SLEEPER

The sleeper developed a fixation on a memory from childhood. It was very early in his life – when he was three or four and hadn’t yet fully succumbed to the harsh realities of insomnia. He was with his parents and travelling east in a train. A long, long train that took days to get to the other side of the country. During daylight he fixed on the vast stretches of open space, of sky and an endless flat surface that his father had called nothingness. He remembered being amazed by this, as to him it looked like a fullness he had never seen before. Intermittently, he would see and be told the names of kangaroos, dingoes, emus, camels and eagles. There were never too many and they didn’t come frequently, so every sighting was an event. The odd clump of bluebush, a rare wizened casuarina, filled his imagination out of the flatness. The sky was wakefulness at its most complete. A wisp of cloud was a waking dream.

Thinking back, he felt there was a truth for him in this journey – that his sleeplessness was of planar qualities, and that it needed to be unwound. At night, for they were on the train for three nights, they had slept in a sleeper carriage, and though he remembered nothing about the first night, he remembered the other two nights and how he had stared out of the window at the stars which moved with him, and hadn’t feel tired at all, and hadn’t told anyone he’d stayed awake all night, and they never knew. When they had emerged from the flat place and came to hills and finally mountains, he had been dissatisfied, and his inability to sleep had bothered him.

He hadn’t been west for many years and hadn’t travelled back by train since that time when he was a small child. His parents were long dead and he only had a distant auntie to catch up with, but he invented a research project that could only be realised on the west coast and used that to justify the trip.

He only half admitted in any kind of cogent way that he was making the train journey to unravel himself. He booked a roomette, which seated you during the day and converted to a sleeper at night, and took the necessary reading to cover three nights of stark wakefulness. A sleeper in name only, his life’s experience told him. He took some pride in thinking that almost four thousand kilometres of this line in fact used the synthetic railway sleeper he’d invented. The rail lines sat more securely on his sleeper and they lasted a lot longer than the old wooden jobs. He’d thought of the design at three o’clock in the morning, when his first real girlfriend was sound asleep with plugs in her ears and a cover over her eyes to prevent any disturbance at all from his nightly perambulations.

His first night on the train was like his first day, and he read two books he’d saved up for the occasion. Reading has been his salvation and damnation, his mum would say. She told him that as a baby he was the perfect little sleeper. Like clockwork. Never any trouble. Fall asleep as soon as he was put down. But gradually the desire to sleep wore off. Would sleep fitfully, couldn’t settle, grew irritable. But after he’d learnt to read, there was a form of liberation. It brought peace to the house. When his parents noticed his bedside lamp on in the small hours of the morning, and called out for him to put it off and go to sleep, to stop all that reading or it would make him blind or mad or both, he continued silently with a torch under the bedcovers.

The second night passed in similar fashion and the train staff couldn’t help remarking that he seemed not to sleep – the bed had not been disturbed, and when they asked if he wanted it pulled down, he said, No need … But when he reached the entirely flat place, the treeless place, his mind filled with its vastness and he fell into one of his waking sleeps. The fact that it was not entirely flat, but rose in gentle and elusive curves, as if planar surfaces had been forced slightly upwards from beneath, as if the world’s curve was closer and both less and more than he’d realised, confused his topographical memory and assumptions. The horizons were close and gathering fast. All circles and spirals, and the planes were twisting like water down a plughole. His sight blurred. Someone in my business should have this at the forefront of his mind, he insisted. He absorbed every detail, and it was as if the most vivid series of dreams was cascading into his reality. He followed an eagle across the vastness and became that eagle. He could see through its eyes, and homed in on the nest jammed in an old tower near the railway lines. There, awaiting him, was his partner for life. They shared a common vision and set out together over the gibber, over the sand made from shells ground down over the millions of years since this place was an inland sea, the bluebush. They flew together into the radiated zone and felt the forbidden eat into their feathers, claws, beak and flesh. The other eagle, the female, his life partner, swooped and snatched a snake from the ground. It hung from her beak, a writhing curlicue.

He skipped his meals. An attendant knocked on his door, poked his head in and asked if he was okay and he heard himself saying ‘fine’, but it wasn’t him speaking. The attendant pulled a face, as if confronting something slightly off-putting. The sleeper’s early loss of hair, his squint, his indeterminate skin colour, the early appearance of a stoop, were put down to his lack of sleep. Few said this to his face after his successes. But out here, in the desert, he was strangely vulnerable, anonymous, exposed in his roomette. Things could be thought and said with impunity.

Images from a vast, sleeping world burgeoning with potential spilt through his head, but no ideas connected them and no conclusions were reached. Kangaroos paralleled the train, counterbalancing the vastness, the immensity, with the deft curve of their tails. He was full, replete. He was inside the shape of sleeping and waking at once.

When night fell he got up, went to the bathroom, returned, took a big drink of water and decided it was time. He lowered his bed, undressed, and climbed in. It was so narrow and the rattling of the train so intense that he couldn’t see how he’d stay put without full concentration. Through the window he could see the stars – many more than had been named, than had been charted. He could see all the stars to be seen in that part of the sky. He could see the stars as if through daylight. And then he forgot who he was and forgot what wakefulness is. Was. He slept the sleep of the dead.

Obituaries appeared in papers across the country, even around the world. Some written by colleagues, some by old lovers, and some by strangers. Most were written by those who write obituaries for a living. All of them, however, finished with the same words, as if the ironies of his sleepless life were swept away by the fact that he died in the way we’d all like to die. They marvelled at how he had accomplished so much in one lifetime, but those last words made his nighttime musings acceptable and human: ‘passed away peacefully in his sleep, while travelling across the country he did so much for …’