SLEEP WAS A biological imperative for every creature on earth. It was essential because it did something the awake brain could not do. The mother knew as she watched the sleeping child that the brain was taking what it learned during the day and placing it into more efficient storage regions. To consolidate all the memories, certain genes up-regulated during sleep and got activated. Memory tracks were laid out, categorized, distilled. The brain synthesized some memories during the day, but these memories were enclosed and concretized in the night. Synaptic plasticity strengthened connections, and it was a beautiful thing. In the night, new inferences were drawn leading to insights the next day.
The limbic system, she knew, amps up during REM sleep, and the brain’s emotion streams fear while rational thought is dormant. The secondary Visual Cortex, striving to decipher, ricochets through it. In REM sleep, a small region in the brain that paralyzes the body is alive. Immobile, the streaming video of one’s life passes by.
The mother loved the drama of the night. Had she not had the child, she might have been a Scholar of Sleep, she thinks, a Professor of Sleep, or at the least, a Sleep Advocate, tirelessly working for the Rights of Sleepers in the hospital’s deepest recesses.
In the night, the sleepers might be closely monitored and observed, and experiments might be conducted. The object would be to scramble, detoxify, and discard old fears, so that there was room for new ones. Circadian rhythms could be measured by testing saliva. Open your mouth; sleep researchers might serenely take a swab.
Dreams take the day and cannibalize it, using real life, such as it is, for props and spare parts, defanging fear—making it stupid, useless, harmless. Close your eyes, says the mother to the child. Everything was changing. Sleep was the ingredient for change.
Melatonin, as a child grows, makes it harder and harder to go to sleep early—teenagers need as much sleep as toddlers but cannot begin their descent until midnight. It’s science, the mother says.
The child loves the idea of it—that she one day might be the one to keep the night vigil, while her mother sleeps.
VOCABULARY IS SYNTHESIZED by the hippocampus early in the night. During slow-wave sleep, the motor skills of enunciation are processed. In slow-wave sleep, we practice our French. Auditory memories are encoded across all stages: the song the bird sang, the music from chorus, the piano lesson, the mother’s voice.
Memories that are emotionally laden get processed during REM sleep: the mother upstairs dizzy, for instance, or the way more and more, the Grandmother from the North Pole seems to tip away from them on her axis.
The more you learn during the day, the more you need to sleep at night, and earlier and earlier the mother and the child grew sleepy.
A WOLF DRESSED in a tuxedo with the moon under its feet, and on its head a crown of twelve stars, rose in the sky. What to make of this wolf in a prom outfit surrounded by a halo of stars? the mother wondered. Emblazoned behind him was Jupiter, larger than it had ever been, closer to the earth than in all recorded time.
Next a red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and diadems appeared in the west. Its tail swept away a third of the stars in the sky and hauled them down to the earth.
And after that in the east: Mr. Min. How are you doing, Mr. Min? He waves to her and motions to the box he holds.
What an unusual night, the mother thought to herself.
When the visitations were over, she sloshed through stars, back to the house, and wiped the florescence off her feet before entering the room where the child was sound asleep, dreaming. The wolf stood over the child’s bed. Sleep spindles and the presence of Complex K told the mother that the child would not be waking for some time yet.
THE NEXT MORNING, Mr. Min appeared again, tapping the mother on the shoulder. What is it, Mr. Min? He asks if he might take the bats that are asleep beneath the mother’s shutters. Be my guest, the mother says. Curled into small balls, he plunks them in a bowl; there must have been a hundred. My son, he says, he loves them very much.
Come, Mr. Min, and pluck the sleeping bats, the mother whispered. Come and pluck my sleeping bats from underneath the shutters for your son. He smiles and is gone. Gone to pluck the bats and plunk them in a bowl. His son, he loves them very much.
