Nothing (29 page)

The man ends the video then almost as quickly as he’d begun, with his website information repeated for the cause, followed by a slow fade to a whole black, but for the same URL writ on the screen, replication within replication, waiting for the next viewer in the queue to wake it up, open it on. I close the tab and go back to my e-mail, where there is nothing new, even when I hit refresh.

The sum message of this video and others like it is: You are comfortable. You are safe. You should slowly breathe in and out. There are many adverbs. You cannot hear the speaker breathe him- or herself. “Relax,” they say. “Relax.” The only thing we seem to need to know is
it’s okay
. “That’s right,” they say. “Thaaat’s right.” The lilt of the voice like some secret broadcast over America, in slow uncombing. “Everything is just okay. No matter what happens, you will be calm and you will feel better than you have ever felt before.” Many programs like to suggest you floating up into or with clouds out of your bed. You might be encouraged to see yourself in the bed soft below you, the room familiar. You exit your body and your home. You might be transported into the sky or, if you like, a beach. “Even if you do not fall asleep during this,” many mention, “you will feel more rested and relaxed as a result.” The product, then, we may imagine, might not necessarily be something immediate to feel, but instead a product that will open in us without warning. Many of the meta-commentary-type allusions that pepper the dream-speak are concerned with allaying any fears that you can err here, affirming there is no intended massive goal. The direction, they insist, is yours. Wherever you want to go, you can go there. Any choice you make is the right choice. Your imagination belongs to you. “So relaxed,” they say. “So comfortable,” as if the words themselves in transition to you then must immediately become true. Somehow even the most horridly produced versions of these videos on YouTube often have more than one hundred thousand views, with comment testimonials from users proclaiming the product’s virility. And of course, beyond the idea that these tapes are working because of the actual instructions and their effect, what these directives succeed in more so is allowing the mind to become distracted from itself—you are no longer fixated on the monologue or further scrying, but aimed at something designed to awake a blank. All of these ads and videos together—loops in looping—form a network, an endless hole in which to drown. Perhaps the strangest thing, and at the same time the most obvious, is that most people by now are so tuned out to this kind of influx that this video effectively does not to most people exist. We’re so used to the pyramid of input that most of the day, during countless hours trolling, we don’t even see these icons and their connectors any longer, at least not consciously, or pragmatically. It’s become as clear as not looking at messy spots in your apartment or gaudy billboards near your house—they are part of an environment—more, they are the environment itself: the scab woke on the skin. We are tuned in to tuning out. And yet, in surrounding, they are there. They are looking at you looking or not looking. You are taking this all in.

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And so how the fuck under this false ceiling and its false ceiling and the house and all this meat now do we relax? What in one hour might seem the best thing might in another scream a knot, make one want to hit one in one’s mouth. Beyond even just the far-off future, there is the present minute of having constant day in constant time, a hundred ways to spin in any intuition. All these arts asking questions left unsaid. All these doors and hallways prying open and looming open and awake. The weight of decades of human dreaming. And every second, seen or unseen, within and around our heads, the spread. Each idea stung with all its gather. The unindexed histories of contexts and accusational collisions and theories, exponential. Imagine our history’s quantified timeline ideas translated into thicking glass—glass growing out and thicker in our air there, unseen. How difficult it can seem sometimes to breathe. And with that, the growing contention of how obvious all of this light is. How well we already know what we are underneath. How we are expected to keep curving. Reaching. Eating. Going. Hello. Hello. Hey.

“Just get wasted” is a common response from a lot of people when sleeping trouble is brought up. Indeed, being drunk, if not quite parallel to entering the unconscious via dreaming, affords rooms within rooms, warbled hallways, multiplying doors, ones often unremembered in the sobering process, through which the body, often, when forced to return, becomes ill. Much like a role-playing game’s “summoning sickness,” wherein new characters are unable to act in early rounds of their invocation due to the trauma there involved in being brought into the field, coming back out of the drunk state reiterates some common side effect of sleep medication, and insomnia: dizziness, nausea, exhaustion, sweating—damage.

