4
Good morning, it’s 4:52 a.m., and I’m very glad to be conscious when nobody else is conscious. To get to this point, where I am the sole node of wakefulness at the heart of the sleeping world, takes a fair amount of preparatory work. I have to get out of bed carefully, so as not to wake Claire, and I have to put on my bathrobe; I have to cinch snug the flannel sash and come downstairs by the front stairs, so as not to wake my son, whose bedroom is at the top of the back stairs, and I have to make coffee.
Making coffee in the dark, especially when the moon has set, or when there is no moon, is a skill that improves with practice. First you pull out the old filter, with its layer of coffee sludge, and pin its sides together like a soft taco so that you can get it safely into the garbage can without spilling, and then you rinse out the filter basket and the carafe, taking special care to clean the little hole in the plastic top of the carafe, which is like the hole in the top of a baby’s head, where the coffee tinkles down from the basket and into the baby’s brain. And you stretch the fluted mass of paper filters so that your fingers can feel and take hold of one layer — a sensation similar to turning the pages of an eighteenth-century book — and you settle the filter in the basket so that none of its sides are likely to flop over, allowing the water to flow around the coffee without drawing out its liquor. When in darkness you scoop new coffee into the new filter, the danger is that the coffee will unbeknownst to you stay stuck in the scooper, and that you will think you are pouring in scoop after scoop when in fact nothing is going in. Today to be sure I poked my finger into the mound in the filter until I crunched bottom: I felt the coffee grains go past my first knuckle and a little way to the second — but I added another scoop to be sure.
Filling the carafe with water is not so difficult as measuring the coffee, because the sink is directly under the window, and I can sense the weight of the water; but when I pour the water into the top of the coffeemaker sometimes some streams out and down the sides and onto the counter. But who cares? It’s just water. It’ll be dry by the time there is light.
Then, back in this living room, I position the chair and make sure my computer is plugged in, since its battery no longer holds a charge. I bought it for $250 from a used-computer store several weeks ago: once it was the sleekest and most desirable of black laptops, now it is practically junk. Someone, not me, has worn away the stippling on the space bar under the resting place of the right thumb, and the upright of the T is gone; I’ve changed the screen colors so that they display dark blue letters against a black background, almost illegible even in the dark, and when I’m ready to start typing I tip the screen towards me, so that it nearly grazes the tops of my prancing fingers. I’ve always liked the phrase touch-typing: I type by touch, staring at, or at least looking steadily at, the fire.
When I lit the fire this morning, a pompadour styling of flame came forward from underneath and swooped back around a half-detached piece of bark. Right now there is one flame near the front that has a purple underpainting but a strong opacity of yellows and oranges and whites: it is flapping like one of those pennants that used to be strung around used-car lots. You don’t see those so much anymore: multicolored vinyl triangular flags on cords that hopeful sales managers hung from pole to pole to offer a sense of carnival.
5
Good morning, it’s 4:20 a.m. — You know, I used to have trouble sleeping, but now I have much less trouble because I’m getting up at four in the morning. Before five, anyway. I’m so sleepy that I sleep well. For some years I relied on suicidal thoughts to help me go to sleep. By day I’m not a particularly morbid person, but at night I would lie in bed imagining that I was hammering a knitting needle into my ear, or swan-diving off a ledge into a black void at the bottom of which were a dozen sharp, slippery stalagmites. Wearing a helmet and pilot’s gear, I would miniaturize myself, and wait for a giant screwdriver to unscrew the hatch at the nose of a bullet. I would be lowered into the control room of the bullet, whereupon the hatch would be screwed tight over me. At a certain moment, I would flick a switch and the gun would fire, throwing me back in my seat. I would shoot out the muzzle and over the sleeping city, following a path towards my own house; I would crash through the window and plunge toward my own head, and when the bullet dove into my brain I would fall asleep.
Now I lie in bed and think a few random things about soil erosion or painting a long yellow strip on the side of a black ship, and because I’ve gotten up so early, I just fall asleep. The soporific suicidalism peaked several years ago, when we were staying for a few months in San Diego, so that I could “encourage” a group of doctors who were supposed to be revising their textbook. My brain was alive with the nightcrawlerly unfinishedness of the project, and there were four palm trees that I could see from the window of the room that I was using as a temporary office. The palms were beautiful trees in their way, especially as part of a quartet, but there is an intrinsic scrawniness to the palm, which grows like a flaring match, with a little fizzle of green at the top. It is doing only what is absolutely necessary to do to be a tree; and it has big, coarse leaves — intemperate leaves — and the bark shows its years on the outside, so that the tree has no secrets: it doesn’t have to die and be cut down before you can date its birth. I would look up at those four trees as I worked, and then at night I would imagine digging my own grave, because it just seemed that it would be so much easier to die than to get those three contentious doctors to contribute their material for the new and heavily revised edition of Spinal Cord Trauma. Claire and the children would be fully provided for as long as I was able to craft a way of dying that didn’t seem like suicide. But eventually the new edition was written, and then it was copyedited and indexed and published and distributed, and now medical-school students are buying it and underlining things in it, and all is as it should be.
At around four-thirty, sometimes later, the freight-train whistle goes off. At seven I have to get dressed and drop my daughter Phoebe off at school and drive to work. I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty. A hundred years ago, a trolley line and two passenger trains came through this town; Rudyard Kipling reportedly stayed here for a week on his way inland to his house in Vermont, where he wrote the Just So Stories. “How the Leopard Got His Spots” is a good one. My mother read it to my brother and me, and it changed the way I thought about shadows. There were several places in our yard that offered Kipling’s kind of jigsawed shade. The euonymus tree that grew near the edge of our property worked best. Euonymus bark has beautiful fins, and under this low tree I could sit and watch the sunlight break into pieces.