Nothing (30 page)

Mention this ever-spooling solution list to most anybody and more than half have some little trick to pass along, something that might have worked for them or their grandmother among some long night. And often, too, these things, in some desperation, these things appear rising in the wash as wishes or mirage. Regardless of what doubt the long patterns have inscribed, any new thing might still be a potential key. Inevitably, and almost by default, they fall into place on the long list of Things I’ve Tried That Haven’t Worked. Part of the problem herein seems to have to do with resignation—a skepticism for the cure probably leading only that much more headstrong to an awakeness. At some point, even in your want and wish for x-ing out, you almost can’t help but strand yourself therein inside it and thus be cultishly committed to the idea that nothing short of hard-core overriding will make the sleeplessness desist. And so in some ways it becomes self-perpetuating, both consciously and unconsciously, as if it were a state in wanting, a terror badge. Still, no matter how deep this resignation may take hold of the unsleeper’s will, there’s likely no point at which, given a quick reliable out, you’d throw yourself into it whole on.

Stagnated or sealed out of the world of the public remedy, then, the next mode for many turns to more. Antidepressants are considered strong options for those with histories of depression, pain, or substance-abuse problems—the lack of sleep therein likely often a byproduct or shared terror floor. Among these medications, trazodone has been around since the 1960s, a second-generation antidepressant, and remains popular for its chemic lack of addictive properties, if still surrounded by endless potential inner destructions—drowsiness, fatigue, headaches, decreased sex drive, dizziness, as well as priapism in 1 in 6,000 men, 1 in 23,000 of whom will require surgery and suffer potential impotence for life. In addition, popular painkillers such as OxyContin. Darvon. Vicodin. Percocet. Percodan, Demerol. Lortab, Norco, Lorcet, though not prescribed in cases of pure sleeplessness, are often used for that end, sometimes, under the roof of self-medication, serving as a doorway unto death. The laundry list of effects and odds in deep relation with medication has for the most part become another feature in the stream of new info we as a community receive.

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For years inside my own mess I’d gone on simply worming, resolved to remain floated in whatever unsleeping space my brain would bring. And yet, as household orders failed, and times stretched longer, the length of night began to grow, becoming just slightly more unbearable and hated in its new reach, night after night, night in night. In general I’d avoided doctors, appearing before them only when there were no other ways around, mainly out of some aversion to the small rooms and the white paper, the waiting behind doors for bodies who make their living negotiating, feeding, feeling, peering into other bodies. In the same way I’d let my wisdom teeth barrel in reckless, creating slow screw sound inside my mouth, which some nights would keep me up or wake me, the same way some people grind their molars through their night hours. This state, known as bruxism, is actually one of the most common forms of non-thought-sound-based insomnia, wherein people will grind their whites together so hard as to cause damage, ruin their smile. In addition to the usual symptoms that accompany sleep disorders, bruxism has been related to aggressive personalities and those with suppressed anger. Because it occurs during sleep, it can be difficult to detect bruxism, outside of waking symptoms such as chewed mouth tissue, teeth cracking, earaches, unusual wear on teeth or gums, headaches, jaw pain, and so on.

My mother gave me my first few Ambien from a prescription she’d gotten for occasional relief. She hesitated placing the small football-shaped powder-blue orbs in another orange container, also labeled with her name, and agreed only to let me have them if I’d hide the bottle in an inner pocket of my large coat. If the police were to catch me, she said, explain that they were hers, that I was bringing them to her, after a vacation. Something. I kissed my mother on the head—she who had gifted me with the brain of no sleep had gifted me again. I took the blue pills home. I carried the bottle near my heart. I felt excited, in the low lurch, to try this chemic door, this X-ing out. I did not know why it had not occurred to me before now to dig this yard up. Inside my bathroom, I shook a pill into my palm. I nudged it with my finger, saw my reflected face. It went down the way a pill does, a tiny bite of nothing. I don’t remember any flavor. I do remember moving there with the pill inside me to sit down on the bed in my bedroom, the thread of expectation snowing in me, waiting for inverted fireworks, some fall. I did not know if I expected some sense of caving, a slowing blackout, or some more immediate snuffing, like a blanket over light. I was nervous, like a waiting parent. I took my clothes off, did not pee. The room waited, with its light. I don’t remember the way the blank came, except that when it did, outside me, I was gone. The doors opened and I went through them, and there I hid. There was no roll. No silent chorus of selves in nothing, saying the same sounds again, again. That night, at least, I fell in.