But drunk sleep is shallow, prone to exit. The architecture of the unconscious rooms is nearer to the brain, deflating dream components under muffle, often unremembered, zapped. Like those faking their way through exercises seeing no results, the aggregate of many consecutive days of sleep through beverage-based sedation can pile up on the body, rested and not rested, groggy, gross. Sleep without the drink then might seem even harder, and more required to feel full. The doors, as with all forms of such influx, grow wider, their halls thereafter nearer-walled. Something greased in the gears of that depressant as an entry, dragging the cells down heavy, as with the same caloric fat in breakfast cereal, though also in the loosening of the cheeks and meat around the brain—a state not that far off from early insomniac gyration, where the air feels different but also new. Staying awake seventeen hours has been equated, in the drop of performance, to a blood-alcohol-content level of 0.05 percent (one to two beers, depending on your beef), and further corresponds in ruined performance with continued deprivation. In the same way, the effect of alcohol rising in the bloodstream begins with onset euphoria, which becomes lethargy, which becomes confusion, which becomes stupor, and, finally, coma, heading, again, toward death.

On particularly nasty nights post–high school, up late sweating in small apartments looking hard on into machines, I preferred the slur of NyQuil. At first I used the serving cup and filled it full twice, a double serving, justified by my frame. Lying down with that thick liquid purple light leaking inside me seemed to promise untold fortunes—like now, with its warnings of “marked drowsiness” and warnings against using while “operating machinery,” the substance turning on all through the blank spots there inside me, I could at last go quiet, lurch off, under the warming ceiling spreading out through my insides. Its bouquet like doctor’s exam-table paper and cheap tacky candy, bite like melted plastic child slides, aftertaste like licking the linings of a rarely ever worn winter coat—or something—still the head swims lightly. Still, a little jostle, slot machines, a slow stirring around the shoulders, at the skull’s edge a muffle lamp. Other nights two servings would say nothing, and still hours later I’d be in the same spot anywhere, if that much more groggy underneath the antihistamine. One thing about chemically altering the door of your coming and going is that when they don’t seem to click, the frustration becomes that much more severe. This door, even with these keys, did not open. So now then I need more keys that push harder. I must cut through all the locks. So I took more NyQuil. I’d swig off it fat-lipped, get half a bottle in, the slicky throttle of it enough to suggest drowse by perfume and lick alone. Maybe a few swigs in a row until it seemed right. Whichever. Drink enough until you can feel it in your head.

Still on the OTC side of the barnyard, Benadryl could work also, or any of the countless antihistamines—nonprescription sleep pills, the allergy medicines, the “night aids” and bedtime versions of other basic medications—Tylenol PM and what have you—each of which, by turns, I sucked down, depending on what there was around. Four or five Benadryl felt like light to lay inside, a humming, the warm rubbed rind of its waving coming on, if still not causing the over-thinking to black out, then at least there lapping at my body like a blanket, waiting—or
seeming waiting
, to one of the other me inside of me—for some small lapse in the obsess-chain, a slow down, so that therein we could slip in, gone, in witching hour. And the more you take the more you believe, the more you need to make yourself think it’s setting in, though underneath all this expectation what you don’t hear so often is that increasing antihistamine dosage doesn’t cause a comparable increase in response. While they benefit from having no side effects, and working better than a placebo, there’s only so much gain to glean from eating up those basic agents. A pat on the head, a little padding, but ultimately, through most hours, little more than something like a jacket, worn.

