has arrived! Then I realize I’m thinking this, and the stadium lights in my brain whoosh back on, and I jolt awake again, counting.
So when I sit up and get my night eyes, I decide to forget counting and focus, really hard, as a Sleep Portal, on this little glass particle, way off in my mind.
Hold on. It’s turning into something.
I look at the light squeezing through the bottom of my bedroom door. As in, I can’t remember if we always leave the hallway light on the whole night, or did Mom recently start leaving it on to make it look like we’re awake when we’re really asleep.
Like when I was way younger. Sometimes, I’d wake up around midnight. I could hear the dog-whistle-quiet noise from the living room’s TV, and Real Dad through the air vent, watching Mr. Show, laughing angrily, like he was showing Mom he really got the jokes.
Or how, once, way even before that, when I decided to sneak out of my room, I could see Mom, at the kitchen table, staring at a four-pack of cigars she’d just bought—a hobby she’d taken on to one-up Real Dad’s going to Bug Jar shows. But she threw up every time she smoked them.
And Real Dad would pass out in the bathroom, some Popcorn Wylie album sounding like tinsel through his Discman headphones, a large bottle of Cantillon half-full next to the sink, some issue of Preacher face-down in his eczema foot bath. “Woman thou hast betrayed me!” he slurred into my shirt once, when I shouldered him to the living room couch. But I’d kind of agreed with him, because why else would you take a foot bath and read Preacher if you weren’t right?
After we helped Real Dad move into his new place in Penfield, Mom took me out for a drive. “Did you really like your father?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I sort of snapped at her. “I mean, didn’t you?”
Her room is next to mine. I can’t tell if I can hear anything in there.
There are times when I can sit in my desk chair at night, with maybe only the chalky fluorescent desk light on, and everything I’ve ever thought about before suddenly harmonizes into one chord. And when I stare long enough, the Fred Flintstone piggy bank on my dresser, suddenly, will look like a totem pole mask worn by whoever is going to come to me in my sleep and slit my throat.
Or, maybe this glass-particle feeling I’m feeling is that feeling when you stay awake in your room until you’re sure the rest of your friends, who went out without calling you, have gone to bed.
So I start thinking that, maybe, the glass-particle feeling is like those times at night after I closed my eyes long enough and I couldn’t tell if I fell asleep. I’d open my eyes, and the light at the bottom of my door would be gone. And the dishwasher would be on, sloshing water, like the inside of a dark mouth.
And the thing is, I begin to understand this glass-particle business more when I turn on CMF. Next to my bed, the red light from my radio’s ON switch stretches out a few shadows in the dark. CMF has been playing the same eight songs in the exact same order between 4 and 5 a.m. for about four months. Def Leppard’s “Hysteria,” the fifth song in the rotation, comes on. And, during the outro, when the band coasts on the D chord, it gives me this stomach-level feeling, which made me stay in my room all night when I was fifteen, imagining girls who I liked moving out of town, until Lip Cheese or whoever called to tell me that Necro wanted to climb on the high school roof that night.
And the feeling I get, I realize: The stomach-level feeling is this same actual fifteen-year-old feeling, this basic intro-to-sad kind of thing. Not like a looking-back kind of sad—like, “Oh, I remember those sad times.” The feeling I get now, while “Hysteria” ends, feels like I am actually in the present tense of being fifteen.
Like there are different levels of being sad. Fifteen-year-old sad, climbing-on-the-school-roof sad, DWI-ing-it-in-one-direction-until-gas-runs-out sad. They’re still there, not gotten over, filed away. The Sad Archives, I’d probably call them. Here I am, still there.
That’s what this glass-particle feeling is. The same way, when you dream, it can break your heart when someone forgets to bring a stapler to a funeral. But next scene, life is fine. But still, all the while, there’s this voice in the back of everything you’re dreaming. The kind of voice that, when I finally do fall asleep tonight, asks, like it’s the beginning of an AM station politics debate, if freinium hens can munter themselves.