The particular thing about Ambien is that if you don’t follow its lead, it does a different job. You can’t take Ambien and then walk around the house and wait to get knocked over into zzzzz. The crossover, if not played party to, if not laid down for in want and waiting for the night, might make the waking room itself take on the space of sleep. There are people there who are not there. Somewhat, in another way, like those extended colors and doors of particularly extended periods of insomnia—the dream folds invading the conscious mind regardless, reclaiming the air. For this reason Ambien frequently ends up as a party favor, a recreational detonator, turning the self onto the rooms’ air—taking pills to find the tunnels, the hidden hours, that otherwise you’d only negotiate asleep—the folding of conscious and unconscious, even if often afterward you don’t remember it anymore than you would a dream, unto the self hidden in the self. A state of unwaking fused in waking, removed in the way one might find coming open after long periods of sleeplessness, though in this case invoked through chemicals. This is another self called to the front, rather than drawn up in small collapsing. Then in the morning there I was again. Untroubled, I’d gone somewhere. I felt newly rejuvenated, rested, if just in the name of having nodded off without the fight, a clipping of those flopping hours. Night was shorter now—even if, under just that first time, something about my body felt off center somewhat, slightly not right. This sleep had been fraught upon me, opened by chemistry and not by the elevators of my mind. A little glassy in the waking, copied. But that was fine. Oh, that was fine. Even underneath the slight trace of sleep hangover, I could get up on time and move throughout a day. That next night I took the sleeping pill again.

That next night’s next night I took the sleeping pill again. Here, now, a triad of nights of normal sleep. Waking that third day, it seemed so open. How easy, in repetition. How quick to want so hard. If anything’s the problem with eating sleep out of a doctor’s bottle, it’s that once you’ve realized there’s a way, it can instantly become
the only
way. On the fourth night, then seeing the pills there, I think I thought, “Three good nights in a row, perhaps now I can roll on inside myself. Save those others for when I need them.” The bottle stayed inside the drawer of my bedside table, almost touching to the bed. Lying down unpilled-up, the room settled around me as it mostly had, again. The dark air waiting. Windows. The rhythm of the breathing. Outside the pill realm, pressed on the pillow, in want, my same old thoughts turned on again, the roll of routine of never silence. Only this time, now, there was another fold into the throes—no longer simply an endless scroll of my own thinking, but now,
I should take a sleeping pill
. I could hear the bottle right there in the room beside me, asking. Like the sublime objects of my child years, I felt its eyes. The night in this expectation went on even longer, every minute doubled in its doubling, pressing on. Every minute I did not succumb and take the pill was a moment wasted in going on. With an immediate, unnatural door now open, the door was right there, despite my want to stick most hours to the fleshy, silent self-made hall.

When I’d eaten all the Ambien my mother gave me from her surplus, I went back for the rest of what she had. I tried to make these last longer, by forgetting. I took the bottle into another room, to keep them farther from my body. I would take half a pill, a third, though sometimes this would just instigate again the idea that I had not taken enough, and keep me up inside it, waiting to take the other half. Some nights the gap herein would be enough to reduce the effect that it came not at all. Quickly taking a half or whole pill, by mood or building tolerance, might seem diluted. Even in the grips of it beginning to come on, one might disremember how much has already been eaten, how much the air around one’s skin is already coming slurred. In want, you take another, the air gets deeper, you’re still awake. In the pill mind it might be easy to take several without even knowing, in the mental insistence, as a drunk does, that you are casual, you feel on par. You exist inside yourself and, in the way the walls around you go new, invite the space of dreams onto their width. Seeing sober someone pill-eating it can seem as if they are operating in altered space, unjarred: conversations with long bodies on the bookshelf, curls of color bouqueted from the TV, the room itself as several rooms.

