Insomnia

We could go out, he said. Do you know that new bar? My friend is playing there tonight.

Sure, she said twisting in the sheets towards his covered, prostrate figure, facing the other wall so that when he spoke his voice sounded muffled.

You are not sleepy, he said with an inflection at the end of his sentence that indicated his surprise.

No, she said aloud and meant it. Let's go.

I am sleepy. I am so tired but I cannot sleep. What is the word? Insomnia. I have been having problems with it. No, he said. We will not go.

You need a distraction, she told him. Something on which to concentrate. She rose quickly and moved the mix of shoes and pants blocking the door, unable to stay shut without a prop, and disappeared down the hallway. He heard her scuffle, fumbling for the unfamiliar light-switch and then in her bag, full of keys that she had recently decided to group by home and work but no longer together, before she returned with a book, half-read and marked with a folded piece of paper that she did not recognize until she opened it from the edges to expose the printed things she had the best intentions of doing but found herself intentionally avoiding.

I just started this story. I read the first part but no matter, she said as she discarded her paper obligations to the side and crossed the room to the light, controlled by a gauge that she carefully increased to the lowest glow possible for her to see.

You will hurt your eyes with that light, he told her.

How do you think they got the way they are today, she smiled.

He would have to excuse, she warned, her poor Russian accent for the characters' names.

If it is anything like your Spanish, he joked, and she laughed though she did not always find it funny.

She settled on the side of the bed farthest from the light and began.

"There lives in Russia a certain honored professor..." she read and found herself closer to the book with each sentence. It was much darker on page than she had imagined. He was right about the eyes but she continued stubbornly fumbling for the sentences based on logic. "My name is linked to the concept of a man who is famous." She changed positions, first to her belly with the book in her face and then to her normal hunch but with a larger inwards incline in hopes the familiar shape would increase her eyesight. “But I am as austere and ugly as my name is celebrated and beautiful." She stopped to cough deeply a cough that had plagued her for days and at her own hands that continued to find lighters to begin the next cigarette that burned her raw throat. As a consequence she read with guttural monotony to keep the fits at bay but it only worked for a paragraph at most before she found herself choking from the inside out. This cannot go on much longer, she thought but she loved reading and even more to people. She persevered. “With regards to my physical health, I must note insomnia, from which I have been suffering as of late."

In disbelief she looked to him but his eyes were shut; she wondered what he was thinking. How could she have forgotten about the character's insomnia, having just read the pages days before? She continued to read to him the protagonist's struggle with insomnia and she thought what if he will now be haunted by this story rather than comforted? Hearing his current state articulated with what struck her as precision and bitterness, will he be able to dissociate how he had previously viewed his condition from the book's character, whose despondence cut into her being, not because the story was spectacular but because she let herself get lost in the situation as if it were her sleeplessly wincing as mosquitoes buzzed in her ear. This was a mistake and this light is impossible, she thought as she rose to increase it a shade more.

What happened? he asked.

This light. Did you hear what the story was saying? she asked him, a trifle excited.

I was sleeping, he told her as he readjusted in the bed with his eyes still closed. She was at first pleased that her idea had worked, but soon she found herself sorry that he had not shared in the coincidence.

She started again. "You are conscious of every moment and every second you are not normal when you fail to sleep at night." Her throat hurt, the voice slowly weakening with each page, but wanting him to rest, gauging sleep by his breaths, rhythmic and delicate, she persevered in monotony but was unable to escape the world and how strange it had been (is it funny?) for longer than she cared to remember and even when she did remember, it all seemed so many lives away and further assisted her feeling both connected and severed from her past and present and future.

"'Lime . . . cream . . . pistachio . . .' but it is not the same. I am as cold as ice and feel ashamed." She looked at him and set the book down next to the mattress before putting out the light and returning to the bed, careful on the old wooden floors that creaked like ones from her childhood.

She lay next to him, trying not to cough, not to breathe, and pulled the white sheet over her side.