AS THEIR FRIEND down the road grew smaller inside the dark house, the hole outside grew larger and deeper. Mute boulders had been excavated and served as a reminder of the severity and silence at the heart of the earth. Just when it seemed the great cavity could not get any bigger or deeper, it was lined with concrete. At the time the concrete was still wet, the man inside could still walk a short distance, and he went out into the day with his wife and infant son so that they could press their hands into the smooth wet surface and make a permanent imprint of their lives together. A little while after that, the hole lined with cement, along with the family’s hands, was filled with water.
The man’s wife dips the baby again and again into the blue, and the baby squeals with delight. Often the priest comes now to talk with the man, and afterwards the priest walks out to the cement cavity filled with water where the woman and baby are waiting.
THE PAINTER TOLD the child: she remembered that after her father died, she would watch the train each day on the horizon depart at 9 AM, and that she could still see it crossing the horizon at noon, that was how vast the world was, and it was not until 3 that the train disappeared entirely. That was what life was like on the Plains. I was a small, magical girl, she said, with a wand that could not save my father; he clutched his heart, and the world was flat and wide and the train was so tiny and the horizon was a hovering stripe.
For years she painted the blue horizon, multiplied. The painter takes the child’s hand and they move through rooms and rooms of stripes. It took a long time—almost my whole life, but finally I found it: the grid; and the child saw stripes that moved back and forth and also up and down. And that is what I wanted all along.
The Mourning Party moves along the grid now to the Spiegelpalais. It’s a strange diagonal step we take, they say, strangely cheerful, but a bit bewildered, the invisible father leading the way.
MR. MIN APPEARS again, some miles away. He has come with his cages to catch the woodchucks because woodchucks, Aunt Eloise says, are the kind of creatures that can take down a whole barn if you let them. How many can you catch in those Have a Heart Traps? Uncle Lars asks.
Oh it depends, says Mr. Min. The lady said to come and trap them. The lady says she is at her wit’s end.
How much to catch them? Uncle Lars asks.
Fifteen dollars each, says Mr. Min.
Uncle Lars can’t complain.
Aunt Eloise had called to have Mr. Min come and trap the varmints in his very nice Have a Heart Traps and take them with him, but when the varmints were caught, Aunt Eloise was away.
In the cage, the woodchuck is making a tunneling motion. After a while, exhausted, it stops. Uncle Lars looks at the large face of the creature that fills the cage. On the radio someone is saying the war is botched, there is no way to make any good of it.
Mr. Min is getting out of his truck; he’s brought along his grown-up son—he loves him very much. Mr. Min, where have you been? The woodchuck has been in here a long time, Uncle Lars says, pointing to the cage, and with that Uncle Lars hands the cage to Mr. Min.
What will you do with him now? Uncle Lars asks.
I will let him out in a green, green field, some miles away from here, says Mr. Min.
And what happens out there? Uncle Lars asks, lighting his pipe.
Out there? says Mr. Min.
Out there, says Uncle Lars.
Out there he will have no place to go. The others will shun him. And eventually he will die.
Uncle Lars blows some smoke into the cage, and thinks awhile.
How much would it cost to let that woodchuck go? asks Uncle Lars.
Right here?
Uncle Lars looks around and nods.
Fifteen dollars, Mr. Min whispers. On one condition.
Yes?
You won’t tell the lady.
Uncle Lars winks.
And that is what it was like with Uncle Lars and why the child loved him most. He always asked one question extra.
UNCLE LARS SAYS the soldiers on the green, green grass are only children. Boys in helmets, they might easily have been playing football. When day is done someone throws a last ball, and they take off their helmets, then lie awhile on the green, green grass and fall asleep. They are not expendable fodder this time. Their lives are not sacrificed for a few meters of land.
THE LADY CALLS Mr. Min one day to retrieve his cages. She is pleased with how many woodchuck faces she has seen, and she is happy that so many have been released into a green, green field far away. She has seen not hide nor hair, she says, since Mr. Min has been on the case. She shakes his hand goodbye. In the driveway, she sees a large, slumped shape in the front seat of his truck. I see you have brought your dog today, Aunt Eloise says.
No, Mr. Min says, that is my son. I love him very much.