I don’t remember dreaming while on Ambien, only that the dreaming seemed to start before I was actually asleep, played into the screwed lack of light inside the room, becoming new walls—and somewhere in there I would fall. I don’t remember entry or exit periods around the hole, the memory of dreaming and sleeping therein feeding into blurs around the waking and moving states, an infernal fabric, nowhere—except here from a temporal distance, they seem in relief—in multiple meanings of the idea, in that they milked me, gave me a room inside the well-hollowed curl of my on-thinking during a period in which I genuinely felt light-starved, but also, “an apparent projection of parts in a painting, drawing, etc., giving the appearance of the third dimension”
²⁰⁰
in the pill’s lingering residual effect, often causing slowness, blank of nowhere, chalky ideas, slowing down. Whereas sleep would come on quicker, it would hold fakey, shallow, as if poured into me on film, and in waking also walls would feel flimsy, different, waiting to be knocked down. Waking hours between rest afforded by sleeping pills become also colored by that false shift, making the flesh itself somehow off. Harder to speak, to write, to move under that awning, with the trace elements eating the bloodstream, and the expectation of the next elapsed state waiting in the wings. Staring headlong into the computer, clicking, clicking, seeing even less, the fake light feeding its uncolor and its unheat to my flesh.

In the unfurl of days and into weeks thereafter, however, the threat of sleep newly out from under dazing pills, the recoil came in a fast wave, a sudden and immensely stacked new wall. Whereas before in no sleep I’d learned my alleys, struck somewhat in the line of daze of saddened understanding, with my mind and body’s recent foray into sleep coming to claim me, and without the easy reach of more pills, the house around me herein grew even harder. It had been only a handful of weeks, but those fingers quickly learned me to their grip. The hours of the night would squeeze and bleat me. A set of new locks on my mind. Commonly known as
rebound insomnia
, and in its surrounding horror of worry for its coming,
rebound anxiety
, this state set upon me even worse, learning my waking hours into itching over what was coming for me quicker still that evening, and thoughts of how to disrupt it, shake it off. The use of the word rebound here is particularly moving, to me, in that not only does it speak for doubling, for falling back from out of some hard plane, but the idea of
being bound again
seems apt—tied into a parcel to be thrown again and again against a flat and tiny, unforgiving board. What’s worse, the prior modes that’d worked to soothe me, the OTC knobs, seemed passive jokes, hardly even denting, in my new want, the thickened pools of where I walked. The inlaid terror of not sleeping now had another layer, reflexive in its bent, which therein made the insomnia itself that much more wretched, rolling. All minutes ramping up toward one unblinking, false-faced sun.

After my supply of Ambien dried up, I moved to Lunesta—sought from a friend who could get free samples, and would share. These, he promised, were different from Ambien in their pronouncement. I’d need to be lying down. I can particularly remember that first night I pushed the thin Lunesta white globe out of its skinny backing into my hand. I slid the nodule into my mouth and sat around a minute and got up and sat down in front of my computer in a mind, tried to write a seeming e-mail, a letter off into a person in my life I missed, one I’d met with the both of us inside the Ambien walls, the e-mail’s title and descending text of the mouth of synthetic sleeping coming on:
i got words and together i’m trying out a new sleeping pill, half-glazed, now let’s you have them . . .
, the words thereafter also honest and spilling from some glown gut of the new room, as it came quickly to sit around me. Unlike Ambien, there’s little trickery to Lunesta’s window—it is there and then it’s there. Also unlike Ambien, I can distinctly remember the room around me as I blabbed into her, of a mind,
My brain the big suspendered burning, and you, and you, and yours
, and there at the end smashed send, threw into the mouth of the computer my dissolving dream text, then fell back into my bedroom’s bed. There was the room then there was black. Upon waking, hours later, my friends in the other room would report me breathing louder than they’d ever heard me, speaking in another language, texture tongue. I also cannot, from here, remember dreaming, these hours also settled under heavy curtains of their coming, but for certain in the grip of it I had no answer. I slept on top of covers, in my clothing, in the light.