Worn, too, are the books that offer logic for the exit from the barrage, constrained advices aimed less at direct motions and more like overall life guides:
Set up regular bedtimes and rising times, including holidays and weekends
, certain books will tell you, milking on the body’s wanting to be programmed, made a box. The funny thing about this advice, though, is that another common piece, often listed in the same spiel, is:
Don’t get in bed until you’re tired. Don’t spend extra time in bed awake reading or watching TV; only sleep until you’re rested; don’t nap.
The wider logic here would be to set up a time in scheduling when you are usually tired enough on most days to be ready when it hits, but inside the wide strain of stimulus, continuous redressing, constant input, and so on, it seems harder now than ever—and again growing by the minute—to predict where the body is meant to be. Not to mention the frequent further advice of
Don’t flop in the bed for longer than thirty minutes; if you can’t sleep get up and read or watch TV until you’re tired
, which has the benefit of removing the frustration period, but also further displaces the timeline. The people I know who seem to tend toward those regular settings are those programmed by their nine-to-five, most of whom having been at it so long they know to fit their obsessing and consuming into a specific set of slots—I watch TV now, I shop now, I eat at this time, when I want to go to bed I go to bed. Concerns of territorializing the environment of the sleep state. Building inertia, consecrating space; the idea being that if you can decenter the errored condition in the blood, by negotiation and conditioning, rather than meds, you can change the expectation, the nature, and emerge clean.
Schedule worry time during the day
, suggests another fragment of advice, which alone seems so insane and off base, as if anxiety were a muscle one could gather up and outlay only in a 3' × 3' square section of the dining room partitioned off under thick glass—though really, such rigor and demonstrative restraint seems cozy, even expected, in the fields of office buildings and neon shopping space, where behavior out of the frame could not only cause one to look bananas, but could result in further repercussions, psychic leakage.

Another manual goes so far as to define mathematical procedures for determining sleep efficiency (SE), constructing logo-speak over what should be, at its heart, the simplest thing of all:

Total sleep time (TST)
——————————— x 100 = SE
¹⁹⁹
Total time in bed (TIB)

This SE coefficient is then to be used in maximizing efficiency by setting a “sleep window,” where there is a terminal period between the concrete time one wakes up (not to vary) and the time one goes to bed (to be shifted based on level of sleepiness at bedtime, which is also given mathematical terrain, a seven-point scale known as the Stanford Sleepiness Scale, where “1 = feeling alert; wide awake” and “7 = sleep onset soon; lost struggle to stay awake.” The very fact that this continuum ends in expectation—the perceived idea of “Here I go, I really am about to go under now” being, often, only one of many mirage doors in a long night’s hallway. In the meantime, further comfort can occur through consecrating and reinforcing the sleep environment as a place of rest (including removing outside light, as the presence of even tiny LCD glow such as from clocks and VCR faces have been shown to dramatically influence quality of sleep), as well as carefully monitoring the substances brought into the body, particularly stimulants, and volumes of liquid large enough to make you need to pee.

What we’re supposed to do, then, is spread all of this worry throughout the day, focusing on attending to these moments actively and in consideration of the night, so that by the time we hit the pillow we’re not only physically rolled upon, but we’ve spent enough brain light on the contraindicators that we might, in our backminds, actually be settled over the idea of interruption, distraction, fright.
Do something relaxing and enjoyable before bedtime
appears in the same list as the worry scheduling, seeming both a fair suggestion and one worthy of an interminable angst—
Like what? How should I relax? Look up sports scores? Eat a scone? This TV has nine hundred channels. Even my e-mail is making sales. Some nights I enjoy music, but tonight the headphones seem to be eating hard into my head. I can’t sit still. My arms feel like someone else’s. I keep thinking there is someone at the door, and the phone keeps ringing, and, and, and . . .
Beyond the mental, masturbation might fill the purpose, teasing the body into a definitive release, and many nights surely that unlocking can kill a body’s stress, but it doesn’t always serve to kill the mind—in fact, the mind sometimes I’ve found in those post-spaces can come even more awakened, spun with the fantasy of flesh architecture or want for want—or on the opposite dimension, a more complete sense of desperation, a silence interrupted thereafter by having peeled away the basic need and awakened again obsessive thinking into
now what
. Any act that might work one night might not the next night, or might not come again, therefore creating only more frustration or compulsion or distinct confinement to be used to rail against itself. Often the clog just wants more clog.